Titus, 79-81. Denarius (Silver, 18 mm, 3.40 g, 6 h), Rome, January-June 80. IMP TITVS CAES VESPASIAN AVG P M Laureate head of Titus to right. Rev. TR P IX IMP XV COS VIII P P Elephant standing left. BMC 43. Cohen 303. RIC 115. Faint scratches, otherwise, very fine.

The Romans first encountered elephants in 280 BC at the Battle of Heraclea against Pyrrhus of Epirus, who brought twenty of the beasts to Italy. As the horses were terrified of the unusual smells and the deafening noises of the trumpeting elephants, the Roman cavalry was quickly routed. The animals served as the equivalent of the modern tank in battle and could easily decimate a century of Roman soldiers, smashing and tossing men with their trunks, goring them on their tusks, and crushing them beneath their feet. However, they could just as easily prove devastating to their own side. Experienced soldiers soon learned how to get them spooked or in pain and fear by hitting them with missiles such as javelins, darts and sling bolts, in which case they could easily be routed, turning and trampling their own side.

It is perhaps for this unpredictability that the legions never set up their own elephant force. In Rome, the beasts were normally reserved for the spectacle - which is exactly the purpose of the animal depicted on the reverse of this coin - and were often pitted in the arena against criminals or gladiators. It was not uncommon for the leviathans to be butchered for the public amusement during games. In fact, Pliny records that Pompey used them frequently, mentioning how at one time Pompey had twenty or so elephants cruelly butchered, and that they had become so distressed that they tried 'to gain the compassion of the crowd by indescribable gestures of entreaty, deploring their fate with a sort of wailing, so much to the distress of the public that they forgot the general and his munificence carefully devised for their honor, and bursting into tears rose in a body and invoked curses on the head of Pompey' (Pliny Hist. Nat. VIII, 7.21).