The Importance of Elephants in the Hellenistic World

[Fluvius Camillus]

Not to mention Demetrios I (the Baktrian)!

~Fluvius

[Mulceber]

@DeathFinger - good point - I wish I'd had articles on that. Unfortunately, the ones I was assigned were fairly limited and I was operating on a pretty short schedule (four days to research and write the paper). If I was to do a rewrite, I'd definitely incorporate your suggestions.

@Fluvius - true, although that elephant scalp could also be him imitating the Ptolemaic Alexander coinage (sorry for the lousy Photo - I took it with my camera phone:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

On the whole though, I'm inclined to agree with you that it's probably an attempt by Demetrios to use elephants to boost his royal credentials, rather than using Alexander to boost his credentials. Although even if it's Alexander imitation, the Ptolemies originally gave him the elephant scalp to associate him with elephants, so it's still an example of elephants being associated with the monarchy.

Speaking of Alexander and monarchy though, I do have a paper on the ways in which Alexander was ideologically influential for Hellenistic Kings if anyone wants to read it. It isn't as directly relevant to EB as papers on war elephants and Klerouchies, but if anyone's interested I'd be happy to post it. -M

[Horatius Flaccus]

Speaking of Alexander and monarchy though, I do have a paper on the ways in which Alexander was ideologically influential for Hellenistic Kings if anyone wants to read it. It isn't as directly relevant to EB as papers on war elephants and Klerouchies, but if anyone's interested I'd be happy to post it.

Sure, I would be interested.

Your papers are very informative.

[Ludens]

[Mulceber]

All right, I'll get started transcribing it post haste. I say transcribing because when I originally wrote the papers, I used footnotes for the citations and so when I'm posting it for you guys I have to change the footnotes to MLA style citations.