A recent book on the conquest of Roman Britain includes an imaginative painting of the emperor Claudius arriving in a British village at the head of a line of marching legionaries. The emperor and his legate, Aulus Plautius, is shown proudly standing in a large timber turret balanced on the back of an Indian elephant. The animal’s handler, carrying the characteristic hooked and pointed goad, walks carefully beside it. We might note that, according to the Roman historian Livy, it was the handler’s job, if the elephant became uncontrollable, to kill it instantly by driving a spike “between the ears, where the neck joins the head” (Livy, Ad Urbe Conditia 27.49.1). Of course, this act would be impossible for someone walking alongside, and could only be accomplished by someone sitting on the beast’s shoulders.
Be that as it may, it is the very presence of the elephant in a first-century British village that concerns us here, for the evidence to back it up is surprisingly thin. According to the Greek historian Cassius Dio, once Aulus Plautius, the general in charge of the invasion, had overrun the territory south of the River Thames, he halted before advancing on the local tribal capital at Camulodunum (modern Colchester) and sent for Claudius to bring reinforcements. “He had been instructed to do this, if he met with any particularly stubborn resistance”, writes Dio, “and much equipment, both elephants and other things, had been collected for 60.21.2). This, sadly, is the first and last mention of the beasts.
