Hannibal's real Alpine trunk road to Rome is revealed

The Times ^ | February 17, 2010 | Norman Hammond

[SunkenCiv]

From the Col du Mont Cenis in the north to the Col Agnel 35 miles (60km) almost due south of it three approach routes have been argued for. In the most recent study, Dr William Mahaney, a geomorphologist, and his colleagues have looked at the evidence from Classical sources. "As documented by Polybius and Livy in the ancient literature, Hannibal's army was blocked by a two-tier rockfall on the lee side of the Alps, a rubble sheet of considerable volume," they note in the journal Archaeometry. "The only such two-tier landform lies below the Col de la Traversette, 2,600 metres above sea level, a rubble sheet with sufficient volume to block the Carthaginian army. The character of the rockfall can best be seen from the sides or below, where a thin cover mass lies atop a much larger and more substantial rubble mass," they say... Hannibal is said by Livy to have ordered timber to be cut and laced around the blocking rocks and then set alight. When a high temperature was reached, sour wine was thrown on to the hot rocks, splitting and spalling many of the large stones and allowing Hannibal's engineers to remove them.

[SunkenCiv]

Hannibal crossed the Alps site:freerepublic.com

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[SunkenCiv]

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[JoeProBono]

[spyone]

Has there never been found physical artifacts on any of the possible routes?

[max americana]

I love reading Hannibal. For those who need to visually see his exploits, there are tons of documentaries on Youtube. He did a “General Sherman” in Italy: right in the Romans frontyard and goated Roman armies into his trap. Always outnumbered, yet somehow wins. No one had more hatred of Rome than he did.

[Ken H]

Hannibal's real Alpine trunk road to Rome is revealed

Award the headline writer 2 points for cleverness.

[stainlessbanner]

ping

[AZLiberty]

Dr Mahaney’s studies, in a book, Hannibal’s Odyssey, suggest that the tree line would have been higher in ancient times, so that timber would have been available; the area today is treeless.

Hah! The tree line moving down is evidence of cooling since Roman times.

[Mashood]

Those Romans always did fall for goats.

[colorado tanker]

The Battle of Cannae is still a classic, well worth studying.

[SunkenCiv]

/bingo

[SunkenCiv]

One thing to remember, crossing the Alps wasn’t easy, trying to get his army (half died) and those elephants (most of them died) was a miserable experience.

I guess that’s why they say Hannibal is in Missouri.

[SunkenCiv]

What he did was amazing — since politics had turned against him and his family and faction back in Carthage, he seldom received resupply of any kind, had to live off the land, and yet remained in Italy for sixteen years. Then he was done. Politicians haven’t changed much in the years since. Well, some of them haven’t, that is.

Had it not been for Hannibal, regularization of the Roman army probably wouldn’t have taken place, there wouldn’t have arisen a series of de facto kings (Julius Caesar wasn’t the first imper iter) who based their power on their control of successful armies, the importance of the hidebound aristocracy would not have declined in the way or at the time that it did, and history would not have unfurled quite the way that it did, being the product after all of specific series of acts by specific individuals.

[SunkenCiv]

Nothin’. Of course, these routes were heavily in use ever since that time, and anything left setting around (for example, by someone who’d died) would have been grabbed by either a survivor of Hannibal’s army, or by passersby during the following years. Trade went on after the army went over. His crossing of the Rhone was also stupendous — rafts were built and covered with turf so the elephants would go aboard, then they were launched, then poled and paddled across. The Gauls waiting on the opposite bank didn’t like the look of this, and amscrayed.