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  • Polyaenus (Strat. 8.23.5) and Caesar's British Elephant

  • Michael B. Charles, Tom Stevenson
  • Journal:
    Britannia , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 October 2024, pp. 1-15
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  • Polyaenus (Strat. 8.23.5) includes an armoured elephant in his description of Julius Caesar crossing a defended ford in Britain (54 b.c.) – something found nowhere in Caesar's own Bellum Gallicum. From looking at a range of loci in the Strategica dealing with Caesar's military exploits in Celtic lands, it becomes clear that, instead of being the remnant of a now-lost source tradition, Polyaenus either based the elephant vignette on an underlying narrative structure provided by the Bellum Gallicum, or a source using this work very closely. Given the overall unlikelihood of Caesar taking an elephant to Britain, Polyaenus probably inserted an elephant for rhetorical and/or didactic purposes and was perhaps influenced by Caesar's own non-literary propaganda involving elephants.