To browse Academia. Careful study of 1 Polybius' and Livy's narrative methods in their accounts, and 2 their limited but crucial details of place and tribal names, and chronology--including Livy's misplaced reference to the river Durance--enables the likeliest route taken by Hannibal to cross the Alps into Italy to be identified at last. Hannibal's most famous achievement is his crossing of the Alps. Two major historical sources exist for this event, Polybius and Livy.
However, reconstruction of the crossing, and indeed any topic concerning the history of the Punic Wars itself, is contentious, due to the discrepancies and contradictions between the available sources. This paper examines significant conflicts between the accounts of Polybius and Pliny. Some of the key environmental features include a gorge along the approach route, bivouac area near the summit of the Alps, and a blocking rockfall on the lee side of the range, amongst others.
Strange that Kuhle and Kuhle , provide a rebuttal of the Traversette Pass blocking rockfall for location see Fig They present various quibbles over various translations of Polybius by no end of authors over the last two millennia, excellent photographs of various passes, but with the Traversette Col and major landforms misplaced on Fig. Yet, it is clear from any author translating Polybius' Histories that Polybius did indeed see the rockfall mentioned in all ancient texts and he clearly understood the deposit to be a substantial mass, a two-tier event, that is, older and younger deposits superimposed on one another.
Kuhle and Kuhle quote Walbank as a prime author who disputed translations of Polybius Scott-Kilvert, etc. What then, if one were to go to Paton revised by Walbank and Habicht , only to find that the translation of the rockfall encounter runs parallel with Scott-Kilvert's translation, the one favored by Mahaney , The Carthaginian general Hannibal astounded the ancient world when he crossed the Alps during the Second Punic War with not only an army but a contingent of 37 African war elephants to wage war on the Roman Republic.
His achievement secured him a place in the history books as one of the greatest military minds ever born. Since that time, scholars have poured over descriptions of the event by the Greek historian Polybius and Roman historian Livy in an effort to identify the route used by the Carthaginians and their Celtic allies. In April of geomorphologist Bill Mahaney of York University in Toronto, Canada announced that he and his colleagues had recovered new evidence to support their claim that Hannibal had used a southerly course across the Col de la Traversette.
