elephant, n.
1. b. fig. of a man of huge stature.
1609   Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida ii. iii. 2   Shall the Elephant Aiax carry it thus?

The elephant; noble, beautiful, and calm, gracefully shuffling forwards on four tree-stump legs that crush anything that may so unfortunately find itself beneath them—bugs, small mammals, human toes. It’s a fait that can’t be avoided because, as we know, elephants can’t bend their knees. 

The elephant hath joints, but none for courtesy:
his legs are legs for necessity, not for flexure.
(2. 3. 98-99)

That’s what we would have thought, had we lived in the 16^th or 17^th century. That’s what you may still think if you see an image of an elephant (pictured below, to refresh your memory), with column-like legs that don’t seem to move like ours. Have you ever seen an elephant cross their legs? The elephant’s hilariously inflexible legs coupled with its large stature proves to be an excellent insult to those around you who may not be the smallest and most delicate of companions. Shakespeare chose Ajax as his target – the dimwitted yet strong Greek commander of Troilus and Cressida. Taken straight out of Homer’s Iliad, where Ajax is described as having a large frame and being the strongest of the Achaeans, Shakespeare’s characterization is not necessarily wrong, although it isn’t the most humanizing.

Early in the play, Alexander describes Ajax as a man who “hath robbed many beasts of their/ particular additions; he is as valiant as the lion,/ churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant” (1. 2. 23-25). He is a collection of different animalistic traits that combine to create one man who seems out of proportion, too large for himself and any other, and ultimately beastly. Alexander tells Cressida that he has made Hector angry by striking him in battle, which, as a man of his purported stature, is not particularly surprising. But all Ajax’s intelligence and skill seen in the Iliad is missing in Troilus and Cressida. He is elephant in more than body, in mind too.

The elephant, as Shakespeare knows it, is inflexible. When Ajax is given this name, he takes on its characteristics. He may be large and strong, but he is not nimble of mind or body. He is clumsy (of mind) and immovable. Shakespeare chooses which elements of the elephant he will attribute to Ajax. Used in another way, it may portray grandeur or wisdom, yet Ajax is not shown as intelligent or as elegant as the elephant; he is as slow. His features are not as prized as the elephant’s tusks or as multi-faceted as the elephant’s trunk, but instead they are as rigid as its legs. Shakespeare purposefully constructs Ajax’s large and brutish personality around his idea of the elephant, giving us little room for movement. In a comical twist of events, four hundred years later we know that elephant legs may actually be as nimble and flexible as horses and, in some areas, they may actually out-wit humans. Factually, Ajax’s elephantlike description is in fact no hindrance to him at all, allowing him as much movement and intelligence as the rest of us. In reality, we still associate that description with a clumsy and bulky animal. By today’s standards, we might call him a heffalump or heffa, for short, which we all know from A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. Even now, the majestic elephant cannot escape its reality as the largest living land mammal, just as Ajax must take his place as the largest of the Achaeans.