30.
Accordingly Hannibal, having settled in his own mind to go forward and advance on Italy, called the soldiers together and worked on their feelings with alternate chiding and encouragement.
[2]
He marvelled, he said, what sudden terror had [p. 87]invaded breasts that had ever been dauntless. For1 these many years they had been victorious in war, nor had they quitted Spain until all the tribes and territories which lay between two distant seas were in the power of the Carthaginians.
[3]
Then, indignant that the Roman People should demand that whoever had laid siege to Saguntum be surrendered up to them, as though to expiate a felony, they had crossed the Ebro, in order to wipe out the Roman name and liberate the world.
[4]
The march had not then seemed long to any of them, though they meant to advance from the setting to the rising sun;
[5]
but now, when they could see that they had measured off the greater part of it;2 when they had made their way, through the fiercest tribes, over the Pyrenees; when they had crossed the Rhone —that mighty river —in the teeth of so many thousand Gauls, overcoming, too, the violence of the stream itself; when the Alps, the other side of which was in Italy, were in full sight;
[6]
—were they halting now, as though exhausted, at the very gates of their enemies?
[7]
What else did they think that the Alps were but high mountains? They might fancy them higher than the ranges of the Pyrenees; but surely no lands touched the skies or were impassable to man. The Alps indeed were inhabited, were tilled, produced and supported living beings; their defiles were practicable for armies.
[8]
Those very ambassadors whom they beheld had not crossed the Alps in the air on wings. Even the ancestors of these men had not been natives of Italy, but had lived there as foreign settlers, and had often crossed these very Alps in [p. 89]great companies, with their children and their wives,3 in the manner of emigrants.4
[9]
For armed soldiers, taking nothing with them but the instruments of war, what could be impassable or insurmountable? To capture Saguntum, what dangers or what hardships had they not endured for eight long months?
[10]
Now that Rome, the capital of the world,5 was their objective, could anything seem so painful or so difficult as to delay
[11]
their enterprise? Had Gauls once captured that which the Phoenician despaired of approaching? Then let them yield in spirit and manhood to a race which they had so often vanquished in the course of the last few days, or look to end their march in the field6 that lay between the Tiber and the walls of Rome.
1 B.C. 218
2 Polybius (III. xxxix) estimates the distance covered by Hannibal as follows: New Carthage to the Ebro 2600 stades (the stade is roughly a furlong); the Ebro to Emporium 1600; Emporium to Narbo 600; Narbo to the passage of the Rhone 1600; the passage of the Rhone to the foot of the pass over the Alps 1400; the foot of the pass to the valley of the Po 1200.
3 B.C. 218
4 See v. xxxiv-xxxv. Livy places the earliest Gallic immigration in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus.
5 This expression is a strange anachronism in the mouth of Hannibal; but Livy thinks of Hannibal as realizing —and so perhaps he may have done —that the struggle now beginning would determine whether Rome or Carthage should rule the world.
6 The Campus Martius lay outside the Servian wall, between the Capitoline, Quirinal, and Pincian Hills and the Tiber.
Livy. Boooks XXI-XXII With An English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1929: no copyright notice.
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