Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 61406-h.htm or 61406-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61406/61406-h/61406-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61406/61406-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/hannibalcrossesa00torruoft HANNIBAL CROSSES THE ALPS Cambridge University Press London: Fetter Lane New York The Macmillan Co. Bombay, Calcutta and Madras Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Toronto The Macmillan Co. of Canada, Ltd. Tokyo Maruzen-Kabushiki-Kaisha All rights reserved HANNIBAL CROSSES THE ALPS by CECIL TORR, M.A. [Illustration] Cambridge: at the University Press MCMXXIV Printed in Great Britain PREFACE I have heard this question discussed ever since I was a child, but have never yet written anything about it except in my _Small Talk at Wreyland_. In the First Series, page 75, I was talking about travelling on the Continent, and I said: “Plenty of people went to Switzerland at the time when I first went--1869--far more than when my father went there thirty years before, but nothing like the crowds that go there now. They kept more to peaks and passes then; and they were always talking of Hannibal’s passage of the Alps. Junius was talked out: Tichborne and Dreyfus were yet to come; and Hannibal filled the gap. I used to hear them at home as well as there; and they all had their pet routes for Hannibal--Col d’Argentière, Mont Genèvre, Mont Cenis, Little Mont Cenis, Little St Bernard and Great St Bernard, and even Simplon and St Gothard. In 1871 I went looking for traces of the vinegar on the Great St Bernard. My father upheld the Cenis routes as the only passes from which you can look down upon the plains of Italy. I doubt if Hannibal did look down. I think he may have shown his men their line of march upon a map, just as Aristagoras used a map to show the Spartans their line of march 282 years earlier.” I wrote Anaxagoras by mistake for Aristagoras, and passed it in the proofs; and it was printed in the first impression of the First Series, though corrected in the second impression. I mentioned my mistake in the Second Series, page 102, and this and other instances led me on to say: