24. Varro is quoted by Servius (AD ÆNEIDEM, x. 13) as mentioning five passes across the Alps: one alongside the sea, through the territory of the Ligures; a second, which Hannibal crossed; a third, by which Pompey went to Spain; a fourth, by which Hasdrubal came into Italy; and a fifth in the Graian Alps--presumably the Little St Bernard: see paragraph 58. This agrees with Strabo’s quotation from Polybios in making Hannibal cross the next pass to the coast-road; and if it were Varro’s own statement at first hand, it would have high authority. But similar interpolations may be suspected here, as it makes Hannibal and Hasdrubal cross different passes, whereas Livy (xxvii. 39) and Appian (HANNIBAL, 52) agree in saying that Hasdrubal crossed the same pass that Hannibal had crossed twelve years before. 25. Pompey crossed another pass. He wrote a letter to the Senate after he had gone to Spain--the letter has been preserved by Sallust, and is printed in most editions of his works--and in this letter Pompey says that he has made a new road across the Alps, taking another and more convenient route than Hannibal’s, _iter aliud atque Hannibal, nobis opportunius_. In mentioning the making of this road Appian says (DE BELLIS CIVILIBUS, i. 109) that it passed near the sources of the Rhone and the Po, which were not far apart. Strabo (iv. 6. 5) calls them the sources of two tributaries of the Rhone and the Po, namely, the Durance and the Dora; and this is enough to show that Pompey’s pass was Mont Genèvre. 26. This was in 76 B.C., therefore in Varro’s lifetime, but after Polybios was dead, and a few years before Strabo and Livy were born. As already mentioned in paragraph 5, Strabo says (iv. 1. 3) that the Roman road from Spain crossed the Rhone at Tarascon and bifurcated there, one branch going through Aix to Antibes on the Mediterranean coast, and the other going through Cavaillon and along the Durance to “the beginning of the ascent of the Alps,” 63 Roman miles from Tarascon, thence to Embrun, 99 miles further on, and thence through the Briançon district in 71 miles to Césanne, the first town in Italy. The road must thus have crossed the Alps by Mont Genèvre, and presumably was Pompey’s.