elephants to advance, or even manoeuvre. The elephants' mahouts, eager to demonstrate their charges' prowess, nevertheless drove them forward. Some accounts also have missiles being hurled down from the city walls at them. Peppered with missiles and unable to retaliate, the elephants panicked and fled through the Carthaginian infantry behind them. Metellus had concealed himself and a large part of his army either in the woods just outside the city gate, or immediately inside the gates; in either case this meant he was upstream from where the Carthaginian army was fording the river. From here Metellus fed fresh troops into the large-scale skirmish under the city walls. When the elephants broke, disorganising a large part of the Carthaginian army and demoralising all of it, Metellus ordered an attack on its left flank. The Carthaginians fled; those who attempted to fight were cut down. Metellus did not permit a pursuit, but did capture ten elephants in the immediate aftermath and, according to some accounts, the rest of the surviving animals over the succeeding days. Contemporary accounts do not report the other losses of either side, although the Carthaginians' are thought to have been heavy. Modern historians consider later claims of 20,000–30,000 Carthaginian casualties improbable. Similarly, later accounts that the large Celtic contingent in the Carthaginian army were drunk when the battle began are usually dismissed; as is the suggestion that a Carthaginian fleet took part in the operation, causing heavy casualties when many fleeing soldiers ran into the sea hoping to be taken off by their ships. Aftermath The Carthaginian defeat, and especially the loss of their elephants, resulted in the Romans feeling freer to manoeuvre on the plains, and the Carthaginians no longer being willing to challenge them. As was the Carthaginian custom after a defeat, Hasdrubal was recalled to Carthage to be executed. After his success at Panormus, Metellus received a triumph in Rome on 7 September 250 BC, during which he paraded with the elephants he had captured at Panormus, who were then slaughtered in the Circus Maximus. The elephant was adopted as the emblem of the powerful Caecilii Metelli family, whose members featured an elephant on the coins they minted until the end of the Republic. Hasdrubal's successor, Adhubal, decided that the large fortified city of Selinus could no longer be garrisoned and had the town evacuated and destroyed. Encouraged by their victory at Panormus, the Romans