rray, if the quality and discipline
of the troops is taken into account, which Europe had yet seen. Of this
great force, not more than a fourth part were Carthaginian soldiers; so
mightily had the military force of Hannibal increased with the
prosperous issue of his Peninsular campaigns.

Had the Carthaginian general succeeded in reaching the banks of the
Tiber with the half even of this force, the fate of Rome was sealed, and
the glories of the Capitol were extinguished for ever. But he had
innumerable difficulties to contend with--physical, warlike, and
moral--before he reached the Italian plains. His march from the Ebro to
the Po was a continued combat. The mountain tribes of Catalonia,
celebrated in every age for their obstinate and persisting hostility,
were then firm in the Roman interest. The mountain strength of the
Pyrenees; the rapid currents of the Rhone; the cruel warfare, and yet
more dangerous peace of the Gauls; the desperate valour of the
inhabitants of the Alps; the inclemency of the weather on their snowy
summits, all required to be overcome, and they thinned his ranks more
than all the swords of the legions. Instead of ninety thousand foot, and
twelve thousand horse, with which he broke up from Saguntum, he brought
only twenty thousand infantry, and six thousand horse to the fields of
Piedmont. No less than seventy-six thousand men had been lost or left to
preserve the communications, since they left the Valencian plains. So
slender was the force with which this great commander commenced, on its
own territory, the conflict with a power which ere three years had
elapsed, carried on the war with fourteen legions, numbering an hundred
and seventy thousand combatants, between the auxiliaries and Roman
soldiers. It is in the magnitude of this disproportion, and the
extremely small amount of the reinforcement which he received from home
during the next fifteen years that the war lasted, that the decisive
proof of the marvellous capacity of the Carthaginian general is to be
found. It is a similar disproportion which has marked the campaigns of
Napoleon in Italy in 1796, and in France in 1814, with immortality.

The first necessity was to augment his numbers, and fill up the wide
chasm in his ranks, by fresh enrolments in the territory in which he had
entered. The warlike habits and predatory dispositions of the Cisalpine
Gauls afforded the means of obtaining this necessary succour. The
victory over the Roma