Reverse of a silver drachma of the Seleucid king Antiochus III "the Great" (r. 223-187 BCE), depicting an Asian war elephant surrounded by the inscription ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ANTIOXΟΥ ("Of King Antiochus").
Antiochus employed war elephants throughout his career. At the Battle of Raphia in 217, his Asian elephants clashed with the African elephants of Ptolemy IV Philopator (victory went to Ptolemy, thanks largely to his phalanx of native Egyptians). In 209, Antiochus campaigned eastward as far as the Hindu Kush, renewed his treaty with the local monarch Sophagasenus (Shubhagasena), and gained a fresh supply of elephants. At the climactic Battle of Magnesia against the Romans and Pergamenes (190 or 189), he deployed an impressive force that may have numbered 70,000 men and was supported by 54 war elephants; however, the Romans were victorious, in large part because the elephants panicked under projectile fire and threw the Seleucid phalanx into confusion. This defeat, together with the previous defeat of Philip V of Macedon at Cynoscephalae (197), marked the eclipse of Macedonian phalanx warfare that had dominated battlefields since the days of Alexander the Great.
Now in the Staatliche Münzsammlung, Munich, Germany. Photo credit: ArchaiOptix | Wikimedia Commons | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
