Who won the Battle of Panormus?
Rome won. In 250 BC the Roman commander Lucius Caecilius Metellus let the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal, son of Hanno, march up to the walls of Panormus, modern Palermo. Missiles from a ditch and the walls turned Hasdrubal's war elephants back onto his own army, a sortie routed it, and the Romans captured the elephants.1
In the years after the disaster of 255 BC in Africa, Roman soldiers in Sicily were afraid of one animal. Carthage had shipped war elephants to the island, and Roman armies would not come down from the hills to fight them. Then the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal marched his army and his elephants up to the walls of Panormus, the Punic city the Romans had taken four years earlier. Its commander, Lucius Caecilius Metellus, had been waiting for exactly that. This is the story of why Hasdrubal attacked, how Metellus turned the elephants against their own army, what happened to the captured herd, and why the victory changed the war. It belongs to our hub on the Punic Wars.2
Why was the Battle of Panormus fought?
Panormus was an old Phoenician foundation. Thucydides lists it with Motya and Soloeis as the three towns the Phoenicians of Sicily drew back to when the Greeks arrived, because they lay closest to Carthage. Its walled old town and its newer quarter were laid out on a Phoenician and Punic plan, and the Cambridge Ancient History calls it the long-standing Punic headquarters in Sicily.3
In 254 BC a newly built Roman fleet, under the consuls Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Asina and Aulus Atilius Calatinus, attacked it by land and sea. The walls were breached, the outer town was stormed, and the people of the old town surrendered. Panormus became one of Rome's chief naval bases for the rest of the war.4
On land, though, the war had turned. In 255 BC the Carthaginians, advised by the Spartan mercenary Xanthippus, had used elephants and cavalry to destroy the Roman army of Marcus Atilius Regulus outside Tunis. Carthage then sent Hasdrubal to Sicily with fresh troops and 140 elephants. Polybius says the Roman soldiers had heard how the elephants broke the ranks in Africa, and for two seasons, though the armies often stood five or six stades apart near Lilybaeum and Selinus, they never dared to begin a battle or come down onto level ground.5
At sea Rome had lost heart as well. After storms destroyed one fleet in 255 BC and more than 150 ships of the next in 253 BC, the Senate gave up building warships and kept only sixty vessels to carry supplies for the legions. It put its hopes in the army instead, and in 251 BC sent both consuls, Lucius Caecilius Metellus and Gaius Furius Pacilus, to Sicily with their legions.6
Hasdrubal's decision: the Carthaginian view
Hasdrubal, son of Hanno, was no stranger to the Romans. In 256 BC Carthage had elected him one of its two generals against Regulus in Africa, so he had served in the campaign in which elephants broke a Roman army. In Sicily he had the advantage: the Romans would not face his elephants, and the open country was his.7
Yet two years of standing still had won Carthage nothing. Diodorus says Hasdrubal's own soldiers spoke badly of him for not fighting. When Furius went back to Italy with part of the Roman forces, leaving Metellus at Panormus to guard the harvest of Rome's Sicilian allies, the moment looked right. The Italian historian Gaetano De Sanctis adds a strategic reason: Rome was fitting out a new fleet, and Hasdrubal, expecting soon to be cut off from Africa and encouraged by Roman caution and by there being only one consular army left on the island, decided to strike before it sailed. Adrian Goldsworthy suggests he also wanted to show Rome's allies that her soldiers could not protect them.8
So he marched on Panormus. When Metellus did not come out, Hasdrubal concluded that the Romans dared not fight, crossed the river that ran between him and the town and came right up to the walls. Diodorus adds that he camped close to the walls without fortifying his camp, out of contempt for the enemy.9
Metellus' trap
The Roman reluctance was a pretense. Frontinus says Metellus withdrew his troops inside Panormus under a pretense of fear and had a trench of huge size dug in front of the walls. Gaetano De Sanctis saw the calculation behind it: the longer Metellus left the Carthaginians free to ravage the plain, the easier it would be to force them to fight, unexpectedly, on ground he had chosen.10
His orders to the light infantry were exact. Some lined the wall and the edge of the trench, ready to shower any elephant that came within range. Others went out to harass the Carthaginians as they crossed the river, and if the elephants drove them back they were to drop into the trench, then come out again and throw at the nearest animals. The town's craftsmen were to carry missiles out and stack them at the foot of the wall. Metellus himself waited with the heavy infantry, the maniples, at a gate facing the Carthaginian left wing, and kept sending out more men to feed the skirmish.11
How was the Battle of Panormus fought?
Drawn on by the skirmishers, the Carthaginians formed for battle. As the fight grew, the elephant drivers, eager to win the credit for the victory, charged together. Frontinus has the elephant drivers goaded into it by Roman javelins. The beasts scattered the skirmishers easily and chased them back to the trench.12
There the trap closed. Archers on the wall and fresh men at the edge of the trench poured javelins and arrows into the elephants at close range. Stuck with darts and in pain, they became uncontrollable, turned and ran back through their own lines, trampling men and throwing the Carthaginian army into confusion.13
Metellus now led his fresh troops out of the gate and struck the disordered enemy in the flank. The Carthaginians broke. Zonaras says the Carthaginian fleet had come close to the shore, and the fugitives ran for the ships: some fell into the sea and drowned, some were crushed by their own elephants, and others were cut down by the Romans. Theodor Mommsen also describes the beaten army crowding with its elephants toward the beach to be taken off by the ships. Gaetano De Sanctis, however, distrusted the Carthaginian fleet in Zonaras' account as an old ornamental motif of battle stories.14
Diodorus tells a different story: merchants had brought plenty of wine into the camp, the Celtic mercenaries got drunk, and Metellus fell on them while they were rioting. Goldsworthy thinks this is probably no more than a stock tale of barbarian drinking. He also warns that the fight may have been smaller than our sources make it, hardly a full pitched battle; the Victorian historian Reginald Bosworth Smith, by contrast, called it the greatest pitched battle of the war.15
How many elephants did Carthage lose?
Polybius says Metellus captured ten elephants on the field together with their Indian drivers, and after the battle rounded up all the others, which had thrown their riders. Zonaras adds that the riderless animals grew wild, so Metellus promised safety to any captured keepers who would calm them; they tamed the gentlest first, and the rest followed. Eutropius says Numidians in Roman service helped gather the scattered herd.16
The ancient numbers do not agree. Polybius says 140 elephants were shipped to Sicily with Hasdrubal; Frontinus and Eutropius give him 130. Of those captured, Diodorus counts 60, Zonaras and the summary of Livy 120, and Pliny the Elder 142, "or, as some say," 140. Goldsworthy notes that it is not clear whether all of Hasdrubal's elephants were at Panormus at all. The animals were no novelty on the island by then: Sicilian potters of the 3rd century BC made oil lamps in the shape of an elephant's head, like the one now in the Metropolitan Museum.17
For the men, there is no trustworthy figure on either side. Eutropius claims 20,000 Carthaginians killed; Goldsworthy judges the later claims of 20,000 or 30,000 dead implausible, while Gaetano De Sanctis thought 20,000 not excessive if, as Orosius says, Hasdrubal had landed with more than 30,000 men. No ancient writer gives the Roman losses or the size of Metellus' army. The sources say only that Metellus held Panormus after his colleague had left with part of the forces, and Frontinus speaks of Hasdrubal's "immense army."18
Elephants on rafts: the triumph in Rome
Getting the herd to Rome was a problem in itself, since Rome had few ships left. Zonaras and Pliny describe the solution: large earthenware jars were lashed together, held apart by timbers, and covered with planks, earth and brush, with a fence around the edge like a farmyard. The elephants were led onto these rafts and ferried across the Strait of Messina, Zonaras says, without realizing they were on the water.19
Metellus celebrated a triumph, probably in early September 250 BC according to the classicist M. Gwyn Morgan. The summary of Livy's lost Book 19 says thirteen enemy commanders and 120 elephants were led in the procession, and Eutropius has the elephants filling the roads. A generation later his son, in the funeral speech that Pliny quotes, still boasted that his father had been the first to lead elephants in a triumph, although Pliny himself records that elephants had already been shown in a triumph after the war with Pyrrhus.20
What became of the animals is disputed. Pliny reports that, according to Verrius, they were made to fight in the Circus and were killed with javelins because the Romans did not want to keep them or give them away to allied kings; Lucius Piso said only that they were driven around the Circus to make the crowd despise them. Tenney Frank, in the Cambridge Ancient History, says only that they were sent home to amuse the public. The elephant became the badge of the Metelli: it appears on denarii struck by men of the family from the 120s to the 40s BC.21
Hasdrubal escaped from the battle, but not from Carthage. Zonaras says he was later recalled home and impaled, and Tenney Frank agrees that he was recalled and put to death, with Adherbal sent out in his place.22
Did Carthage sue for peace? Regulus and the embassy
Later Roman writers attached one of their most famous stories to this moment. According to the summary of Livy, Eutropius and Zonaras, Carthage, shaken by its losses and anxious to recover its prisoners, sent envoys to Rome and with them the captured consul Regulus, bound by oath to return if he failed. Regulus is said to have advised the Senate to refuse both peace and an exchange of prisoners, and to have gone back to Carthage and his death. Mommsen accepted that Carthage offered peace a second time and that the Senate, encouraged by Metellus' victory, refused.23
Polybius, our best source, says nothing about any of this. Goldsworthy calls the Regulus story a deeply romantic tradition and thinks it safer to reject the whole of it, together with the tale that Regulus' widow tortured Carthaginian prisoners in revenge. Serge Lancel, the French historian of Carthage, also treats the story as a myth and notes that Polybius says nothing of Regulus after his capture. It is best read as a Roman legend about keeping faith, not as a record of what happened in 250 BC.24
Who won the Battle of Panormus, and why did it matter?
Rome won clearly, and Polybius is precise about why it mattered. The news was received at Rome with delight, he says, less because of the elephants Carthage had lost than because the army had learned it could beat them. The victory restored the soldiers' confidence and gave Rome command of the open country. William Smith's classical dictionary says that from then on Roman superiority on land was almost undisputed.25
Confidence brought back the fleet. In 250 BC Rome sent the consuls to Sicily with 200 ships, and they laid siege to Lilybaeum by land and sea. Carthage now held only Lilybaeum and Drepana in Sicily and threw everything into keeping them. The siege was long and hard, the Roman fleet was beaten off Drepana in 249 BC, and the war in Sicily passed to Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal's father. It was finally decided at sea in 241 BC.26 › Hamilcar Barca
Metellus did well out of his victory. He was master of the horse in 249 BC, consul again in 247 BC and later pontifex maximus. In 241 BC, when the temple of Vesta burned, he rescued the sacred objects from the fire; Pliny says he lost his sight doing so. The Treccani encyclopedia doubts the blindness, since he was named dictator to hold elections in 224 BC.27
Panormus also showed Rome how to fight elephants. Metellus did not meet the charge head on. He used missiles, a ditch and the city walls to wound and panic the animals until they turned on their own army, and only then sent in his infantry. As Tenney Frank put it, the dreaded elephants had lost their power to terrify. Elephants would face Roman legions again in the next war, from the Trebia to Zama.28 › War elephants in history
When was the Battle of Panormus: 251 or 250 BC?
The year has long been argued over. The summary of Livy and Eutropius set the victory in the consulship of Metellus and Furius, 251 BC, and Mommsen followed them. Polybius places it after Furius had left Sicily, and Morgan, in a 1972 study of Polybius' muddled chronology for these years, notes a general modern preference for 250 BC, with the triumph in early September of that year. Gaetano De Sanctis put the battle in June 250 BC, when the crops were ripe, and the Enciclopedia Italiana follows him; Tenney Frank put it early in that year, while the consuls were changing over. No source gives the day.29
Where was the Battle of Panormus fought?
It was fought just outside the walls of Panormus, today Palermo, the capital of Sicily, between the town and a river that the Carthaginians had to cross to reach it, which Italian scholars identify as the Oreto. The sources describe the Roman light troops fighting from the city wall and the trench in front of it, and the sortie coming out through the gates. The battle accounts do not let us place the trench or the gate on a modern map.30
Palermo grew over the ancient town. The Phoenician and Punic city survives in stretches of its walls, strengthened in the first half of the 3rd century BC, before the Roman conquest, and in a Punic cemetery southwest of the old center, used from the late 7th century to the 3rd century BC. Read the rest of the war in our Punic Wars hub and in Rome vs Carthage.31
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