The Roman consul Sempronius went with a hundred and sixty quinqueremes to Africa, and already dreamed of a siege of Carthage; but before he reached it, events of quite a different kind had come to pass. Hannibal, who had rested himself during the winter, now crossed the Ebro with ninety thousand infantry and twelve thousand horse (according to Polybius, who took it from the tablet of Hannibal,--a number which the writer certainly meant to be correct; yet one ought perhaps to suppose it to be a slip of the pen, so as to read seventy thousand instead of ninety). The tribes beyond the Ebro were allies of the Romans, though not subject to them, and were therefore hostile to the Carthaginians: they made a stout resistance; but Hannibal quickly hastened on and took their strongholds, at the cost, however, of many men’s lives. He in all likelihood set out in May, as from Polybius it is pretty certain that he reached Italy in the middle of October. There is no doubt but that, if he could have started a month sooner, his expedition would have been far from being as dangerous as it was; yet the obstacles which had given rise to this delay, must have been insurmountable. He was leagued with those Gauls in Lombardy, who four years before had been subjected and cruelly treated by the Romans: they had promised him to put the whole of their force at his disposal. The Romans, however, had now seen through his plan. A year before, they had begun to build Placentia and Cremona; colonists were sent thither in great haste, and the fortifications completed before the beginning of the campaign; so that neither Hannibal nor the Gauls were able to take these places. Polybius rebukes the writers of his day, who spoke of Hannibal’s undertaking as of a thing that had never happened before, but had sprung from a desire of doing some thing which was unheard of, and never could be carried through without the co-operation of unearthly powers. The story that a demon had showed Hannibal the way, is in Livy changed into a dream of surpassing beauty, as if a being more than human were directing Hannibal not to look backward, but only forward; but the writers of those times gave it as an actual part of their narrative.