156 ANIMALS AT WORK AND PLAY 



action at all under modern conditions, this can hardly 

 be ground for assuming that the Punic elephants would 

 not have been useful and obedient if employed as 

 beasts of burden. Pyrrhus landed no less than fifty 

 elephants in Southern Italy, and there seems little 

 doubt that these were all African beasts. As the 

 Indian elephant line ends at the eastern border of 

 the Punjab, it is not conceivable that they could have 

 been imported directly overland. They were lent to 

 him by Ptolemy Ceraunus, King of Macedon, and 

 though he (Ptolemy) may have obtained them from 

 Antiochus, who probably imported them from the 

 Persian Gulf, it is much more probable that they came 

 from his half-brother, Ptolemy Philadelphus, the reign- 

 ing King of Egypt. Pyrrhus's elephants must have 

 been very ' handy ' beasts, for he seems to have 

 taken them across to Sicily from Italy, and also to 

 have used them in the Peloponnesus to attack Laconia. 

 The wonder is, not that the Libyans tamed their 

 elephants, but that they ever lost the art of doing 

 so. Possibly the decay of Egyptian power in the 

 interior may have discouraged their use on the Upper 

 Nile. But it is in the more western regions, in the 

 ' Hinterland ' of the Mediterranean coast, that their 

 use seems to have been most general and their train- 

 ing best understood. Libya did not cease to be civilised 

 because Carthage was destroyed. But the elephants 



