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Hannibal’s brush with the cryosphere

Amazingly, the Romans managed to create an empire that lasted 500 years without having a word for glacier. Amazing to me as a glaciologist, that is. I can see that there would not be much call for such a word in ancient Greek – all those sun-drenched islands – but the Romans needed to cross the Alps regularly, and on one vividly-recorded occasion to cope with Hannibal and his elephants.

A few articles ago, I was able to trace the word glacier back to 1332 on the strength of documentary evidence, and more conjecturally to some date in the post-Roman period when some unknown speaker of Franco-provencal first uttered a word from which our modern form could have descended.

The notional Latin word ancestral to French glacier is glaciarius or glaciarium, but its first known appearance was in London in the 1870s, when an entrepreneur used it for his skating rink. The name didn’t take, as we know. The Oxford English Dictionary’s next quotation is about the closure of the Southport Glaciarium in 1889.

The closest thing to a description of a glacier in writings preserved from antiquity is Polybius’ account of the crossing of the Alps by the Carthaginian general Hannibal in September 218 BC ( Histories, III, 55). He wrote in Greek, some 70 years after the event, but he emphasized that his account was based on interviews with participants. He says of Hannibal’s descent on the eastern side “The new snow which had fallen on the top of the old snow remaining since the previous winter was itself yielding, both owing to its softness, being a fresh fall, and because it was not yet very deep, but when they had trodden through it and set foot on the congealed snow beneath it, they no longer sunk in it, but slid along it with both feet, as happens to those who walk on ground with a coat of mud on it.” This is the Loeb translation. The verb translated by “congealed”, sunestekuian, might be better rendered as “compacted”.

Evidence of absence is always harder to find than absence of evidence. It appears that, although they had words like glacies, ice, and glaciare, to freeze, the Romans simply did not have in their minds the idea of a glacier. One possibility, of course, is that Hannibal and his elephants were just slithering down a steep snow-covered slope. Perhaps he had more sense, assuming he had the choice, than to march his army onto a glacier. We will never know the facts, I suppose.

Some of the possible solutions, notably my not knowing enough Latin or Greek, are very plausible. Another plausible answer is that Hannibal travelled through a pass that was not glacierized. Polybius is not very specific about which valley Hannibal exploited, and two thousand years of follow-up investigation have failed to identify it. A good bet seems to be the route from Gap to Turin via Briançon, the Col du Montgenèvre and Susa, and he could have gone that way without coming across any glaciers. There are several other candidates, though.

But there is something here that I really do not understand. How could Polybius, who writes proudly of how he made the passage of the Alps so as to see for himself the terrain he was immortalizing, not have noticed the weird whitish things hanging from the ridges and creeping down the valleys? Surely the local inhabitants, if they had a word for them either in Latin or, more probably, a Celtic language akin to modern Breton and Welsh, would have given him the word? And in later centuries the Alps were well inside the boundaries of the larger Roman empire. Apparently neither politics nor trade nor even curiosity provoked the Romans into inventing the word glaciarium or finding an equivalent.

Perhaps ancient history is like palaeoclimatology, a subject about which I am slightly less ignorant. If nearly all of the evidence has disappeared irretrievably, is it a waste of time to wonder about Hannibal and glaciers, or about Roman-era climate and glaciers? Somehow I cannot manage to think so.

Posted by Graham Cogley on November 2, 2009 3:00 PM | Permalink