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Imaginary Conversation. 11 I condemn no less his bringing into the front of the center, as became some showy tetrarch rather than Hannibal, his eighty elephants, by the refractoriness of which he lost the battle. SCIPIO. What would you have done with '^em, Polybius ? POLYBIUS. Scipio, I think it unwise and unmilitary to employ any force on which we can by no means calculate. SCIPIO. Gravely said, and worthily of Polybius. In the first book of your history, which leaves me no other wish or desire than that you should continue as you begin it, we have, in three different engagements, three different effects produced by the employment of elephants. The first, when our soldiers in Sicily, under Lucius Postumius and Quinctus Mamilius, drove the Carthaginians into Heraclea; in which battle the advanced guard of the enemy, being repulsed, propelled these animals before it upon the main body of the army, causing an irreparable disaster : the second, in the ill-conducted engagement of Atilius Regulus, who, fearing the shock of them, condensed his center, and was outflanked. He should have opened the lines to them and have suffered them to pass thro, as the enemys cavalry was in the wings^ and the infantry not enough in advance to profit by such an evolution. The third was evinced at Panormus, when Metellus gave orders to the light-armed troops to harass them and retreat into the trenches, which wounded and con- founded them, and, finding no way open, they rushed back (as many as could) against the Carthaginian army, and acce- lerated its discomfiture. POLYBIUS. If I had employed the elephants at all, it should rather have been in the rear or on the flank ; and even there not at the beginning of the engagement, unless I knew that the horses or the soldiers were unused to encounter them. Han- nibal must have well remembered (being equally great in memory and invention) that the Romans had been accustomed