63. The northern passes would best suit Hasdrubal, coming from the Bay of Biscay and Auvergne, whereas the southern passes would be better for Hannibal, coming from the Mediterranean coast. Hasdrubal might gain by going to a southern pass that Hannibal had opened up, but Hannibal would gain nothing by going to a northern pass. And if he went up the Rhone to Lyons, as Livy and Silius say, there is no sense in what Polybios says about the distance marched. To reach Lyons he would have to average 25 Roman miles a day instead of his usual 10 miles--see paragraph 12--and he would then have to march 100 Roman miles along the Rhone to the ascent of the Alps--see paragraph 29--and this 100 miles would bring him to Geneva, whereas the distance is only 50 Roman miles to Yenne, where he presumably would quit the Rhone if he were making for the Little St Bernard or Mont Cenis. 64. There is no difficulty about the distance if the river was the Durance, as Livy states explicitly in xxi. 32 and certainly implies in xxi. 31. Excepting his mention of the Saône in xxi. 31, his statements are consistent with the statements of Polybios as to Hannibal’s route--he only supplements Polybios by quoting some one else about the Vocontii and other tribes and the crossing of the Durance. No doubt, Polybios says nothing of Hannibal’s crossing any river but the Rhone; but he implies that Hannibal crossed a tributary of it--see paragraph 35. If the tributary was the Durance, he must have crossed it a second time a good deal further up, if Livy’s statement is correct. Polybios might ignore a second crossing just as he ignores the first, but Livy represents this second crossing as an operation of great difficulty, the river being then swollen by rain. His description, however, seems inapplicable to the Durance so far up--see paragraph 42--and I suspect that he was copying a description of the Durance much further down its course. * * * * * 65. To recapitulate all this. The main difficulty is that Polybios speaks of a tributary of the Rhone as the Scôras, and no other ancient author speaks of any river of that name. The river Saône had two names, Saucona and Arar--see paragraph 17--and I conjecture that the river Durance also had two names, Druentia and Scôras, and that the name of Scôras was current when Polybios wrote, but obsolete when Livy wrote. My reasons are:-- While Polybios (iii. 50. 1) merely says “the river,” Livy (xxi. 32) says “the Durance”; and in this part of his narrative he is copying Polybios almost word for word. Polybios gives distances for Hannibal’s march along the river which are curiously like the distances that Strabo gives for the Roman road along the Durance from Tarascon to the Alps: see paragraph 29.