Professor Josephine Quinn

So Rome sends an embassy to Carthage in 218 to declare war.

Their initial plan is to send a consul called Publius Cornelius Scipio.

He's actually the father of the famous Scipio to fight Hannibal in Spain.

And their idea is they're going to send one consul to Spain and another consul to Africa.

So two consuls.

take the Roman army in two directions and get rid of the whole threat in both directions.

But then what happens is that Hannibal, again, basically decides to kind of call their bluff and he actually decides to invade Italy himself, which they are not expecting.

I didn't expect that at all.

It was great.

He doesn't care, does he?

So he basically has to take his troops and elephant over land from Spain to Italy because Rome essentially controls the sea at this point.

OK, so the real problem with the elephants isn't actually the mountains.

The elephants can kind of manage the mountains.

It's the river.

It's when he has to cross the Rhône in between the Pyrenees and the Alps.

And elephants really don't like crossing water.

So what he has to do is construct a kind of bridge of rafts and then cover it in earth.

So the elephants think that it's land.

But then they leave the female elephants on first, so the other elephants will just follow.

Actually, they do.