When the account of this sudden disturbance was brought to Rome, and the senators
heard that the Punic had also been increased by a Gallic war, they order Caius
Atilius, the praetor, to carry assistance to Manlius with one Roman legion and
five thousand of the allies, enrolled in the late levy by the consul: who, without
any contest, for the enemy had retired through fear, arrived at Tanetum. At
the same time Publius Cornelius, a new legion having been levied in the room
of that which was sent with the praetor, setting out from the city with sixty
ships of war, by the coast of Etruria and Liguria, and then the mountains of
the Salyes, arrived at Marseilles, and pitched his camp at the nearest mouth
of the Rhone, (for the stream flows down to the sea divided into several channels,)
scarcely as yet well believing that Hannibal had crossed the Pyrenaean mountains;
whom when he ascertained to be also meditating the passage of the Rhone, uncertain
in what place he might meet him, his soldiers not yet being sufficiently recovered
from the tossing of the sea, he sends forward, in the mean time, three hundred
chosen horses, with Massilian guides and Gallic auxiliaries, to explore all
the country, and observe the enemy from a safe distance. Hannibal, the other
states being pacified by fear or bribes, had now come into the territory of
the Volcae, a powerful nation. They, indeed, dwell on both sides of the Rhone:
but doubting that the Carthaginian could be driven from the hither bank, in
order that they might have the river as a defence, having transported almost
all their effects across the Rhone, occupied in arms the farther bank of the
river. Hannibal, by means of presents, persuades the other inhabitants of the
river-side, and some even of the Volcae themselves, whom their homes had detained,
to collect from every quarter and build ships; and they at the same time themselves
desired that the army should be transported, and their country relieved, as
soon as possible, from the vast multitude of men that burthened it. A great
number, therefore, of ships and boats rudely formed for the neighbouring passages,
were collected together; and the Gauls, first beginning the plan, hollowed out
some new ones from single trees; and then the soldiers themselves, at once induced
by the plenty of materials and the easiness of the work, hastily formed shapeless
hulks, in which they could transport themselves and their baggage, caring about
nothing else, provided they could float and contain their burthen.
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