674 HannihaVs Passage over the Alps. should have induced him to quit the basin of the Rhone : and hence he considers the route of the Great St Bernard as one step nearer to the trutli. The former however labours under some other difficulties : as^ the silence of Polybius about the Isere, the names of the tribes into whose territories it leads, which were not the Insubres, but either the Salassi, or the Lai and Lebecae (Polyb. ii. 17.) In the description of Polybius there are two features which strike him as the most important, and as affording a decisive criterion which no other hypothesis but his own will bear. In the first place Polybius describes the valley of the Rhone, and remarks that the plains of the Po are separated from it by the chain of the Alps, and adds that these were the mountains which Hannibal crossed from the country on the Rhone to enter into Italy (aKpcofjeiaLy a? t66* VTrepapa^ 'Avi/LJ3a^ aVo (tcov KaTO. tov ^ooavov tottvov evefictkev e^ 'iraXfai^.) Hence it must have been from some point in the Valais that Hannibal effected his passage. This might indeed have been Martigny, if there had been no other objec- tion to the Great St Bernard. But beside that the distances and features of the road do not correspond to the account of Polybius, and that Strabo informs us that this track was im- passable for beasts of burden before the time of Augustus (Strabo says, iv. p. 205. rj cid tov Yiotvrjvov Xeyo/mej/ov ^evye- or IV ov fiaTfj kutu tu aupa twv 'AXirecop)^ it would have brought Hannibal down into a different region from that which he sought, and found according to Polybius, who ex- pressly states that after having accomplished the passage of the Alps in fifteen days, he came boldly down to the plains on the Po, and to the nation of the Insubres. This points to the neighbourhood of Milan, and thus confirms the conclusion already drawn from the direction in which the nature of the Transalpine regions tended to determine Hannibars march. But now the intelligent reader will naturally be tempted to inquire, as the author takes Polybius for his guide, how he reconciles his hypothesis with some other statements of the historian no less precise than those just adduced, and appa- rently very difficult to accommodate to the route here pro- posed. Polybius, after relating the assistance which Hannibal gave to the elder of the two brothers whom he found at war in the Island^ proceeds to say that he marched eight hundred
