Battle of Zama
About
Scipio Africanus finally beat Hannibal on African soil, breaking Carthage's war elephants with disciplined gaps in the Roman line and finishing the fight with Numidian cavalry. The defeat ended the Second Punic War and Carthage's status as a great power for good. Hannibal survived and fled into exile. The battle is often staged as ancient history's classic general-versus-general showdown. Polybius recorded that Hannibal massed more than 80 war elephants at the front of his line, backed by 12,000 mercenary infantry. Scipio broke from Rome's standard checkerboard formation and arranged his maniples in open lanes, funneling the elephant charge harmlessly through to his rear ranks.
What happened here
A Roman army fights the way it camps: in lines, by drill, on ground chosen if possible. The legions form up in cohorts with gaps that let ranks rotate, throw a volley of heavy javelins at close range, and then close with the short sword, pushing behind the shield. Auxiliaries hold the flanks and do most of the cavalry work and most of the skirmishing. Battles are short and decided by whether one line breaks, and the killing happens in the pursuit rather than the fighting. The camp is dug and palisaded every night regardless. Afterwards the dead are stripped and the field is looted for days; the ground is remembered locally long after the campaign is a paragraph in someone's history.
In ancient writing
- Polybius, Histories 15.9–15
Scipio opens lanes through his maniples to let the elephants run through, then re-forms; the two commanders meet before the battle and neither gives ground.
Sources
Nearby
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