...nor their elephants. My favorite historian, Will Cuppy, said that the Carthaginian war elephants were trained to rush forward and trample the enemy; often as not they would rush backward and trample the Carthaginians.
Besides being trained up from "childhood", the elephants underwent simulated battles as training, and (at least as far back as Hannibal) were lit up a little on some kind of alcoholic beverage, and were sometimes a danger to both sides. Alexander the Great innovated how to cope with elephant warfare when he was in India, and his life and work was being taught in antiquity. That may even be the reason the Carthaginians started using them. But the Romans were good at dealing with them, and the last major battle with elephants involved in the Med basin was probably Thapsus, one of the post-Pompey battles of the Pompeian war.
I have long suspected the Elephants were Roman spies. Hannibal always said, they’re only good for their tusks. Never march behind them.