From the Druentia, by a road that lay principally through plains,
Hannibal arrived at the Alps without molestation from the Gauls who
inhabit those regions. Then, tho the scene had been previously
anticipated from report (by which uncertainties are wont to be
exaggerated), yet the height of the mountains when viewed so near, and
the snows almost mingling with the sky, the shapeless huts situated on
the cliffs, the cattle and beasts of burden withered by the cold, the
men unshorn and wildly drest, all things, animate and inanimate,
stiffened with frost, and other objects more terrible to be seen than
described, renewed their alarm.
To them, marching up the first acclivities, the mountaineers appeared
occupying the heights overhead, who, if they had occupied the more
concealed valleys, might, by rushing out suddenly to the attack, have
occasioned great flight and havoc. Hannibal orders them to halt, and
having sent forward Gauls to view the ground, when he found there was
no passage that way, he pitches his camp in the widest valley he could
find, among places all rugged and precipitous. Then, having learned
from the same Gauls, when they had mixed in conversation with the
mountaineers, from whom they differed little in language and manners,
that the pass was only beset during the day, and that at night each
withdrew to his own dwelling, he advanced at the dawn to the heights,
as if designing openly and by day to force his way through the defile.
The day then being passed in feigning a different attempt from that
which was in preparation, when they had fortified the camp in the same
place where they had halted, as soon as he perceived that the
mountaineers had descended from the heights, and that the guards were
withdrawn, having lighted for show a greater number of fires than was
proportioned to the number that remained, and having left the baggage
in the camp, with the cavalry and the principal part of the infantry,
he himself with a party of light-armed soldiers, consisting of all the
most courageous of his troops, rapidly cleared the defile, and took
posts on those very heights which the enemy had occupied.
At dawn of light the next day the camp broke up, and the rest of the
army began to move forward. The mountaineers, on a signal being given,
were now assembling from their forts to their usual station, when
they suddenly behold part of the enemy overhanging them from above, in
possession of their former position, and the others passing along the
road. Both these objects, presented at the same time to the eye and
the mind, made them stand motionless for a little while; but when they
afterward saw the confusion in the pass, and that the marching body
was thrown into disorder by the tumult which itself created,
principally from the horses being terrified, thinking that whatever
terror they added would suffice for the destruction of the enemy, they
scramble along the dangerous rocks, as being accustomed alike to
pathless and circuitous ways. Then indeed the Carthaginians were
opposed at once by the enemy and by the difficulties of the ground;
and each striving to escape first from the danger, there was more
fighting among themselves than with their opponents. The horses, in
particular, created danger in the lines, which being terrified by the
discordant clamors that the groves and reechoing valleys augmented,
fell into confusion; and if by chance struck or wounded, they were so
dismayed that they occasioned a great loss both of men and baggage of
every description; and as the pass on both sides was broken and
precipitous, this tumult threw many down to an immense depth, some
even of the armed men; but the beasts of burden, with their loads,
were rolled down like the fall of some vast fabric.
Tho these disasters were shocking to view, Hannibal, however, held his
place for a little, and kept his men together, lest he might augment
the tumult and disorder: but afterward, when he saw the line broken,
and that there was danger that he should bring over his army preserved
to no purpose if deprived of their baggage, he hastened down from the
higher ground; and tho he had routed the enemy by the first onset
alone, he at the same time increased the disorder in his own army; but
that tumult was composed in a moment, after the roads were cleared by
the flight of the mountaineers, and presently the whole army was
conducted through, not only without being disturbed, but almost in
silence. He then took a fortified place, which was the capital of that
district, and the little villages that lay around it, and fed his army
for three days with the corn and cattle he had taken; and during these
three days, as the soldiers were neither obstructed by the
mountaineers, who had been daunted by the first engagement, nor yet
much by the ground, he made considerable way.
He then came to another state, abounding, for a mountainous country,
with inhabitants, where he was nearly overcome, not by open war, but
by his own arts of treachery and ambuscade. Some old men, governors of
forts, came as deputies to the Carthaginian, professing, "that having
been warned by the useful example of the calamities of others, they
wished rather to experience the friendship than the hostilities of the
Carthaginians; they would, therefore, obediently execute his commands,
and begged that he would accept of a supply of provisions, guides of
his march, and hostages for the sincerity of their promises."
Hannibal, when he had answered them in a friendly manner, thinking
that they should neither be rashly trusted nor yet rejected, lest if
repulsed they might openly become enemies, having received the
hostages whom they proffered, and made use of the provisions which
they of their own accord brought down to the road, followed their
guides, by no means as among a people with whom he was at peace, but
with his line of march in close order. The elephants and cavalry
formed the van of the marching body; he himself, examining everything
around, and intent on every circumstance, followed with the choicest
of his infantry. When they came into a narrower pass, lying on one
side beneath an overhanging eminence, the barbarians, rising at once
on all sides from their ambush, assail them in front and rear, both at
close quarters and from a distance, and roll down huge stones on the
army. The most numerous body of men prest on the rear; against whom
the infantry facing about and directing their attack made it very
obvious that, had not the rear of the army been well supported, a
great loss must have been sustained in that pass. Even as it was, they
came to the extremity of danger, and almost to destruction; for while
Hannibal hesitated to lead down his division into the defile, because,
tho he himself was a protection to the cavalry, he had not in the same
way left any aid to the infantry in the rear; the mountaineers,
charging obliquely, and on having broken through the middle of the
army, took possession of the road; and one night was spent by Hannibal
without his cavalry and baggage....
On the standards being moved forward at daybreak, when the army
proceeded slowly over all places entirely blocked up with snow, and
languor and despair strongly appeared in the countenances of all,
Hannibal, having advanced before the standards, and ordered the
soldiers to halt on a certain eminence, whence there was a prospect
far and wide, pointed out to them Italy and the plains of the Po,
extending themselves beneath the Alpine mountains; and said "that they
were now surmounting not only the ramparts of Italy, but also of the
city of Rome; that the rest of the journey would be smooth and
down-hill; that after one, or, at most, a second battle, they would
have the citadel and capital of Italy in their power and possession."
The army then began to advance, the enemy now making no attempts
beyond petty thefts, as opportunity offered. But the journey proved
much more difficult than it had been in the ascent, as the declivity
of the Alps, being generally shorter on the side of Italy, is
consequently steeper; for nearly all the road was precipitous, narrow,
and slippery, so that neither those who made the least stumble could
prevent themselves from falling, nor, when fallen, remain in the same
place, but rolled, both men and beasts of burden, one upon another.
They then came to a rock much more narrow, and formed of such
perpendicular ledges that a light-armed soldier, carefully making the
attempt, and clinging with his hands to the bushes and roots around,
could with difficulty lower himself down. The ground, even before very
steep by nature, had been broken by a recent falling away of the earth
into a precipice of nearly a thousand feet in depth. Here when the
cavalry halted, as if at the end of their journey, it was announced to
Hannibal, wondering what obstructed the march, that the rock was
impassable. Having then gone himself to view the place, it seemed
clear to him that he must lead his army, by however great a circuit,
through the pathless and untrodden regions around it. But this route
also proved impracticable; for while the new snow of a moderate depth
remained on the old, which had not been removed, their footsteps were
planted with ease as they walked upon the new snow, which was soft and
not too deep; but when it was dissolved by the trampling of so many
men and beasts of burden, they then walked on the bare ice below, and
through the dirty fluid formed by the melting snow. Here there was a
wretched struggle, both on account of the slippery ice not affording
any hold to the step, and giving way beneath the foot more readily by
reason of the slope; and whether they assisted themselves in rising by
their hands or their knees, their supports themselves giving way, they
would tumble again; nor were there any stumps or roots near by
pressing against which one might with hand or foot support oneself; so
that they only floundered on the smooth ice and amidst the melted
snow. The beasts of burden sometimes also cut into this lower ice by
merely treading upon it, at others they broke it completely through,
by the violence with which they struck in their hoofs in their
struggling, so that most of them, as if taken in a trap, stuck in the
hardened and deeply frozen ice.
At length, after the men and beasts of burden had been fatigued to no
purpose, the camp was pitched on the summit, the ground being cleared
for that purpose with great difficulty, so much snow was there to be
dug out and carried away. The soldiers being then set to make a way
down the cliff, by which alone a passage could be effected, and it
being necessary that they should cut through the rocks, having felled
and lopped a number of large trees which grew around, they make a huge
pile of timber; and as soon as a strong wind fit for exciting the
flames arose, they set fire to it, and, pouring vinegar on the heated
stones, they render them soft and crumbling. They then open a way with
iron instruments through the rock thus heated by the fire, and soften
its declivities by gentle windings, so that not only the beasts of
burden, but also the elephants, could be led down it. Four days were
spent about this rock, the beasts nearly perishing through hunger; for
the summits of the mountains are for the most part bare, and if there
is any pasture the snows bury it. The lower parts contain valleys, and
some sunny hills, and rivulets flowing beside woods, and scenes more
worthy of the abode of man. There the beasts of burden were sent out
to pasture, and rest given for three days to the men, fatigued with
forming the passage; they then descended into the plains, the country
and the dispositions of the inhabitants being now less rugged.
In this manner chiefly they came to Italy, in the fifth month (as some
authors relate) after leaving New Carthage, having crossed the Alps
in fifteen days. What number of forces Hannibal had when he had passed
into Italy is by no means agreed upon by authors. Those who state them
at the highest make mention of a hundred thousand foot and twenty
thousand horse; those who state them at the lowest, of twenty thousand
foot and six thousand horse. Lucius Cincius Alimentus, who relates
that he was made prisoner by Hannibal, would influence me most as an
authority did he not confound the number by adding the Gauls and
Ligurians. Including these (who, it is more probable, flocked to him
afterward, as some authors assert), he says that eighty thousand foot
and ten thousand horse were brought into Italy; and that he had heard
from Hannibal himself that, after crossing the Rhone, he had lost
thirty-six thousand men, and an immense number of horses and other
beasts of burden among the Taurini,[71] the next nation to the Gauls,
as he descended into Italy.