An elephant is a walking wall; do not set horse against it

For a fight against elephants. The ancients thought elephants a great help in the fights: to strike with fear horses unaccustomed at the first spectacle, and men; and themselves, having been towered, to be a fear, as if a wall were walking before the phalanx. The clang is sharp, and the charge unbearable. The tusks are sufficient even otherwise for the overturn of every crowd; they also fitted to them spear-points analogous to the size, fenced most of them with broad breastplates, and even gave the beasts javelins to throw with the trunk. It was a portable phalanx, an image of every kind of war having the advantage: from above, the sendings of missiles of many men on high; at the feet, things unfightable; and hostile flights even far off. The fight is not from equal honor; one had to fight a wall against the elephant.

The crowds, overturned, the shield-lock always having been broken, furnished easy to the opponents the loosened order for destruction, as if, a bronze-mouth trireme having been broken by a very small charge, the whole surge, roughened, dissolved. Who will withstand the bearing of a crag that has broken? A fighting elephant is the image of a mountain. He overturns, throws down, breaks, destroys; and he does not disdain even the man lying, in the manner of noble beasts. Drawing with the trunk both horse and man and chariot, bringing them down by force and turning them, he drags them as far as his own feet; and leaning on the knees, he crushes them even otherwise, having perceived his own burden, and then is heavier still by the putting-on of the towers, so that a man is not pressed by one elephant, but is destroyed by a meeting of much heaviness.

How should one ward off a beast hard to fight, armed both with many advantages from nature and with the arts of men? He overturns the standing, overtakes the fleeing, crushes the fallen, frightens the horseman, strikes the chariot-drivers from the tower. First, then, one must set light javelin-men and bowmen against them, and no longer station cavalry against them, so that the army not be thrown together by the horses' fear from the unaccustomed sight. Let the trumpeters shout in terribly, so that the clang of the instrument, opposing the hiss of the beast, blunts the threat. Let the peltasts aim at the elephant, not using an unmissable mark; let the bowmen throw fire-bearing arrows onto the towers. For a chance missile stuck in is enough for the destruction of the whole.