A mallet and a carpenter's chisel
At the Metaurus in 207 BC, more of Carthage's elephants were killed by their own drivers than by the enemy. When a beast turned on its own side, the driver set a chisel between its ears and drove it in with a mallet. Livy says Hasdrubal invented it.
What it was
Two ordinary carpenter's tools, carried by a man riding a war elephant for the one purpose named above. Livy's Latin is exact — fabrile scalprum cum malleo, a craftsman's chisel with a mallet — and he places the blow precisely, at the joint where the neck meets the skull.
What the record will and will not say
Livy credits the invention to Hasdrubal Barca, Hannibal's brother, at the Metaurus in 207 BC, where Hasdrubal died. "First to introduce" is his claim rather than a verified fact, and modern work on Barcid elephant tactics is sceptical of it.
Worth saying plainly: Polybius, who is the better source on Hannibal's elephants, never mentions a goad or any driving implement at all.
- Livy 27.49: fabrile scalprum cum malleo
- Charles & Rhodan, 'Magister Elephantorum', Classical World 100.4 (2007)
- Picture: made with AI for The Ember Atlas, an imagining, not a record of how it looked.