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Updated: April 30, 2025
Much about eight thousand of the Romans and the allies were slain; and so completely were even the victors satiated with blood and slaughter, that the next day, when Livius the consul received intelligence that the Cisalpine Gauls and Ligurians, who had either not been present at the battle or had made their escape from the carnage, were marching off in one body without a certain leader, without standards, without any discipline or subordination; that if one squadron of horse were sent against them they might be all destroyed, he replied, "Let some survive to bear the news of the enemy's losses and of our valour."
The Ligurians, who were the first of the Italic people to go down to battle with them, hearing their shouts, and understanding what they said, responded by calling out their old national name, which was the same, for the Ligurians also call themselves Ambrones when they refer to their origin.
When voting ceased and silence was obtained, Marcus Servilius, a man of consular rank, who had challenged and slain twenty-three enemies in single combat, spoke as follows: "What a commander Aemilius Paulus must be, you are now best able to judge, seeing with what a disobedient and worthless army he has succeeded in such great exploits; but I am surprised at the people's being proud of the triumphs over the Illyrians and Ligurians, and begrudging itself the sight of the king of Macedon brought alive, and all the glories of Philip and Alexander carried captive to the arms of Rome.
Already 8000 Ligurians, enlisted by Phoenician gold, were ready to unite with Hasdrubal; if he gained the first battle, he might hope that like his brother he should be able to bring the Gauls and perhaps the Etruscans into arms against Rome.
It had been occupied by a powerful colony of Gauls, who, settling themselves along the banks of the Po, from Piedmont to Romagna, carried their arms and diffused their name from the Alps to the Apennine. The Ligurians dwelt on the rocky coast which now forms the republic of Genoa.
He was five times consul, and in his first consulship had the honor of a triumph for the victory he gained over the Ligurians, whom he defeated in a set battle, and drove them to take shelter in the Alps, from whence they never after made any inroad nor depredation upon their neighbors.
The land of the Ligurians and Celts alone could be to Hannibal, what Poland was to Napoleon in his very similar Russian campaigns.
While the consuls supposed that, for that year, they should have no employment of a military kind, a letter was brought from Marcus Cincius, who was commander at Pisae, announcing, that "twenty thousand armed Ligurians, in consequence of a conspiracy of that whole nation, formed in the meetings of their several districts, had first wasted the lands of Luna, and then, passing through the territory of Pisae, had overrun the whole sea-coast."
It was in the spring of 207 B.C. that Hasdrubal, after skilfully disentangling himself from the Roman forces in Spain, and, after a march conducted with great judgment and little loss, through the interior of Gaul and the passes of the Alps, appeared in the country that now is the north of Lombardy, at the head of troops which he had partly brought out of Spain, and partly levied among the Gauls and Ligurians on his way.
His description of the proud old Genoese nobleman, who lives in marble and feeds on scraps, is not unsympathetic, and suggests that the "deceipt of the Ligurians," which Virgil censures in the line Haud Ligurum extremus, dum fallere fata sinebant may possibly have been of this Balderstonian variety. But Smollett had little room in his economy for such vapouring speculations.
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