The Book        Aids to Reading         Samples

Home

About the Book

Characters

Glossary

Maps

Place Names

Bibliography

Notes

Album

Buy the Book

About the Author

Notes: Chapter 7

Back to Chapter Notes

Notes for Chapter 7, Hannibal, Rhodanus River, 218 B.C.

1. 26^th day of September. The sources put Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps in October, so I have him crossing the Rhodanus around the end of September. Based on the ancient sources and on several modern readings of them, particularly Prevas, I constructed an elaborate timetable for Hannibal’s passage, getting him into Italian Gaul at the beginning of November, time for him to sack the capital of the Taurini (modern Turin) after resting his men before first encountering Publius Scipio’s skirmishers towards the end of November on the Ticinus River. See Hannibal’s Timetable for details.
2. Hannibal’s crossing point. The various sources on Hannibal speculate on where this might have been. I put it at about Avignon, just north of where the Druentia (modern Durance) River strikes the Rhodanus. We know he veered well north to avoid Publius Scipio and had some distance to travel upriver to the Island.
3. Attrition of Hannibal’s forces. The sources discuss this, mentioning several sources of reduction, as I’ve indicated in the text.
4. Six hundred feet as width of the Rhodanus at Hannibal’s crossing. I’ve not visited the area, unfortunately, so I’m going on what I could read about the river and on one photograph, which led me to estimate such a width. I have no real idea of its depth, but I know the modern Thames is about 70 feet deep, so I thought it not too unreasonable to use the same depth for the Rhodanus, though without modern dredging it might have been silted enough to make it shallower in Hannibal’s day. Deep enough, and wide enough, though, to make it a major obstacle.
5. The details of Hannibal’s crossing are partly from the ancient sources and partly from Connolly, Greece and Rome at War, particularly details of ferrying the elephants over.
6. Hannibal’s keeping his destination secret from his men. This is my own invention, based on how I think his Iberian troops, in particular, would be likely to react to the fact that the campaign would take them far from home for a long time, unable to speak the local languages, surrounded, as Hannibal later points out, by enemies on all sides.
7. Decurion. The rough equivalent for cavalry of the centurions in the Roman infantry. A non-commissioned officer in charge of a relatively small body of men. The Romans didn’t use cavalry heavily (they were not born horsemen, in general), so their cavalry forces tended to be small, usually about 300 horse attached to each legion. These were divided into ten turmae of thirty men each. The tribunes selected three decurions for each turma and three optiones, who managed the rear of the turma. Thus each turma consisted of three groups of ten men—hence, decurion. Likely the turma consisted of three files of ten, and they probably lined up either ten deep or five deep, per Connolly, Greece and Rome at War, p. 133. The first decurion commanded the whole unit. The men wore a cuirass with a small round shield and carried a spear with a butt spike. Later, during the late Republic and the Empire, Rome came to use more cavalry, use it more creatively, and use mercenaries, often Gauls or Germans. In Scipio’s day, the cavalry were Romans of the equestrian class, the wealthier among the enlisted men, able to provide their own kit, though the state furnished the horse. As each legion of Romans marched and fought with a body of allied Italians of roughly legion size, there were also allied cavalry. See also Dixon and Southern, The Roman Cavalry, though their emphasis is on the imperial period.
8. Hannibal’s misestimation of Publius Scipio’s location. We see this as the motivation for Hannibal’s hurrying north as far as the Island after crossing the Rhodanus.
9. Publius Scipio’s decision to return to Italy. All the sources laud his decision as the best thing he could have done when Hannibal had eluded him.
10. Proconsular imperium. Imperium was the elected Roman magistrate’s power to command and even, outside the city of Rome, to execute men if he saw fit. Here Gnaeus Scipio is granted the imperium of a proconsul, that is, of a man who is still in service after serving his consulship. Often a consul’s military work was unfinished at the close of his one-year term of office, so the Senate made him a proconsul, subordinate to the incoming consuls but with power nearly equal to theirs within his designated theater of operations. A man who had been a praetor could then become a propraetor if he were generaling troops and the job was not finished. Gnaeus Scipio’s being given proconsular imperium when he was, in effect, a privatus (private citizen, as opposed to elected magistrate), was one of many similar irregularities as Rome altered her traditional constitutional practices to meet the exigencies of war.
11. Trireme. A warship with three banks of oars. By this time, the trireme was one of Rome’s smaller ships, as she had at least quinqueremes (five banks) and “Sixes” (presumably six banks). The arrangement of these banks of oarsmen is much in dispute. See Casson, Ships and Seafaring, and, especially, Morrison et al., The Athenian Trireme—which details a modern archaeological project to reconstruct a Greek trireme that actually sails and can be rowed. The Roman ship would have been similar. It’s quite stirring to see photographs of an ancient warship at sea.
12. The Island. The location of the Island, mentioned in all the ancient sources, is disputed by modern scholars. I place it near modern Orange (Arausio to the Romans). The geographic feature I describe in the text, a long, thin, but roughly triangular peninsula formed as the Agas River (modern Eygues) comes into the Rhodanus at an angle, is located near Orange and more or less matches the ancient descriptions. For more discussion, see Connolly, Greece and Rome at War, p. 163.