With his preparations completed, Hannibal left New Carthage early in the spring of 218 B.C., with an army numbering about one hundred thousand men, and including thirty-seven war elephants. Crossing the Pyrenees and the Rhone, he reached the foot-hills of the Alps. Nature and man joined to oppose the passage. The season was already far advanced—it was October—and snow was falling upon the higher portions of the trail. Day after day the army toiled painfully up the dangerous path. In places the narrow way had to be cut wider for the monstrous bodies of the elephants. Often avalanches of stone were hurled upon the trains by the hostile bands that held possession of the heights above. At last the summit was gained, and the shivering army looked down into the warm haze of the Italian plains. The sight alone was enough to rouse the drooping spirits of the soldiers; but Hannibal stirred them to enthusiasm by addressing them with these words: "Ye are standing upon the Acropolis of Italy; yonder lies Rome." The army began its descent, and at length, after toils and losses equalled only by those of the ascent, its thinned battalions issued from the defiles of the mountains upon the plains of the Po. Of the fifty thousand men and more with which Hannibal had begun the passage, barely half that number had survived the march, and these "looked more like phantoms than men."
Battles of the Ticinus, the Trebia, and Lake Trasimenus.—The Romans had not the remotest idea of Hannibal's plans. With war determined upon, the Senate had sent one of the consuls, L. Sempronius Longus, with an army into Africa by the way of Sicily; while the other, Publius Cornelius Scipio, they had directed to lead another army into Spain.
While the Senate were watching the movements of these expeditions, they were startled with the intelligence that Hannibal, instead of being in Spain, had crossed the Alps and was among the Gauls upon the Po. Sempronius was hastily recalled from his attempt upon Africa, to the defence of Italy. Scipio, on his way to Spain, had touched at Massilia, and there learned of the
