Did Hannibal really cross the Alps with elephants?

The march

Hannibal was the general of Carthage, the great sea power of North Africa, in today’s Tunisia. As a boy of nine he had sworn at an altar never to be Rome’s friend. In 219 BC he besieged the Spanish town of Saguntum, an ally of Rome, and started the Second Punic War. Then, instead of waiting for Rome to come to him, he decided to take the war to Italy, overland.

In the spring of 218 BC he marched out of New Carthage, today’s Cartagena, with perhaps 90,000 men, thousands of horses and 37 elephants. Across the Ebro, over the Pyrenees into what is now France, and on to the broad Rhône.

How do you get an elephant across a river?

The Greek historian Polybius, who says he questioned men who were there and walked the route himself, describes the answer. Hannibal’s engineers built large rafts, lashed them together and covered them with earth, so the water looked like solid ground. Female elephants were led on first, and the others followed. A few panicked and fell in, but they made it across.

Fifteen days in the Alps

The crossing of the Alps took about fifteen days, late in the season. Mountain tribes rolled boulders onto the column. Fresh snow hid old ice, and horses and pack animals skidded into the gorges. Livy claims Hannibal split a blocking rock by heating it with fire and pouring sour wine on it; that may be legend. Near the top, he showed his freezing army the plains of Italy below. He came down with about 26,000 men left.

Which pass did he use? Nobody knows for sure. Scholars favor the Little Saint Bernard, the Mont Cenis, the Col de Clapier or the high Col de la Traversette, where scientists found a churned layer of ancient horse dung. All lie on today’s border between France and Italy.

What happened to the elephants

The elephants fought at the river Trebia in December 218 BC, where Hannibal crushed a Roman army. The winter that followed killed almost all of them. Polybius says only one survived. Livy later describes Hannibal himself riding the last elephant through the flooded marshes of the Arno, sick with an eye infection that cost him the sight of one eye.

They were probably North African forest elephants, a smaller kind that is now extinct. Pliny, quoting Cato, remembers the bravest elephant in the Carthaginian army by name: Surus, “the Syrian,” which has led some to think he was an Asian elephant.

The elephants made the legend, but they were not what won. Hannibal went on to destroy Roman armies at Lake Trasimene and Cannae and stayed in Italy for fifteen years. Rome refused to break, and in 202 BC, at Zama, it finally beat him, after Scipio left lanes in his lines for Hannibal’s new elephants to run harmlessly through.