Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life (20 page)

The scene at the banks of the Rhône on the day of the elephant crossing must have been discussed by the locals for generations to come and only added to the legend of Hannibal (Polyb. 3.46.1–12; Livy 21.28.5–12). The Carthaginians had constructed a type of pontoon made of strong rafts lashed together. This was brought right up onto the bank of the river. Earth was used to cover the rafts so that the elephants would not notice as they began to walk on to them. The elephant walkway projected 65 metres into the river, with two very large solidly built detachable rafts at the far end attached to boats. With two female elephants in front, the ‘Indian mahouts’ led them out on to the pier and down to the last detachable rafts. These were cut free once the elephants were on board and the rafts began to move off into the river towed by the boats. The elephants panicked: some jumped into the water and walked on the riverbed using their trunks for air, others froze and stayed on the rafts. Many of the elephants’ minders were drowned or swept downstream but in the end all thirty-seven elephants made it across.
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Once across, the elephants formed a ‘rearguard together with the cavalry’ and the last of the Carthaginian troops marched north up the banks of the Rhône (Polyb. 3.47.1). The Roman consul and army ‘arrived at the place where Carthaginians had crossed the Rhône three days after they had resumed their march’ (3.49.1). Again the speed at which Hannibal moved his army across difficult territory ‘astonished’ Publius Scipio, who ‘had felt certain that
they would never venture to advance into Italy by this route …’ (3.49.2).
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The Roman consul turned his army around, marched back to Marseilles and began to embark his forces. Once on the coast Publius Scipio made one of the best decisions, from the Roman perspective, in the early part of the war. The consul sent his army, under the command of his brother Gn. Cornelius Scipio, onwards to the Iberian peninsula while he returned to Italy to raise more troops. He planned to march north to meet the Carthaginians as they descended from the mountains. Sending his army on meant that the Romans were able to occupy the Carthaginians in Iberia and keep them from providing reinforcements or supplies to Hannibal for a number of years.
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There is a long, historic debate over where exactly Hannibal crossed the Rhône. The location of the crossing is important because it helps to identify the route taken by the Carthaginian army through the Alps. Polybius (3.42.1) recorded that Hannibal crossed the river a four days’ march from the sea in the territory of a tribe that Livy named as the Volcae (21.26.6–7). The delta of the Rhône river has built up considerably since the third century and on the basis of a 15 kilometre per day march, some calculations place the crossing north of the confluence of the Durance river whilst others put the crossing south of the Durance (Polyb. 3.50.1). If Hannibal had been consciously following what was known in antiquity as the ‘road of Herakles’ then his route should have taken his army up the Durance valley and across the Alps into Italy. This course through the most southern of the Alpine passes became impossible for Hannibal with a Roman army so close at hand. Therefore the Carthaginian army had to turn north and Hannibal was forced to change his plans and seek another way through the mountains (Polyb. 3.47.1; Livy 21.31.1–4). He believed it essential to set the agenda himself and not allow the Romans to choose the place of their first meeting in battle.
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In 1891 Theodore Ayrault Dodge published one of the great military histories of Hannibal. By the time Dodge wrote his history, over a hundred and twenty years ago, there were already three hundred and fifty published works on Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. Just over fifty years ago the book
Trunk Road for Hannibal
described a British Alpine expedition that attempted to take an elephant named Jumbo over the Col du Clapier to prove the feasibility of that particular route.
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The interest continues and there have been many other re-creations and re-enactments by those attempting to experience the journey, including a recent television programme following three brothers on bicycles.
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Part of our modern and ongoing fascination with Hannibal’s journey rests in the disagreement over which route he took, with opinion balanced between
the Col du Clapier and Col de la Traversette.
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After he crossed the Rhône, our ancient sources agree that Hannibal turned north, ‘marching steadily from the crossing-place for four days and reached a place called the Island … deriving its name from its situation; for the Rhône and the Isère running along each side of it meet at its point’ (Polyb. 3.49.5; Livy 21.31.4).
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After this four-day march, Livy and Polybius go their separate ways and it becomes very difficult to follow one or the other through to Italy without having to make major (and unrealistic) adjustments to their descriptions.
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Polybius is usually considered the more reliable source because he claimed to have spoken to people who made the march, so we shall follow his information as far as that will take us.
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At a place called the ‘island’ Hannibal intervened in a clash between two brothers ‘disputing the crown’ in the region of the Allobroges. The victorious brother was grateful and Hannibal ‘derived great assistance’ from the king, who replenished supplies, rearmed his soldiers and provided the whole army with ‘warm clothing and foot-wear’ for their trek across the mountains (Polyb. 3.49.8–12). It was by now late September or possibly even early October and although the weather was still warm, it would soon be winter in the mountains. The newly allied chieftain supplied Hannibal with a much-appreciated rearguard as they started to climb the mountains into the territory of the hostile tribes (again the Allobroges but a less friendly group of the larger tribe).
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After a 140-kilometre (800
stades
) march that took ten days along the bank of the river the army ‘began the ascent of the Alps’ and their local escorts returned to their homes (Polyb. 3.50.1). The hostile chieftains, up until this point, had left the Carthaginians alone, fearing the cavalry and their well-armed escort. Now that the climb had begun the cavalry would be less effective and the Carthaginian troops more vulnerable. Hostile tribesmen occupied strategic positions along the route by day. Polybius implies that had Hannibal proceeded he would have been ambushed and his army destroyed. In camp that night Hannibal set his men to take positions up above the local tribesmen along the pass and thus he managed to out-ambush the ambush. When the Carthaginian army began to move out, the locals attacked. The footing was slippery, uneven and the baggage-carriers and horses were easy targets, which caused mayhem along the narrow path they followed. Hannibal and his men counter-attacked and they ‘inflicted enormous losses on the Allobroges’ although his own troops also suffered greatly (Polyb. 3.51.1–13).

Hannibal’s army endured another ambush and the loss of more ‘men, pack-animals and horses’ as the army trudged upwards through the narrow passes of
the mountains. The hostile resistance eventually gave way to sporadic attacks by small groups, who harassed the column ‘either from the rear or from the front and carried off some of the pack-animals’. The enemy ‘never dared to approach’ the elephants and after ‘an ascent of nine days Hannibal reached the summit’. Once there, he gave the army two days’ rest (Polyb. 3.53.4–10).

‘The Alps stand to the whole of Italy like a citadel to a city,’ comments Polybius (3.54.2) and at the top of the pass Hannibal is said to have gathered his men and looked down to the valley of the Po river. Italy lay before them and the exhausted and wounded men stared out across the valley while Hannibal reportedly rallied them with stories of their many allies who waited below and the great spoils to be won. Polybius’ version of the crossing is thought to derive from one of his sources, either the pro-Hannibalic Sosylus or Silenus or the Roman Fabius Pictor. The difficulty is that there is no pass through the Alps where you can stand at the summit and look out over the Po valley and Italy. Thus one of the sources made this story up, or perhaps imagined what it should have been like at that moment on the summit of Europe, looking down to Italy. If the Roman Fabius Pictor was Polybius’ source, the view as described from the top of the Alps might actually be the view at the northern edge of the Apennines looking towards the Alps and the Po from the south, which would be a uniquely Roman view. From the Apennines you can see the whole of the Po and the Alps very much as described by Polybius – like a citadel.
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‘As it was now close on the setting of the Pleiades, snow had already gathered on the summit.’ The constellation Pleiades sets towards the horizon in late October so Hannibal and his army had reached the summit of the pass just before then.
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The army did not rest long at the top of a pass that was over 2,000 metres in altitude and freezing in the late October/early November snow.
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The descent proved almost as treacherous as the ascent and although no enemy soldiers harassed the army on the way down, the footing was deadly. With a new snowfall lying on the hardened snow of the previous year and on a narrow, steep track, ‘both men and beasts could not tell on what they were treading … all who stepped wide of the path or stumbled were dashed down the precipice’. It was slow going but then ‘they reached a place where it was impossible for either the elephants or the pack-animals to pass owing to the extreme narrowness of the path’ and landslides had carried away the face of the mountain in places (Polyb. 3.54.1–7, 3.55.1).

The Carthaginian army was caught: they could not turn back – yet going forward would be too treacherous. Hannibal camped the army on this exposed ridge and ‘sweeping it clear of snow set the soldiers to work to build up the
path along the cliff’ to make it passable for the animals (Polyb. 3.55.6). This was an enormous task for an exhausted force but there was little choice – die on the mountain or move forward. Livy provides intriguing detail on how the Carthaginian army forged the path:

they felled some massive trees … stripped the branches and made a huge pile of logs. This they set on fire … and as the rocks became hot they made them disintegrate by pouring vinegar on them. After scorching the cliff-face with fires in this way, they opened it up with picks and softened the gradient with short zigzag paths so that even the elephants, not just the pack animals, could be brought down (21.37.2–4).
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The construction of a route out of the mountains took four days, during which the pack animals almost starved to death (Livy 21.37.4; Polyb. 3.54.7–8). When they finally reached pastureland the army rested and allowed the animals to graze. It took them another three days before they were ready to make the last push towards the plains (Livy 21.37.6; Polyb. 3.56.1).

The whole journey from New Carthage to the Po valley had taken five months and the army that had survived the trek was a shadow of that which had departed from Iberia.
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Hannibal’s forces now numbered 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry, according to his own account (Polyb. 3.56.4). He had lost ‘36,000 men and a huge number of horses and other beasts after crossing the Rhône’ (Livy 21.38.5).
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He had, as Napoleon Bonaparte would note two millennia later, ‘sacrificed the half of his army for the mere acquisition of his field of battle, the mere right of fighting’.
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By crossing the Alps and bringing the fight into Italy, Hannibal had taken the initiative away from Rome. Although it is impossible to know what his expectations might have been, Hannibal may have judged the sacrifice of half an army to be worth that.

The greatest achievement of Hannibal’s long march to Italy was the paradigm shift that it created in the war. The Carthaginians had never attempted to invade Italy before and had surrendered the initiative in the First Punic War. By invading Italy Hannibal had seized the momentum and put the Romans on the back foot where they would remain for another five years. Most importantly, the Roman fleet assembled in Sicily and poised to invade Carthage was recalled to northern Italy. The Romans were forced by Hannibal’s actions to move away from their plans of invasion and adopt a defensive strategy.

The symbolic aspects of Hannibal’s journey began to take hold and as news of his approach reached the Roman population it must have seemed like
the coming of a supernatural force. Invasion of Italy was an extremely rare occurrence in the whole history of Rome, and one that would not be achieved again for another six hundred years.
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The legend of the Alps was so significant that the rationalist Polybius, feeling he had to play down Hannibal’s achievements, criticized ‘some … writers’ for trying to impress their readers with the supernatural abilities of Hannibal. Polybius claimed these authors built up the story to such a degree ‘that unless some god or hero had met Hannibal and showed him the way, his whole army would have gone astray and perished utterly …’ (3.47.6–9). Polybius felt the need of the rational historian to diminish the claims of divine backing for Hannibal’s achievements, thus proving that the crossing of the Alps had quickly become legendary.
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The reality of the group that came down from the mountains was quite different. The men ‘had suffered terribly from the toil of the ascent and descent of the passes and the roughness of the road … they were also in wretched condition owing to the scarcity of provisions and neglect of their persons’ (Polyb. 3.60.3). It is hard to imagine that this army would be able to take on and fight Roman legions. In the territory of an allied tribe, the Insubres, Hannibal ‘made every provision for carefully attending to the men and the horses likewise until they were restored in body and spirit’ (3.60.7–8).
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To restore to fighting fitness a demoralized and dejected force of men who had witnessed the loss of half their colleagues seems an extraordinary challenge. That this army would go on to fight and win two battles in the month that followed is quite astonishing. It may well be therefore that the losses and the hardships of the long journey have been exaggerated in our sources for dramatic impact.
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