Eine längere Passage dazu findet sich in den Κεστοὶ des Sextus Iulius Africanus (F 12, 18).

Die Darstellung ist nicht bloß historischer Art, sondern zur Zeit des Iulius Africanus setzten die Sassaniden, Roms Gegner im Osten, Elefanten ein.

The ancients used to consider the elephants a great advantage in battles; they make a terrifying spectacle at first sight both to horses who are not accustomed to them and men as well; and when they equipped them with a tower, they considered them as a source of fear, a kind of rampart advancing before the battleline. Their trumpeting is piercing and their charge irresistible. While their tusks have in any case the capacity to bring ruin to any concentration of soldiers, this is especially true when they would outfit them with spears suitable to their huge seize, fortify the largest bulk of their body with wide corselets, and give the beast javelins [ἀκόντια] to hurl with their trunk.

It was a portable battalion, a multiform image of military superiority [Φάλαγξ ἦν φορητή, παντοία πολέμου πλεονεκτοῦντος εἰκών]: barrages of many missiles being fired from above by men with the upper hand, the zone at the elephant’s feet being impregnable, and the enemy even fleeing far away. The battle was not one fought on equal footing. Against the elephant, a siege operation would have to be mounted. When the front ranks were broken through, as always happened, the troops, turned back, and their ranks dismantled by the enemy, were primed for annihilation – a ship, so to speak, that, after being shattered by the slightest impact of a bronze-beaked trireme, was completely destroyed by the angry wave. Who could stand up to a landslide from the collapse of a cliff?

An elephant in combat makes the impression of a mountain: it overturns, it hurls down, it smashes, it annihilates, and it does not disdain at all anyone lying in his way, in the way noble beasts do. It snatches them with his trunk – horse, man, and chariot –, strikes them violently, turns them upside down, and drags them up to his own feet; by leaning upon them with its knees, it pulverizes them, aware of its own weight, then made even heavier by the addition of the towers. It is thus not by a single elephant that one is crushed, but rather one is obliterated by an enormous confluence of weight.

(Iulius Africanus: Cesti. The Extant Fragments. Edited by Martin Wallraff, Carlo Scardino, Laura Mecella and Christophe Guignard. Berlin/Boston 2012, pp. 88 sq.)