ver, and also by the
aid of the Brixian Gauls, they defended themselves against the daily
increasing multitude of their enemies.

26. When the account of this sudden disturbance was brought to Rome,
and the senators heard that the Punic had also been increased by a
Gallic war, they order Caius Atilius, the praetor, to carry assistance
to Manlius with one Roman legion and five thousand of the allies,
enrolled in the late levy by the consul: who, without any contest, for
the enemy had retired through fear, arrived at Tanetum. At the same
time Publius Cornelius, a new legion having been levied in the room of
that which was sent with the praetor, setting out from the city with
sixty ships of war, by the coast of Etruria and Liguria, and then the
mountains of the Salyes, arrived at Marseilles, and pitched his camp
at the nearest mouth of the Rhone, (for the stream flows down to the
sea divided into several channels,) scarcely as yet well believing
that Hannibal had crossed the Pyrenaean mountains; whom when he
ascertained to be also meditating the passage of the Rhone, uncertain
in what place he might meet him, his soldiers not yet being
sufficiently recovered from the tossing of the sea, he sends forward,
in the mean time, three hundred chosen horses, with Massilian guides
and Gallic auxiliaries, to explore all the country, and observe the
enemy from a safe distance. Hannibal, the other states being pacified
by fear or bribes, had now come into the territory of the Volcae, a
powerful nation. They, indeed, dwell on both sides of the Rhone: but
doubting that the Carthaginian could be driven from the hither bank,
in order that they might have the river as a defence, having
transported almost all their effects across the Rhone, occupied in
arms the farther bank of the river. Hannibal, by means of presents,
persuades the other inhabitants of the river-side, and some even of
the Volcae themselves, whom their homes had detained, to collect from
every quarter and build ships; and they at the same time themselves
desired that the army should be transported, and their country
relieved, as soon as possible, from the vast multitude of men that
burthened it. A great number, therefore, of ships and boats rudely
formed for the neighbouring passages, were collected together; and the
Gauls, first beginning the plan, hollowed out some new ones from
single trees; and then the soldiers themselves, at once induced by the
plenty of materials an