Hs Pass Correcd

Crossing the Durance with Hannibal and Livy:

the Route to the Pass

I Hannibal’s crossing-point at the Rhône (Tables 1-2). II Polybius and Livy (Tables 3-

4). III Crossing the Durance with Livy. IV The Island. V The march from The Island.

VI The start of ‘the ascent’. VII The second attack. VIII The ‘remaining crossing

over the Alps’ (Table 5). IX Views on the pass. X Polybius’ distances (Tables 6-10).

XI Conclusions.

To narrate Hannibal’s march to Italy in 218 B.C., writes Polybius,

it would be necessary to mention not the mere names of places and rivers, as

do some historians, under the idea that that is altogether sufficient to give

knowledge and clarity. My opinion is that, in the case of well-known places,

the mention of names is not a small but a great assistance; but, in the case of

unknown ones, the recital of names has the same impact as unintelligible and

unmeaning sounds. For, since the understanding has nothing to go on, and is

able to link the term uttered to nothing known, the narrative becomes

indecipherable and vague (3.36.2-4).

This is his explanation, or excuse, for not festooning his account of the march with

place-names. To Polybius it may have seemed a ‘pragmatic’ enough decision; but it

has made perplexingly difficult every attempt at clarifying not just the pass used by

the Carthaginian forces, but also the entire route from their Rhône-crossing onwards.

In fact, if it were not for details in Livy’s parallel—and often severely criticised—

narration, an effort would be pointless, though Livy himself does not make it at all

easy. Yet it is worth revisiting the question to reassess the data in both historians,

and so point to a solution for an enduring puzzle.1

I Hannibal’s crossing-point at the Rhône

Having marched from Spain across southern Gaul to the Rhône with an army of

seasoned professionals (cf. P. 3.35.8), Hannibal crossed the river in the face of local

opposition, and next day the threat of Roman opposition emerged too. His Numidian

cavalry scouts clashed, near his camp, with Roman scouts sent out by the consul

Scipio, who had happened to make a temporary stop (en route to Spain with army

and fleet) at the eastern mouth of the Rhône. Hannibal turned north to march

upstream to a place called The Island, where he settled a dispute over power

Dexter Hoyos 2

between two brothers; with the army’s food, clothing and weapons replenished by

Braneus, the successful chieftain, the march proceeded for 800 stadia over ten days

to ‘the ascent of the Alps’. From there on, ‘the remaining crossing over the Alps’, the

Carthaginians had to cope with severe attacks from Gauls along the route, sustaining

heavy losses in men and pack-animals, until they arrived at the summit of the pass to

Italy. The descent to the plains of the river Padus (Po) followed over six or more

laborious days.

This is a résumé of Polybius’ account (3.42.1–60.9). It is closely followed by Livy

(21.26.6–38.9), who adds some items not in Polybius and, in places, touches up his

Polybian content too. For example, Polybius simply reports Hannibal marching across

southern Gaul ‘having the Sardinian sea on his right’ (41.7); Livy, drawing on a

different but believable source, brings him first to Iliberris, modern Elne 14 km. south

of Perpignan, and then takes him past Ruscino, now the derelict site Castel-Roussillon

just outside Perpignan (21.24.1-2, 5). Meanwhile Polybius writes that from Emporiae

in Spain, the Greek colony (modern Empúrie) past which Hannibal had marched from

the south, to the Rhône the distance was 1,600 stadia, and his text adds that this

route had now been measured by the Romans and milestones placed along it every 8

stadia (3.39.8). He includes this figure in calculating the total length of Hannibal’s

march (39.6-11). The ratio of 8 stadia per Roman mile was by his time the Roman

standard, and so his 1,600 stadia work out as 200 milia passuum. As the Roman mile

was equivalent to 1.48 km., this gives a stadium-length of 185 metres.2

The highway, the Via Domitia, was built soon after the Romans subjugated

Transalpine Gaul in the late 120s BC. It reached the Rhône at Ugernum (Beaucaire),

opposite the town of Tarusco (Tarascon). On the distance from Emporiae to Ugernum,

the Roman itineraries are not entirely uniform, but they register it as between 197

and 206 milia passuum. The lower total, 197 m.p., is preferable, because the

comparable modern route from Ampurias in north-east Spain, over the Pyrenees via

the Le Perthus pass to Beaucaire at the Rhône is 290 kilometres or 196 Roman miles.

This road does not correspond at all points to the Via Domitia, but the closeness of

the two totals (290 km./196 m.p. and 1,600 stadia/200 m.p.) supports the notice at

3.39.8.3

Polybius plainly believes that Hannibal followed the route that would later be the

Via Domitia. He shows this in detailing the major sectors of the march. Because the

Via Domitia was not built until very near the end of his life, it is widely held that this

reference, both to it and to its milestones, must be either a very late addition or an

Crossing the Durance with Hannibal and Livy

insert by a posthumous editor. (There are two other obvious later insertions in the

same chapter.) Moreover, in his largely lost Book 34 on Mediterranean geography,

Polybius equated a Roman mile with 8.33 (eight and one-third) stadia according to

the geographer Stabo (P. 34.12.3-4 and 9 = Strabo, Geogr. 7.7.4 C322). This means a

stadium-length of 177.7 metres; he perhaps preferred this ratio because it

approximated the Attic stadium of 177.4 m., and he may well have assumed they

were identical.

Many if not most march-reconstructions take the Carthaginians to a crossing

higher up the Rhône. If so, this means that Polybius is wrong about the length of the

sector through Gaul to the Rhône, or ignores the longer real distance that Hannibal

covered in favour of an easily-available official statistic. But such reconstructions

themselves depend largely or wholly on other measurements and indicators in

Polybius’ account, for instance the distance he gives between the crossing-site and

the sea. Which bits of him to believe, therefore, and which to reject becomes a nice

problem in interpretative method.4

If Polybius had to wait until old age to learn that it was 1,600 stadia from Emporiae

to the Rhône, then in the earlier version of 3.39 he must have given some other

figure (an estimate?); or else the entire chapter has to be judged a late insert. But as

he himself had visited Gaul, apparently in the 150s, it is more reasonable to infer that

such measurements were recognised by the time he first composed the Histories.

The path of the Via Domitia, before the Roman conquest, was already the standard

route (the fabled ‘Way of Hercules’) linking Spain to Italy. It is quite likely, therefore,

that well before the 120s the Romans had already calculated the distance between

the Rhône and Emporiae via the ‘Way of Hercules’. After all, they had long had to use

the route across southern Gaul for land journeys between Italy and Spain, especially

in seasons when sailing was dangerous. It is not credible that, to work out distances,

they always had to build a milestone-marked road first. Moreover, at 3.39.8 solely the

comment about the milestones (a separate sentence from the distance-statistic) may

constitute the late-in-life—or after-death—addendum; it is in effect a parenthesis in

the extensive sentence-structure of 39.6-9.5

The Roman highway did not conform to the ‘Way of Hercules’ exactly: for instance,

the Via Domitia took in the site of the Roman colony of Narbo, founded not many

years later, rather than the Gallic hill-fort of Naro a few kilometres further north. Such

small divagations did not make it improper for Polybius to use the mileage of the

highway. Hannibal crossed into Gaul with 59,000 infantry and cavalry, plus pack-

animals and his famous elephants, which would, whenever convenient, spread out

3

Dexter Hoyos 4

over the comfortable Gallic countryside rather than stay confined on a single road in

a column dozens of kilometres long. But all still had to follow the same overall route.6

He does give a few other topographical details about the crossing-point. It was at a

place where the river was still a single stream (3.42.1): thus above Arles, ancient

Arelate, for at Fourques just north of this town it branches to form the Rhône delta

and the Camargue marshlands. The Roman army under the consul Scipio, having

disembarked earlier at the river’s eastern mouth, reached the Punic camp near the

6 ‘Way of Hercules’: cf. A.L.F. Rivet, Gallia Narbonensis: Southern France in Roman

Times (London, 1988), 8, 43, 130 (Naro and Narbo). Size of Hannibal’s army on

entering Gaul: P. 3.35.7. This and other strength-totals along the march are widely

disbelieved (most recently by P. Barceló, Hannibal: Stratege und Staatsmann

(Stuttgart, 2004) 123, 276 n.20, who arbitrarily denies Polybius’ figures and revises

them drastically downwards); but see D. Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty: Power and

Politics in the Western Mediterranean, 247–183 BC (London, 2003) 227-8.

1 This paper develops, and occasionally modifies, points made by the author in J.C.

Yardley and D. Hoyos, Livy: Hannibal’s War: Books 21–30 (Oxford, 2006) 620-30.

Translation of Pol. 3.36.2-4 adapted from E.S. Shuckburgh’s, The Histories of Polybius

(2 vols., London, 1889). Modern distances are calculated from Les Guides Bleus:

Espagne (Paris, 1957 and 1967 edns.); Guide Bleu France 1974 (Paris, 1974); France:

Motoring Map (Geographia, London, n.d.); Alpenländer: Autokarte (Freytag & Berndt,

Wien (2004?) ); and France: Tourist and Motoring Atlas (Michelin, 3rd edn.: Paris,

2005). The fullest recent study of Hannibal’s march, citing earlier literature, is by J.

Seibert, ‘Der Alpenübergang Hannibals. Ein gelöstes Problem?’ Gymnasium 95 (1988)

21-73; see also his Forschungen zu Hannibal (Darmstadt, 1993) 193-213, with

detailed bibliography at 195-7 (listing studies since 1820), and Hannibal (Darmstadt,

1993) 96-113. C. Jullian, Histoire de la Gaule, 1 (7th edn.: Paris, 1920) 451 n.7 (on

451-4) lists studies from 1535 to 1906; Sir G. de Beer, Hannibal’s March (London,

1967) 148-51, gives a selection of proposed routes from 1574 to his own. The route

of Hannibal and its theories since the Renaissance are analysed by Sir D. Proctor,

Hannibal’s March in History (Oxford, 1971); see also J. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War: a

Military History (Warminster, England, 1978) 34-48. J. Prevas, Hannibal Crosses the

Alps: the Enigma Re-examined (Staplehurst, Kent, 1998), is a recent popular study,

with striking photographs of his (and de Beer’s) favoured pass, the Traversette. Any

worker in this field must feel rather as U. Kahrstedt did in 1913: ‘da ich noch nicht


crossing ‘three days after’ Hannibal had left it (49.1). The crossing was also, Polybius

writes elsewhere, ‘around four days’ road from the sea for an army’ (42.1: Hannibal

scedo;n hJmerw`n tettavrwn oJdo;n ajpevcwn stratopevdw/ th`~ qalavtth~).7

The eastern (Polybius calls it the Massiliotic) mouth seems to have been closer

then to Arelate/Arles than today. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, writing just

before AD 400, reports that in his day Arelate lay 18 m.p., about 26.6 km., from the

sea (Amm. Marc. 15.11.18); now Arles lies 39 km. from Port-St-Louis, with the river-

100 Jahr alt bin, habe ich die einschlägige Literatur noch nicht ganz gelesen’

(Geschichte der Karthager 3: Von 218–146 (Berlin, 1913) 181).

2 On Polybius’ stadia and Roman milia passuum see Walbank, Comm. 1.373; and

Comm. 3 (Oxford, 1979) 593-5, 617, 619, 623-8, 630-2. Walbank, 1.373, sees the 8:1

ratio applying ‘only to the section from Emporiae (i.e. the Pyrenees) to the Rhône’; so

too de Beer, 49-50; Rivet (n. 6) 36 n.12. Earlier, Polybius reports the Roman camp, at

the siege of Agrigentum in 262–261, lying ‘at eight stadia from the city’ (1.17.8),

which may well mean 1 m.p., but this must reflect a Roman source. E. de Saint-Denis,

‘Encore l’itinéraire transalpin d’Hannibal’, Revue des Études latines 51 (1973) 122-49

(see 127-8), and P. Connolly, Greece and Rome at War (London, 1981; repr. 1988)

159, 161, 163, apply 8:1 to all Polybius’s march-distances. Jullian (n. 1) 1.464 n.4,

generalises from the Via Domitia measurement to suppose that Polybius ‘apporte des

données prises ailleurs et appliquées à cette expédition’, or that he reckons up stadia

by multiplying march-days by 100 or 200 (cf. 467 n.5); likewise C. Torr, Hannibal

crosses the Alps (Cambridge, 1924) 1-2; Seibert (1988: n. 1) 35, and cf. n. 83 below.

3 Modern distances: Ampurias-Perpignan 63 km. (via the Le Perthus pass),

Perpignan-Narbonne 63, Narbonne-Montpellier 93, Montpellier-Nîmes 52; Nîmes-

Tarascon 19: total 290 km. The 8:1 Roman ratio: Pliny, Nat. Hist. 2.85; Censorinus, de

Die Natali 13.2; cf. Strabo, Geogr. 7.7.4 C322. Distances listed in itineraria: Itin.

Antonini 388-90, 396-7; Itin. Gaditanum (the Vicarello goblets), see K. Miller,

Itineraria Romana (Stuttgart 1916; repr. Roma, 1964) lxxi-lxxii; O.A.W. Dilke, Greek

and Roman Maps (London, 1985) 122-3; G. Barruol, Les Peuples préromains du sud-

est de la Gaule: Étude de géographie historique (Paris, 1975) 43-82. On the Roman

route via the Col du Perthus, see Miller, 127, 183. The scalae Hannibalis (Mela, Geogr.

2.80), cited in this connexion by P.G. Walsh (T. Livi … Liber XXI (London, 1973) 165),

in reality were on the Mons Iovis south of Emporiae, perhaps the La Ganga pass in

the Serra de les Gavarres near Gerunda/Gerona. Strabo’s figures are 200 stadia (i.e.

5

Dexter Hoyos 6

mouth itself some 7 km. further south again. (Ammianus cannot be thinking of the

Petit Rhône, which winds sinuously south-westwards to meet the Mediterranean at

Saintes-Maries, and which—more important—branches off north of Arles.) The mouth

of the Grand Rhône has therefore advanced just over 19 km. since his time, a rate of

1.2 km. per century. If the same rate applied between 218 BC and AD 400, the

Massiliotic branch should have met the sea only 19.4 km. from Arelate in Hannibal’s

time—about 13 m.p. Arles in turn is 17 km. south of Tarascon (Tarusco), or 12 m.p.

according to the Roman itineraries.8

25 m.p.) from Emporiae to the Pyrenees, then—plainly from a Roman source—63

m.p. to Narbo, and another 88 to Nemausus (3.4.8 C159; 4.1.3 C178; cf. n. 84); they

add up to 201 m.p., so that with another 15 m.p. (as in the Itineraria) from Nemausus

to Ugernum the total comes to 216 m.p. or 1,728 ‘Roman’ stadia. But Strabo’s

mileages are fuzzy: his own next stage (Nemausus via Ugernum to Aquae Sextiae) is

53 m.p., but the Itin. make it 68 (Miller, 85-6, map 29), and today’s distance is 107

km., equivalent to 72 m.p.

4 T. Büttner-Wobst’s rejection of the reference to the Roman road, as a later

interpolation (Polybii Historiae (Teubner edn., 1905) xxix), is followed by Jullian, 1.464

n.1; P. Pédech, La Méthode historique de Polybe (Paris, 1964) 536 n.120; J. de

Foucault, Polybe: Histoires Livre III (Budé edn.: Paris, 1971) 77, 199. Seibert, too

(1988: n. 1) 35, judges it as ‘von einem Herausgeber nachträglich seinem Werk

eingefügt’. By contrast, F.W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius 1

(Oxford, 1957) 373, sees it as a very late addition by Polybius himself. Other

interpolations in this chapter are, at 39.6, a remark about the name ‘New Carthage’

(Walbank, Comm. 1.372), and at 39.8 the statement that from Emporiae to Narbo (a

Roman colony founded in or after 118) there are 600 stadia, with Polybius’ authentic

text going on to state that ‘from there’ it was 1,600 to the Rhône. In fact 1,600 stadia

from Narbo to the Rhône is a geographic absurdity: from Narbonne to Orange—itself

well north of Hannibal’s likely crossing-site—is 188 km. by the modern highway

(1,016 stadia on the 8:1 ratio, 1,058 on the ‘Polybian’); and, in the itineraries, from

Narbo to Ugernum is 107 m.p (thus 856 ‘Roman’ stadia or 891 ‘Polybian’). Both

passages are secluded in most editions, though the second is accepted in Paton’s

Loeb text.

5 Polybius’ visit to Spain: 3.48.12. See F.W. Walbank, Polybius (Berkeley, Los

Angeles, London, 1972) 11, 24, 30-31, 51-2, 120; Pédech, 528-9; C.B. Champion,


Thus the coast south of Arelate formed a deep gulf in 218. Today, the Camargue

marshes have a shape very roughly triangular, with the apex to the north. But the

Petit Rhône further west has not pushed that section of the delta southward. Rather,

the coast there has been receding for centuries. In turn, just east of the ‘Massiliotic’

Rhône begins the broad Plaine de la Crau, a windswept plain of rubble, stones and

boulders—in places over 10 metres deep—left behind from a geologically ancient era

when the river Durance extended to the region and swept rubble down from the Alps.

La Crau was well known to the Greeks, who devised a Herculean myth for it, told for

instance in a passage of Aeschylus quoted by Strabo. Pliny the Elder registers it in his

geographical survey as the ‘Campi Lapidei’ and elsewhere notes how thousands of

sheep grazed on its thyme-grass, all that grew there (Nat. Hist. 3.34; 21.57).9

This is relevant to Scipio’s advance northwards after he learned of Hannibal’s

crossing. A cavalry unit, which he had first sent forward, clashed successfully with

some of Hannibal’s Numidian horse close to the Carthaginian camp, on the day after

the main Punic army had crossed the Rhône (P. 3.41.9, 45.1-3; L. 21.29.1-4 fails to

mention the locale). The Romans then had to ride back to alert Scipio. They reached

Cultural Politics in Polybius’ Histories (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2004) 17-18.

Seibert (1988: n. 1) 35 holds that ‘die römischen Messungen konnten erst nach dem

Bau der via Domitia aufgenommen werden’, but this should apply only to the actual

placing of the milestones.

8 Tarusco to Arelate: Miller (n. 3) 85, with map 29 there.

7 scedovn, ‘almost’ or ‘around’, should not be ignored, as by Lazenby (n. 1) 35,

translating the phrase as ‘being at a distance of four days’ march from the sea’.

9 Nature of the Rhône delta and Camargue since ancient times: A.T. Hodge,

Ancient Greek France (New York, 1999) 40-4, 238 nn.12-14. Plaine de la Crau: Strabo

4.1.7 C181-3; Hodge, 45-6, 238 n.15 (stressing the violence of the Mistral wind, which

blows mainly in winter); Rivet (n. 6) 5. Cf. C. Headlam, Provence and Languedoc

(London, 1912) 228, ‘in some places the boulders lie from 30 to 60 feet deep. … an

immense, strange desert of stones and rubble.’ Mythological explanation: as early as

Aeschylus, Prometheus Unbound, fragm. 199 Nauck (= Strabo, Geogr. 4.1.7 C183).

Jullian (n. 1) 474 strangely supposes that it would have been perfectly suited to

Hannibal’s cavalry in battle. La Crau supported up to 100,000 sheep in the later 19th

Century (E. Desjardins, Géographie de la Gaule romaine, 3 vols. (Paris, 1876–1885),

1.195).

7

Dexter Hoyos 8

him probably on the day following, since the clash had occurred during daytime and

was hard fought, and on their return they had to make their way down the river-

marshlands. Also on the day after the clash, Hannibal set his own army in motion

northwards while he waited to bring across the elephants (P. 3.45.5–47.1). Scipio

meanwhile loaded his baggage on his ships, which he left behind (45.4, 49.3), and

marched for the enemy camp to arrive ‘three days after’ the Carthaginians had left

(hJmevrai~ u}steron trisiv, 49.1: see Tables 1 and 2).

Polybius does not write that Scipio reached the camp ‘on the third day’ (tritai`o~),

though he often elsewhere uses the adjectival form for march-times. Does he mean

three days by modern reckoning or by inclusive reckoning? Inclusive reckoning would

mean that, after setting out on ‘day 1’, Scipio reached the site on ‘day 3’. Livy’s

‘triduo fere’ (21.32.1), meaning ‘in three days roughly’, looks like a hedging of bets,

but it may also be common sense. Although Scipio must have set out as soon as he

could after hearing his cavalrymen’s report, he had to spend some time first on the

baggage-loading and other preparations—for he expected to meet Hannibal in battle.

This produces two possible alternatives for his march.10

TABLE 1: SCIPIO’S MARCH: ALTERNATIVE I

Hannibal: days Hannibal: actions Scipio

Crossing day H.’s infantry and cavalry cross Rhône

Scipio sends out cavalry scouts

1 day after crossing H. sends out Numidians; prepares to bring over elephants; cavalry clash with Romans

Roman cavalry clashes with Numidians

10 The Roman cavalry probably set out on Hannibal’s crossing-day, for they had an

absolute minimum of 13 m.p. (19 km.) to ride—the distance from the sea to where

the river branched—and all but certainly further still. To do so, fight a hard skirmish,

inspect the enemy’s camp (P. 3.45.3), and then ride back to their own, all in one day,

is scarcely possible; cf. Seibert, Forsch. zu Hann. (n. 1) 103 n.152. Even if it was

achieved by at least a few riders, the rest of the reconstructed timetable remains

unaffected. Time needed for army to load baggage aboard ships: stressed also by

Torr (n. 2) 4-5.


2 days after

crossing

H. sends off infantry, brings over elephants and abandons camp

Cavalry reports to Scipio; Scipio loads baggage on ships, sets out north (1st march day)

3 days after crossing;

2nd day since departing camp

H. marching north Scipio’s 2nd march day


3rd day since departing camp

H. marching north Scipio’s 3rd march day; reaches Punic camp?


4th day since departing camp

H. reaches ‘The Island’ Scipio begins march back to coast

If Scipio set out on the same day that the Carthaginians left their camp, it could

not have been until after noon, as shown above. This would in turn have required the

marching Romans to pitch their first camp as night itself was coming on—an unusual,

because risky, procedure, but one which the consul might think necessary—whereas

normally a Roman army stopped in the early afternoon to encamp. A second day’s

marching, and then a third, followed: for had the Romans arrived at the Punic camp

on the evening of only the second march-day, it would have been on the day after

Hannibal’s departure.

Alternatively, Scipio may not have started out on the day his cavalry returned,

preferring to avoid a march through afternoon and early evening. After all, he was

expecting Hannibal to confront him; that the Carthaginian would head away to the

north would come as a shock (P. 3.49.1-2). In other words Scipio was moving towards

an enemy whom he supposed to be moving towards him, and this called for caution—

as both Polybius and Livy imply (P. 3.45.4; L. 21.32.1). If he preferred to start out on

the day after his cavalry returned, this was also the day after Hannibal departed

northwards. Since the Romans still reached the Punic camp ‘three days after’ his

departure, they will have had a march of just two days.

TABLE 2: SCIPIO’S MARCH: ALTERNATIVE II

Hannibal: days Hannibal: actions Scipio

Crossing day H.’s infantry and cavalry Scipio sends out cavalry

9

Dexter Hoyos 10

cross scouts (?)

1 day after crossing H. sends out Numidians; prepares to bring over elephants

Roman cavalry clashes with Numidians

2 days after crossing

H. sends off infantry, brings over elephants and departs from camp

Cavalry reports to Scipio; Scipio loads baggage on ships


2nd day since departing camp

H. marching north Scipio sets out north (1st march-day)


3rd day since departing camp

H. marching north Scipio’s 2nd march-day; reaches Punic camp


4th day since departing camp

H. reaches ‘The Island’ Scipio sets out for the coast

Roman army recruits on exercises, according to the later military compiler

Vegetius (De Re Militari 1.9; cf. 1.27), should normally cover 20 m.p. daily, thus about

29.6 km., in five summer hours; at a faster pace, they should cover 24 m.p. (35.5

km.) in this time. But whether Scipio took three days of marching, or two, to reach

the abandoned camp, he cannot have moved even at Vegetius’ ordinary speed, at

any rate not until he passed Arelate. First his army had to progress either through the

Camargue marshes beside the Rhône or else, looping eastwards, across the Plaine de

la Crau. Neither route permitted the pace of a good road (and La Crau’s treacherous

and endless stones would endanger horses). Even after reaching relatively good

terrain after Arelate, his pace would hardly quicken much, for now he had to be on

guard against the enemy. Livy indeed reports him advancing on the Punic camp

‘quadrato agmine’, in battle order (21.32.1), though it would be unwise to suppose

that he marched like this all the way from the coast. In three marching days, then,

Scipio cannot have covered anything like Vegetius’ ordinary 60 m.p.; nor 40 m.p. in

two. He might, though, cover the 36 or 37 km., about 25 m.p., to the area around

Tarusco.11

This is not decisive evidence by itself for Ugernum-Tarusco as the crossing-point,

but it does add a modicum of support. Polybius’ other item of reckoning still remains

to be considered: the crossing lay ‘around four days’ road from the sea for an army’


(3.42.1: stratopevdw). With Scipio taking two, or at most three, days from the sea to

the campsite, this cannot refer to his route.12

Polybius himself is no help at all in working out marching rates. Later he records

Hannibal taking ten days to cover 800 stadia ‘on the plains’ along the Rhône (3.50.1;

see §V). On the 8:1 ratio of stadia to m.p., this means 100 m.p. in 10 days, a speed

half that of Vegetius’ ordinary rate. Later still, he has Hannibal taking fifteen days to

get through the Alps (3.56.3); and his distance for this—‘the remaining crossing over

the Alps’ quoted above (39.10)—is 1,200 stadia, thus 150 m.p. on the same ratio. In

fact, of those fifteen days one was stationary, the rest-day after capturing a town

from the Allobroges (52.1). It will be shown that two later rest-days, at the top of the

pass, are not to be counted in (§VIII); so if Polybius tells it all correctly, the Alpine

stage was covered in 14 days of actual marching, one of which included fighting off

severe attacks. On his own figure of 1,200 stadia, this would average 85.7 stadia a

day, rather faster than the previous, unobstructed stage ‘on the plains’. In fact it will

12 Proctor, 120, rejects the 4-day measurement: ‘this statement, however, is

demonstrably unsound [his italics] on the evidence we have considered’, meaning

especially Scipio’s march. Torr, 1-2, 18, 25; de Beer (n. 1) 50, 53; Proctor, 162-4; and

Lazenby, 35-6, all interpret the statement to imply 80 stadia or 10 m.p. a day,

because of Polybius’ report at 3.50.1. Proctor and Lazenby then use this to buttress

their case for Beaucaire-Tarascon. Seibert (1988: n. 1) 42-5, judges the prospects for

‘eine sichere Rekonstruktion’ as ‘a priori ungünstig’ but favours Beaucaire.

11 La Crau unsuitable for marching (cf. n. 9): so too Proctor (n. 1), 106, 109. On

Vegetius 1.9 see the notes by N.P. Milner to his translation, Vegetius: Epitome of

Military Science (Liverpool, 1993) 10; cf. his Introduction, xiii-xxx. Five summer hours

(‘horis quinque dumtaxat aestivis’) are approximately 6.5 hours, standard time. On

marching speeds: G. Watson, The Roman Soldier (London, 1970) 54-5; Proctor, 26-34,

who also stresses the importance of periodic rest-days (every 4-5 days in the imperial

Roman army).—Proctor insists (109, 116, 120) that Livy has Scipio march all the way

‘quadrato agmine’; actually Livy writes ‘quadrato agmine ad castra hostium venerat’,

a plausible nuance he may have found in one source (not in Polybius, though). For

Connolly (n. 2), 155, Scipio ‘with his men stripped down for forced marching raced

north’; similarly D. Freshfield, Hannibal Once More (London, 1914), 67; Torr, 4, 7—

even though he notes (5) that Scipio would have proceeded cautiously; Lazenby

(n. 1), 51, ‘marched rapidly up river’; Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty (n. 6) 105, ‘marched

fast’. This picture builds too much on speuvdwn: see Proctor, 108-10.

11

Dexter Hoyos 12

be shown that the real figure for the later stage was around 1,400 (§X). 1,400 stadia

in 14 marching-days is a daily average of 100 stadia, or 12.5 m.p. on the Roman

ratio, again faster than the preceding 800 in ten. How these rates are to be explained

will be studied later (§§VIII, X), but it is plain that these varying rates from particular

Hannibalic marches cannot safely be used as guides to Polybius’ idea of a normal

day’s march ‘for an army’.

For ‘around four days’ road from the sea for an army’ Polybius obviously has a

yardstick of some sort in mind. At Vegetius’ ordinary rate of 20 m.p. per day, and

assuming no rest day, it would total around 80 m.p. (118.4 km.). Polybius, of course,

was not using a Roman military manual; they lay in the future, as did paved Roman

highways criss-crossing the empire. But for a seasoned army of his and Hannibal’s

time, over unpaved roads or fairly level open ground, and when not arrayed in battle-

order against possible attack, an average of some 17 m.p. (25.2 km.) a day, taking

six to seven hours—the equivalent of five Roman ‘summer hours’—seems a

reasonable, indeed conservative estimate. Elephants, which reportedly can move

easily at 16 km. (almost 11 m.p.) an hour, would have little trouble keeping up,

although pack-animals with their loads must have required special care. Hannibal had

left all the army’s ‘baggage’ in Spain (P. 3.35.5, ta;~ ajposkeuav~), but pack animals

were still needed, to carry armour, weapons and provisions on the march, and are

attested (3.51.2 etc.; L. 21.33.6-7 etc.). Other rates of speed—over broken or hilly

ground, in bad weather, under frequent enemy attacks, or with ill-disciplined and

dispirited troops—could not serve as a yardstick for an average day’s march.13

At 17 m.p. for a standard day’s march in open country, a march of ‘around four

days’ would then be around 65-68 m.p., or about 96-101 km. With Ugernum and

Tarusco only 25 m.p. or so from the mouth of the ‘Massiliotic’ Rhône in 218, such a

yardstick obviously does not fit, or fit a crossing further south at Fourques, another

occasional candidate 3 km. north of Arles, where the Rhône forks (hence the name).

This 4-day measurement is one basis for hypotheses which locate Hannibal’s crossing

higher up the river. Such supposed crossings range between Avignon, close to where

the river Durance (Druentia) joins the Rhône from the east, 23 km. north of Tarascon

and thus about 59 km. from the river-mouth in 218 (hardly far enough for a 4-day

13 Lancel, too (n. 14: 128), estimates a march-rate for Hannibal’s army of only ‘une

quinzaine de kilomètres par jour’, i.e. about 10 m.p. a day. Elephants’ speed, in

herds: H.H. Scullard, The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World (London, 1974) 22,

‘ten miles an hour’.


march, however), to Bourg St Andéol, 58 km. north of Avignon and so 117 km. or 79

m.p. from the river-mouth. Each depends on estimates of how wide the Rhône is or

was—to account for Hannibal’s inventive solution for transporting the elephants

across—or where the right bank afforded room for an army still 46,000 strong to

gather (P. 3.60.5), plus its horses, pack-animals and elephants.14

On such hypotheses, Polybius is wrong in firmly equating the line of march with

the later Roman highway and its crossing at Ugernum-Tarusco, even though there

was no propaganda benefit from falsifying a crossing upriver. The suggested

crossing-points upstream, like Bagnols or Bourg-St-Andéol, are more distant from

Emporiae than the 1,600 stadia (200 m.p.) to Ugernum. Preferring any of them

therefore requires rejecting a topographical measurement—the 1,600 stadia—to

accommodate a chronological one, the 4-day march-distance ‘from the sea’.

Contrastingly, to accept the Ugernum-Tarusco crossing-point supposedly means that

the 4-day measurement must be rejected. But this conundrum can be resolved.

If the 4-day distance from the sea ‘for an army’ (stratopevdw/) meant from the

mouth of the Rhône, one must ask where, why and when an army might have

operated in the Camargue in or before Polybius’ time. Scipio himself had no intention

of campaigning there; he was en route by sea to Spain and had put in to land for a

brief stop only. The Camargue may in places have been less marshy in ancient times

—some farming was done, though not it seems in the eastern sector around the

Grand Rhône—but it was never known for military operations. Neither the Rhône

delta nor the Plaine de la Crau to its east were at all suited to warfare and, in fact,

none is known there. In other words, ‘around four days’ road from the sea for an

army’ cannot refer to an army using the Rhône delta, or to a distance starting from

the sea there. It refers to some other distance.15

One suggestion has been to measure it from the area of Lunel, between

Montpellier and Nîmes, which supposedly would have been the last time Hannibal’s

army saw the sea before striking inland for the Rhône-crossing. Now Lunel is only 54

km. from Beaucaire (Ugernum), or about 36.5 m.p., over reasonably level terrain—

roughly two ordinary marching days. A ‘four days’ road’ from there would have to

extend beyond Nîmes, which lies 28 km. or 19 m.p. beyond Lunel, to one of the

proposed upriver crossing-points again. Yet this prompts another question: why

generalise the crossing-point as around 4 days ‘from the sea for an army’, if Polybius

actually means 4 days from the last time Hannibal’s own army saw the sea in the

distance? Lunel is equally unsatisfactory.16

13

Dexter Hoyos 14

As mentioned above, the historian himself travelled from Italy over the Alps and

into southern Gaul, apparently around 150 BC. He recorded the Romans’

contemporary operations in southern Gaul; a surviving excerpt concerns a successful

campaign by the consul Opimius in 154 to protect Massilia against her troublesome

Ligurian neighbours (P. 33.8–10). Second-century Roman armies en route to or from

Spain by land would have to pass near Massilia, or indeed stop at that city for fresh

supplies and occasionally even rest. Then in 125–121 Massilia had to be defended

again, including action against large and restless Gallic cantons to her north, like the

Allobroges who were crushed in a battle at the junction of the Rhône and the Isère.

These wars needed Massilia as a base: in 154 for operating against the Ligurians of

the Maritime Alps, thirty years later for thrusts far up the Rhône. Along with the Via

Domitia and firmer Roman control over southern Gaul, another result of these later

campaigns was the colony at Aquae Sextiae (Aix), 30 km. north of Massilia.

Marching-distances from Massilia are likely to have become well known through

these operations, even as early as the 150s. One of the best-known toutes,

necessarily, would be from Massilia to the Rhône-crossing of the ‘Way of Hercules’ at

Ugernum-Tarusco. On today’s roads it is 96 km. (64.9 m.p.) from Marseille to

Tarascon and 98 (66.2 m.p.) to Beaucaire. Polybius’ yardstick-measurement of

around four days’ march for an army was estimated above, on other grounds, as 65-

68 m.p. It might have been more helpful to specify ‘from the sea at Massilia’, but this

was not obligatory. There is, therefore, no need to jettison either his treatment of

Hannibal’s route to the Rhône as the line of the Via Domitia, or his separate

measurement from the Rhône-crossing to the sea.17

II Polybius and Livy

Livy’s account of Hannibal’s march becomes increasingly pertinent, and

controversial, from the Rhône-crossing on. Most but not all of it he draws from

Polybius. His methods, though, are neither slavish nor predictable. He imports his

own interests and selectivity, and naturally draws on other predecessors as well.

For instance, as already mentioned, he avoids distance-statistics. He also leaves

out the Punic army-strengths which Polybius records at the Pyrenees (L. 21.24.1

merely ‘cum reliquis copiis’) and at the Rhône (P. 3.60.5). On the other hand,

discussing Hannibal’s strength on reaching Italy, Livy mentions not only Polybius’

figure—without naming him or his source, Hannibal himself—but two other estimates,

both of them bigger and less plausible (21.38.2-5). Interestingly, one came from


Hannibal’s contemporary (and one-time prisoner of war) Cincius Alimentus, whom he

does name; and he then adds what Cincius said was Hannibal’s own estimate of

losses from the Rhône-crossing onwards.

Even where Polybius is Livy’s direct source for a sequence of events, Livy’s

treatment is not simple copying. Hannibal’s and Scipio’s movements from the Rhône

to the beginning of the Alps are an example. In Table 3, the Livian items that differ

significantly from Polybius’ sequence or content are in italics.

TABLE 3: EVENTS AROUND THE RHÔNE

Polybius 3 Livy 21

41: Scipio reaches Rhône’s mouth. Hannibal reaches Rhône. Scipio sends out cavalry.

26: Scipio reaches Rhône’s mouth, sends out cavalry. Hannibal reaches Rhône.

42–44: Hannibal’s crossing. ‘Next morning’ he sends out Numidian scouts. Addresses army, presents envoys from Boii in Italy.

26–28: Hannibal’s crossing.

28.5-12: Elephants brought across.

45: Cavalry skirmish near his camp. Learning of it, Scipio sets out from Rhône’s mouth. Day after addressing army, Hannibal sends off infantry northwards.

29: ‘Dum elephanti traiciuntur’, Numidians sent out and clash with Roman cavalry.

30: Hannibal addresses army, presents envoys from Boii in Italy.

46: Elephants brought across. Hannibal sets off northwards with them and cavalry.

47–48: Discussion of the region and criticism of unnamed previous narrators.

31: ‘Postero die’ Hannibal marches north, reaches The Island ‘quartis castris’, rests, then marches towards Alps via Gallic tribes (named) as far as the Durance.

15

Dexter Hoyos 16

49: Scipio finds camp abandoned, returns to coast, sends brother with army on to Spain, returns personally to North Italy to confront enemy. Hannibal reaches The Island in 4 days.

50: He marches for the Alps.

32: Scipio finds camp abandoned, returns to coast, sends brother with army on to Spain, returns personally to Genua to defend Italy. Hannibal from the Durance enters the Alps.

Most striking here is how Livy reverses the timings of Hannibal’s address to the

army, at which he presented the Gallic envoys from across the Alps, and of the

elephants’ crossing. His time-indicators are decidedly economical: just ‘dum

elephanti traiciuntur’ and ‘postero die’—and the first one is wrong if Polybius is right.

Maybe he draws these divergent touches from another source, even though he did

not prefer that one to Polybius as principal fount. Certainly he knew more than one

version of how the elephants were brought across (21.28.5 and 6), and he gives tribal

names that Polybius does not (§IV). But quite possibly, too, some divergences may be

due to his own handling of what he read in Polybius and others, to create a unified

narrative by relying partly on direct consultation of other papyrus rolls, partly on

notes (excerpta or adnotationes) and partly—it may well be—on memory.18

14 For a conspectus of the suggested crossings and their proponents: Seibert

(1988: n. 1) 43 (map), 45; cf. de Beer, 148-51. S. Lancel, Hannibal (Paris, 1995) 117-

20, 122, locates it ‘en amont du confluent de la Durance’ because of Polybius’ 4-day

measurement; cf. G. de Sanctis, Storia dei Romani 3.2 (2nd edn., Firenze, 1968 [1st

end., Torino, 1907]) 68-9; de Saint-Denis (n. 2) 125-8, 132-3. On Fourques, cf.

Connolly (n. 2) 161-2, for evidence that the terrain to its west was lakes and marshes

until the 17th Century. Prevas (n. 1), 90-1, 106, who seems not to know of the

coastline changes since 218 BC, holds to Fourques or Tarascon with little discussion.

15 Camargue less waterlogged in ancient times: Hodge (n. 9) 42-4, noting that ‘in

all parts of it except in the south-east corner [i.e., the sector of the Grand Rhône]…,

excavation regularly turns up coins, potsherds and other evidence of ancient

habitation’ (44). Marius around 103 dredged a channel, the fossa Mariana, from the

Rhône some miles inland to the sea at Fos, whose modern name preserves the Latin

term (Hodge, 43, 148-9, 272 n.26): this was to avoid the difficult river-mouth, with silt

and sandbars, for shipping cargo and perhaps troops up to Arelate and beyond.

Marius was preparing for the Cimbric invasion, ultimately crushed at Aquae Sextiae in

102, not for campaigning in the Camargue or on La Crau.


An earlier episode in Book 21 compactly shows how Livy adapts a mainly Polybian

account of an episode and adds other items: Hannibal’s campaign in 220 into central

and north-west Spain and his victory at the river Tagus (21.5.6-17; P. 3.14.1-9).

TABLE 4: HANNIBAL’S CAMPAIGN IN 220

Polybius 3.14.1-9 Livy 21.5.6-17

P1: H. attacks Vaccaei, captures Helmantica by storm and Arboucala ‘after much labour’.

L6: H. captures Hermandica and Arbocala, Arbocala being ‘et virtute et multitudine oppidanorum diu defensa’.

P2: On return march, H. is endangered by Carpetani and others,

L7: Refugees from Hermandica and the Olcades join together,

P3: incited by Olcades refugees [previous victims of H.] and those from Helmantica.

L8: stir up the Carpetani and attack H. on his return march, close to the Tagus.

P4: H. would have been defeated in pitched battle,

L9: H., avoiding battle, encamps on the bank and then crosses the river during ‘rest and silence from the enemy’. He builds a rampart at a distance, to lure the enemy across and attack them.

P5: but he manoeuvres to have the river Tagus in his front and deploy

L10: H. orders the cavalry to attack the enemy in the river, and places

16 Lunel suggested by Connolly (n. 2) 161.

17 For sources on the campaigns of 154 and 125–121 see Broughton, MRR (n. 44)

1.449, 510-11, 516, 520-1, 524; cf. J. Drinkwater, Roman Gaul (London, 1983) 5-7;

Rivet (n. 6) 32-44. Why Hannibal should have marched away from Scipio at the

Rhône is explored by Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty (n. 6) 103-5; cf. below, §XI.

18 Livy’s second version (21.28.6-12) is Polybius’. So Walsh (n. 3) 174 holds that

‘Livy probably found the same account in Coelius, who like Polybius followed Silenus’,

and ‘the first version will accordingly be [the later annalist Valerius] Antias’.’ This is

normal quellenkritisch method, obviously fragile. Whether Coelius did follow Silenus

and, even more pertinent, whether Polybius did is far from clear. An implied further

assumption is that each author slavishly copied out what the favoured predecessor

had written, except where the copier explicitly added mention of another version.

Livy’s own technique, shown above, disproves the assumption; while to regard

Polybius as largely a copier is more than mildly implausible.

17

Dexter Hoyos 18

his 40 elephants. his 40 elephants on the bank.

L11: The enemy totalled 100,000, unbeatable in a pitched battle.

P6: The barbarians, coming across the river, are destroyed by the animals as they come ashore;

L12: Excited and over-confident, they rush disorganisedly into the river.

P7: others are killed in the river by H.’s cavalry.

L13: H.’s cavalry attacks them in the stream,

L14: where the flow and uncertain footing give the cavalry the advantage over the enemy foot-soldiers.

L15: Some who reach the other bank are crushed by the elephants.

P8: Crossing the river, H. routs the rest of the enemy force of 100,000.

L16: When those in the rear retreat to their side of the river, H. crosses—‘agmine quadrato’—and routs them, ravages their lands and soon compels the Carpetani to capitulate.

P9: ‘After these were defeated, no one now of those below the river Iber readily dared confront them [the Carthaginians], except the Saguntines.’

L17: ‘And now all beyond the Hiberus, except the Saguntines, belonged to the Carthaginians.’

Again, items that Livy does not take from Polybius are in italics, though it is worth

noting that at L10 the addition is a common-sense inference from Polybius’ account,

while L12 and L14 need be only Livy’s imaginative reconstruction of the scenes

implied at P6-7. Noteworthy, too, is how Livy again takes some items from Polybius

but puts them in a different setting. Thus L11 reproduces P4 and P8, but comes in

where it emphasises the size of the Spanish army; then Livy reports the cavalry’s

action in the river—which plainly stirs his imagination—before the elephants’ doings

on the riverbank (L13 = P7, L15 = P6).

By contrast, the italicised details at L6, L8-9 and most of those at L16 are not in

Polybius (save that the Carpetani’s capitulation at L16 is a commonsense inference

from P9). L6’s non-Polybian information probably, and L8-9’s surely, draw on some

other author. At L8 that other author had the Spaniards first attack Hannibal before

he crossed the Tagus, whereas Polybius writes (P2) only that they put him ‘into the

greatest peril’ by ‘gathering together against him’. Then Livy seems to compress (or

misconstrue) what he read next, for the detail about ‘valloque ita producto [or


praeducto] ut locum ad transgrediendum hostes haberent’ (L9) does not clearly

convey the situation after Hannibal crossed the river. There seems no reason for

Hannibal to build a vallum so as to lure the enemy after him; but quite possibly Livy

found Polybius’ succinct report here unclear or unsatisfying, and so looked about for

some extra details which he then not too skilfully added. Finally, L16 may again be

Livy’s own imaginative reconstruction—Hannibal ‘must have’ crossed the Tagus

agmine quadrato and ‘must have’ then ravaged the enemy’s lands, to rout their army

and force their submission—or it too may rely on another source.

The episode clearly illustrates several features: how much Livy takes from his

principal source, here Polybius; how he shifts and colours some of Polybius’ details;

how he adds items from elsewhere; and how he adds touches perhaps from his own

mental visualisation of the actions.19

Such methodological practices were hardly strange in ancient historiography, even

if a historian shifted periodically from one principal fount to another. Writing a

detailed history required coping with a variety (sometimes a wide variety) of earlier

authors, many of them no less detailed, and all written down on voluminous rolls of

papyrus, with few or no reference-aids like the column numbers in today’s

Realencyclopäedie or Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. The younger Pliny, who at one time

thought of composing a history, was anxious about—and ultimately deterred by—the

thought of a topic for which many sources existed: ‘parata inquisitio, sed onerosa

collatio’ (Epist. 5.8.12). Short of a photographic memory (which Livy certainly

lacked), finding a particular item or even section in any work was something like the

ancient equivalent of laboriously scrolling—an apt term—through a disk file without

using the ‘Find’ button. A principal fount, periodic consultation of others followed by

insertions from memory, and also considerable note-taking earlier on (adnotationes

and excerpta) were all but inevitable.

19 Walsh (n. 3) 130-1 discusses aspects of Livy’s account, including a case for

reading producto with the MSS., against Conway and Walter’s praeducto (in the

Oxford text). Polybius’ version and Livy’s are discussed by Walbank, Comm. 1.318.

Livy 21.5 is analysed in quellenkritisch fashion (focussing largely on 5.1-3) by K.-H.

Schwarte, Der Ausbruch des Zweiten Punischen Krieges—Rechtsfertigung und

Überlieferung (Wiesbaden, 1983) 18-20, judging it ‘ein unmittelbar aus Polybios

geschöpfter Einschub’ within a larger, anti-Hannibalic narrative which, he assumes on

orthodox Quellenkritik principles, Livy constructs as he does because it is what his

chosen anti-Hannibalic source did.

19

Dexter Hoyos 20

Excerpta were one of the ways in which Pliny the encyclopaedist dealt with

multifarious source-materials, as his nephew famously describes (Pliny, Epist. 3.5.10-

17). The encyclopaedist himself implies it in the preface to his Naturalis Historia

(Praef. 17: 2,000 works read; 20,000 res dignae assembled in 36 books), and so do

his fact-totals, summae, for each book of the work in Book 1’s contents-list. Codicilli

by amanuenses apart, he bequeathed to a bemused nephew no fewer than one

hundred and sixty books of personally handwritten ‘electorum commentarios’ (Epist.

3.5.17). These were not relevant solely to his encyclopaedia, for the elder Pliny was

also a noted historian. How systematically compiled they were we are not told.20

Hannibal’s Greek companions and biographers Silenus and Sosylus were available

to both Polybius and Livy. Whether Livy also looked at other Greek writers mentioned

by Polybius, like Chaereas (whom Polybius disdains, as he does Sosylus, for retailing

‘barber-shop gossip’: 3.20.5), or a Eumachus of Naples who is merely a name to us,

cannot be known. He does mention Cincius Alimentus, as noted above, and in his

next book Fabius Pictor (22.7.4), another contemporary of Hannibal’s and the first

Roman to compose a formal history, whom Polybius too mentions early in his Book 3

(3.8.1-8). For the march of Hannibal, though, only guesses can be made about which

of these he consulted besides Polybius.21

20 For Livy’s working methods, at any rate in later Books, see T.J. Luce, Livy: the

Composition of his History (Princeton, 1977) 139-229, summarised at 228: after a

preliminary reading of available sources, ‘the second step [in composition] was to

read through the main blocks of source materials for periods of at least a consular

year … At this stage the exact sequence he would follow in joining his source

material together was determined, odd notices from secondary sources searched out,

and plans made for the methods of adaptation that would be necessary for the

various sections.’ The final stage was ‘to write up the material section by section’,

and—in Luce’s analysis—Livy ‘usually read over the material by units [i.e. episodes]

and wrote them up from memory by units.’ Cf. C.W. Fornara, The Nature of History in

Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1983; repr. 1988) 47-9,

56-61. On the Elder Pliny’s ceaseless note-taking (‘nihil enim legit quod non

excerperet’: Pliny, Epist. 3.5.10), and the resulting commentarii, cf. A.N. Sherwin-

White, The Letters of Pliny: a Historical and Social Commentary (Oxford, 1966) 219,

224-5.


III Crossing the Durance with Livy

After setting out from his camp by the Rhône, Hannibal’s next recorded stop, 4

days later, was a place which Polybius, closely followed again by Livy, calls The Island

(P. 3.49.1; L. 21.31.4). En route to The Island, though, the army had to cross more

than one intervening tributary of the Rhône, though neither historian mentions any.

The most notable—for several reasons—was the Durance (ancient Druentia), which

meets the Rhône at Avennio (Avignon) about 20 km., or rather under a day’s march,

north of the crossing-site. Livy elsewhere describes this river vividly:

Also an Alpine river, the Druentia is, of all the waterways of Gaul, by far the

most difficult to cross. The volume of water it carries is enormous, but it is not

navigable [non tamen navium patiens est] because it has no banks to confine

it. Its flow is divided amongst a number of channels that never remain the

same, and the river is continually forming new shallows and new pools,

making passage hazardous also for a foot soldier. In addition, it rolls along

gravel [saxa glareosa], thus providing no steady or secure footing for any one

stepping into it. At that time, too, it was in spate from the rains, which caused

terrible problems for the men as they tried to cross, for, in addition to

everything else, they were also thrown off balance by their own fear and

discordant cries (21.31.10-12).22

This is a credible portrayal of the lower reaches of the river—note the comment

‘non tamen navium patiens est’—in spate across the Provençal plains, at any rate

until modern hydroelectric and irrigation projects imposed firmer controls. From

Sisteron in the north-east, if not from still higher upstream, the Durance does flow

‘amongst a number of channels’, creating innumerable small islands. Until recent

times at least, it was notorious for its periodically furious flow in autumn and when

the Alpine snows melted. Even the mention of saxa glareosa is accurate. In the

river’s last stretch towards its junction with the Rhône just outside Avignon, the area,

La Petite Crau, is geologically similar to the Plaine de la Crau and was created by the

Durance under similar conditions (though now the Petite Crau is covered with famous

vineyards). Only the high ground of the Chaîne des Alpilles separates the two Craus,

save near the Rhône where its level terrain joins them up.23

Livy’s datum about the rains should be treated seriously too, although his source

is not Polybius who nowhere mentions the Durance. While it is often held that the

Carthaginians were marching in August with the Durance in its summer doldrums—

and that therefore Livy is wrong—the likelihood is that the season was autumn.

Polybius, echoed by Livy, dates their arrival on the final pass over the Alps to near

21

Dexter Hoyos 22

the setting of the Pleiades (3.54.1, to; sunavptein th;n th`~ Pleiavdo~ duvsin; Livy

31.35.6), an astronomical event occurring in early November. The view that this is

merely a vague generalisation for approaching winter is not compelling; essentially it

rests on the further, unpersuasive view that for Hannibal to reach North Italy only in

early November left too little time for the events up to the battle of the Trebia around

22 December. In fact, those events can be reasonably fitted into the period, while the

other items of weather in Polybius and Livy well suit a march from Rhône to Alps

during the last weeks of autumn. From Polybius’ details of the days the Carthaginians

spent between crossing the Rhône and arriving on the pass to Italy, it can be worked

out that the Rhône-crossing occurred about 40 days before the latter, therefore in the

last week of September. Autumn rains, even heavy rains, cannot be ruled out for

Provence in late September.24

The notorious problem is that Livy does not report this crossing where it ought to

be. Instead, like Polybius’, his narrative of Hannibal’s march up the Rhône (21.31.2-4)

ignores the Durance and other intervening tributaries like the Ouvèze (Ovidis)

between Avignon and Orange (Arausio), the Aigues or Eygues (ancient name

debated) beside Orange, and beyond these the Drôme (Druma) 18 km. south of

Valence. Both historians carry Hannibal straight to The Island on a four-day march (L.

21.31.1-4, ‘quartis castris’; P. 3.49.5 ejpi; tevttara~ hJmevra~). After activities there,

in Polybius’ account he marches ‘along the river’ for 800 stadia (3.50.1). In Livy, on

departing The Island he avoids approaching the Alps ‘recta regione’ and instead ‘ad

laevam in Tricastinos flexit; inde per extremam oram Vocontiorum agri tendit in

Tricorios, haud usquam impedita via priusquam ad Druentiam flumen pervenit’

(31.9). Livy then describes the Durance vividly as just quoted, and shortly afterwards

21 Livy’s sources, including for the Second Punic War, are discussed by (e.g.) P.G.

Walsh, Livy: his Historical Aims and Methods (Cambridge, 1963) 110-37; B.D. Hoyos,

Unplanned Wars: the Origins of the First and Second Punic Wars (Berlin & New York,

1998) 291-2; cf. Hoyos, in Yardley and Hoyos (n. 1), xxx-xxxii. Silenus and Sosylus:

Nepos, Hann. 13.3. On them, Chaereas and ‘anonymen Hannibalhistorikern’: K.

Meister, Historische Kritik bei Polybios (Wiesbaden, 1975) 150-72. On Fabius and

Cincius, the earliest historians of Rome: E. Badian, ‘The early historians’, in T.A.

Dorey (ed.), Latin Historians (London, 1966) 1-6; H.G. Gundel in Kleine Pauly 1.1190;

I. Becker in Kl. P. 2.498; Schwarte (n. 19) 1-36; B.D. Hoyos, ‘Polybius mendax?’

(reviewing Schwarte), Liverpool Classical Monthly 10 (1985) 136-9; Seibert, Forsch.

zu Hann. (n. 1) 11-23, 29-31; Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty (n. 6) 212-14.


(32.6) takes up Hannibal’s doings once more with the words ‘Hannibal ab Druentia

campestri maxime itinere ad Alpes cum bona pace incolentium ea loca Gallorum

pervenit.’25

The Durance, in the High Alps where the course of his narrative has it, flows

mostly through a narrow valley flanked by mountains. Once a traveller has reached

its banks beyond Gap, ancient Vapincum, the access-route that Livy’s description

implies, there is no campestre maxime iter from there up to the mountains (although

22 ‘Is et ipse Alpinus amnis longe omnium Galliae fluminum difficillimus transitu

est; nam cum aquae vim vehat ingentem, non tamen navium patiens est, quia nullis

coercitus ripis, pluribus simul neque iisdem alveis fluens, nova semper vada

novosque gurgites—et ob eadem pediti quoque incerta via est—ad hoc saxa glareosa

volvens, nihil stabile nec tutum ingredienti praebet; et tum forte imbribus auctus

ingentem transgredientibus tumultum fecit, cum super cetera trepidatione ipsi sua

atque incertis clamoribus turbarentur’ (translated by J.C. Yardley (n. 1) ).

23 The monthly volume of the lower Durance is charted by de Beer, 75, showing a

steadily increasing rate from September to maxima in October and November (with

another peak in the summer months); cf. next note. Freshfield (n. 11) 36, and Seibert

(1988: n. 1) 38 read Livy’s description as compatible with the middle Durance below

Embrun (Freshfield) or Briançon (Seibert).—Petite Crau: Headlam (n. 9), 228.

24 Sudden spates in Provençal rivers after heavy rains: Proctor, 173-4 (eyewitness

description). For a useful relative chronology of the march see Lazenby (n. 1) 275-7;

he dates the Rhône-crossing to 25 September. The Durance at the end of August is

broad but only ‘un réseau de filets minces et peu profonds’ (Jullian (n. 1) 1.464 n.1

(at 465); echoed by Rivet (n. 6) 29; cf. de Beer, 75). Setting of the Pleiades: the last

visible setting before sunrise in 218 BC has been calculated as 7 November (de Beer,

140-3). Among those who reject the astronomical dating in favour of a less exact

earlier one (late August for the crossing and late September for the pass): de Sanctis

(n. 14) 77-81; Jullian, 1.487 n.2; Walbank, Comm. 1.365-6, 390, and in Selected

Papers: Studies in Greek and Roman History and Historiography (Cambridge, 1985)

109 n.6 (= J. of Rom. Stud. 46 (1956) 38 n.6); W. Huss, Geschichte der Karthager

(München, 1985) 298 n.35; Lancel (n. 14) 115. The case for treating the setting of the

Pleiades as accurate is satisfyingly made by Proctor (n. 1) 13-15, 40-5, 75-82;

Seibert, Forsch. zu Hann. (n. 1) 176-8. For strategic arguments supporting it: Hoyos,

Hannibal’s Dynasty (n. 6) 102-5. Events up to the Trebia in this time-frame: Lazenby,

23

Dexter Hoyos 24

the valley does widen for a few kilometres before Embrodunum/Embrun) or room for

multiple and constantly-changing channels. It goes without saying, too, that to term

this reach of the river ‘not navigable’ would be otiose. Nor, again, could Hannibal

leave the upper Durance behind at once, as ab Druentia ad Alpes pervenit implies:

for to reach any pass to Italy from there, the army must march either right up the

river-valley to the Col de Montgenèvre, or else some distance up it and then turn

right into one or other equally narrow tributary-valley, to reach a pass like the

Traversette or Larche. And the troops certainly did not advance with local goodwill;

the locals made intermittent attacks throughout, as Livy himself goes on to show

(31.8–35.3), once more following Polybius.

By contrast, travellers on crossing the lower Durance near Avennio/Avignon do

enjoy a campestre maxime iter northwards, with the Rhône on their left, the Ouvèze

ahead (at Sorgues), and then the Aigues at Arausio/Orange. (Between Tarascon and

Avignon, by contrast, the roads pass on either side of a low ridge, La Montagnette,

parallel to the Rhône.) Nor was there any opposition to Hannibal along that route,

and Polybius describes him as moving ‘steadily’ (eJxh`~: 3.49.1). Livy’s statement

about locals’ bona pax, supposedly beyond the Alpine Durance, likewise rings true for

this earlier section of march.

These passages supposedly describing the Alpine Durance are usually rejected as

fiction or as a non-Polybian source’s faulty rationalisation of the supposed route, with

Livy viewed as foolishly copying them without realising their incompatibility with

Polybius. Or—at best—he is viewed as mistakenly inserting at a wrongly late point

49-57.

25 L. 21.32.6 is closely followed by Silius Italicus, Punica 3.466-76, who is of no

independent value. Ammianus (15.10.11) succinctly mentions Hannibal passing ‘per

Tricasinos (sic), et oram Vocontiorum extremam, ad saltus Tricorios’—language

clearly taken from Livy, but perhaps by memory: for he also makes some egregious

mistakes in the same paragraph, and contradicts Livy on the meaning of the name

‘Alpes Poeninae’ (see 15.10.9-11; contrast L. 21.38.9). At 15.9.2 he names the 1st-

Century BC historian Timagenes as his authority ‘super origine prima Gallorum’; but

then mentions other sources, including Gauls themselves (15.9.5), so it is hardly

secure to see Timagenes as his source again at 15.10.11, though very often this is

assumed. Kahrstedt (n. 1) 164, prefers to see Ammianus using the Roman annalist

whom Kahrstedt and many others hold also responsible for L. 21.31.9.


details which properly belong just after the Rhône-crossing. Yet, if 31.9 were referring

to the army’s movements just after crossing the Rhône, it would still be strange.

Livy’s order of movement there is (a) ‘ad laevam in Tricastinos’, (b) ‘per extremam

oram Vocontiorum agri’, (c) ‘in Tricorios’, (d) ‘ad Druentiam’; but for the march from

the Rhône-crossing the order should be d-a-b-c, and we might also expect a mention

of The Island.26

By contrast, as some scholars have maintained and as will be examined below

(§IV), Livy’s topographical details about these tribes fit what is otherwise known of

their locations, and do outline a topographically comprehensible route (whether it is

the correct route is a further issue). Nor does the information contradict Polybius’

narrative of the post-Island march: partly because Polybius offers no names apart

from the Allobroges, and partly because his account of distances and passes through

mountainous country are compatible with the locations of the Vocontii, Tricorii and

upper Durance (§§IV–V).

It looks very much as if at 21.31.9, followed up distortedly by 32.6, Livy supplies a

topographical résumé of Hannibal’s advance from The Island to the High Alps (not to

26 Thus, for instance, Kahrstedt, 149-50; and Jullian (n. 1), 1.475 n.6, castigates all

of L. 21.31.9 as ‘les lignes les plus extraordinaires du récit de Tite-Live’, hence ‘il faut

étudier son texte sans en tenir compte.’ Connolly (n. 2) 163 likewise rejects Livy’s list

of tribes. Other sceptics include S. Wilkinson, Hannibal’s March (Oxford, 1911) 20-2;

Proctor, 165-6, 168, 181; de Saint-Denis (n. 2) 134-8 (‘il faut renoncer à concilier

Polybe et Tite-Live’), 147-8 (‘rejeter … Tite-Live’); Lancel (n. 14) 125 (judging 21.31.9

‘incompréhensible’). The passage and its ‘ad laevam’ turn seen as misplaced,

because it supposedly refers to Hannibal’s turn upstream after crossing the Rhône:

Wilkinson, 21; Walbank, Selected Papers (n. 24) 112 (= J. of Rom. Stud. 46 (1956)

40), and Comm. 1.383-4; Barruol (n. 3), 327; Walsh (n. 3) 181; Rivet, 30-2. Lazenby

(n. 1) 286 n.23 suggests textual confusions—Livy’s or a later copyist’s—at 31.4, 32.6

and 32.9, pointing out similarities in phrasing: e.g. ‘quartis castris ad Insulam

pervenit’ (31.4) and ‘priusquam ad Druentiam pervenit’ (31.9). He does not explain,

though, how the possible confusions might have occurred palaeographically. By

contrast, Seibert (1988: n. 1) 50 strongly defends the plausibility of Livy’s

topographical details at 21.31.9: ‘es scheint absurd zu sein, gerade weil diese

Angaben so exakt sind, sie als annalistische Erfindungen verwerfen zu wollen.’ But he

judges them incompatible with Polybius’ account (73, ‘nicht zu kombinieren’); again

in Hannibal (n. 1) 106 n.163.

25

Dexter Hoyos 26

the lower Alpes du Dauphiné, which lie between the Rhône and the main Alpine

chain). For this he had to draw on some another authority, thanks to Polybius’

aversion to naming names. This source, quite possibly an early writer, may also have

narrated the entire march in detail, but for that Livy prefers Polybius. His account of

the events is largely Polybius paraphrased (32.8–38.1), though with occasional

additions much in the fashion of the examples analysed above.

The layout of Livy’s narrative at this point (31.9–32.6) is worth noting. After the

topographical résumé brings Hannibal to the upper Durance (31.9) and the river is

described as discussed above (31.11-12), Livy returns to Scipio’s doings at the mouth

of the Rhône (32.1-5), having earlier left him in his camp there (29.5). He uses

Polybius for these further details about Scipio, but it must be noted that Polybius

reports them before taking Hannibal to The Island (3.49.1-4; cf. §II Table 3).

Livy then leaves Scipio and returns to Hannibal to take him on his way ‘ab

Druentia’ (32.6). His topographical source would naturally mention that at this point,

after the Tricorii, the troops had the Alps before them. Livy provides an evocative—

but quite generalised, therefore probably freely-composed—description of the mighty

heights, incongruously in the depths of winter (32.7; cf. n. 62). Next, at 32.8, he

starts using Polybius once again for his narrative of Hannibal. Thus he is combining

material from two separate places in Polybius (3.49.1-4 on Scipio, 50.1 ff. on Hannibal

once more), plus material from the topographically helpful fount; while he has just

supplied the description of the Durance itself either from this fount or even, perhaps,

from a third writer.

It is worth noting that, had he begun 21.31.4 with the words ‘Hannibal ab Druentia

campestri maxime itinere cum bona pace incolentium ea loca Gallorum quartis

castris ad Insulam pervenit’—that is, combining the first sentence of 32.6 (minus ‘ad

Alpes’) with the first sentence of 31.4—the report would have made sense for the

section of the march beyond the lower Durance. This is not to suggest emending

Livy’s text, but to point out how his Durance-mentions include items of sound detail

that have somehow found their way into an inappropriate later spot.

Other sources may well have recorded Hannibal crossing the lower Durance, with

a description of the distinctive features of the march in that region. But Livy at this

point (31.4) is using Polybius and ignores other sources. Once he comes to report

Hannibal’s departure from The Island, however, he evidently feels that he ought to

supply a topographical description of the next part of the route; and with his main

fount silent about it (apart from naming the Punic army’s attackers as Allobroges, an


item Livy does not accept or else misunderstands), he has to find details elsewhere.

From an excerptum, or from memory, he therefore supplies details which another

account gave (31.9). He also describes the Durance at this point (31.10-12), because

the source registered this river as the next distinctive stage after the Tricorii. But Livy

uses a description of the river applicable to its lower reaches; this may well have

been the only description he had—whether from the same source or from another (in

an excerptum ?). Then, after briefly catching up with Scipio, he returns to Hannibal

with a notice again applicable to that earlier stage of the march (32.6). He is

unaware, it seems, that the river did not have the same aspect in its Alpine reaches

as in its lower ones; or even that the descriptive phrases at 32.6 (‘campestri maxime

itinere’, ‘cum bona pace incolentium ea loca Gallorum’) in their turn came from the

earlier and not this Alpine stage of marching.

After 32.6, in turn, his march-narrative (32.7–35.4) cannot fit an advance solely

through the upper Durance region. For that would mean that all the varied and

stressful events he records from Polybius (notably the repeated Gallic attacks)

happened on this final leg of the march up to the pass, until ‘nono die in iugum

Alpium perventum est’ (35.4; ‘nono die’ echoing P. 3.53.9). This is impossible.

For instance, it is some 62 km. from Embrun, in the upper Durance valley east of

Gap, to the Col de Montgenèvre, and 73 km. to the Col de Larche (§X Table 8).

Polybius’ measurement for the distance covered during the same excitements is

‘around 1,200 stadia’ (3.39.10), which on none of the usual measurements for the

stadium is less than 190 km. Moreover the time taken over the same distance was 15

days, not nine (P. 3.56.3). Nor again is there any obvious place amidst these high and

constricted valleys to squeeze in a ‘frequentem cultoribus alium, ut inter montanos,

populum’ (L. 21.34.1) as the second lot of attackers, or their cultivated fields.

The three tribes that Livy names (Tricastini, Vocontii, Tricorii) dwelt, in the same

order, from west to east between the Rhône and the river Drac, which runs

northwards to the Isère on the far side of the Vercors massif. Wherever The Island

lay, these three will have come into contact, in one fashion or another, with the Punic

army on its march. Livy’s names, therefore, are not only of genuine tribes of the

region but are potentially appropriate to events. If, on marching beyond The Island

and the Tricastini, the Carthaginians did move ‘per extremam oram Vocontiorum agri

in Tricorios’—along the farthest margin of the ager Vocontiorum and into the ager of

the Tricorii (the saltus Tricorii in Ammianus’ phrase (15.10.11) )—then they

traversed the northernmost section of Vocontian land to enter the valley of the Drac.

To reach the nearest passes to Italy from there, they would advance south and then

27

Dexter Hoyos 28

east to reach the upper Durance, the next notable physical feature on the approach

to the High Alps. The topographical résumé is therefore coherent in making the army

arrive, via the Tricorii, at the Durance—the upper Durance. And it is certainly true

that travellers there have the High Alps straight ahead of them, quite as Livy

graphically describes (32.7).

Why then does his version of the march have, at best, a disjointed look or—more

widely inferred—the appearance of confusedly offering two successive and

incompatible accounts, a topographical one and then one of the events? The

explanation must be that he has overlooked, or perhaps simply ignored, a crucial

flaw in his narrative format. While his topographical résumé has brought Hannibal to

the upper Durance just below the High Alps (31.9), his detailed narrative from

Polybius (32.7–35.4) resumes the story much further back. In other words, 31.9 on

the topography actually treats the same stages of the march as 32.7–35.4 on the

events. In its turn, the sentence at 32.6 is meant as a bridge to take up the events

from 31.9, but it clumsily incorporates descriptive phrases applicable only to the

crossing of the lower Durance, just as 31.10-12 describes the lower reaches of that

river. Flawed memory, or flawed use of excerpta, should account for these

malformations.

Were Livy to be given the benefit of the doubt, both 21.31.10-12 and 32.6 might

be blamed on a careless later copyist—or even on an amanuensis of Livy’s. Mistaken

transpositions of Livian text can occur, sometimes on a large scale: for example, in

Book 26 the start of the younger Scipio’s capture of New Carthage in 209 (26.41.18–

43.8) is missing from surviving manuscripts, but most of it was found in another

manuscript—now itself lost—in its text of Book 27, copied thereto by a scribe plainly

but fortunately oblivious to the logic of the narrative. All the same, the peculiarity of

the Durance-mentions is not easily explained in the same way, for it would require a

scribe not just careless but meddlesome. Such a copyist—a very early one, since the

text is the same in all manuscripts—would have had to shift an originally

straightforward report on the crossing of the lower Durance forward to the Alpine

sector, break it into two, and insert the words ‘ad Alpes’ into the second bit (32.6).

This is rather ambitious for any copyist. These mistakes are more plausibly explained

as Livy’s own, in his efforts to compose a readable story, largely Polybius-based but

fleshed out in places with details from other sources.27

In sum, Livy’s topographical source reported Hannibal both crossing the lower

Durance and, later, reaching the upper Durance via the Tricorii. Livy, seeking to put


together a narrative largely Polybian but with (intended) clarifications, has mentioned

only the latter event but worked in details which he had about the former. His

résumé of the march-topography after The Island, in turn, will be shown to be

compatible with Polybius’ and his accounts of its events (§V).

This conclusion makes unnecessary what has occasionally been suggested, most

recently by Jakob Seibert: that Hannibal divided the army, sending part via the Mont

Cenis or a similar route (taken to be the one that Polybius describes) and leading the

rest via the upper Durance and the Montgenèvre (the route of the topographical

résumé). Even without the compatibility just inferred between Polybius’ narrative and

Livy’s topographical résumé, it would be hard to believe that not just one, but both

writers have no inkling that their detailed narratives actually involve only half the

Punic army. Polybius’ assertion that Hannibal came down to the North Italian plains

among the Insubres, and Livy’s that the Taurini were the nearest tribe (P. 3.56.3; L.

21.38.5), are no support for a division of forces. As will be shown below (§IX), Polybius

must be writing succinctly, for beneath any Alpine pass there were other tribes

between the arriving Carthaginians and their friends the Insubres.

In military terms, too, dividing an army—already reduced in numbers by 22 per

cent, from 59,000 at the Pyrenees to 46,000 at the Rhône—for travel through two

widely separated and unfamiliar mountain-regions, in the face of strong hostility from

warlike natives, would have been risky to the point of folly. The scale of losses that

did ensue was proportionately immense: another 20,000 men, or 43 per cent of the

total at the Rhône. If Hannibal did divide the army, then each corps was reduced to

under fourteen thousand by the time it reached the plains; or one had been almost

annihilated en route, and without a glimmer of this catastrophe reaching our

sources.28

It is noteworthy that the only names in the topographical résumé are Gallic tribes.

Livy names no towns, mountains or even rivers in his account of the march after the

Rhône-crossing, except for the rivers at The Island (based on Polybius), the Durance,

and of course the Alps. Conceivably his topographical source, sharing some of

Polybius’ attitude, judged that handful of names alone as of likely interest to readers.

In Roman times, by contrast, Transalpine Gaul was governed, surveyed, and settled

27 On the oddities of 26.41.18–43.8, and the lost codex Spirensis: R.S. Conway and

S.R. Johnson, Livi Ab Vrbe Condita XXVI–XXX (Oxford text: 1935, repr. 1957) xix-xxii.

For another possible example, in Tacitus—the argument that Annals 2.56–61 belongs

after 2.67—see F.R.D. Goodyear, The Annals of Tacitus 2 (Cambridge, 1981) 393-6.

29

Dexter Hoyos 30

by Romans, and widely visited by learned Greeks. Strabo’s description is full of

named towns, peoples and rivers. There is therefore a strong possibility that, for the

topography of Hannibal’s route, Livy was drawing on a writer fairly well-informed (as

will be shown) but also early: quite possibly one of Hannibal’s own historians.29

IV The Island

The Island is a notorious puzzle. It lay 4 days’ march from the Rhône-crossing (P.

3.49.1, followed by L. quoted above); was well-peopled and fertile (P. 49.5, 49.11-12),

‘very similar in size and shape’ to the Nile delta—the shape, Polybius means, of a

triangle—and had on its eastern side mountains difficult to approach or cross, ‘and

almost so to speak inaccessible’ (49.7). Most controversial of all (49.6), ‘on one side’

the Rhône (h/| me;n ga;r oJ ÔRodanov~) flowed alongside it and, ‘on the other side’

(h/| dev), a river which joined up with the Rhône and which Polybius’s manuscripts

name simply Skaras or (one manuscript) Skoras: h/| de; Skavra~/Skwvra~.

Livy’s manuscripts in their turn give strangely varied names for this river

(21.31.4):

ibi Arar Rhodanusque … confluunt

Bisarar. Rhodanusque (sic) … confluunt

Ibi sarar Rhodanusque … confluunt

Since the Arar, today’s Saône, joins the Rhône at Lyon 249 km. (168 m.p.) north of

Tarascon, that reading is ruled out (it would have been 10 marching-days from the

Rhône-crossing, plus at least 1 rest-day). Neither a river Sarar nor a Bisarar existed,

while Arar, the reading in one of the oldest manuscripts—the 10th-century Medicean

—looks like a copyist’s, or indeed Livy’s, wild guess at replacing an unrecognised

Gallic river-name with a Rhône-tributary which he had at least heard of.

As no ancient Skaras/Skoras is known either, Polybius’s text needs explaining too.

It is usually emended as h/| d∆ Isavra~ (first suggested in 1624), meaning that the

other side of The Island was bounded by the Isère. Correspondingly Livy’s text is

emended to ‘Isara’, which—palaeographically anyway—is an acceptable correction of

Bisarar and Ibi sarar. The Isère meets the Rhône just above Valence, 153 km. from

Hannibal’s crossing. This is the site, on the northern bank of the Isère, most

frequently claimed for The Island. North of the Isère lay the lands of the powerful

Allobroges, who were unfriendly to the expedition as Hannibal knew (P. 3.49.13). Livy

first describes them as dwelling ‘near’ The Island (‘incolunt prope’: 21.31.5), but goes

on contradictorily to treat them as living in it (31.6 and 9). Polybius, by contrast,


implies that the dwellers in The Island were different, and names the Allobroges as

the enemy who afterwards clashed repeatedy with the army once it began its ‘ascent

of the Alps’. Livy terms these enemies only ‘montani’: having given The Island to the

Allobroges, he probably prefers to leave the ensuing attackers as a generalised foe,

rather than have to disentangle who they might have been. This vagueness may be

due to an error in combining details from his topographical source with the material

he was taking from Polybius.30

Four days’ march from the Punic army’s crossing at Tarusco/Tarascon would take

it about 100 km., if the men moved at 25 km. (17 m.p.) a day. If they were following

the Rhône faithfully, the last day of the four would bring them approximately to

where Donzère stands, roughly 10 km. south of Montélimar (ancient Acunum) and

still 50 km. short of the Isère confluence. Hence the numerous scholarly efforts to

show that Hannibal had crossed the Rhône higher upstream than Ugernum-Tarusco.

But with his crossing well assured there, the district on the northern side of the

Rhône-Isère confluence is too distant for a four-day march unless it was forced. It is

implausible, too, to treat that district as a triangle. The only mountains available, and

often urged, as its supposed third side would be the Massif de la Grande Chartreuse

north of Grenoble and the Mont du Chat beyond that; but these in fact form merely

the 60-km.-long eastern edge of a great quadrilateral. The northern side of this

quadrilateral is an 85 km.-wide expanse of undulating hills and plains, from Vienne on

the upper Rhône over to the Grande Chartreuse and the Mont du Chat; or, still further

north, the upper Rhône flowing in an east-to-west zigzag until its southward bend at

Lyon. There is hilly country (up to about 400 metres high) nearer the confluence, but

no high ground closes off the region into a delta shape. Another difficulty is how the

name ∆Isavra~ could be corrupted into Skavra~ or Skwvra~: it would be a case of a

relatively known name (known before Polybius’ death, at any rate) being replaced by

a total unknown.

Donzère and its district, further south, cannot serve as The Island either, for, apart

from the east bank of the Rhône narrowing there to a tight gap, there is no

confluence that suits Polybius’ description. The Berre to the south is a little stream,

and the Roubion (just below Montélimar) meets the Rhône at a close angle, enclosing

a tract of ground very small and with nil resemblance to the Nile delta even in shape.

Nor is there any mountain range to form the third side of a triangle between either

river and the Rhône, although hilly country extends parallel to the latter. The Alpes

du Dauphiné rise much further to the east, crossing the river Drôme to become the

Vercors massif to the north.

31

Dexter Hoyos 32

The other well-known candidate for The Island is the triangle formed by the

confluence of the Rhône and the Aigues (or Eygues) just beyond Arausio/Orange, with

its third side formed by high ground extending from Donzère eastward to Nyons on

the Aigues—or perhaps by the high ground farther north and east, extending from

the area between Montélimar and the junction of Rhône and Drôme, right across to

the Alpes du Dauphiné. As some modern studies, notably de Beer’s, have shown,

medieval names for the river Aigues at least look similar to ‘Skaras’ or ‘Skoras’: they

range from Egrum, Araus, Icarus and Ecaris to Aqua Yquarum. This is noteworthy,

though hardly decisive as we do not know what the Aigues’ name was in ancient

times (‘Aigues’ itself is simply a Provençal version of Aquae, ‘the waters’).31

As we have seen, Polybius gives 1,400 stadia ‘from the crossing of the Rhône, for

those travelling along the river itself as though towards its sources, up to the ascent

of the Alps to Italy’ (3.39.9). From The Island later, he writes, Hannibal ‘after

proceeding in 10 days along the river for 800 stadia, started on the ascent to the

Alps’ (50.1). It should follow that from the Rhône-crossing to The Island was 600

stadia. Whether he means the same starting-point for ‘the ascent’ in both passages is

another debated issue; some march-hypotheses delay the start of the ‘true’ ascent

until later, necessarily leaving a gap between the distance covered in 800 stadia and

the 1,200 stadia-distance given for ‘the remaining crossing over the Alps’ (loipai; aiJ

tw`n ”Alpewn uJperbolaiv, 3.39.10). It will be shown that this is not warranted (§X).32

Polybius can certainly be imprecise or fuzzy at times with his measurements and

comparisons. He generalises that Hannibal’s total marching-distance from New

Carthage to North Italy was 9,000 stadia, grandly overshooting his own itemised

figures by 600 (3.39.6-11: §X). In his first Book (1.55.7), he calls Mt Eryx (751 m.) the

second highest mountain in Sicily; in fact there are at least two loftier ones—but not

as visible from the sea. The comparison of The Island with the Nile delta in size (tw`/

megevqei, 3.49.7) is just as excessive: for the latter, measuring about 175 km. by

260 km. (110 by 160 miles), is nearly as large as the entire country between the

Rhône, the French Alps and the Isère.

What 600 stadia amount to in other measurements is itself an uncertainty. If

Polybius applies the Roman ratio of 8:1, it would be 75 m.p.; this would imply a route

also measured by the Romans. But in his Book 34, only excerpts from which survive,

he applies a different ratio—8.33 per Roman mile, thus a stadium of 177.7 metres as

opposed to the ‘Roman’ one of 185 m. On this ratio 600 stadia work out as 72 m.p.

Yet it cannot just be assumed that Polybius, outside the Via Domitia sector, uses the


8.33:1 ratio. For one thing, this would suggest that the distances he gives for the

march from the Rhône to the Alpine pass (a total of 2,600 stadia) were based on

Roman measurements too, although Hannibal’s route—on any reconstruction—was

an extended zigzag across these regions. For another, the ‘Polybian’ 177.7m.-

stadium produces distances in kilometres which are hard to match to the various

proposed routes. Polybius’ distance-figures are, in fact, such a conundrum that it

seems best to consider them separately (§X).

From Tarascon to Arausio/Orange, just short of the confluence of Rhône and

Aigues, is only about 51 km. or 34.5 m.p. (§X Table 8), a good deal less than a 4-day

campestre maxime iter. Beyond this confluence, up to the river Drôme almost 70 km.

further north, two Gallic tribes shared the ground: the Tricastini and Vocontii. Their

territories will shortly be studied, but, to anticipate, the Tricastini seem to have

occupied the district along the Rhône between the confluence and Montélimar

(ancient Acunum), roughly halfway to the Drôme. To their east and, probably, north

were the Vocontii. Both tribes may well have been among those contacted by

Hannibal during the winter of 219–218 as he planned his expedition (P. 3.34.4-5), but

the Vocontii were much bigger and more powerful.

Here it is worth looking again at Livy’s topographical résumé of the later march

(21.31.9). First Hannibal turned ‘ad laevam in Tricastinos’, then moved ‘per

extremam oram Vocontiorum agri’ to the Tricorii. As noted, these three peoples lay in

a west-to-east line from the Rhône to the valley of the river Drac, which runs below

the eastern flanks of the lofty Vercors massif. This triangular massif separated the

Tricorii on the Drac from the other two, at any rate according to evidence from

Roman provincial times, our only guidelines for territoria. The Vocontii, like their

Allobrogian neighbours to the north, held an extensive territory stretching from the

Mont Ventoux range (south of Vasio/Vaison) northwards to the dramatic heights and

plateaux of the Vercors. This region preserves the name of the Vertamocori, their

northern section or pagus; at its steep northern point, the Bec de l’Échaillon, it looks

over a stretch of the Isère valley some 550 metres below; Grenoble, ancient Cularo,

lies in this valley to its south-east. To the east of the Tricorii, and also worth

mentioning here, were their neighbours the Iconii or Ucennii, in the valley of the

Romanche between the Belledonne and Pelvoux massifs: their land is still called

l’Oisans.33

The Tricastini are more debated. As just mentioned, they lived west of the

Vocontii, on the lower lands of the Rhône valley, approximately between Bollène (20

km. north of Orange) and Acunum/Montélimar, 35 km. further north again. The Celtic

33

Dexter Hoyos 34

tribal name is preserved, apparently through a Latinate misunderstanding, in the

town of St Paul-Trois-Chåteaux, 10 km. east of the Rhône and also 10 north of

Bollène. Its Gallic name is uncertain, but in Roman times it became Augusta (and

later still Colonia Flavia) Tricastinorum. The area around St Paul is called le Tricastin,

a name surviving since Roman times.34

It has been suggested that the Tricastini never extended west as far as the left

bank of the Rhône, but rather that this bank, as far north as the later Roman colony

of Valentia (Valence), was owned by the larger tribe of the Cavares. The Cavares

earn no mention at all in Polybius or Livy, though the Carthaginian army must have

tramped through their lands around Avennio and Arausio; presumably they kept a

low profile. Their territorial relationship to the Tricastini, however, is relevant to

Hannibal’s route. Strabo does donate to the Cavares all the territory from the lower

Durance at Cabellio (Cavaillon) up to the Rhône-Isère junction (Geogr. 4.1.11 C185),

and Valence stands just below this junction. But Strabo promptly goes on to describe

the Vocontii and Tricorii as ‘lying above’—that is, north of—the Cavares; yet their

territories, too, lay south of the Isère. He makes no reference at all to the Tricastini,

who are well attested epigraphically, and he equally ignores the Segovellauni,

resident just below the Rhône-Isère junction in the Valentinois, the plain of

Valentia/Valence. These latter are registered by Pliny (Nat. Hist. 3.34) and Ptolemy

(Geogr. 2.10.7).35

Valentia, too, is sometimes ascribed to the Cavares, on the strength of a supposed

mention in Pliny again—one of the arguments for giving them all this left-bank

stretch of the Rhône and keeping the Tricastini away from it. The argument is unwise.

Properly read, Pliny’s list of Roman colonies in southern Gallia Narbonensis ascribes

Arausio to the Cavares, a fact otherwise known anyway, and does not do so with

Valentia: ‘in mediterraneo [sc. provinciae] coloniae Arelate Sextanorum, Baeterrae

Septimanorum, Arausio Secundanorum in agro Cavarum, Valentia, Vienna

Allobrogum’ (Nat. Hist. 3.36; ‘Secundanorum’ and the other numerical genitives

denote the legionary origins of these colonies). Pliny’s next sentence, listing oppida

Latina, likewise places all the ethnic genitives after the town-names (Aquae Sextiae

Salluviorum, Avennio Cavarum etc.). The common punctuation of the relevant

colony-entries, to read Arausio Secundanorum, in agro Cavarum Valentia, Vienna

Allobrogum, does violence to his format, something all the more improbable since—

unlike modern editors—Pliny had no commas to mark off relationships and therefore

had to rely on clarity of arrangement. There is therefore no need to suppose the


Segovellauni a pagus of the Cavares either.36

Further supposed evidence for the Cavares owning this stretch of the Rhône-bank

has been seen in colonia Arausio’s fragmentary marble cadastral tabulae of late 1st-

and early 2nd-century AD date, which display survey-plans of the colony’s territory at

that period, with annotations showing some tracts as ‘Tric(astinis) reddita’. Evidently,

much of that tribe’s land had been taken originally for the colony. This is hardly proof

that the Tricastini, even in the late 1st Century AD, were part of or ruled by the

Cavares. Some land even on the far side of the Rhône, taken for instance from the

Helvii, had been given to the newly-founded colonia. Again, although on the

(fragmentary) tabulae no land close to the Rhône is shown as restored to the

Tricastini, this scarcely proves that the tribe had owned none along the river.37

Yet another piece of evidence invoked for keeping the Tricastini away from the

Rhône is Ptolemy’s list of peoples and towns in that part of Gallia Narbonensis: he

has the Segovellauni ‘below the Allobroges on the west’ and the Tricastini as ‘below

the Allobroges on the east’ (Geogr. 2.10.7). But this is quite implausible. Ptolemy’s

data can be fuzzy: he gives the Tricastini the unlikely capital of ‘Noiomagus’,

probably a confusion with the real Noviomagus (Nyons) nearby, a Vocontian town;

locates the Vocontii ‘below’ them, instead of to their east as does all other evidence;

and has other errors in his Narbonensian survey, like transforming Alba Helviorum

(Alba-la-Romaine, across the Rhône from Montélimar) into ‘Albaugusta of the Elycoci’

(2.10.8).38

What Polybius and Livy between them report about Hannibal’s ensuing march

from The Island points to the Tricastini, in 218 anyway, dwelling along the Rhône

itself. First Polybius: on leaving The Island Hannibal ‘proceeded in 10 days along the

river [para; to;n potamovn] for 800 stadia’ and then ‘started on the ascent to the

Alps’ (3.50.1). Polybius’ elliptical phrase ‘along the river’ is responsible for perhaps

the most exhaustive debate within the topic of Hannibal’s route. For he does not

state which river, even though his last mention of rivers was of both the Rhône and

the mysterious ‘Skaras/Skoras’. All the same, it is reasonable to infer that he means

the Rhône. Earlier he has implicitly compared Hannibal’s movements from the

Rhône-crossing ‘up to the ascent of the Alps to Italy’ with ‘those travelling along the

river itself as though towards its sources [par∆ aujto;n to;n potamo;n wJ~ ejpi; ta;~

phgav~]’ (39.9). He virtually confirms this after telling of the Rhône-crossing:

Hannibal proceeded ‘along the river [para; to;n potamovn] away from the sea as

though eastwards [wJ~ ejpi; th;n e{w]’—adding the flourish, ‘making his way as

though towards the centre of Europe’ (47.1). At both 39.9 and 47.1, then, Polybius

35

Dexter Hoyos 36

plainly draws for his readers a general picture of Hannibal following the Rhône itself

up to ‘the ascent of the Alps’.

Whether he was right about this or not (few scholars think he was), for him to

change his meaning to a different river at 50.1 without naming it would make no

sense in his own terms. Although Hannibal’s route at some point also lay along or

close to the Isère, it is possible that Polybius thought this stream was the upper

Rhône (§V). But equally plausible, if not more so, is that at 50.1 he has in mind only

the river to which Hannibal first came after departing The Island—even though the

march along its bank would account for only part of the 800 stadia.39

Second, Livy. Hannibal’s turn ‘ad laevam in Tricastinos’, from The Island to the

territory of the Tricastini, is widely disbelieved or (as noted earlier) is interpreted as a

clumsy Livian mislocation of his initial turn to the north after crossing the Rhône. Yet

it was shown above that, if it means that earlier turn, the sequence in Livy is wrong

(the Durance should be mentioned first, not last, at 21.31.9). Again, if that initial turn

were meant, Hannibal would logically then have proceeded directly upriver to reach

the Tricastini, and next have continued further upriver, through their territory, to

reach his new friends at The Island. For Livy depicts the Tricastini as separate from

these: only after settling affairs among this other tribe does Hannibal go on to them.

On such an interpretation The Island lay north of the Tricastini; yet, as shown earlier,

north of this stretch of the Rhône there is no suitable site. These considerations

further rule out the left turn as an item misplaced from the Rhône-crossing.40

On reaching The Island, Hannibal intervened in a struggle between two brothers

‘over the kingship’ (uJpe;r th`~ basileiva~, according to Polybius, which Livy

translates as ‘regni certamine’), drove out the younger to install the elder in power—

Livy calls him Braneus, a name plainly from elsewhere but reasonably Celtic—and

was rewarded by Braneus with provisions, fresh weapons and warm clothing for the

army (P. 3.49.8-12; L. 21.31.6-8). Since the Carthaginians had marched up from the

Rhône-crossing, and since their first move after The Island was to turn ‘ad laevam in

Tricastinos’, who dwelt by the Rhône, the obvious inference is that Braneus’ folk

dwelt east of the Tricastini: thus the Vocontii.41

Even if the power-struggle between the brothers had flared just recently, Hannibal

probably learned of it before he reached the area. It is possible that messages

imploring his aid, from one brother or both, reached him on the march. It should be

inferred, then, that during its four-day march the Carthaginian army turned from the

Rhône to march along the Aigues north-eastwards. The obvious destination would be


the Vocontian heartland around the town of Noviomagus, modern Nyons, which lies

on the north bank of the Aigues.

Nyons lies 93 km. by road from Tarascon, which works out as just under 63 m.p.

This is within the average for a four-day march, although Hannibal’s actual marching-

rate on the four days may well have varied—the army would take slowed, for

instance, to cross the difficult Durance about 20 km. from Tarascon, at the end of the

first or the start of the second day. But the Carthaginians were probably not fixed at

Noviomagus. Intervening in the local power-struggle may well have taken them

further, for they had to join forces with Braneus and drive out the beaten younger

brother (P. 49.10). It is at least conceivable that Hannibal then established his camp

not too close to Braneus’ chief town—that might seem unnecessarily intimidating—

but in a comfortable station like the district of Valréas, 14 km. (just over 9 m.p.) west

of Nyons/Noviomagus. From the Rhône-crossing, this was a total of 72 m.p. or 107

km. (§X Table 8). Depending on which stadium-measure is used (§X), this distance

converts in turn to between 557 (Olympic) and 600 (Polybian) stadia.

The notable Vocontian towns in that area, at least in Roman times, were

Noviomagus and Vasio (Vaison-la-Romaine), which stood beside the Ouvèze north-

east of Arausio and south-east of Augusta Tricastinorum/St Paul-Trois-Châteaux. In

turn, within a ring of higher ground to the north-west of Nyons lies Valréas (ancient

name unknown), which has St Paul some 20 km. to its west. All this is picturesquely

hilly to mountainous land, with the southern sector of the Alpes du Dauphiné on its

eastern side—Mont Ventoux, south-east of Vaison, is the highest peak, at 1909

metres—while lower but still notable ridges and crests lie between them and the

Rhône valley. The Vercors, north of the Drôme, is even more picturesque, but much

wilder, steeper and less populous. Between the Ouvèze and the Drôme, therefore, lay

the heartland of the Vocontii. It is true that they shared a small sector of this district

with the Tricastini, while the rest of the ager Vocontiorum in turn extended far

beyond these latter. But Polybius does not specify that Braneus’ people had The

Island all to themselves, or that it alone formed their territory.42

In Roman times, the Vocontii had two capitals, Vasio and Lucus Augusti (Luc-en-

Diois by the Drôme), but both were largely Roman developments. Noviomagus

should have been important in Hannibal’s day: it stood beside the Aigues, near the

centre of the lowland ager Vocontiorum, with easy communication to the lower,

middle and upper Rhône, and with routes across the mountains eastward to the

Gapençais, then beyond Gap to the upper Durance, and so to Italy via the passes

there. Topographically, as just noted, a hilly landscape extends from the Nyons area

37

Dexter Hoyos 38

north-westward to the Rhône-gap at Donzère; further north-west, other hilly ground

stretches from the Alpes du Dauphiné to near the Rhône north of Montélimar, with

ridges running beside the river as far as the Drôme. Both tracts of hills, one more

southerly than the other, would close off the land between Aigues and Rhône to form

a delta shape, though naturally not one as vast as the Nile’s—an absurd comparison

which (as noted above) can fit no river-confluence in southern France.

Just to the east, the Alpes du Dauphiné are not contemptible mountains either,

even though only a brisk imagination can see them as difficult. Between the Aigues

and Drôme they attain 1,500-1,600-metre heights, and to travel beyond them

requires using the Col de Grimoine (1,318 m.) or Col de Cabre (1,180 m.), both east

of Luc-en-Diois, or else the Col de la Saulce (817 m.) east of Nyons. To an observer

near the Rhône—an observer in the Punic army, for instance—all this increasingly

rising ground must have looked like a third side for The Island’s triangle, and a not

too inviting side at that. Incidentally, if Polybius owes his description (3.49.7) to such

a source—Hannibal’s friends Silenus or Sosylus?—this could be a clue that the

Carthaginians did not march on to the High Alps via the Alpes du Dauphiné, as has

sometimes been urged (notably by de Beer). For, had such an author traversed the

Alpes du Dauphiné in that region, he could not have termed them hard to cross and

almost inaccessible.43

A different, more vexing uncertainty is the name ‘Skaras’ in Polybius’ manuscripts

(or ‘Skoras’). On the arguments put above for locating The Island between Rhône and

Aigues, ‘Skaras’ means the Aigues; but the name is never mentioned otherwise and

the Aigues’ medieval name-forms (Ecaris, Yquaris and the like) are not decisive

guides. Why Polybius should supply a river-name otherwise unknown to his readers,

after emphasising his intention not to mention names with ‘the same impact as

unintelligible and unmeaning sounds’, is hard to guess. But the puzzle would be just

as baffling if ‘Skaras’ did mean the Isère, for the Isère is not mentioned anywhere

else in the Histories, either, and even at the time of Polybius’ death would have been

known mainly or only to readers who had heard of the Roman victory near that

stream, in 121, against the Allobroges. The only plausible reason for naming the The

Island’s other river (whatever he actually named it) is that otherwise he could have

defined The Island only unsatisfyingly, as having ‘on one side the Rhône, and on the

other another river’; or the like.44

It is worth pointing out that—in the entire area between the Mont du Chat, well

north of the Isère, and the Montagne du Luberon range edging the lower Durance—


the only terrain fitting Polybius’ dramatic description of almost inaccessible

mountains is the Vercors, which blocks off the district between Rhône, Isère and

Drôme and has limited, often steep access-routes. That district is not, in itself,

impossibly far for a 4-day march from the Rhône-crossing. If The Island lay at Livron,

thus on the north bank of the Drôme and the east bank of the Rhône (with the Isère

only 25 km. further north), to reach it in 4 days from the crossing at Tarusco the

Carthaginians would have had to march 121 km.—nearly 82 m.p. or 654 (Roman)

stadia, and this means just over Vegetius’ daily rate of 20 m.p. Hannibal’s army of

professionals may have been quite able to keep up this speed for four successive

days (his much slower speed on leaving The Island has other explanations: §V).

But Rhône, Drôme, Isère and Vercors form a quadrilateral; nor can Polybius’ river

‘Skaras’ or ‘Skoras’ be explained as even a colossally-inexpert copyist’s mangling of

‘Druma’. Such a site would also make nonsense of Hannibal afterwards turning ‘ad

laevam’ to reach the Tricastini, who dwelt 30-40 km. south of the Drôme. He would

have had to make a 180-degree turn and retrace his steps to reach them—then

swing round in another half-circle to head north once again. The quadrilateral

blocked off by the Vercors will not do as The Island. The Rhône-Aigues triangle will.45

V The march from The Island

The army’s 800 stadia ‘in 10 days along the river’ on leaving The Island (P. 3.50.1)

reveal a remarkably slow speed, whatever the length in m.p. or kilometres. On the

Roman 8:1 ratio it is only 10 m.p. a day, half Vegetius’ ordinary rate for recruits, and

on the ‘Polybian’ ratio of 8.33:1 it is a sedate 9.6 m.p. Even on the Olympic stadium-

length of 0.192 km. the daily rate is only 10.4 m.p. This 80-stadia per day marching-

rate is very often taken to be the army’s normal speed over reasonably level terrain

but, as shown above, this is a quite implausible deduction (§I). In turn, Livy’s report of

the left turn ‘in Tricastinos’ (21.31.9) prompts the obvious question why the

Carthaginians should march, even briefly, over to the Rhône when their overall

direction was eastwards (ejpi; th;n e{w, as Polybius puts it: 3.47.1). Livy obviously

does not see the problem and probably did not realise that there was one. In fact the

leftward move and the slow march are not beyond explanation.

Moving from the Vocontii into the ager Tricastinorum did, in effect, mean moving

‘ad laevam’ for an army which, from its Rhône-crossing, had come north and north-

east. Livy’s topographical source was aware of this, for Livy adds that Hannibal ‘non

recta regione iter instituit’: he did not advance through direct country to the Alps. He

had reached The Island only one day after Scipio reached the abandoned Punic camp

39

Dexter Hoyos 40

at the Rhône-crossing (§I Tables 1-2). He spent perhaps five to seven days with the

Vocontii, perhaps long enough for word to reach him about the consul returning to

the coast—or perhaps not. Even if he did learn of it, he probably had no word of what

Scipio would do next. After all, it would take Scipio another two to three days to get

back to his own camp, then at least one day or maybe two to determine what to do

next (and to rest his troops after up to six days’ marching). For all Hannibal could tell,

he might decide to pursue the Carthaginians after all, in hopes of yet provoking them

to battle somewhere in the Rhône valley. Considering what he himself was planning—

the invasion of Italy via a colossal mountain range with which neither he nor his

troops had any acquaintance—it was vital to obtain whatever news he could about

Roman movements. The most efficient conduit for news from the coast would be the

Rhône.46

This need not be the sole reason for the left turn. The Tricastini, themselves

residents of the fertile Island, may also have had goods and animals to offer.

Braneus’ people—those not supporting his expelled brother—were no doubt full of

goodwill towards their Carthaginian visitors. But to provide an army of some 46,000

men with provisions, warm clothing and footwear, and even fresh weapons, must

have been something of an effort. All the more as it mostly had to be arranged now:

for the Vocontii, hitherto distracted by civil strife, cannot have spent much time

preparing quantities of goods in advance. Whether as vassals or friends of the

Vocontii, or just as opportune traders, the Tricastini might well supplement the

army’s needs. Upstream beyond the Tricastini was again Vocontian (not Cavarian)

land. The army, in other words, would be gathering in the arms, clothing and food

(and pack-animals to help carry these) as it moved along, a sensible enough

arrangement. If it did have tasks to perform en route, its 65-km. advance from the

Valréas area to the Drôme could well be slower than the daily average of 17 m.p. a

day—for example, it could have taken up to five days instead of under three.47

Polybius, arguably, saw no reason to detail such modulations to a route which he

considered essentially eastbound, especially as his avoidance of place- and tribe-

names made it hard to describe any march in topographical detail. For most of this

leg of the march, the troops had the Rhône nearby. A few days later, they had the

Isère similarly close. For Polybius, ‘along the river’ (singular) could seem a handy

generalisation. In fact, any hypothesis which does not take Hannibal along one single

stream all the way to the High Alps, but first along the Rhône and then along one of

its tributaries—Isère, Drôme or Ouvèze—implicitly or explicitly modifies his


generalisation, since the historian does not write ‘along the rivers’. Virtually the only

hypothesis for which para; to;n potamovn could be literally true would be that which

sends the Carthaginians up the whole length of the Durance; but that theory

contradicts or ignores most of Polybius’ and Livy’s evidence.48

After the Tricastini, Livy’s next stage is ‘per extremam oram Vocontiorum agri’.

From Acunum/Montélimar to the Drôme was probably Vocontian ground, not in 218

part of the ager Segovellaunorum. The only evidence for this stretch of the Rhône’s

east bank being Segovellaunian is indirect and from imperial times: the view that it

had been assigned to colonia Valentia, on the implausible assumption that no other

tribe’s land was so affected—a notion shown above to be untrue for colonia Arausio.

But were the army to continue due north beyond the Drôme, it would indeed enter

the ager Segovellaunorum very soon, since they dwelt around the town later called

Valentia. Livy’s phrase indicates that the army did not do so but kept to the edge of

Vocontian territory. Certainly if Hannibal meant to turn eastward to the Alps, there

was no gain in first going all the way to the Rhône-Isère confluence. An advance from

Loriol or Livron across country to the likeliest place for starting ‘the ascent’, Pont-en-

Royans, would be over the easy countryside east of Valence, the Valentinois. This

suits Polybius’s description of the march at this point (ejn toi`~ ejpipevdoi~, 50.2).

The Isère was close by and at some point the army may have reached it, for instance

between Bourg-de-Péage and St Nazaire-en-Royans.

There is an extra possibility to add to this, one noted earlier. As already

mentioned, Polybius sees the Rhône as flowing, not westward till it meets the Saône

at Lyon and there turns due south to the sea, but westwards all the way (3.47.1 and

3—or south-westwards at 47.2), past the northern slopes of the Alps. Likewise his

Alps run west-east to form a horizontal northern border to Italy (2.14.6 and 9, 15.8;

3.47.2). By Livy’s day the orientation of the river was much better known (as Strabo

shows, 4.1.11 C186), and the Roman historian is more careful in his phrasing:

Hannibal, after crossing the Rhône, ‘profectus adversa ripa Rhodani mediterranea

Galliae petit’ (21.31.2). Again, Polybius plainly implies that Hannibal followed the

Rhône ‘as though towards its sources, up to the ascent of the Alps’; but that river

does not approach the Alps until it reaches Lake Geneva. It is plausible, then—as

Dennis Proctor, elaborating on earlier work, suggests—that Polybius thought the Isère

was the upper Rhône, although this cannot be proved. All the same, even if he knew

which river was which, he was clearly not concerned enough to set out very detailed

timetables, any more than to offer many names.49

41

Dexter Hoyos 42

Even at The Island, Hannibal had foreseen possible trouble from the Allobroges,

whose land lay beyond the Isère. The helpful Braneus provided an escorting body of

his own warriors for part of the next stage of marching (P. 49.13, 50.2-3). Just why

the Allobroges should be hostile is not explained by anyone. If Hannibal had

successfully used agents from Spain to conciliate the Gauls not only in North Italy but

also in the Alps (P. 34.4-6), the Allobroges ought have been one of the tribes

conciliated; but if so they had by now turned against him for unknown reasons. If

they had not been approached by him earlier, then they had had no dealings with the

Carthaginians. Certainly they had not opposed the crossing the Rhône, nor are they

recorded as friendly with either Massilia or the Romans.

Holding that The Island was at the Rhône-Isère confluence and that Livy is right

about its being Allobrogian—and wrong about them dwelling only ‘prope’—some

scholars see Braneus’ brother’s losing faction as disaffected Allobroges, who then

attacked the Carthaginians. But with the Vocontii far likelier as the people with whom

Hannibal dealt, this theory fails to persuade. A quite different suggestion is that the

Allobroges were trying to make Hannibal pay a customary transit-toll through their

country. If so, they were the only people in south-eastern Gaul to do so, for no other

tolls are mentioned. This solution, too, is implausible if Hannibal even earlier was

foreseeing possible Allobrogian attacks; and in fact the Allobrogian chieftains held

back from attacking only until Braneus’ warriors had gone home and the

Carthaginians entered the cavalry-unfriendly ‘rough terrain’ (50.3). On this evidence,

they were not merely seeking tolls.50

The Allobroges may, in fact, have held part or all of the south bank of the middle

Isère as well as their main territory to its north. As usual the evidence dates from

later. Cularo (Grenoble), on the south bank just east of the Vercors massif, was

Allobrogian in Cicero’s day, as was the Isère itself according to Cicero’s

correspondent Plancus (Ad Fam. 10.23.7, 10.15.3: 43 BC). This would help to clarify

Polybius’ otherwise odd comment that the Carthaginians, during their stay in The

Island, were ‘having reservations [eujlabw`~ diakeimevnoi~] about the march

through the Gauls called Allobroges’ (P. 3.49.13), a comment which may be the

compressed vestige of a fuller statement in one of his sources.51

The Vocontian escort hints why this is relevant. In itself the escort is another

oddity: why should a highly trained, and now even better-equipped, veteran army of

46,000 infantry and cavalry, with elephants, stand in need of protection by a Gallic

war-band? Even more oddly, the warriors kept pace with the Punic army only on the


plains (ejn toi`~ ejpipevdoi~, 50.2)—where an Allobrogian attack could have been

efficiently dealt with by Hannibal’s own forces, a threat appreciated by the Allobroges

themselves (ibid.)—but as soon as the Carthaginians reached ‘the rough terrain’ (eij~

ta;~ duscwriva~, 50.3 and 5, 51.1-10), in fact mountain-country, the escorts left for

home. It looks as though they were making a demonstration, rather than providing

serious military protection.

Land-disputes between neighbours were a standard feature of the ancient world.

In Roman times they were usually dealt with by the province’s governor or an

appointed arbitrator, but in other eras and places a decision, lasting or temporary,

often came about through war. The Valentinois is not sharply delimited by ridges or

rivers. The Segovellauni held the sector around Valence and perhaps some of the

Rhône’s east bank down to the Drôme; but between there and the Vercors—and in

the Vercors as well—there may well have been areas in dispute, especially between

the Vocontii and their warlike northern neighbours. For a Vocontian war-band, maybe

led by their successful chieftain himself, to march along the tribe’s border, actual or

claimed, in company with an imposing foreign army was surely a signal to neighbours

that the Vocontii had powerful friends (it did not have to be permanently true). It

was, though, a signal, not a provocation. As soon as his new friends neared a region

where actual trouble was liable to flare, Braneus made his farewells.

The nuances of Vocontian-Allobrogian relations may have been lost on Hannibal,

or he simply ignored them. Polybius treats the escort as militarily meaningful, even

judging it to be more important than the food and equipment donated by Braneus

(49.13, to; de; mevgiston): a view hardly justified by its actual behaviour, but

deriving no doubt from his source or sources. To the Allobroges, Hannibal’s friendship

with their southern neighbours and irritants may have been cause enough to seek

reprisals. But just as potent a motive, if not more potent, would be his army’s freshly-

replenished commissariat, not to mention its funds. Polybius mentions the appeal of

plunder to the attackers (51.11). They perhaps could not believe their luck when

Braneus went home while the Carthaginians pressed on into hazard.

VI The start of ‘the ascent’

On the itinerary so far reconstructed, the hazardous region involved the Vercors.

Given Braneus’ behaviour, it looks as though the right (south) bank of the Isère and

the northern part of the massif were currently under Allobrogian control. On the other

hand, the Vocontian sub-group the Vertamocori later dwelt there, and Polybius treats

the region where the barbarians attacked the Carthaginian army as non-Allobrogian

43

Dexter Hoyos 44

territory, writing that they fled ‘to their home country’ after Hannibal drove them off

(eij~ th;n oijkeivan, 51.9). It may be that they had recently seized the district from

the Vocontii, who by Polybius’ day had got it back.

To reach the Alps via the extrema ora Vocontiorum agri and then via the saltus

Tricorii, the army had either to follow the Isère in its convex loop around the Vercors

massif, or cross the massif itself, to the Drac valley. Polybius, followed closely by

Livy, reports a perilous journey through a long, rising and difficult pass or gorge (P.

3.50.3-52.10; L. 21.32.8–33.10). In the Isère valley, such narrows could only be on

the route along the left bank of the river around the Bec de l’Échaillon—the steep

northern point of the Vercors, 550 metres above the valley floor—but this was

virtually impassable to an army until 19th-Century roadworks widened it. On the right

bank opposite, the valley is far wider and quite flat; it therefore fits no description of

the passage as being through ‘rough terrain’. Besides, Polybius mentions no crossing

and re-crossing of any river, first to its right bank (which would, moreover, have

landed the army squarely in Allobrogian home territory) and later back to the left, as

would have been necessary to regain the route to Italy. More important still, he

shows the column having to climb the pass, emphasising its narrowness and the cliffs

along one side (51.1-5). Livy echoes this (21.33.2-9), though over-enthusiastically

supplying the path with chasms on both sides (‘utrimque’, 33.7). The Isère valley at

the Bec de l’Échaillon will not do.52

This leaves a crossing of the Vercors massif as the alternative, obviously not a

route to take in the normal course of things. But once Hannibal had decided against a

confrontation with Scipio in Gaul and therefore marched northwards from the Rhône-

crossing, he was bound to face a choice of less than ideal routes. Polybius writes that

he took the route through the pass ‘by necessity’ (kat∆ ajnavgkhn: 50.3), which helps

to confirm that it was not one which the general would have freely selected. But,

however undesirable and risky, it was how the Carthaginians had ‘to make the

ascent’ (poiei`sqai th;n ajnabolhvn: 50.3); the first time in Polybius’ narrative, as

distinct from his geographical passages, that he mentions the term ‘ascent’.

One route for the army over the Vercors, first suggested a century ago, takes it

along the left bank of the Isère past St Nazaire-en-Royans to St Quentin just 6 km.

short of the Bec de l’Échaillon. Then, via a hair-raisingly zigzag road, the army

supposedly climbed to the site of the village of Montaud (7 km. from St Quentin by

road) to descend by a slightly less zigzag 7-km. path back to the Isère valley and the

road to Cularo/Grenoble. But, apart from the extremely steep and winding paths, in


this reconstruction the enemy’s attacks occur on the descent, contradicting Polybius.

Tactically, too, the preceding 37-km. march along the Isère, from St Nazaire to St

Quentin, would have made the army an even easier target for the Allobroges, with

the road in places brushing the river’s edge on one side and the Vercors slopes on

the other, with the barbarians’ own land directly across the water and with Braneus’

warriors by then far away—not that these could have done much for an army

necessarily strung out along kilometres of narrow road. It is also worth noting that,

from The Island via St Nazaire to St Quentin, the distance is 166 km. and therefore

between 865 (Olympic) and 934 (Polybian) stadia, well over Polybius’ claimed 800.53

The alternative ascent to the Vercors, proposed by John Lazenby, begins at Pont-

en-Royans, 9 km. east of St Nazaire and at the entrance to the valley of the short

river Bourne, which flows down from the Vercors to join the Isère at St Nazaire. The

massif—a series of dramatic stepped plateaux edged on their eastern flanks by a

range where the highest peak reaches 2,284 m.—can be climbed to the top by only a

few roads; the one up the Bourne valley is the most accessible from the west and

would perhaps have been the only one usable by an army in 218. Well up the valley,

and just below the resort town of Villard-de-Lans on the highest plateau, are the

scenic narrows called the Gorges de la Bourne, where the road winds over steep and

high slopes as it climbs. The Gorges are an 8-km. stretch of the pass which, from

Pont-en-Royans to Villard, is 24 km. long (16 m.p.). As Lazenby has noted, this sector

well suits the terrain Polybius describes for the Allobroges’ attacks. Throughout the

attacks the army was climbing, until finally it emerged from the ‘rough terrain’ as the

barbarians were driven off ‘to their own country’ (51.9).

A problem with this reconstruction is that, once on the plateau at Villard, one

needs to descend it elsewhere to proceed. The road, having climbed eastward up the

Gorges de la Bourne to Villard, now turns north across a scenic countryside, past

Lans-en-Vercors, to descend by another narrow passage, the Gorges d’Engins (long

and fairly straight) and then du Furon (narrow and winding, but quite short), to rejoin

the Isère on the eastern flank of the massif where Sassenage now stands. Polybius

does not report the army traversing a second, descending pass, and since Livy here

mainly paraphrases his account there is no second Livian pass either, but their

silence is explicable. Polybius writes that, thanks to his victory over the Allobroges,

Hannibal was safe from attacks by ‘those [Gauls] further on’ (toi`~ eJxh`~: 51.13).

He was able to rest the army for one day at the captured town and then proceed on

his way (52.1-2). There was therefore, from Polybius’ point of view, no need to

mention a descent.54

45

Dexter Hoyos 46

At the ‘town’ (povlin) which the enemy had used as their base, Hannibal rescued

the prisoners and animals captured during the attacks earlier in the day, while Livy

adds, presumably from another source, that he also seized ‘viculos circumiectos’

(21.33.11). The captured town also yielded two to three days’ quantity of grain and

sheep or cattle (P. 3.51.12). The town has been suggested as Cularo (Grenoble),

down in the Isère valley, as the plentiful stocks of food and farm animals could

suggest. But the Allobroges had retired only overnight to the povli~, then returned

next morning to renew their blockade of the pass (50.7, 51.1). With Cularo 33 km.

from Villard-de-Lans, it is virtually impossible that they could accomplish a 66-km.

round trip on foot—up and down the plateau, too—overnight, even if they did without

sleep. (Their fear of the Carthaginians’ cavalry indicates that they were foot-soldiers.)

A centre on the plateau is therefore more likely as the town that Hannibal captured,

even though Lazenby’s suggestion, the site of Villard virtually on the top of the pass,

is less likely than, for instance, Lans-en-Vercors 7 km. to the north over fairly level

pastures. The Villard site would instead be the initial vantage-point that Hannibal and

his men seized once the enemy had left for the night.55

All the same, Cularo may have fallen into Punic hands afterwards, on the next

stage of the advance ‘in Tricorios’. The army had first to follow the Isère valley—here

making its great southerly bend around the Grande Chartreuse massif—for a

distance, and then the Drac from the south meets the Isère at Cularo. If the troops

marched thence ‘ad saltus Tricorios’, in Ammianus’ phrase, they now headed south.

They did not branch off eastwards a few kilometres south from Cularo; the road that

turns east at Vizille follows the river Romanche through the territory of the Iconii or

Ucennii, today’s l’Oisans. Reconstructions which take Hannibal by a different route—

up the Isère itself, for example, past Pontcharra to the junction of the Isère and the

Arc near Aiguebelle (63 km. upstream from Grenoble, the land of the Medulli)—

necessarily reject Livy on the Tricorii, or relocate them arbitrarily to some area that

better suits such reconstructions.56

As noted earlier, marching up the Drac valley is one way to the upper Durance.

The road (now the Route Napoléon) rises to the Col Bayard at 1,248 m. to reach the

plateau of the Gapençais, bounded on all sides by mountains including the High Alps

that fill the eastern horizon, but itself relatively easy marching terrain. A left turn at

Vapincum/Gap—that is, a turn eastwards—brings travellers, after another 27 km., to

the upper Durance, just where it bends from the north to flow westward for some

distance. Livy’s topographical résumé thus maintains its internal coherence.


VII The second attack

Polybius reports the army resting for one day (mivan hJmevran) at the captured

povli~ used by the Allobroges, then marching ‘on the ensuing days in safety’ (tai`~

d∆ hJxh`~ ajsfalw`~, 52.1-2), only to run into grave danger on the fourth (tetartai`o~

w[n, referring to Hannibal: ibid.). This was after two days’ guidance by locals, who

must be the Tricorii and who turned out to have treachery in mind, despite first

greeting Hannibal in friendly style and offering farm-animals aplenty (for food), as

well as hostages and the guides.

These specious gestures cannot in themselves have put the army into grave

danger, especially as Hannibal was not taken in by them (52.4-6). So the locals’

overtures should not be dated to ‘the fourth day’ of this new stage of marching, but

to its second day. The day when the ambush took place, which did place the army in

grave danger, must be the fourth since leaving the captured povli~, not the fourth

since the very start of ‘the ascent’. Had it been the latter, as is often held, then—with

day 1 being the ascent itself, day 2 the rest-day and day 3 the start of the further

march—day 4 as the ambush-day leaves no room for some preceding ‘ensuing days’

(plural) of safe marching, including two with the guides from the Tricorii. Reckoning

from Hannibal’s departure from the captured povli~, the ‘fourth day’ means a

previous three safe days’ marching, the second and third of them with the guides:

this fits Polybius’ indicators. Here, then, he is reckoning from one major point of the

march to the next, not from the overall start of ‘the ascent’ (cf. §VIII Table 5).57

As suggested earlier, the march must have slowed at times and lengthened at

others. Descending from the Vercors plateau would need care, whereas on ensuing

days the army may well have increased not its speed, but its hours of marching,

whenever possible. By now it was October with every day adding to the chances that

bad weather might come down to impede—or block—the passes. Vegetius’ recruits

might well find longer daily marching a problem (though he specifies that on the fast

march they should do 25 m.p. a day), but a veteran professional army was capable of

a longer marching-day at least for limited periods, even along an ascending route

and accompanied by a train of pack-animals, and even if there were stragglers (for

these, P. 53.9; cf. L. 21.35.5). Nor was it passing through a wilderness. The Drac

valley, in modern times at least, has been well cultivated, and the cattle or sheep

supplied ‘lavishly’ (ajfqovnw~, P. 52.7) to the Carthaginians suggest a productive

countryside even in 218.58

From Cularo/Grenoble (214 m. above sea-level) along the Drac to the town of

Corps (961 m.) is 63 km. or 42.5 m.p., most if not all of which could be covered on

47

Dexter Hoyos 48

the second and third days from the Vercors. The Drac flows in a rocky bed with steep

sides, often well below the surrounding plateau while, in other places, the mountains

on either side of the valley close in on the river. It is possible, then, that the attack on

the fourth day struck the army somewhere beyond Corps—purely as examples,

perhaps around the Col des Festreaux 7 km. further south, or past Chauffayer

(another 10 km. or so on) when the road descends to cross the Drac, then turns from

it to climb over open fields to the Col Bayard 32 km. south of Corps.

Polybius’ account of this attack is not entirely straightforward. The troops were

‘passing through a difficult and precipitous gorge’ (favragga, 52.8). Hannibal,

foreseeing danger, had put the cavalry and pack-animals in the vanguard, and

followed with his ‘hoplites’ (the regular infantry). These duly took the brunt of the

attack (53.1-2), but as a result he passed the night ‘with half his force’ separated

from the vanguard (53.5) on a ‘strong position of bare rock’ (periv ti leukovpetron

ojcurovn, 53.5; not in Livy), apparently in the gorge. There he continued ‘keeping

watch on these’, the men and animals in the vanguard (ejfedreuvonta touvtoi~), as

they spent the entire night struggling to emerge from ‘the ravine’ (th`~ caravdra~—

properly the canyon carved by a mountain torrent). The vanguard must have kept

going to the farther exit, for next day Hannibal ‘joined up with’ it (sunavya~) to

proceed on the march (53.6); so too Livy, ‘postero die … iunctae copiae saltusque

haud sine clade … superatus’ (21.35.1).

Polybius thus depicts Hannibal, though immobile overnight at the ‘bare rock’

position, as still able from there to keep the Gauls from pursuing the vanguard, even

though the barbarians had earlier been hurling rocks lethally down the slopes onto

the cavalry and pack-animals—which means that some of them were up ahead of

him (53.3-4). How he succeeded in putting a stop to this from his rock-site is not

shown. Nor is it clear how he could have only ‘half his force’ there, if just the cavalry

was up ahead in the defile with the pack-animals (or even if they had the light-armed

troops, invisible in our sources, for company). Livy too may have found Polybius’

narrative a little difficult to follow—or he chose to paraphrase another account—for

he does not mention the cavalry and pack-train taking all night to emerge from the

angustiae, and writes that, during the next day’s passage by the entire army through

the saltus, losses continued, though chiefly of pack-animals (21.35.1).59

Given Polybius’ rather fuzzy depiction of events, it is unpromising to speculate

where the ‘strong position of bare rock’ lay (another notorious topic in march-

discussions). Identifications like the great crag of Chåteau-Queyras in the valley of


the Guil, just beyond the narrow Combe du Queyras and about 28 km. before the Col

de la Traversette—or a similar outcrop at L’Argentière-la-Bessée, 30 km. south of the

Montgenèvre in the upper Durance valley—rely on reckoning Polybius’ ‘fourth day’

(when the Tricorii attacked) as the eighth day of the ascent itself, with the summit of

the pass being reached on the very next day. But it was shown above that

tetartai`o~ must mean the fourth day after the army left the captured povli~ (cf. §VIII

Table 5). On the same principle, reckoning from one major point of the march to the

next, ejnatai`o~ should signify a date nine days after the new attack. Physically, the

report of Hannibal’s force passing the night around bare rock is not the same as

having it do so on a high crag. The description implies, rather, that the position was

not forested or near trees—safe, therefore, from surprise attack in darkness. Whether

such a site, on any suggested route, could now be identified must be dubious:

changes both natural and man-made over twenty-three centuries may have changed

its appearance, or hidden it.60

Traversing the gorge or ‘ravine’ was enough to relieve the army from further mass

attacks, though not from hit-and-run strikes. This suggests that the district beyond

the ravine was too open for an ambush, and that is compatible with the area of the

Col Bayard and then of the Gapençais beyond. This area, though surrounded by

mountains and defiles through them, presents open and easy country eastwards until

the Gapençais meets the upper Durance; and Livy’s source for the topographical

résumé may have noted this, even if Livy himself interpreted it to mean that it had

been a ‘haud usquam impedita via’ ever since The Island (21.31.9). If he did, he

should have discovered the reality once he returned to Polybius for the post-Island

events on the march; but he makes no change to his text at 31.9. Quite possibly he

failed to realise that the events in Polybius, from the Allobroges-infested ‘ascent’

onwards, occurred on Vocontian (though contested) land and then in the land of the

Tricorii. His own narrative, vividly imagined though it is, plainly involves no clear or

coherent idea about how the march fitted into actual Alpine topography. Or, perhaps,

rephrasing the résumé looked like more trouble than it was worth. It would not be the

first example of him letting an earlier inaccuracy stand.61

VIII The ‘remaining crossing over the Alps’

Where the Durance valley meets the eastern end of the Gapençais, beyond

Caturigomagus/Chorges, is today the reservoir of the Lac de Serre-Ponçon. Above it

was shown how, having taken his readers this far—and after an overwrought

depiction of the Alps with snowy peaks all but touching the sky, all living creatures

49

Dexter Hoyos 50

‘torrida frigore’ and (rather tautologically) ‘omnia rigentia gelu’ (21.32.7)—Livy in fact

takes up Polybius’ account once more. It is only at 21.35.1 that this Polybian-based

narrative properly brings him back to where his topographical résumé at 21.31.9 had

left Hannibal. This corresponds to Polybius 3.53.6.62

Over the next several sentences, Livy again modifies his Polybian information.

Most notably, he reports the army attaining the summit of the pass only ‘per invia

pleraque et errores’: that is, after a series of false turns up culs-de-sac, due (he

asserts) either to treacherous guides—whose origin is not explained, though they can

hardly have been Tricorii still—or to unsuccessful guesswork by the mistrustful

Carthaginians (21.35.4). All this may come from a separate and not very convincing

source, but Livy’s own imagination cannot be ruled out.63

If one of his predecessors named a different route up to the pass, or a different

river from the Durance, Livy does not record it. Neither does Ammianus, who is

content to compress Livy’s version—though again with distortions (n. 25). It looks as

though no narrator known to Livy reported the army coming to any High Alpine river

other than the Durance. Thus the most plausible inference, as we have seen, and one

based on both Livy’s and Polybius’ evidence, is that Hannibal took a route which

brought him finally to that river’s Alpine reaches. Here he had a choice of passes, via

the Durance valley or via others branching off from it. Of these, the most accessible

was the Col de Montgenèvre at 1,850 metres, another the relatively easy Col de

Larche (or de l’Argentière) at 1,948 and, much more difficult, the Col de la

Traversette at 2,915.

‘The remaining crossing over the Alps’ (loipai; aiJ tw`n ”Alpewn uJperbolaiv)

totalled some 1,200 stadia according to Polybius (3.39.9-10). The clause following

this statement has not invariably received its deserved attention: ‘after passing over

this [a}~ ujperbalwvn], he meant to reach [e[mellen h{xein eij~] the plains of Italy

around the Padus’. The 1,200 stadia, in other words, are counted as far as the top of

the pass to Italy. The ensuing descent is extra. The 15 days for ‘the crossing over the

Alps’ (th;n de; tw`n ”Alpewn uJperbolhvn, 56.3) should also apply to this distance,

and not include the 9-10 more days spent repairing the road down and reaching the

plains. How the 15 days and their sequel work out in Polybius’ own narrative may be

tabulated.64


TABLE 5: TIMETABLE FOR ‘THE REMAINING CROSSING OVER THE ALPS’

Day

(–1, or –2 & –1?)

H. encamps at the foot of ‘the ascent’ (P. 3.50.5, 8)

__________________________________________________________________________________________

1 (Overnight) H. seizes the heights

(Day) fights off the Allobroges, brings the army through the pass

2 Rest-day at captured povli~

3 Departure (into territory of Tricorii)—first of some days of marching ‘in safety (ajsfalw`~)’

4 Another day (second from the povli~) marching ‘in safety’

Tricorii make overtures; H. accepts and marches peaceably on with guides

5 (Third day from the povli~) Further marching ‘in safety’

6 ‘On the fourth day’ (of the march from the povli~) Tricorii attack in ‘gorge’

(Overnight) H. separated from cavalry and pack-animals

7 Army reunited beyond ‘ravine’ and advances (FIRST DAY of FURTHER march)

8 to 14 March continues (SECOND to EIGHTH DAY); hit-and-run attacks by enemy

15 ‘On the NINTH day’ (after the Tricorii attacked) Hannibal reaches the pass

____________________________________________________________________________________________

16-17 Two rest-days on the pass

18 Fruitless attempted descent due to broken road

Failure to find alternative pass (cf. n. 71)

19-21 or -22 Broken road repaired: 3 (or perhaps 4) days’ work; cavalry sent on ahead after first day (P. 54.6-8)

21 or 22 Elephants start descent to plains

22-24 or 23-25

Rest of army makes 3-day descent

The army’s pause at the foot of ‘the ascent’ must count as occurring on day 10 of

the previous stage from The Island, for the ascent was yet to start. Polybius in fact

twice reports Hannibal encamping in face of the Allobroges (50.5 and 8) before

making his first upward move. Though possibly this is a mere repetition of one camp

in two contexts, more likely it registers a first, temporary camp (while Hannibal

gathered information from Gallic scouts) followed by a second, later in the same day

51

Dexter Hoyos 52

and closer to the start of the ascent. A third possibility, not as plausible, could be that

the first camp was on the ninth day from The Island and some distance from the start

of ‘the ascent’, while the second camp was pitched at its very foot on the tenth day.

Livy does read Polybius as meaning two separate days (21.32.9-11), and such a

sequence might also help account for the slow overall pace of the 10-day march from

The Island. But Polybius has the first camp ‘next to the pass’ (pro;~ tai`~

uJperbolai`~) and implies that the second was further forward. As it happens, the

entry to the Vercors via the Gorges de la Bourne would suit the suggested two camps

28 Compatibility of Livy and Polybius: similarly Proctor (n. 1) 164-84, but with

several differences of detail, especially his rejection of the upper Durance route. Two

separate routes: Seibert (1988: n. 1) 72-3; Forsch. zu Hann. 195-200; Hannibal 106

and n.163. As a predecessor for this thesis Seibert cites E. Hesselbarth, Hannibals

Alpenübergang im Lichte der neueren Kriegsgeschichte (Tübingen, 1906). Army

strengths: P. 3.35.7, 60.5; Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty (n. 6) 227-8, citing earlier

literature.

29 Early source: cf. also n. 43 below.

30 On the territory of the Allobroges: Barruol (n. 3) 295-305, with evidence (295-6)

that it included the south bank of the middle Isère; Rivet (n. 6) 305-11, 312-31.

Kahrstedt (n. 1) 182-6; Jullian (n. 1) 1.475; de Sanctis (n. 14) 69-70; Walbank, Comm.

1.388; Seibert, Hannibal (n. 1) 68 n.35, 107 n.165; and Lancel (n. 14) 124, 128-9, are

among the scholars who see them as the inhabitants of The Island. (Kahrstedt (n. 1)

186 suggests that ‘Allobroges’ was merely a general term used by the North Italian

Gauls for all the peoples of beyond the Alps.) Barruol (n. 3) 296-7, perhaps uniquely,

identifies The Island as le Valentinois, the territory of the Segovellauni around the

site of Valence.

31 Aigues: De Beer (n. 1) 42-4, referring to G. Devos, D’Espagne en Italie avec

Annibal (Vaison-la-Romaine, 1966). Proctor (n. 1) 129-30 counsels caution over the

resemblances between ‘Skaras’ and Egrum, Ecaris et al.). Now Polybius’ MSS. at

3.49.6 read th/` me;n ga;r oJ rJodanov~ th/` deskavra~ proagoreuovmeno~ or

variants of this. Büttner-Wobst prints h/| me;n gavr oJ ÔRodanov~, h/| d∆ ∆Iskvara~,

and this is generally accepted. In other words, in the MSS. no definite article

accompanies ‘Skaras’ (cf. Walbank, Selected Papers (n. 24) 115 n.25). It looks

possible that in fact Polybius wrote h/| d∆ oJ ejskavra~, only for corruption to strike


on the same day: the first just outside the start of the pass, for instance around

Auberives-en-Royans near St Nazaire, the second (the overnight camp) 6 km. further

on at Pont-en-Royans, at the bottom of the valley of the Bourne.

Overnight Hannibal seized the deserted Allobrogian strongpoints above this

second camp (P. 50.9), and next day the rest of the troops began the ascent (51.2).

This day, therefore, counts as day 1 of the fifteen. It must have been a long day

thanks to the Gauls’ attacks and the need to emerge from the pass so as to make the

next camp: this would help to explain the pause for rest on day 2 (52.1). Day 3 was

then the start of the further march. As shown above, it was on the ‘fourth day’ of this

further march (52.2) that Hannibal again faced serious danger, after two days with

later. If he did call the river ‘Eskaras’, this would strengthen de Beer’s case, for the

forms earliest attested (AD 825 and after) are Egrum [syncopation for Egarum ?],

Araus, Icarus and Equer (de Beer, 43), with conceivable loss of the -s-.—Other,

unpersuasive candidates for The Island include the Rhône-Ouvèze junction at

Sorgues, 13 km. above Avignon (Wilkinson (n. 26) 18-19); the Rhône does enclose an

actual river-island, but the site lies only 38 km. from Tarascon, hardly even a 2-day

march, and no continuous high ground closes off the triangle. Another is the area

between the Rhône-Durance junction, with Hannibal made to cross the Durance

northward at Cabellio/Cavaillon, the Tricastini to take part in The Island’s civil strife,

and—most improbable of all—the Allobroges made to live near the upper Durance

(Torr (n. 2) 6-10, 14-25; cf. n. 48).

32 ‘After proceeding in 10 days’ etc.: ejn hjmevrai~ devka poreuqei;~ para; to;n

potamo;n eij~ ojktakosivou~ stadivou~, h[rxato th`~ pro;~ ta;~ “Alpei~ ajnabolh`~.

That the ‘ascent’-phrases at P. 3.39.9 and 50.1 refer to two separate points is held,

e.g., by Proctor, 36-9, 159-61 (citing the pioneer of the Clapier route J.L.A. Colin,

Annibal en Gaule (Paris, 1904) 337-9); de Beer, 59-61 (famously arguing for the route

up the Drôme); Lazenby, 38, 41-2, 287 nn.40-1. For pro;~ th;n ajnabolh;n tw`n

“Alpewn (39.9) Paton (Loeb tr.) gives ‘as far as the foot of the pass across the Alps’,

which obscures the sense of ajnabolhvn.

33 For the territories of these peoples see Barruol (n. 3), 247-67 (Tricastini), 278-94

(Vocontii), 325-30 (Tricorii), 318-25 (Iconii/Ucennii), 231-72 (Cavares), 267-72

(Segovellauni). See also Rivet (n. 6) 277-82, 286-99, 311-12 (Tricastini, Vocontii,

Tricorii respectively); 31, 252, 262-5 (Cavares), 300 (Segovellauni); 302 fig. 42, 339

fig. 51 (maps).

53

Dexter Hoyos 54

the guides from the Tricorii. Day 6 (that is, the sixth of the 15-day crossing) was the

harrowing day of the new attack; its ensuing night was when Hannibal was cut off on

his ‘bare rock’ from his vanguard. By the following morning it had tapered off,

Hannibal had caught up with (sunavya~) the vanguard and the army pressed on

towards the pass.65

There are other, less convincing timetables for the period up to this point.

Sometimes the one day or two days for the initial two camps below the Allobrogian

blockade are counted as the start of ‘the ascent’—even though logically the army

was still on the plain; if so, reaching the summit of the pass on ‘the ninth day’ would

mean a mere six days of actual marching. After all, Hannibal had allowed a rest-day,

which has to count in the total. Even if the ascent is counted, correctly, from the day

34 Augusta Tricastinorum (St Paul-Trois-Châteaux): Barruol, 246-51, cites Ptolemy’s

‘Noiomagus’ as the supposed original name of the tribal capital; seconded by

Walbank, Selected Papers (n. 24) 110-11. But, as Rivet too notes (280, 289), this

seems instead a Ptolemaean confusion with the well-attested Noviomagus (Nyons)

upriver on the Aigues, which Ptolemy does not otherwise list. By his time, Roman

town-names were long established. Walbank, ibid., identifies Augusta Tricastinorum

as Aouste-en-Diois, on the Drôme 50 km. north of St-Paul; but the evidence is

strongly against this. Le Tricastin, the district around St Paul, has had some form of

this name since antiquity, but the town-name is a 16th-century (or earlier) fancy from

Tricastini, mistaken for a Latin name (tria castella): C. Rostaing, Essai sur la

Toponymie de la Provence depuis les origines jusqu’aux invasions barbares (Paris,

1950; repr. Marseille, 1994) 338-9; Barruol, 247, 252-3; cf. Proctor, 166-9.

35 Proctor, 149-52, 183 (citing earlier works), sees The Island as in the Cavares’

territory and the Tricastini as under the Cavares’ suzerainty; this relies on the faulty

inferences about the extent of the ager Cavarum discussed above. The Roman colony

of Valentia later had territory extending south of the Drôme to meet that of the

Tricastini, or so the cadastral tablets of Arausio suggest (Rivet, 301), but the coloni

quite possibly received these when the Roman foundation took place in 46 BC.

36 Tricastini barred from Rhône by a 7-8 km. strip of Cavares’ territory: Barruol,

247, 256-7, 262-4. ‘In agro Cavarum Valentia’: Barruol, 17, 268; accepted by Proctor,

149; Rivet, 300. The far more convincing punctuation was employed long ago by D.

Detlefsen, Die Geographischen Bücher … des C. Plinius Secundus (Berlin, 1904; repr.

Roma, 1972), 15 ad loc., though largely ignored since.


the troops began winding their way up the first pass under Allobrogian attack, for

them to attain the final pass on the ninth day after this would mean only eight days’

actual march (because of the rest-day again). These are extraordinarily and, in fact,

impossibly short periods for 1,200 stadia which included traversing passes and two

days of attacks (39.10), for this distance is 144 m.p. if measured in ‘Polybian’ stadia

(8.33:1), 150 using the Roman ratio, and 156 on the Olympic. Even 144 m.p. in eight

days averages 18 m.p., over 26 km., a day—faster than the average worked out

earlier over easy terrain (§I). They are out of the question if the distance was really

1,400 stadia, which may be the true length of ‘the remaining crossing over the Alps’

(§X).66

37 Evidence from the cadastres d’Orange: Barruol, 254-66, with references to

earlier literature. Land taken for colonia Arausio from Helvii and others on the other

side of the Rhône: Rivet, 275.

38 ∆Albaugouvsta and ∆Eluvkwkoi: Rivet, 182, cf. 280.

39 Polybius seeing Isère as upper Rhône: Proctor, 154-5. Some hypotheses

(discusssed by Seibert (1988: n. 1) 57-64, cf. his Maps 3, 5 and 6) hold that Hannibal

followed the Rhône further north to Vienne or even to Lyon, then east to Chambéry,

and next turned south to cross the Grande Chartreuse to the upper Isère and then its

tributary the Arc. They thus treat The Island as the Rhône-Isère triangle, require

Hannibal still to abandon the Rhône after only part of the 800 stadia, and also require

relocating, or jettisoning, the Tricastini, Vocontii and Tricorii.

40 For other views about the left turn cf. n. 26.

41 ‘Braneus’ is the manuscripts’ reading in Livy; ‘Brancus’ an alteration by the

editio Venetiana of 1470 (see Walters and Conway’s Oxford edition, ad loc.). Braneus,

perhaps cognate with Brennus, looks equivalent to the Celtic name Brian (possibly

from bran, ‘raven’).

42 Valréas: see especially Barruol (n. 3), 226-7, who considers its district,

surrounded by hills and low mountains, as the borderland between Tricastini and

Vocontii.—Vasio and Lucus: Barruol, 282 n.3; Rivet, 286-91.

43 This would, incidentally, chime with the tentative suggestion above that Livy’s

topographical résumé comes (ultimately, anyway) from one of these writers.

55

Dexter Hoyos 56

Thus, when Hannibal reached the summit of the Alpine pass ejnatai`o~, this

should be counted as the ninth day from the previous major point on the march—the

Gallic attack in the caravdra. In turn, the day of the attack itself (‘the fourth day’ from

the captured povli~) cannot be the first of these nine, since that would mean double-

counting it. The first of the new nine was the day after, when Hannibal caught up with

his vanguard and ‘advanced towards the highest pass over the Alps’ (proh`ge pro;~

ta;~ ujperbola;~ ta;~ ajnwtavtw tw`n “Alpewn: P. 53.6). This was day 7 of the entire

fifteen-day advance (Table 5).

Polybius’ words do not imply that Hannibal arrived at the pass on that same day.

44 For this victory-site see Strabo, 4.1.11 C185; Pliny, Nat. Hist. 7.166; Florus,

1.37.4; other sources in T.R.S. Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic 1

(1951) 520-1; A. Lintott in Cambridge Ancient History 9 (2nd edn.: Cambridge, 1994)

24.

45 Foucault (n. 4) 91 n.3 (cf. 190) cites the theory of P. Marquion (Sur les pas

d’Annibal (roneo tpyescript: Orange, 1965) ) that The Island was not ‘une île fluviale’

but the ‘massif montagneux de forme triangulaire, terminé par la pointe du Vercors

entre Drôme et Isère.’ This makes poor sense of the details in Polybius and Livy. For

criticisms of other hypotheses of Marquion, on marching speeds and the Rhône-

crossing for instance, see Proctor, 28-30, 107-13, 143-4.

46 On rest-days cf. n. 11. Walbank, Comm. 1.389, is suspicious of the 800 stadia in

10 days, because of its slowness (‘the distances of the stages from “The Island”

onwards are not to be taken at face value’); commended by Seibert (1988: n. 1) 34-5

and n.65. Five(?) days at The Island: de Sanctis (n. 14) 1.80; Lazenby, 39 (‘several’),

275-6 (suggesting 4 days, which looks too brief). 6-7 days might be more realistic.

47 Connolly (n. 2) 161 infers foraging by the troops, though not a more organised

collection under Braneus’ auspices. Seibert, Forsch. zu Hann. (n. 1), 204, and

Hannibal, 107 n.166, also realises that Braneus could not have gathered full

provisions, clothing and arms at a moment’s notice; his solution is that Hannibal

must have arranged these long before, from Spain, but there is no evidence for this—

P. 3.41.7, reporting payments to Gauls en route to the Rhône, is not a support, nor

are the messages of support from unnamed Gallic chieftains at 34.6. Nor indeed are

goods, prearranged or taken ad hoc, recorded from any other tribes—the Cavares, for

instance—en route to The Island.


Apart from his using the imperfect tense proh`ge, it would have been rather more

logical to write th/` d∆ ejpauvrion (‘on the next day’ after the attack), a phrase he did

use a few lines earlier (53.6) and elsewhere (44.3, 54.3, for instance) as appropriate.

The descriptions, too, of intermittent attacks by venturesome tribesmen on this

stretch of the advance, and how the elephants effectively scared them off, imply

more than one further day or day and a half. It can be calculated, then, that the

summit of the Alpine pass was attained on Polybius’ day 15, which was the ninth day

after the ambush.67

48 See n. 31 for Torr’s whole-of-Durance hypothesis. He takes the extrema ora

Vocontiorum to be the southern edge of their territory and this to be the Durance

valley (arguing that in pre-Roman times Gallic tribes’ territories could fluctuate

greatly), and treats 10 m.p. a day as the army’s normal speed (Torr, 20, 22);

puzzlingly, he locates The Island 40 m.p. up the Durance from the Rhône-crossing

(18), but reckons the 600 stadia from crossing to Island as 75 m.p. (15), without

clarifying the discrepancy.

49 For the view that, in Roman times, the stretch of the Rhône below Loriol was

also part of the ager Segovellaunorum because it was then given to colonia Valentia,

see Rivet 301-2 (with map 42). But the one does not necessarily imply the other (cf.

n. 37).—P. 3.47.2 describes the Rhône’s flow as ‘towards the winter sunsets’ (pro;~

ªta;~º duvsei~ ceimarinav~); Walbank, Comm. 1.381, supports an earlier suggestion

that ceimarinav~ may be a later addition of Polybius’, after he had learned that the

Rhône did not flow simply west to east. Isère taken by Polybius to be Rhône: Proctor,

154-5, citing R.L. Dunbabin, Class. Review 1931, 55; Seibert (1988: n. 1) 48-9 cites

other such theories.

50 Losing faction: Walbank, Selected Papers (n. 24) 116, and Comm. 1.388; Huss

(n. 24) 303; Prevas (n. 1) 110. Allobroges exacting tolls: Seibert, Forsch. zu Hann.

(n. 1) 206, comparing Strabo 4.6.7 C205 (the tolls-cum-brigandage of the Salassi in

the Italian Alps); cf. J. Seibert, ‘Zur Logistik des Hannibal-Feldzuges: Nachschub über

die Alpen?’, Studia Phoenicia 10: The Punic Wars (Leuven, 1989) 218-19.

51 Carthaginians eujlabw`~ diakeimevnoi~: I. Scott-Kilvert’s ‘were full of anxiety’

(Penguin tr. (1979) 223) and Paton’s ‘being not at all easy on the subject’ (Loeb tr.)

paraphrase too strongly; Foucault (n. 4) is preferable, with ‘qui n’avançaient qu’avec

circonspection’.

57

Dexter Hoyos 58

Hannibal then devoted two days to rest the survivors and await stragglers (P.

53.9-10; followed by L. 21.35.4-5 with the implausible modifications already

discussed, like ‘per invia pleraque et errores’). After these two days, it took him and

his men another nine or more to descend to the plains (P. 54.4–56.1; Table 5). These

further days, or the first few anyway, are sometimes regarded as part of Polybius’ 15

for ‘the remaining crossing’—naturally so by scholars who date the arrival at the top

of the pass to day 9—but this is not compatible with his plain indication, at 39.10,

that the descent was additional to the 1,200 stadia of ‘the remaining crossing’.

52 Excellent photograph of the Isère at the Bec de l’Échaillon: Lancel (n. 14) plate

18, who argues for this route (128-9); so does Barruol (n. 3) 326-8. Objections to it:

Wilkinson (n. 26) 24-5; Proctor, 155-6; Lazenby (n. 1) 41-2.

53 St Quentin-Montaud route: Wilkinson, 24-8, following Colin (n. 32); modified by

Proctor, 155, who makes the army start an ascent ‘somewhere short of St Quentin’.

54 Gorges de la Bourne route: Lazenby, 41-2, with Plate III (facing p. 46). Seibert

(1988: n. 1) 51 takes the rescued prisoners to be a scouting group which Hannibal

had earlier sent forward but which was captured; but Hannibal used Gallic—

Vocontian?—guides for this (50.6), and Polybius states that the prisoners and pack-

animals had been captured together (51.12). The qrevmmata obtained at the povli~

are usually seen as cattle, but could as easily be sheep, or indeed both types of farm

animals.—Livy’s treatment of the attacks in the narrows (21.33.1-10) is instructive,

even apart from his refusal to name the Allobroges. First, 33.1-9 fairly closely

paraphrases P. 3.51.1-6; then 33.10 compresses P. 51.7-9—but while Polybius here

reports the pack-animals and horses emerging from the pass ‘with difficulty and

hardship’, Livy rather more cheerfully describes it as ‘nec per otium modo sed prope

silentio’; then 33.10 he terms the povli~ a ‘castellum’ and ‘caput eius regionis’. This

treatment illustrates both his use of items from another source, and his own

elaboration and condensation techniques.

55 Cularo: thus Hoyos (n. 1) 625, following Proctor, 127; also Wilkinson, 27-8.

Villard: Lazenby, 43.

56 Tricorii and Iconii/Ucennii: cf. n. 33. Proctor, 170-1, ignores the Iconii and rather

vaguely spreads the Tricorii from the Drac eastwards to the Arc (map following 221).

Lazenby, 40, cites Strabo 4.1.11, 4.6.5 (C185, 203), as placing them ‘somewhere


Nor, given Polybius’ other indicators, should the two days’ camp on the pass be

counted into the 15. These two days followed the army’s arrival there, and it was now

stationary (stragglers apart). It was on the second of these two days that Hannibal

made his famous speech to the men, summarised by Polybius whom Livy

paraphrases (P. 54.2-3; L. 21.35.8-9: §IX).

From Pont-en-Royans via Grenoble to Embrun is about 198 km., with another 62 to

the Montgenèvre, 70 to the Traversette and 73 to the Col de Larche, to list these in

behind (i.e. to east of) the Vocontii’; but Strabo thus locates not just the Tricorii but

also the Iconii and the still more easterly (in fact north-easterly, in the Arc valley)

Medulli. De Beer, 64, 77, relies on the circuits of late Roman and medieval bishoprics

to locate the Tricorii around Gap near the upper Durance; this procedure is decisively

criticised by Walbank, Selected Papers (n. 24) 110-11; cf. Lazenby, 286 n.18; Rivet,

251-2, 287.

57 Fourth day as day of attack: Wilkinson (n. 26) 29; Torr (n. 2) 23; Walbank,

Comm. 1.389; Huss (n. 24) 304-5; cf. Seibert (1988: n. 1) 52. By contrast, de Sanctis

(n. 14) 80; de Beer, 86-7, and Lazenby, 44, 277, see it as the day the locals made

their overtures, and the sixth (or even seventh) as the day of the attack. Farm-

animals (qrevmmata), cattle or sheep, from the Tricorii: usually seen as cattle, but

qrevmmata could mean both (cf. n. 54). They would probably be slaughtered once

the troops stopped that night, perhaps to be cooked on the campfires, to produce

portable food. Cattle or sheep on the hoof with the army are not mentioned in

Polybius’ and Livy’s narratives, and obviously would have been a nightmare on the

ensuing march.

58 Polybius’ stragglers (tou;~ ajpoleipomevnou~) are humans, for his pack-

animals, uJpozuvgia, are neuter gender; Livy writes only of iumenta. Between Laffrey,

25 km. south of Grenoble, and La Mure (another 13 km. on) ‘s’étend le fertile plateau

de la Matésine’; beyond La Mure, ‘le plateau du Beaumont, aux riches cultures’

(Guide Bleu 1974 (n. 1) 407, 408). A description of the valley around 1900, from

personal knowledge, in Freshfield (n. 11) 32: ‘It is by no means barren. It consists of a

series of broad, cultivated slopes and platforms, cut across by the trenches of the

torrents which flow out of the snowy heights of Dauphiné’, adding details on the

produce-rich plateau of Le Beaumont from an 1877 French travel-book. The valley

may have been less well cultivated in pre-Roman times, but the Tricorii had goods in

plenty to offer (prev. n.).

59

Dexter Hoyos 60

north-to-south order (§X Table 8). Over 15 days the lowest of these totals, 260 km.,

would require an average daily march of 17.5 km.; but with one of the 15 being a

rest-day, the average for each actual marching-day rises to just under 19 km. or 13

m.p. (cf. §I). Such a marching rate would be unthinkable even for the veteran Punic

army (still some 30,000 strong at the summit of the pass and with over 6,000 cavalry

horses, three dozen elephants, and pack-animals), if most of the route were steep,

narrow, and dominated by gorges and cliffsides—as is usually supposed—and if the

army was under attack most of the time. In reality, a great deal of the country was

fairly open, most though not all of the gradients moderate, and the surroundings

59 Lazenby, 44, holds that the bare rock ‘should be looked for before the gorge and

not after it’; but Polybius has (or seems to have) the whole army in the gorge (52.8).

De Beer, 95-6, defies Polybius to put Hannibal in command of the vanguard; so too A.

Goldsworthy, The Punic Wars (London, 2000) 165, while Prevas (n. 1) 126-38,

imaginatively recasts the events, including a breakout by the vanguard—under

Hannibal’s leadership again—into the valley beyond the defile, then most of the

troops coming through by late afternoon (on the day of the attack), but with a loss to

Hannibal of at least 14,000 troops.

60 Cf. Seibert (1988: n. 1) 52: ‘ohne Schwierigkeiten kann man einen weißen, noch

leichter aber einen kahlen Felsen im Gebirge finden.’ Torr (n. 2) 24 supposes that the

Gauls attacked in ‘a gorge into which Hannibal was led by the treachery of his

guides’—in fact in ‘a deviation’ from the proper route, which Hannibal then had to

rejoin. Treachery by guides: also de Beer, 95, 115; Lazenby, 44; Prevas, 126-7, 138.

Crag of Château-Queyras: de Beer, 87, 95-6 and plate 8, who makes Hannibal and

the vanguard occupy this crag as the ‘bare rock’ (thus reversing Polybius). Prevas,

135-8, claims the Combe du Queyras for the ambush, does not identify the crag as

being at Château-Queyras, but supplies a photograph of this (between 112 and 113).

L’Argentière-la-Bessée: Connolly (n. 2) 164, 166.

61 caravdra properly means the ravine or canyon of a mountain-stream; if not just

a literary variatio for gorge or pass, it could confirm Polybius echoing his primary

source to indicate that the army was moving through a narrow river-valley.—For a

noted example of Livy belatedly discovering a problem with an earlier narrative, but

not judging it worth the effort of revision, see 21.15.3-6 in contrast with 21.6.3; cf.

Walsh (n. 21) 143,145; Luce (n. 20) 141, 156-7; Hoyos, Unplanned Wars (n. 21) 202-

4, cf. 233-5.


well-stocked (it was autumn): notably the plateau atop the Vercors, the Isère valley

below, much of the Drac valley, and the region from the Col Bayard to Embrun.

From there on, the upper Durance valley to the Col de Montgenèvre, while narrow

(especially around L’Argentière-la-Bessée), is not a steep gradient until after

Brigantio/Briançon, where a final climb of 520 metres occurs over the 12 km. to the

pass. The Col de Larche would be reached by the Durance valley with a turn-off

eastwards, either up the Ubaye river valley south of Embrun, or at Mont-Dauphin

beyond Embrun (a reportedly easier way, over wooded ridges and dales, with one

62 Livy’s description of the Alps provoked a pained reaction, a century ago, from a

learned Alpinist of Grenoble: ‘on n’est qu’au début de l’automne, entre fin septembre

et mi-octobre, dans cette saison où la montagne est d’accès aussi commode qu’en

plein été’ (S. Chabert in 1907, quoted by de Saint-Denis (n. 2) 136). Chabert, ‘pour

effacer l’absurdité de ces hyperboles’, even conjectured that it was a later

interpolation.

63 While eastwards is the straightforward route from Gap to the upper Durance,

travellers can intead, but more lengthily, move due south through a little valley to

meet the Durance 12 km. away in its own narrow valley, and then turn east to follow

the river up into the high Alps. But this is not a sensible route for an army making for

the passes to Italy; in effect, it follows two sides of a triangle rather than the direct

third side, and the Durance valley directly south of Gap is very narrow once more.—

Torr, 25, accepts the invia pleraque et errores; likewise de Beer, 87.

64 e[mellen h{xein is sometimes obscured in translations: ‘après les avoir passées,

on doit parvenir’ (Foucault, Budé); ‘the length of the actual pass would bring

Hannibal down’ (Paton, Loeb); contrast Shuckburgh (n. 1), ‘which being crossed

would bring him’. That the 1,200 stadia include the descent to the plains: so, e.g.,

Torr (n. 2) 1, 29-30; Walbank, Comm. 1.371; de Beer, 111; Proctor, 84, 86-7, 187;

Lazenby, 39; Huss (n. 24) 304 n.70. Strabo records the distance from Tarusco, via the

Durance valley and Montgenèvre, to Ocelum (probably modern Avigliana, 24 km.

west of Turin) as 261 m.p. (4.1.3 C179), which equates to 2,088 stadia (on the 8:1

ratio), but this is not a march-route supported even by Torr, who opts for the

Traversette.

65 De Sanctis (n. 14) 1.80 sees Hannibal camping for one day pro;~ tai`~

uJperbolai`~, which he reckons as day one of the Alps-crossing, and then reaching

the summit of the pass on the ninth day. Walbank, Comm. 1.391, counts two

61

Dexter Hoyos 62

particularly difficult gorge—the Pas de la Reyssole—about halfway along). Similarly

again to the Traversette, again via Mont-Dauphin but then by the Guil valley trending

north-eastwards. The road there passes through the extremely narrow Combe du

Queyras (one of the favourite candidates for the second attack), but the Combe

forms only part of the way to the Traversette. Early in the 20th Century, the

approaches at least to the Montgenèvre and Larche were portrayed (if a little

enthusiastically) as having villages, cornfields, cow-pastures and hay-meadows all

the way.

Most of the march, too, was relatively free of fighting. The critical days were days

1 and 6 (Table 5). Sporadic scuffles with hit-and-run Gauls continued for the rest of

the march, but Polybius’ account makes clear that they did not much impede the

army’s progress.68

It is worth noting that, in the late spring of 58 BC, Caesar marched with five

legions, horse and foot, from Ocelum (probably Avigliana, west of Turin). He had to

repel Alpine warriors’ repeated attacks en route, but arrived ‘in fines Vocontiorum die

septimo’ (Bell. Gall. 1.10). His route will have been over the Montgenèvre, then via

Vapincum and one of the passes in the Alpes du Dauphiné, at least to the area of the

later Lucus Augusti at the southern foot of the Vercors, if not further west: for he then

proceeded ‘in Allobrogum fines’. From Ocelum/Avigliana to Luc is about 248 km.,

successive days for the two initial camps, counting these as days one and two.

Neither reckoning is persuasive; for, while the army was encamped below the

heights, ‘the ascent’ had not yet begun—even though it was intended.

66 Ninth day was day after the ambush: R. Laqueur, Polybius (Berlin, 1913; repr.

Aalen, 1974) 94-7; Torr, 23; Walbank, 1.391; de Beer, 87; de Saint-Denis, 144;

Connolly (n. 2) 156, cf. 166; Huss, 305; Seibert (1988: n. 1) 52-3; Lancel (n. 14) 130.

For de Sanctis, 1.80, it was the next day but one (ambush ‘il settimo [giorno]’, pass ‘il

nono’). Eight days for Polybius’ ‘around 1,200 stadia’ means a march-rate of 150

stadia a day; six (as Walbank’s timetable necessarily implies) means 200 a day,

which even on the Polybian measure (8.33:1) is 24 m.p. a day, Vegetius’ rapid march

—ascent, ambushes and all.

67 This timetable looks preferable to that in Hoyos (n. 1) 627, where day 1 of the

15-day period is reckoned as from the captured povli~. Lazenby, 45, also makes the

point about the intermittent attacks and the elephants.


which means a marching rate—with fighting—of over 35 km. a day. Clearly there

were no rest-days on this march: Caesar was in a hurry to confront the Helvetii. In

218, Hannibal too needed haste, and he led a fully professional and long-service

army (whereas two of Caesar’s legions were newly recruited). Some Caesarian

exaggeration may well be suspected. But that Hannibal’s army, despite the two

separate and furious attacks from locals and despite its losses, maintained an

average march of 13 m.p. or 19 km. a day for the advance to the summit may be

believed.69

IX Views on the pass

Two features of the pass, as described by Polybius (with Livian paraphrases), are

well-known. First, the entire army had room to encamp for several days near it: two

rest-days, then one day or maybe two when the descent came to a landslip and an

attempted detour failed; and then three days—or perhaps four—spent waiting for the

descent-path to be rebuilt, as the landslip had carried away one and a half stadia of it

(P. 3.54.9, 55.7-8; L. 21.35.2, 37.4 ‘quadriduum’). Second, and much more famous, is

the view of the plains of North Italy which, we are told, Hannibal pointed out to his

weary men on the second of the initial two rest-days, to revive their spirits (P. 54.1-3;

cf. L. 35.8).70

One or both of these features has or have been relied on by investigators as the

most telling proof of a given pass’s claim. There is also Polybius’ reference to it as

‘the highest pass’ of the Alps (ta;~ uJperbola;~ ta;~ ajnwtavtw, 53.6), and his

graphic description of the failed detour-path as covered with fresh soft snow, which

hid hard and slippery ice beneath it, left from the previous winter (55.1-5). This

suggests to some that the detour was over a glacier, to others that the whole region

must have been very high (for at lower heights winter ice would have melted during

the summer).71

Whether or not the plains of the Po can be seen, or glimpsed, from particular

passes is an old bone of contention. From the Montgenèvre, for example, they are

not visible, though further down the descent things are different. From the Clapier,

too, the plains cannot be seen; but a climb up and along a nearby ridge does bring a

view. Much the same is true of the Mont Cenis pass. It seems, in fact, that in the

Western Alps only the Traversette affords a direct view from the summit—along with

the impossibly steep Cols de l’Échelle and de Malaure—although a claim has also

been put for a little-known neighbour of the Clapier, the Col de Savine-Coche (in

recent decades renamed the Pas de Lavis-Trafford, after its keenest local advocate).

63

Dexter Hoyos 64

And whatever the alleged view from a given pass, there is equal argument over

combining that with other features.

At the top of the Traversette, for instance, after a long hard climb there is only a

piece of level ground a few metres wide which provides the much-sought-after view.

To critics, this narrow shelf rules out the Traversette as camping space for the Punic

army; to proponents, broad expanses of ground a few hundred metres below are the

answer. Several passes, notably the Clapier, Traversette and Montgenèvre, have

steep descents (exceptionally steep for the first two); and in each case this has been

treated either as being in accord with Polybius’ and Livy’s reports of a difficult

descent, or as being far too steep, especially for horses and elephants. Hypotheses

which place the second Gallic ambush, that of the ‘night on a bare rock’, only one

day’s march from the summit of the pass naturally look for a suitable bare rock-site

20 km. or so from their preferred pass—hence the identification with the great rock

at Château-Queyras (for the Traversette), the equally large and very bare outcrop

near L’Argentière-la-Bessée (for the Montgenèvre), or rock-formations in the valley of

the Arc (for the Clapier, Cenis etc.).

Again, some hypotheses rule out any lower-level pass—the Col de l’Échelle

(1,766 m.) and the Montgenèvre (1,850 m.) are the lowest in the western Alps—

because of the hard ice which Polybius and Livy report for the failed detour, on the

view that ice from the previous winter could persist only at very high levels. Polybius’

description of the pass as ‘the highest of the Alps’ is also adduced in favour of both

the 2,482-metre Clapier and the Traversette—higher still at 2,947 m.72

Some points may be made about these physical features. First, the snow and ice.

It is virtually impossible that Polybius, or Hannibal, can have known as a fact that the

hard ice dated back to the previous winter. It may well have looked old; but, had

there been a cold snap a few weeks earlier on the heights, this could have deposited

snow (and freezing rain?) which had hardened and been covered by a fresh snowfall

by the time the army arrived. Polybius mentions that the peaks were snow-covered

by now (3.54.1), and we may recall the heavy rains which—it was suggested above—

had swelled the lower Durance when the army crossed it about a month earlier (L.

21.31.10-12; §III): corresponding snowfalls may have occurred then on the High Alps.

Again, efforts to establish whether the climate in the later 3rd Century BC was cooler

than, or similar to, today’s seem essentially tangential. Fluctuations within broader

climatic conditions are a recognised phenomenon (thus occasional flooding rains

during an extended drought can tantalise the Australian countryside). A cold snap in


late 218, or a cooler year overall than the average in that decade, could account for

the ice. This item, then, does not in itself confirm a high pass.73

Nor does Polybius’ terming Hannibal’s pass the highest do so, since neither he nor

any other ancient inquirer had realistic means for judging heights. Monte Viso, which

rises to 3,841 m. above the Traversette and nearby passes, was thought to be the

highest Alpine peak because its dominating pyramid can be seen from afar; in reality

Mont Blanc is one kilometre higher. Pliny the Elder, who enjoyed breadth if not depth

of research, supposes the Alps to reach heights of 50,000 Roman feet, or 74,000

metres (Nat. Hist. 2.162)—a literally stratospheric overestimate. We may also recall

Polybius’ claim that Eryx was the second highest mountain in Sicily, and The Island

about as large as the Nile delta. To weary African and Spanish troops and officers, not

to mention Greek intellectuals, tramping up the cold slopes of a pass like the

Montgenèvre or the Larche, it may well have seemed the highest.74

What then of the panorama of the plains? It is noteworthy that Polybius has

Hannibal deliver his speech—and point to the view of the plains—on the second of

the two rest-days (3.54.1-3), whereas Livy reports him doing so on the following day,

when the weary and dispirited troops begin the descent: Hannibal calls a halt ‘in

promunturio quodam’ to point out the vast view (21.35.7-9). Livy’s detail might,

conceivably, be more accurate. For on the descent from most (if not all) passes, the

plains below can eventually be seen; by contrast, at the actual top of those which do

have a panorama, this would be available only to the small numbers camping close

to it, or to any who were venturesome enough to climb neighbouring heights, as at

the Clapier.

Still, even if more plausible, Livy’s version also has a literary tinge. His descent-

path is blanketed in snow from the fresh snowfall (21.35.6-7), and ‘omnis ferme via

praeceps, angusta, lubrica [sc. erat]’ (35.12); where then, and what, was the

promunturium ? If it existed, it must have been a very wide shelf or ledge where the

upper mountainside drew back from the lower cliff-edge. Even so, it cannot have

been wide enough to accommodate the entire army, or even several thousand troops

with the rest backed up along the narrow path behind. No such striking feature

seems to exist on the descent from any Alpine pass. If it was a much narrower shelf,

where perhaps only a few companies could stand together for the view, we should

have to picture Hannibal repeating the same speech to one grouping of them after

another as the troops passed him—not only a slightly ludicrous image but, more

seriously, a very undesirable slowdown to the men’s descent.

65

Dexter Hoyos 66

More likely, the panorama is a literary invention. On the eve of great

confrontations, ancient historiography required leading figures to make appropriate

speeches. A striking example is the set of speeches (entirely invented) that

Herodotus gives to Persian nobles supposedly debating the most suitable

government of the empire after the murder of Cambyses (Hdt. 3.80–3). On the

approach of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides supplies carefully crafted orations to

spokesmen for the major participants, the Corcyraeans, Corinthians, Athenians, and

two Spartan leaders. One of Tacitus’ most famous compositions is the expertly

rhetorical declamation he gives to the Caledonian leader Calgacus before the battle

of Mons Graupius (Agric. 30–32). In Livy’s telling of the opening stages of the Second

Punic War, Hannibal makes no fewer than four speeches: not only on the pass, but a

brief one before the expedition sets out (21.21.3-5), an encouragement to his troops

after the Rhône-crossing (21.30) and a lengthy address to them later on, before the

clash at the river Ticinus with the Romans under the consul Scipio—this one

symbolically preceded by one of Scipio’s to his own men (40.1–41.17, 43.1-44.9).

Thucydides’ pieces (perhaps) apart, these creations are either inventions or, at best,

rhetorical elaborations which may possibly but not certainly include topics actually

mentioned by a speaker and remembered.75

Two other literary items may be noted. In Petronius’ Satyricon, Eumolpus’ mini-

epic poem on Caesar’s civil war depicts that leader and his troops treading the Alpine

peaks and looking down on Italy’s plains from their summit (Satyricon 122, lines 152-

4). Livy himself, in an earlier book, has the consul Fabius Rullianus, invading Etruria

in 309, pause on the pass over the Ciminian mountains to ‘gaze upon the wealthy

meadows of Etruria’, before letting his army loose on them (9.36.11). Certainly

generals launching invasions over mountain-passes will, at one point or other, see

such panoramas. But obviously too, such tableaux, and their implied encouragement

to each general’s faithful soldiers, held literary appeal for cases besides Hannibal’s.

He no doubt gave a vigorous pep talk to his troops—those, at least, close enough

to hear him on the camping-ground—and, in turn, many or all of them must have

gained a view (or a glimpse) of the plains at one or more places on the descent.

Some of the men might suppose, in their later years, that the speech and the view

had coincided. But inaccurate memories are not essential for explaining how Polybius

comes to make the plains visible from the summit of the pass. Hannibal, thanks to his

guides or scouts or from personal reconnaissance—or just from common sense—will

have known that the flat ground was not far off and would be seen on the descent.


Silenus and Sosylus, writing their histories two or three decades later, surely needed

no greater excuse for casting his words into something like the form they have in

Polybius. The speech’s literary flavour is strengthened by the claim that he not only

showed the men the plains around the Po but ‘pointed out, too, the site of Rome

itself’ (P. 54.3). When Livy came to write his version, common sense had intervened

—his own or a source’s—and, maybe too, an inkling that the plains could be seen

only on the descent. The speech he found in Polybius was not jettisoned—it may

already have been too famous, in one version or another—but Livy re-located it to

the following day after the descent had begun, and to a promunturium conveniently,

if imaginarily, available some way down the path. Again, Polybius’ Hannibal pointing

out the site of Rome becomes Livy’s Hannibal more rationally reminding the men that

they were crossing the defences not of Italy alone but of Rome too.76

These are not the only cases of Livian additions or changes to Polybian material in

this part of the story. In reporting the broken path on the descent, Livy

misunderstands Polybius, transforming a Polybian landslip ‘about’ 1.5 stadia long

(thus about 1,000 Greek feet) into a much less credible chasm 1,000 feet deep (L.

36.2, ‘in pedum mille admodum altitudinem abruptus erat’). He then seems to

imagine not a chasm after all, but a huge rock blocking the path and needing to be

split to open up the way (37.2-3)—or, perhaps, a huge rock which, once shattered,

would provide the rubble for filling up the supposed chasm, though if he means this

he completely fails to make it clear. Therefore he adds the famous story (ibid.) of the

rock being heated and then softened with vinegar for splitting, a story which Polybius

does not tell and which thus comes from another source. His misunderstanding of the

scene does not make the story too convincing, even though the process itself was

feasible.77

With the evidence in both historians showing that the most likely route to the pass

was via the upper Durance valley, speculation can narrow to those accessible from

there by a professional ancient army. The main ones are the Montgenèvre, the

Traversette south of it, and further south again the Larche; but there are still others,

notably the Col Agnel (3,026 m.) and Col de Mary (2,637 m.) between Monte Viso and

the Larche. With the snow and ice not necessarily betokening a high pass, the

panorama of Italy more likely a literary embellishment, and Hannibal needing to

reach the plains as early as possible with as few losses as he could manage, the

Montgenèvre is the most probable. There is room for an army, the descent is steep

(modern defences against landslides have had to be built) but practicable, and, at

492 km. from the Rhône-crossing along the route proposed, it is close enough to

67

Dexter Hoyos 68

Polybius’ total of 2,600 stadia (§X).

Strabo cites, from Polybius’ no-longer-extant world survey, a statement that there

were in Polybius’ day four passes in use over the Alps: the one closest to the

Tyrrhenian Sea, one ‘through the Taurini’, a third through the Salassi, and the last

through the Rhaeti (4.6.12 C209 = P. 34.10.18). These are given in south-to-north

order: the Col de Tende, the ‘Taurini’ pass, one of the two St Bernards, and the

Simplon or Septimer connecting Italy with Rhaetia. To the Taurini pass Strabo’s text

adds the words ‘which Hannibal crossed’ (h}n ∆Annivba~ dih`lqen), sometimes seen

as a non-Polybian interpolation; but, interpolation or not, this should be the pass

which Polybius judged to be Hannibal’s. Not that Polybius himself helps greatly by

reporting that the army came down to the Insubres (3.56.3) before Hannibal picked a

fight with the Taurini (60.8). The Insubres, in revolt with the Boii against the Romans

and therefore friendly to him, dwelt on the Lombard plain between Comum and the

river Po, with Mediolanum (Milan) their chief town. Between the Alps and them were

the Salassi, around modern Aosta, the Libici around Vercellae (P. 2.17.4; Pliny, Nat.

Hist. 3.124), and the Taurini in the valley of the Doria Riparia river, with their chief

town at or near modern Turin. But Hannibal’s goal was to join up with the Gallic

revolt, and so for Polybius to describe his descent as being to the Insubres is

comprehensible though compressed.78

Cicero’s contemporary, the encyclopedic author Varro, is quoted by Servius, the

commentator on Vergil, as reporting five passes in use: the first near the sea, the

second one Hannibal’s, the third a pass used by Pompey when marching to Spain in

77, then the pass used by Hasdrubal in his march to Italy in 207, and lastly a pass in

the Graian Alps (Servius, ad Aen. 10.13). The first looks like the Tende again, and the

last is the Little St Bernard. The middle three float in uncertainty.

Help has been sought from a despatch which the historian Sallust records being

sent home in 75 BC by Pompey in Spain. Pompey, according to Sallust, claimed to

have opened up a more convenient pass than Hannibal’s on his march over the Alps

two years earlier (Sallust, Hist. 2.98.4: ‘iter aliud atque Hannibal, nobis opportunius,

patefeci’). But this is not as useful a piece of information as sometimes supposed. Of

the various candidates put forward for Pompey’s pass, the Montgenèvre is the most

popular and probable, which in turn raises the question of what would Hannibal’s

have been. But it is rarely asked how Pompey knew which pass Hannibal had used.

Obviously there were no eyewitnesses left, and the best he could have done (had he

been so minded and had the time, which he did not) would have been to collect and


sift any available local Alpine traditions about the long-gone Carthaginian. There was

a readier source to hand: Coelius Antipater’s notable monograph on the Second Punic

War, composed only a few decades earlier. Coelius, a writer with some fondness for

dramatic narrative, was not likely to play down the dangers and difficulties of

Hannibal’s march and pass. We also know from Livy that he took Hannibal ‘per

Cremonis iugum’ (L. 21.38.7)—the Little St Bernard, by Livy’s description.79

Livy affirms that the ‘Taurini Semigalli’ were the nearest tribe to the descending

army and that all his sources agreed on this (21.38.5). He over-generalises, as so

often; for his main narrative authority Polybius does not specifically say so. But at

least it can be inferred that no source named a different and still nearer tribe: on

Livy’s evidence, even Coelius still had Hannibal deal first with the Taurini. Moreover,

coming down via another pass would not bring the army immediately to the Insubres

any more than the Montgenèvre did: the Little St Bernard would lead to the Salassi;

the Clapier or Mont Cenis to the Taurini again; the Larche to the Bagienni further

south. Hannibal did not, in fact, view the Taurini as already hostile when he arrived

on the plains, and therefore felt no need to avoid them. Rather the opposite: he

made efforts to win them as allies (P. 3.60.8). But their enmity towards his existing

friends the Insubres caused them to turn him down, though not to attack him; it was

this refusal that prompted his attack on them (ibid.).

The balance of probabilities, though nothing more decisive, points to the Col de

Montgenèvre as Hannibal’s pass. One other yardstick remains to be considered,

though a difficult and perhaps indecisive one: Polybius’s distance-figures.

X Polybius’ distances

Polybius offers precise-looking distances in a preliminary survey of western

European geography (3.36–9; figures at 39.5-11). From the Pillars of Hercules (the

straits of Gibraltar) to the Pyrenees was, he writes, 8,000 stadia, including 3,000 from

the straits to New Carthage. Hannibal’s march from New Carthage he itemises as

follows. From New Carthage to Emporiae, 4,200 stadia; from Emporiae ‘to the

passage of the Rhône’ (ejpi; th;n tou` ÔRodanou` diavbasin) another 1,600, as

discussed in §I. Then, ‘from the passage of the Rhône, for those travelling along the

river itself as though towards its sources, up to the ascent of the Alps [e{w~ pro;~

th;n ajnabolh;n tw`n “Alpewn] to Italy, one thousand four hundred. The remaining

crossing over the Alps [loipai; aiJ tw`n “Alpewn uJperbolaiv], around one thousand

two hundred.’ He then rounds this total of 8,400 up to ‘some 9,000’.

69

Dexter Hoyos 70

TABLE 6: POLYBIUS’ MEASUREMENTS (3.39.5-11)

General stadia

Straits to Pyrenees 8,000

Straits to New Carthage 3,000

Hannibal’s entire march 9,000

Hannibal’s march (detailed)

New Carthage–Emporiae 4,200

Emporiae–Rhône 1,600

from Rhône ‘up to the ascent of the Alps’

1,400

‘the remaining crossing of the Alps’

1,200

TOTAL 8,400

There existed several stadium-measurements. As shown above, the Via Domitia’s

measurement equated with a ‘Roman’ stadium of 185 metres; while Polybius in Book

34 used an 8.33:1 ratio, thus a 177.7-metre stadium. The Olympic stadium was 192

metres long, the Pergamene 198. By contrast, Eratosthenes, Hannibal’s much older

contemporary at Alexandria, may have used a stadium of only 157.5 m. to work out

the earth’s circumference.80

Very possibly, therefore, Polybius was confronted with distance-figures based on

different stadium-measures, and had the problem of making sense of them or the

temptation of using all of them uncritically. His distances within Spain suggest that

there, too, he follows the Roman 8:1 ratio. The Spanish provinces had been Roman

for generations, and their major distances must have been fairly well established by

his time. The 3,000 stadia from the straits of Gibraltar to New Carthage on the

‘Polybian’ ratio is 360, and on the ‘Roman’ 375 m.p.; the modern distance along the

coast (Tarifa to Cartagena) is 598 km. or 404 m.p. Again, the 4,200 stadia from New

Carthage to Emporiae amount to 504 m.p. on the Polybian ratio, and 525 m.p. on the

Roman. By coast roads today, the distance is approximately 790 km., thus 534 m.p.81

Gallic mileages, save for the Via Domitia, were not accompanied by roadworks and

milestones in Polybius’s lifetime. Nor did Hannibal follow a single clearly marked-out

route. The only route available to him which would later have measurements from

start to finish (cf. Strabo 4.1.3 C178-9) would have been the one up the whole length

of the Durance from its junction with the Rhône, but this fits virtually none of the


evidence (not even the stadia-figures: Table 8 below). Still, many sections of the

march—whether this was via the Isère to the Arc and the Mont Cenis area, via the

Drôme to the upper Durance, or via the Vercors and the Drac to the upper Durance

again—were natural thoroughfares in ancient times: river valleys and major passes in

particular. Hannibal did not take route-measurers with him like Alexander the Great,

but a reasonable possibility is that men in his army, notably his Greek friends and

later biographers Silenus of Cale Acte and Sosylus of Sparta, made measurements—

or at any rate estimates—of the distances travelled. The contemporary Roman

historians of the war, Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus, may have supplied some

distances too, from Punic contacts or from Roman knowledge—and may even used

stadia, for they wrote in Greek for Greek readers, if also for educated Romans.82

Again, many if not most of the distance-figures probably varied from author to

author, just as many do in surviving geographic accounts (like Strabo’s and Pliny’s)

and the Roman itinerary-lists. Nor could Polybius be sure even whether his various

authorities all used one and the same stadium-measure. If they did, moderns have no

way of establishing which it was; all that can be inferred fairly safely is that Silenus,

Sosylus and other contemporary Greek accounts did not use the ‘Roman’ stadium—

or reckon initially in m.p. Moderns cannot establish, either, whether for distances

after the Rhône-crossing Polybius went to the trouble of converting varied stadia-

distances to a common standard—his own 177.7-metre stadium, the longer Roman

one, the still lengthier Olympic, or some other.

There is one more consideration worth noting. Polybius himself visited Gaul,

perhaps around 150, and made inquiries about the route (3.48.12). When he claims

to have interviewed there ‘the very persons who participated in the events’ he must

be drawing a long bow (though a few octogenarian Vocontii and Allobroges may have

been available), but in the course of his inquiries he must have had opportunities to

find out details of some major routes and distances: the distance between Massilia

and Tarusco, for example (§I). As just noted, many sections of Hannibal’s march were

along natural thoroughfares, for which distances could be inquired. But there is no

guarantee that the data would all be uniform. Polybius might well encounter a variety

of claimed distances, including estimates based on days-of-travel converted—by

others or by him—to m.p., stadia or even Gallic leugae (leagues).

Moreover, if Hannibal diverged from one major natural route over to another, or

left a major route part of the way and later returned to it, or crossed a less-populous

district whose distances were poorly known—as every reconstruction of the march

makes him do at one stage or other—Polybius would have to make his own

71

Dexter Hoyos 72

comparisons, calculations and estimates to arrive at a final figure (such as the 1,200

stadia ‘from the crossing of the Rhône to the ascent of the Alps’). If he took such final

figures from one of his sources instead, the earlier writer would have had this task.83

Given these considerations, it is useful to set out how his post-Rhône distances

equate to kilometres on the three likeliest ratios, and compare these with the modern

distances along the routes most commonly suggested. These modern measurements

cannot, of course, be treated as identical to the distances along the ancient routes,

but they can hardly be wildly at odds with them.

Table 7: Kilometre-equivalents for Polybius’ distances from the Rhône

stadia Polybian =0.1777

km.

Roman =0.185

km.

Olympic =0.192

km.

i Rhône-crossing to ‘the ascent of the

Alps’ 1,400

248.8 km. 259 km. 268.8

km.

ii from The Island to ‘the ascent’ 800 142.2 148 153.6

iii ‘the remaining crossing over the Alps’

1,200

213.2 222 230.4

TOTAL (i + iii) 2,600 462 481 499.2

In hypotheses (notably de Beer’s) urging the Rhône-Aigues confluence as The Island,

that area is usually seen as lying around Piolenc, 8 km. north of Arausio/Orange and

just past the confluence. If on the other hand The Island lay at the Rhône-Isère

confluence, the little town of Tain l’Hermitage, on the Rhône 14 km. north of Valence,

may serve as a focus-point. This paper by contrast proposes that the area of The

Island where Hannibal arrived was around Nyons and Valréas (§IV).84

TABLE 8: PRINCIPAL SUGGESTED ROUTES FROM THE RHÔNE TO THE PASS

RTE. km.

1a from Tarusco/Tarascon to The Island at the Rhône-Isère confluence

i.e. Tarascon–Arausio/Orange 51 km.

Arausio–Valentia/Valence 97

Valentia–Tain l’Hermitage 15 163


1b from The Island via the Isère to Mont Cenis or Clapier

i.e. Tain–Cularo/Grenoble 97

Cularo to St Pierre-d’Aubigny 61 158

St Pierre–Modane 66

Modane–Col de Mont Cenis or (estimated) Col de Clapier 27 93

TOTAL (1a+b) [descent to plains extra] 414

______________________________________________________________________________________

______________________

68 For a description of the Mont-Dauphin to Larche route: Freshfield (n. 11) 27-8,

37-8, calling the pass by its alternative name, the Col de l’Argentière (cf. 24), and

placing the second attack (with the night of the ‘bare rock’) in the Pas de la Reyssole.

Freshfield describes the approaches to the Montgenèvre and Larche as having

‘villages and cornfields, cow-pastures and hay-meadows all the way; the road runs

through a country adapted for human uses’ (28).

69 Ocelum, by the Itin. Gaditanum (Vicarello goblets), lay 20 m.p. west of Turin; cf.

Strabo 4.1.3 C179; Proctor, 86-7. On Caesar’s route see T. Rice Holmes, Caesar’s

Conquest of Gaul (London, 1899) 609-10. Holmes, 627, notes a 17-day Caesarian

march (21 February–9 March, 49, by the then calendar, but actually in the middle of

winter) of 465 km. from Corfinium to Brundisium, averaging 27.3 km. (18.5 m.p.) a

day if no rest-days occurred.

70 Polybius’ time-indicators are fuzzy at 3.54–56. After the two-day rest, ‘next day’

(day 3) the army began its descent (54.4), but met the landslip and therefore sought

a detour. All this must have taken at least one full day. When this failed, the troops

encamped (again) on the pass (55.6), which must signify the night of day 3. After one

day’s labour (day 4) the original path was widened enough for the cavalry to go down

(55.7; thus on day 5), but it took 3 more days (days 5-7 or days 6-8?) to make it

passable for the elephants (55.8). The rest of the army then followed in three days

(56.1; days 8-10 or maybe 9-11). Writing ‘quadriduum circa rupem absumptum’

(21.37.4), Livy seems to think that the descent began after 4 days’ work, i.e. on day

8.

73

Dexter Hoyos 74

2 from Tarusco/Tarascon via Valence to Clapier 85

i.e. Tarascon–Valence–Villard-de-Lans 235

Villard–Cularo 57

Cularo–Pontcharra 38

Pontcharra–Clapier 120 215

TOTAL 450

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

71 For a survey of such deductions see (e.g.) Proctor, 201-6; Seibert (1988: n. 1)

57-71; and cf. Prevas (n. 1) 163-73.

72 Connolly (n. 2), 164-5, provides a useful list of the main passes and their

relevant features (including the low Col de l’Échelle, about 20 km. north of the

Montgenèvre). Ledge and lower space at Traversette: extensively described by de

Beer, 96, 106-7, 109-110, and plates 9-12 (on 102-4); Prevas, 164-5, 169-70, with

fine photographs between 112 and 113—yet he reports (170) that ‘the descent into

Italy is very difficult. It can be done by an experienced hiker in about three hours, but

the footing is extremely dangerous and requires attention’. This would surely require

a Punic army consisting of experienced mountain hikers and peculiarly agile

elephants.

73 Ice need not date to previous winter: Freshfield (n. 11) 43-6; Seibert (1988: n. 1)

54-5. For fluctuations in Alpine weather, cf. Freshfield, 29-30, 44-6; for instance, snow

in August 1912 (including at Briançon) and, three months later, snowfalls near

Grenoble, when ‘there was already ten feet of snow on the mountains’. De Beer, 144-

7, devotes a hopeful appendix to scientific evidence on the climate in 218.

74 Monte Viso (Mons Vesulus): E. Meyer in Der Kleine Pauly (München, 1975, repr.

1979) 5.1231.

75 Persian nobles’ debate: cf. Fornara (n. 20) 164-5. The pre-war speeches in

Thucydides: 1.32-6 (Cocyraeans); 37-43, 68-72 (Corinthians); 73-8 (Athenians); 80-5

(King Archidamus); 86 (the ephor Sthenelaidas, curt and decisive). On the rhetoric of

Calgacus’ speech: R.M. Ogilvie and Sir I. Richmond, Cornelii Taciti de Vita Agricolae

(Oxford, 1967) 253-64; cf. 265 on the ‘artificially rhetorical’ reply of Agricola (Agric.

33.2–34.3). Dio plays the same game with the wonderfully rhetorical speech of


3a from Tarusco/Tarascon to The Island at the Aigues, around Piolenc

km.

i.e. Tarascon–Arausio/Orange 51

Arausio–Piolenc 8 59

Boudicca at the start of her rebellion (62.3–5). On the literary significance of Scipio’s

and Hannibal’s speeches (L. 21.40–44) cf. Walsh (n. 3) 198; Hoyos (n. 1) 635.

76 Connolly (n. 2), 165, puts the ‘panorama’ down to hazy memories (‘Hannibal

probably pointed vaguely in the direction of Italy … and in later years the soldiers,

looking back on this, imagined perhaps that they saw more than they really did’). If

this problem afflicted even Silenus and Sosylus, it would say little for their general

value as sources. Cf. Hoyos (n. 1) 628. On Rullianus’ Ciminian view, cf. S.P. Oakley, A

Commentary on Livy Books VI–X, vol. 3 (Oxford, 2005) 473-4, noting its implications

of the wealth to be garnered by the invaders.

77 De Beer, 112-13; Huss (n. 24), 306 n.80, and Seibert, 40-1, stoutly defend the

vinegar; cf. Walsh (n. 3) 194. Contrast Walbank, Comm. 1.391, ‘rhetorical

elaboration’. In standard quellenkritisch style, de Sanctis (n. 14), 3.1.75-6, Walbank,

1.391, and Lancel (n. 14), 131, ascribe the misunderstandings of Polybius in Livy’s

account not to Livy, but to an intermediate source (for Lancel, ‘le prisme déformant

de Coelius Antipater’). Vinegar poured over hot rock to split it was a recognised

technique (Vitruvius 8.3.19; Pliny, Nat. Hist. 23.57, 33.71); but, as often pointed out,

Livy does not suggest how enough vinegar was available (perhaps simply assuming

that the soldiers’ rations sufficed) or, more important, where the firewood came from

if ‘nuda enim fere cacumina sunt’ (37.4). Prevas (n. 1), 149, describes a long relay-

line of men stretching back down the Gallic side of the pass, to fell trees at lower

levels and convey them and ‘quantities of dead wood’ up to the work-site, presenting

as fact what he thinks happened (cf. n. 59).

78 On Polybius’ passes see Walbank, Comm. 3.613-14. ‘To the tribe of the Insubres’

(3.56.3): Walbank, Comm. 1.392; Proctor, 84-6. Laqueur (n. 66) 147-8; and Seibert

(1988: n. 1) 55-6, reject the phrase in Strabo and the arrival among the Taurini.

Cremonis iugum: G. Radke, Kleine Pauly 1.1333; Seibert, 57-9.

75

Dexter Hoyos 76

3b from The Island around Piolenc via the Drôme to the

Traversette

i.e. Piolenc–Loriol (Rhône-Drôme confluence) 69

Loriol–Vapincum/Gap 125

Gap–Embrodunum/Embrun 38

Embrun–Traversette 70 302

TOTAL (3a+b) [descent to plains extra: e.g. 40 km. to

Saluzzo = 401]

361

______________________________________________________________________________________

79 On Coelius, see (e.g.) Badian (n. 21) 15-17; W. Herrmann, Die Historien des

Coelius Antipater: Fragmente und Kommentar (Meisenheim/Glan, 1979). Pompey’s

despatch: cf. P. McGushin, Sallust: the Histories, 1: Books i–ii (Oxford, 1992) 242 (on

the Sallustian treatment of it), 245 (on the pass). Seibert too (1988) 56-7 cautions

against assuming that Pompey knew the right pass, when ‘zur Zeit des Livius

allgemein der Summus Poeninus [the Great St Bernard] als Hannibalpaß angesehen

wurde.’

80 On the Greek stadium: H. Chantraine, O.W. Reinmuth and S. Opperman, Kleine

Pauly 5.337-8, s.v. ‘Stadion (1)’; M. Vickers et al., in The Oxford Classical Dictionary,

3rd edn., ed. A. Spawforth and S. Hornblower (Oxford, 1996) 942-3, s.v. ‘Measures’;

H.-J. Schulzki, in Der Neue Pauly (Stuttgart, 1996–2003) 11.886-7. Eratosthenes’

stadium: Dilke (n. 3), 32-3; Dilke meanwhile reckons the Olympic stadium at

178.6 m.; and a later Athenian stadium measured 184.3 (Schulzki, 887).

81 Seibert, 35-6, infers that, for the other distances after the Via Domitia, Polybius

used a stadium of 177.5 m., because this fits the ‘Polybian’ 8.33:1 ratio for the

Roman mile; Seibert is suspicious of all the distance-figures (34-6). Connolly thinks

that Polybius used Roman distance-calculations throughout the march and converted

them to 8:1 stadia ((n. 2) 159).

82 On Alexander’s route-measurers (bematistae): Pliny, Nat. Hist. 6.61, 7.11; Dilke

(n. 3) 29; A.B. Bosworth, s.v. ‘Bematists’, in Oxford Classical Dict. (n. 80) 238. Pliny

(6.62) notes that some texts of Alexander’s route-measurers’ surveys gave

conflicting figures—a useful hint about the difficulties Polybius too may have faced;

cf. n. 3 for varying figures on distances in southern Gaul. For Silenus and the other

early historians of the war, cf. n. 21.


______________________

4 from the Rhône via the Durance to the Traversette km.

i.e. Tarusco–Cabellio/Cavaillon 45

Cabellio–Vapincum/Gap 226

Vapincum–Embrodunum/Embrun–Traversette 108 379

[descent to plains extra: e.g. 40 km. to Saluzzo = 419]

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

5a from Tarusco/Tarascon to The Island beyond the Aigues,

near Valréas

km.

i.e. Tarascon–Arausio/Orange 51

Arausio–Noviomagus/Nyons 42

Noviomagus–Valréas 14 107

5b from The Island around Valréas to Pont-en-Royans

i.e. Island–Acunum/Montélimar 42

Acunum/Montélimar–Loriol 23

Loriol to Pont-en-Royans (cross-country, estim.) 60 125

5c from Pont-en-Royans via Embrun to Durance passes

i.e. Pont-en-Royans via Vercors to Cularo (start of ‘the ascent’)57

Cularo–Vapincum/Gap 103

Vapincum–Embrun 38

Embrun–Montgenèvre 62 260

(Vapincum via Embrun & Guillestre to Traversette (38+70)108)

(268)

(Vapincum via Embrun & Guillestre to Larche (38+73)111) (271)

TOTAL (5a+b+c) to Montgenèvre 492

to Traversette 500

to Larche 503

83 Seibert (1988: n. 1) wonders whether Polybius’ figures might derive from Gallic

leugae (leagues) at about 12 stadia to the leuga (35 n.71)—with, presumably,

Polybius’ source or sources, or Polybius himself, collecting this information and

calculating stadia from it.

84 Piolenc: de Beer, 21 (map), 60.

77

Dexter Hoyos 78

The distance-variations between the routes are notable. Some look too short to be

2,600 stadia even on the ‘Polybian’ measure. For Route 1 above to attain this, the

descent to the North Italian plains must be added, for instance the 45 km. from the

Mont Cenis or Clapier to Ocelum/Avigliana near Turin. These remedies ignore

Polybius’ plain statement (3.39.10) separating the distance to the pass from the

descent, and have to assume that his 15-day timetable is wrong too. Routes 3 and 4

seem to have 2,600 stadia out of reach altogether, even with additions for the

descent. Route 2 does virtually fit the stadia-distance on the ‘Polybian’ ratio, without

adding extra kilometres for the descent, but it is done by inferring that Livy’s

references to the Durance are merely mislocated textually, with no relevance to

Hannibal’s march beyond the Tricorii; and by extending this tribe to the upper Isère

as far as the Arc (in other words excising the Medulli, who were that district’s real

inhabitants).86

Route 5, which this paper proposes, makes better sense of Livy’s topographical

résumé. But how does it fit Polybius’ distance-figures? First, a look at its proposed

sectors in kilometres.

Were the 107 km. from the Rhône to Valréas to equate to Polybius’ full 600 stadia,

this would imply a stadium of 178.3 metres (600 x 0.1783), more or less the

‘Polybian’ measure. But his 800 stadia from The Island to ‘the start of the ascent’,

applied to the 125 km. from Valréas to Pont-en-Royans, would mean a stadium of

only 156.25 m., much like the one supposed for Eratosthenes. Finally, Route 5’s 260

km. for ‘the remaining crossing of the Alps’, applied to Polybius’ 1,200 stadia, would

mean a stadium 216.7 metres long—longer than the Pergamene of 198. This would

certainly be a strange farrago of measurements.

But if the Olympic stadium is applied, first, to the 600 stadia, the result is a

distance of 115.2 km. (600 x 0.192); and the ensuing 800 stadia are 153.6 km. These

figures are close, though not identical, to the actual distances postulated for Route 5

(107 and 125 km.). By contrast, Polybius’ 1,200 stadia for the rest of the march, if

Olympic, work out as only 230.4 km., whereas Route 5’s distance on the ground is

260. This might seem to rule the Olympic stadium out of consideration—except that

Polybius’ total of 2,600 is thereby equivalent to 499.2 km. (Table 7), and this is

virtually the total Route 5 distance on the ground, ranging as it does between 492

km. for the Montgenèvre and 503 for the Larche.

By contrast, if ‘Roman’ stadia are used instead for Route 5’s distances on the

ground, the stadia-totals are significantly larger (and applying the ‘Polybian’


measurement would enlarge them even more). A pair of tables puts the figures into

clear relief.

TABLE 9A: ROUTE 5 DISTANCES IN OLYMPIC STADIA

Route 5 km. Rte. 5 in Olympic stadia

Polybius’ statistics

1 Rhône-crossing to Island

107 557.3 (600 implied)

2 Island to start of ascent 125 651 800

TOTAL 232 1,208.3 1,400

3 ‘the remaining crossing’

260–271 1,354.2–1,411.5 1,200

TOTAL 492-503 2,562.5-2,619.8 2,600

TABLE 9B: ROUTE 5 DISTANCES IN ‘ROMAN’ STADIA

Route 5

distances

Rte. 5 in ‘Roman’

stadia

Polybius’

statistics

1 Rhône-crossing to Island

107 578.4 (600 implied)

2 Island to start of ascent 125 675.7 800

TOTAL 232 1,254.1 1,400

3 the remaining crossing 260–271 1,405.4–1,464.9 1,200

TOTAL 492–503 2659.5–2,719 2,600

Another feature emerges, an unexpected one. The 232 km. from Tarascon to Pont-

en-Royans, the sector of march (Rhône to ascent) for which Polybius registers a

supposed 1,400 stadia, really amount to 1,208.3 on the Olympic ratio, while the

supposed 1,200-stadia final sector is 260 km. on the ground—equivalent to 1,354.2

Olympic stadia. This yields a total of 2,562.5 stadia for the entire march from the

Rhône-crossing to the summit of the Montgenèvre, quite close to Polybius’ rounded

total of 2,600. In effect, the first sector rounds off not to 1,400 but to 1,200, and the

second vice versa.

It does seem, therefore, that Polybius’ statistics for these sectors are calculated on

the Olympic stadium, but that his two major sector-totals have been reversed.

Various explanations are possible. The first, and perhaps likeliest, could be simply

that Polybius’ sources—or Polybius himself—made faulty estimates for some sections

of the march. For example, the slow advance from The Island, partly across open

79

Dexter Hoyos 80

country, was for much of its length not along a single much-used route. The 800-

stadia figure may thus have relied heavily on later dead-reckoning or estimates.

Similarly the first part of ‘the remaining crossing over the Alps’: the transit over the

Vercors to Cularo.

A rather different explanation may be that confusion occurred over distances on

these less widely used parts of the march. For instance, the first day of ‘the ascent’,

suggested in Route 5 as from Pont-en-Royans to Lans-en-Vercors with a distance of

31 km., may arguably have been counted in error into Polybius’ total for the first

sector, and not into ‘the remaining crossing’ as it logically should be.

TABLE 10: POSSIBLE CONFUSIONS IN POLYBIUS’ DISTANCES

km. Olympic stadia

A Rhône-crossing to The Island 107 557

B Island to start of ascent (Pont-en-Royans)

125 651

C Pont to Lans-en-Vercors (§VI) 31 161

TOTAL: B+C 156 812

TOTAL: A+B+C 263 1,369

D Lans to summit of Montgenèvre 229 1,192

TOTAL: A to D 492 2,561

A third explanation for the reversal might be textual. The Greek numerals for

1,200 are ÀasV and for 1,400 ÀauV: these in some scripts might become confused.

Conceivably (to give an example) Polybius wrote the correct statistics as numerals,

then a mix-up occurred in a later copying of the text—or a mistake by a scribe

converting the numerals to words. These possible errors may be quite early; there

are other, evident errors in the same chapter (3.39), as we have seen.87

XI Conclusions

On the map, Hannibal’s proposed route, from the Rhône to the North Italian plains,

looks like a huge zigzag (as it also would via the upper Isère and the Mont Cenis-

Clapier region). The most obvious path for the army to take, apart from one near the

coast, would have been a right turn from the Rhône near Avennio to ascend the

valley of the Durance to either the Montgenèvre or one of its neighbours. But once he

had decided against confronting Scipio near the Rhône—probably because the year

was now so advanced that even a victorious Gallic campaign would force him to


winter there, and not in North Italy among his allies—he instead put a good distance

between himself and the enemy. This ruled out following the Durance valley from

Avennio up to the Alps.

With the Romans now aware that he was nearing Italy, he decided, too, against

marching to the upper Durance via the Drôme and then via Vapincum. His zigzag

advance took him quite out of Roman awareness for several useful weeks: Polybius

stresses their amazement on learning of his arrival in the north (3.61.5-7). Still,

returning at last to the Durance passes was a natural choice, as he could not use a

route near the coast which could bring possible interference from the Romans, and

which in any case was—so he was told—‘lengthy and difficult for armies’ (61.3); and

since at the same time he wanted to arrive in friendly or at least neutral territory in

North Italy.88

The crucial issue for the route is not where The Island lay, important though that

is, but how Livy comes to mention the Durance where he does—on the threshold of

the High Alps—when many of his accompanying details better suit the same river

near the Rhône (§III). This results from his effort to supplement Polybius’s largely

name-free narrative with topographical details from another account (perhaps one of

the earliest versions, and excerpted), an effort he manages unskilfully. Nevertheless,

under examination his topographical résumé of the second half of the march, from

The Island to the pass, proves compatible with Polybius’ narrative, which he also

reproduces (and embellishes). The expedient of inferring two separate routes, by the

army moving in two divisions, is therefore not called for.

85 Route 2, and its major distances, are Lazenby’s (n. 1) 39, 42, 45-6; but he does

not include a distance from Villard-de-Lans to Pontcharra. He reckons by ‘Polybian’

stadia (38, 45, 286 n.8) and includes the descent to the plains as part of the 2,600

total. Susa lies 20 km. beyond the Clapier, giving a total of 482 km., which would be

near enough to 2,600 ‘Polybian’ stadia if the descent were to be included.

86 Medulli: see n. 56. Distances below the pass included (cf. prev. n.): Proctor, 86-8

(Route 1), adds 60 km. from the summit to near the site of Turin, to achieve a grand

total from the Rhône of 464 km.—Torr (n. 2), 29 (Route 4), and de Beer, 111 (Route

3), include Saluzzo on the plain 40 km. beyond their pass, the Traversette.

87 For another manuscript error with figures, note Strabo 3.4.8 C159: his text gives

the distance from Emporiae to the Pyrenees as 4,000 stadia, which editors have

variously emended (cf. n. 3).

81

Dexter Hoyos 82

The answers to the other questions—where Hannibal’s army crossed the Rhône,

the site of The Island, and Polybius’ time- and distance-indicators—can be

summarised. The crossing was made at Ugernum-Tarusco (Beaucaire-Tarascon), four

days’ march from the sea at Massilia (§I). The Island lay north-east of, not at, the

confluence of the rivers Rhône and Aigues (and not at the Rhône-Isère confluence),

where Hannibal’s dealings were with the Vocontii (§IV). His 10-day advance from The

Island to the start of ‘the ascent of the Alps’, followed by the 15 days’ march up to

the summit of the pass over the Alps, were feasible in the circumstances (§§V–VIII).

The pass was reached via the upper Durance valley; probably, though not certainly, it

was the Montgenèvre (§IX).

Whatever the pass, the famous view of Italy is likely a literary invention, and so

too Hannibal’s equally famous use of vinegar for rock-splitting (§IX). Polybius’ figures

for march-days and distances from the Rhône extend to its summit; the days spent

there and on the descent, and the distance involved in descending, are additional to

the count (§X).

Polybius’ distance-figures incorporate two different measurements for the stadium

(§X). Most though not all modern investigators infer this, but with varying views of

which stadium-measurements are involved. In fact his distances within Spain, just as

for Hannibal’s march to the Rhône, correspond to the Roman measure of 8 stadia per

mille passus (0.185 km.). But after the Rhône, his distances compute best with the

Olympic stadium of 0.192 km. (not with his own later standard of 0.1777 km., or 8.33

stadia to the m.p.). His breakdown of distances, 1,400 stadia from the Rhône-

crossing to the start of ‘the ascent of the Alps’, and 1,200 thence for ‘the remaining

crossing’, look like errors of reckoning or, possibly, of manuscript-copying: the figures

ought, it seems, to be the other way round (§X).

Polybius’ and Livy’s march-narratives also illuminate their techniques of selection

and composition (§II). Polybius never represses for too long his instinct for instructing

the reader and admonishing his predecessors. His account pauses repeatedly: for a

broad description of western Europe’s geography (3.36–39), for a disquisition on the

88 Polybius describes Hannibal as now learning that the coastal land route was

pollh; kai; dusdivodo~ stratopevdoi~, but this is surely at odds with the general’s

careful inquiries about terrain and routes before leaving Spain, stressed earlier at

34.2; 48.2-4 and 10-11. For other items of over-dramatic writing at 61.1-5 see

Walbank, Comm. 1.395-6.


Rhône and on the sensationalist shortcomings of earlier narratives of the march (47–

48), and for a lecture on the importance of sound geographical knowledge in history-

writing (57–59; here disclaiming any wish ‘to be constantly interrupting the narrative

and distracting readers from the subject’). Despite the lecture, he supplies absolutely

minimal geographical detail. After the Rhône-crossing and before Hannibal reaches

Italy, the only other names he offers are the ‘Skaras’ and the Allobroges. It is not

even clear in his account whether, after the Rhône, there were further rivers to cross,

as in reality there must have been.89

Livy’s version is complicated by a laudable wish to add some precise details from

elsewhere to flesh out his main Polybian narrative (hence Braneus the chieftain and

the tribal names) and, more questionably, by his efforts to enliven matters with

psychological and dramatic colouring. He rearranges, touches up or simply

misunderstands even the essentially Polybian material, while—as the Durance-

references show especially—details from other sources can be clumsily brought in, or

their relationship to the Polybian material left in obscurity, or both at once (§IV). All

the same, without Livy’s account no reconstruction at all of the march would be

practicable.

Without physical evidence of any kind as a guide (the famous elephant-bones

found at Maillane, south of Avignon, in the 18th Century—but later lost—are no help),

identifying Hannibal’s route and pass rests on these two historians.90 Although the

question is enduringly alluring to Alpinists and warfare-enthusiasts, whose focus

tends to be on finding physical features that look like particular sites in the story

(crags and passes especially), identifying the route and the pass is crucially a

question of text-analysis, and then matching the results of this to what physical

evidence is available. Polybius’ and Livy’s accounts are more than a little flawed—as

well as more influenced by literary considerations than is often thought. Even so, the

details which each provides do after all enable the most likely route for Hannibal’s

and his army’s Herculean feat in late 218 BC to be plausibly recovered.

89 ‘To be constantly interrupting’: 3.57.4 (Paton’s translation).

90 The ‘elephant of Maillane’: de Beer, 131-2. Of course the teeth and bones, found

in a cellar circa 1777 but later lost, could have been a thousand years or more

younger than Hannibal’s elephants.

83

Dexter Hoyos 84

NOTES

Hs Pass Correcd

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