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After these came the Salluvians, who fix themselves near the ancient canton of the Ligurians called Lævi, inhabiting the banks of the Ticinus.
The Falisci rebel; are subdued in six days. Origin of the second Punic war. Hannibal's character. In violation of a treaty, he passes the Iberus. Besieges Saguntum, and at length takes it. The Romans send ambassadors to Carthage; declare war. Hannibal crosses the Pyrenees: makes his way through Gaul; then crosses the Alps; defeats the Romans at the Ticinus. The Romans again defeated at the Trebia.
On the following night, therefore, the soldiers being ordered to prepare their baggage in silence, the camp broke up from the Ticinus, and they hastened to the Po, in order that the rafts by which the consul had formed a bridge over the river, being not yet loosened, he might lead his forces across without disturbance or pursuit of the enemy.
From the Ticinus they floated, we may imagine, into the Po, and thence down the Po into the Adriatic Sea, where they drifted about upon the waste of waters till they were at last, one after another, driven by storms upon the sandy shores. Hannibal pursues the Romans. He takes some prisoners. Revolt of some Gauls from the Romans. Hannibal crosses the river. Dismay of the Romans.
One consul having been defeated at the Ticinus, the other having been recalled from Sicily, and now both consuls and their two consular armies having been vanquished, what other commanders, what other legions were there to be sent for?
If on the other hand the eyes of the senate turned to the young, talented, and experienced officer, who had brilliantly distinguished himself in the hotly- contested days on the Ticinus and at Cannae, but who still had not the rank requisite for his coming forward as the successor of men who had been praetors and consuls, it was very natural to adopt this course, which compelled the people out of good nature to admit the only candidate notwithstanding his defective qualification, and which could not but bring both him and the Spanish expedition, which was doubtless very unpopular, into favour with the multitude.
P. Cornelius Scipio, Africanus Major, was the son of that P. Cornelius Scipio who was defeated by Hannibal at the Ticinus. If it be true that at the age of seventeen Scipio fought in this battle, and rescued his wounded father, he must have been born in B.C. 235. Here the chief command of the remaining troops was unanimously entrusted to him and another.
There were those who missed the pomp of a public funeral, and compared with this the superior honors and magnificence displayed by Augustus in that of Drusus, the father of Germanicus; observing, "that he himself had traveled, in the depth of winter, as far as Ticinus, and, continuing by the corpse, had with it entered the city; around his bier were crowded the images of the Claudii and Julii; he was mourned in the forum; his encomium pronounced on the rostra; all the honors invented by our ancestors, or added by their posterity, were heaped upon him.
The violence of its first assault burst, with a mighty sound, between the Po and the Ticinus. There the army under Scipio was routed; and the general himself, being wounded, would have fallen into the hands of the enemy, had not his son, then quite a boy, covered his father with his shield, and rescued him from death.
One of the noblest characters in old Roman history is the first Scipio Africanus, and his first appearance is in a most pleasing light, at the battle of the River Ticinus, B.C. 219, when the Carthaginians, under Hannibal, had just completed their wonderful march across the Alps, and surprised the Romans in Italy itself.
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