Through the Etruscan Swamps (March 217)
While the consul was busy in Rome appeasing the gods and raising troops, Hannibal left his winter quarters; and as the consul Flaminius was said to have already arrived at Arretium, though Hannibal is shown a longer but easier way, he takes a less remote route, crossing marshes than the Arno in those days, had flooded more than usual. He makes the Spaniards, the Africans, all the veterans, the strength of his army, march at the head, mixing their baggage with these troops, so that, forced to stop at some point, they do not lack what is necessary; he has the Gauls follow, so that they form the center of the column, and puts the horsemen in the rearguard, then Magon, with Numidians without baggage, to close the march, and especially contain the Gauls, in case where, disgusted by the fatigue and the length of the road - this people lacking energy in the face of such trials - they would disperse or stop. The first soldiers, passing everywhere provided that the guides precede them there, through the holes with steep walls and moving bottom formed by the river, almost engulfed by the mud, and sinking there, follow their signs in spite of everything. But the Gauls could neither stay upright when they slipped, nor get out of the holes; they did not sustain their strength by their energy, nor their energy by hope, some dragging their weary limbs with difficulty, others, when once they had gone to bed, their energy overcome by discouragement, dying here and there also among the mules stretched out; and what overwhelmed them above all were the vigils, which they had already endured for four days and three nights. As, the waters holding everything, the soldiers could find no place where they could stretch out their tired bodies in the dry, they piled up their baggage in the water to lie on them, or else the mules, felled here and there, in heaps, on everything. the way, offered to these men, who were only looking for something that emerged from the water, the necessary bed for a short rest. Hannibal himself, suffering from the eyes due to the variations in temperature of the spring which made alternate the heat and the cold, carried by the only surviving elephant, to be higher above the water, in consequence of the vigils, of the humidity of the nights, the air of the swamps that weighed down his head, and because it was neither the place nor the time to seek treatment, lost an eye.