Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps with an army in autumn 218 BC, intending to invade Roman Italy. How many war elephants started the crossing — and how many made it to Italy?
Polybius and Livy report about 37 elephants in the original Carthaginian column. Substantially all of them made it across the Alps — the Roman historians' emphasis on the elephants surviving is precisely because their loss would have been the expected outcome. The losses came after the crossing: the brutal first winter in Cisalpine Gaul killed most of them, and only one (the famous Surus, 'the Syrian') was still alive by the time Hannibal moved south against Rome in 217 BC. Hannibal himself continued his Italian campaign for 14 more years before being recalled to defend Carthage.
Read the full facts →Hannibal Barca (247–c. 183 BC) was a Carthaginian general who invaded Italy with elephants across the Alps in 218 BC and won three of the most famous victories in military history against the Roman Republic. After his eventual defeat at Zama in 202 BC he served as Carthaginian chief magistrate, then as advisor to the Seleucid king Antiochus III, before killing himself in exile in Bithynia to avoid Roman capture.
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