Free Hannibal by Ernle Bradford Page A

might well achieve victory there and destroy the heart of Carthaginian wealth and power. For himself, it was clear that he must return to Italy to take charge of the troops in the north. He sent his fleet and army on to Spain under the command of his brother Cnaeus and embarked for Italy. If, and it seemed unlikely at this season of the year, Hannibal’s troops managed to cross the Alps, they would find him waiting.  
     
     

 
    VIII
     
    ISLAND, RIVER AND ALPS
     
    With the elephants, and a rearguard of cavalry, following the main body of the troops, Hannibal’s invading army moved up on the Rhône. They would have been marching as fast as possible in order to lose the Romans, and they were clearly successful for there were no further reports to Scipio of the enemy being sighted. It is doubtful, in view of the restrictions such as the elephants and their impedimenta, if they can have made any more speed than they had in the early part of their march to the north, so one may assume that fourteen kilometres a day represents their average progress. From Polybius we learn that ‘Hannibal, marching steadily from the crossing-place for four days, reached a place called the “Island”, a populous district producing abundance of corn and deriving its name from its situation; for the Rhône and the Skaras running along each side of it meet at its point. It is similar in size and shape to the Egyptian Delta; only in that case the sea forms the base line uniting the two branches of the Nile, while here the base line is formed by a range of mountains difficult to climb or penetrate, and, one may say, almost inaccessible.’
    Much scholarly controversy has arisen over the location of this area known as the ‘Island’, controversy which may never cease, although Sir Gavin de Beer, by combining scholarship with geography, would seem to have produced an answer which is more watertight than most of the theories previously expounded. The argument arose through the variant spellings in the manuscripts of Polybius and Livy of the name of the river forming the third side of the triangle. It need hardly have happened if scholars had been prepared to accept the text of Polybius, who gives the river’s name as Skaras. Polybius was not only writing a great deal earlier than Livy (the latter leaned heavily upon the Greek historian for his account of the Hannibalic War) but, unlike Livy, he had himself carefully covered the ground and followed in the footsteps of Hannibal on his great march. Polybius, furthermore, was a soldier as well as an historian and—unlike the study-bound Livy—it is most improbable that he would have made a gross geographical error.  
    Polybius states clearly that Hannibal marched a further four days up the Rh6ne after leaving the crossing-place. This makes his distance from the sea, after eight days’ march at fourteen kilometres a day, 112 kilometres—and at exactly this point there flows into the Rhône a large tributary, the Aygues. Not only does the Aygues lie at the appropriate distance from the sea but it forms, together with the Rhône and a mountain range called the Baronnies, a large fertile delta. It is well cultivated and populated today, as doubtless it was two thousand years ago since it has all the requirements for valley farming. Only in one respect does this triangular piece of land fail to match up to Polybius’ description and that is in its size, for it is nowhere near as large as the Nile Delta, but, to quote Sir Gavin de Beer: ‘As there is no piece of land whatever on the eastern side of the Rhône, enclosed between it and any river, approaching anything like the size of the Delta of the Nile, this must be an error somehow introduced in the texts.’ Over the centuries since the river was recorded in Latin as Aqua Iquarum (the s has become an i as is not uncommon in Romance philology), Iquarum subsequently fell away, leaving only Aqua which, as in many other place names, became aigue or