Elephants always move in herds. The oldest takes the lead, and the next in age brings up the rear. When they are crossing a river, they first send over the smallest, for fear lest the weight of the larger ones may increase the depth of the channel, by working away the bed of the river. We learn from Antipater, that King Antiochus had two elephants, which he employed in his wars, and to which he had given the names of celebrated men; and that they were aware too of this mark of distinction. Cato, in his Annals, while he has passed over in silence the names of the generals, has given that of an elephant called Surus, which fought with the greatest valor in the Carthaginian army, and had lost one of its tusks. When Antiochus was sounding the ford of a river, an elephant named Ajax, which on other occasions had always led the van, refused to enter the stream; upon which proclamation was made, that the first rank should belong to the one which should take the lead in passing over. One called Patroclus hazarded the attempt, and as a reward, the king presented it with some silver pendants, a kind of ornament with which these animals are particularly delighted, and assigned it all the other marks of command. Upon this, the elephant that had been degraded refused to take its food, and so preferred death to ignominy. Indeed their sense of shame is wonderful, and when one of them has been conquered, it flies at the voice of the conqueror, and presents him with earth and vervain. Nor ought we to be surprised that such an animal should be sensible of affection: for Juba relates, that an elephant recognized, after the lapse of many years, an old man who had been its keeper in his youth. They would seem also to have an instinctive feeling of justice. King Bocchus once fastened thirty elephants to the stake, with the determination of wreaking his vengeance on them, by means of thirty others; but though men kept sallying forth among them to goad them on, he could not, with all his endeavors, force them to become the ministers of the cruelty of others. Elephants were seen in Italy, for the first time, in the war with King Pyrrhus, in the year of the City 472; they were called “Lucanian oxen,” because they were first seen in Lucania. Seven years after this period, they appeared at Rome in a triumph. In the year 502 a great number of them were brought to Rome, which had been taken by the pontiff Metellus, in his victory gained in Sicily over the Carthaginians.[87] One hundred and forty-two of them were conveyed to our shores upon rafts, which were constructed on rows of hogsheads joined together. Verrius informs us, that they fought in the Circus, and that they were slain with javelins, for want of some better method of disposing of them; as the people neither liked to keep them nor yet to give them to the kings. CHAPTER II. THE COMBATS OF ELEPHANTS.