Who won the Battle of the Ticinus?
Hannibal won. In the autumn of 218 BC, on the plain by the Ticinus river in northern Italy, his heavy cavalry held the Romans in front while his Numidian horse rode round their flanks. The consul Publius Cornelius Scipio was badly wounded, his cavalry broke, and the Romans fell back across the Ticinus and the Po.1
The Battle of the Ticinus was the first clash between Hannibal and a Roman army in Italy, fought soon after he came down from the Alps. It was a fight between horsemen, not legions, and the Romans lost it. Its fame rests on one moment: a teenager in the Roman ranks who, in the best-known account, rode alone into the enemy to save his wounded father, the consul, and who would beat Hannibal at Zama sixteen years later. This page is part of our guide to the Punic Wars; the story continues with the Battle of the Trebia.2
Why was the Battle of the Ticinus fought?
The Second Punic War began in Spain. Hannibal besieged the city of Saguntum, an ally of Rome, and took it in the eighth month of the siege. Rome sent envoys to Carthage to demand satisfaction, Carthage refused it, and war was declared. Hannibal did not wait in Spain. He crossed the Ebro and the Pyrenees, marched through southern Gaul and led his army over the Alps into Italy.3
Rome had planned to fight the war abroad: one consul, Tiberius Sempronius Longus, to Sicily for an invasion of Africa, the other, Publius Cornelius Scipio, to Spain. Scipio, sailing for Spain, landed near Massilia (Marseille) and reached the crossing of the Rhone three days after Hannibal had left it. He then made the decision that shaped the campaign: he sent his army on to Spain under his brother Gnaeus and sailed back to Italy himself, to take over the troops already in the Po valley and meet Hannibal as he came down from the mountains.4
Hannibal reached the plain of the Po about five months after leaving New Carthage, having spent fifteen days in the Alps. Polybius, quoting the inscription Hannibal later set up at Cape Lacinium, gives his surviving force as 12,000 African and 8,000 Iberian infantry and no more than 6,000 horse. Livy found the figures disputed: the highest estimates he knew ran to 100,000 foot and 20,000 horse, the lowest to 20,000 foot and 6,000 horse.5
Hannibal and the Gauls: why he needed a quick victory
Hannibal's war plan depended on the Gauls of the Po valley. The Boii were already at war with Rome, and the other Gauls beside the Po were watching for a chance to revolt; but Hannibal's army was worn out by the Alps, and the Gauls would not commit themselves to a stranger who had not yet beaten a Roman. While his men recovered, he turned on the Taurini, the nearest tribe, who would not join him, stormed their chief town and put the prisoners to death to frighten the other Gauls. Thomas Arnold put it simply: fear alone held the Gauls back, and at Hannibal's first success in the field they would join him.6
The rest of the Celts of the plain wanted to join him, Polybius writes, but the Roman legions had already moved up and cut most of them off, and some were even made to serve in the Roman ranks. That, in Polybius's account, is why Hannibal decided to strike at once: a victory would show the hesitant tribes which side to choose. De Sanctis reads Scipio's advance the same way, as an attempt to keep the Insubres apart from Hannibal while his army was still weak.7
Before the battle Hannibal staged a lesson for his own men. Captives taken in the Alps were offered a choice: fight one another in single combat, the winners to go free without ransom. They chose to fight, and fought eagerly, while those not chosen looked on with envy. Then Hannibal told his soldiers that this was exactly their own situation: a rich reward and freedom on one side, death on the other, and no road home except victory.8
The Roman side: Scipio's gamble on speed
Hannibal could hardly believe the news that Scipio had already crossed the Po: only days before, the consul had been behind him at the Rhone. In Rome the report that Hannibal was in Italy came as a shock. The Senate ordered Sempronius, at Lilybaeum in Sicily, to abandon the invasion of Africa and bring his army north to defend Italy.9
Scipio believed that a quick blow would keep the Gauls loyal. In Livy's version of his speech he told his men that their cavalry had beaten the enemy's at the Rhone, that Hannibal had slipped away there rather than fight, and that he had lost two thirds of his infantry and cavalry in the Alps. Mommsen judged that Scipio, with an army considerably smaller and very weak in cavalry, had the hard task of stopping a stronger enemy and holding down a spreading Gallic revolt at the same time.10
The forces at the Ticinus
No ancient writer gives the size of either force in the battle itself. Scipio took command of the army that the praetors Lucius Manlius and Gaius Atilius had been leading against the Boii, and sent the praetors back to Rome. De Sanctis counts it as two legions with their allies, and Smith's Dictionary puts the praetors' army at 25,000 men.11
Only part of each army fought. Each general pushed forward with his cavalry, Scipio with his light-armed javelin men as well, to reconnoiter the other's position and numbers. The Carthaginians had more horsemen, and better ones. Dodge estimates Scipio's mounted force at about 2,000 Roman and allied cavalry with some Gallic horse, against perhaps 6,000 under Hannibal.12
How was the Battle of the Ticinus fought?
Scipio crossed the Po, threw a bridge over the Ticinus and led his army across into the land of the Insubres. Both armies then marched along the great river, the Romans with the stream on their left and the Carthaginians with it on their right. On the second day each learned from scouts that the other was near, and halted. On the third, each general rode out with his horsemen to see the enemy for himself.13
Scipio put his javelin men and his Gallic horse in front and his Roman and allied cavalry behind them. Hannibal put his bridled heavy cavalry in the center and his Numidians on both wings, ready to take the Romans in the flank.14
The Carthaginians charged so fast that, in Livy's account, the Roman javelin men fled back through the gaps between their own squadrons almost as soon as the shout went up; Dodge and Church let them throw a volley first. The two cavalry lines met head on and fought for a long time on even terms. Many riders dismounted or were thrown, and the fight became a confused struggle of men on horseback and on foot.15
The Numidians decided it. Riding round both Roman flanks, they fell on the javelin men who had taken refuge behind the cavalry and rode them down, then attacked the Roman horse from behind. The front ranks, already engaged with the heavy cavalry, broke and fled. Most scattered in every direction; a small group closed round the consul, who had been badly wounded.16
Who saved Scipio at the Ticinus? The son and the Ligurian slave
The most famous version comes from Polybius, who heard it from Gaius Laelius, the friend of the younger Scipio from boyhood. The boy was seventeen and on his first campaign. His father had given him a troop of picked horsemen to keep him safe. When he saw the consul wounded and surrounded with only two or three riders beside him, he urged his troop to go to the rescue; when they hung back, he charged the enemy alone. The others had to follow, the enemy gave way, and the consul was the first to hail his son as his savior in front of the whole army. Polybius tells the story not in his account of the battle but in book 10, as a proof of the young man's character.17
Livy tells the same story more briefly: the consul's wound and danger were warded off by his son, then just coming of age. But he adds that the historian Coelius Antipater gave the credit to a slave of Ligurian birth. Livy preferred the version about the son, he says, because most writers gave it and it was the common report. Smith's Dictionary repeats both versions.18
The later tradition sided with the son. Zonaras, summarizing Cassius Dio, says the consul would have been killed if his son, only seventeen, had not come to help him, and the ancient summary of Livy's book 21 records only the son. Valerius Maximus turned the rescue into a model of devotion to one's parents.19
Modern historians have mostly accepted it, though not all of them. Mommsen and Church tell the rescue as fact; Thomas Arnold, writing in the early 1840s, gave the consul's life instead, “it is said”, to the courage of the Ligurian slave. Gaetano De Sanctis called the evidence weighty and precise but noted that the German scholar Eduard Wölfflin had questioned it, and suggested that the Ligurian slave may go back to Silenus, the Greek historian who marched with Hannibal, writing at a time when the story of the son was not known in the Carthaginian camp, or perhaps not yet invented.20
The ancient writers did not even agree which battle it was. Appian places the consul's wounding and rescue at the Trebia, and Pliny the Elder has the young Scipio refuse the civic crown for saving his father at the battle of the Trebia. Dániel Kozák notes that some ancient accounts did not separate the Ticinus from the Trebia at all.21
How many died at the Battle of the Ticinus?
Nobody knows. Polybius says only that the Roman front ranks lost many men but inflicted still heavier losses on the Carthaginians before the Numidians reached their rear; Dodge points out that he gives no figures. The horsemen round the consul brought him off the field.22
One loss is recorded. During the retreat about 600 Romans left behind at a bridge were cut off and taken prisoner. Polybius, followed by Thomas Arnold, puts them at the bridge over the Ticinus; Livy, followed by Mommsen, at the raft bridge over the Po.23
What happened after the Battle of the Ticinus?
Scipio saw at once that the open plain belonged to Hannibal's cavalry. That night he broke camp, recrossed the Ticinus, had the bridge cut behind him, and took his army back over the Po to the fortified town of Placentia (Piacenza). The retreat saved the legions, which Hannibal had expected to catch.24
Hannibal followed as far as the Ticinus bridge, then turned up the Po to find a crossing. After two days' march he bridged the river with boats. Polybius says he left Hasdrubal to bring the army over. In Livy, Mago goes ahead with the light Spanish cavalry while Hannibal brings the infantry across himself, and Livy rejects as impossible Coelius's tale that Mago swam the Po with the cavalry while the elephants broke the current upstream; Zonaras repeats a version of that tale.25
The victory did what Hannibal wanted. The Gauls of the region, encouraged by it, came in crowds to his camp and sent envoys. Hannibal drew up his army in front of Placentia and offered battle; Scipio refused it.26
Soon afterward the Gauls serving in the Roman army rose in the night, killed the Romans camped nearest them and the guards at the gates, and went over to Hannibal: about 2,000 foot and 200 horse. Fearing a general Gallic revolt, Scipio moved his camp to the hills by the river Trebia, where his colleague Sempronius joined him. In December their combined army attacked Hannibal and was destroyed at the Battle of the Trebia.27
Who won the Battle of the Ticinus, and why did it matter?
Carthage won, but it was a small affair. Dodge thought it scarcely rose to the size of a battle, and Thomas Arnold thought that calling it a battle at all was an exaggeration. The legions never came into action, and Scipio got them back across the Po.28
Its effects were larger than its size. It showed that the Carthaginian cavalry was superior and that, with their own horse crippled, the Romans could not hold the open plain; Mommsen says the clash taught Scipio the strength of the enemy and the mistake of standing with a weaker army in the plain with a river at his back. It brought the Gauls over to Hannibal and opened the road to the Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae.29
For the Romans it was the first and least severe of four defeats in a row, and it was remembered less for the fighting than for the rescue. Kozák shows how the poet Silius Italicus, writing in the first century AD, turned it into a long epic episode in which the young Scipio carries his wounded father off the field on his shoulders, like Aeneas carrying Anchises out of Troy. Weavers and engravers kept the scene alive, as the images on this page show; the etching made in 1817 by the Roman artist Bartolomeo Pinelli calls the boy “only seventeen”.30
Where and when was the Battle of the Ticinus fought?
The river is the Ticinus, today's Ticino, which runs south from Lake Maggiore to join the Po below Pavia. The ancient writers disagree on where the fight took place, and some called it the battle of the Po, or of Clastidium, after the nearest Roman fortress, which in fact lay on the other bank of the Po. Cornelius Nepos has Hannibal fight Scipio at the Po for Clastidium, a battle his translator J. S. Watson found in no other author. In Livy the Romans, having crossed both the Po and the Ticinus, camp five miles from a place called Victumulae, where Hannibal lay.31
Modern historians have drawn different conclusions. De Sanctis placed the fight west of the Ticino, between it and the Sesia in the plain of the Lomellina, perhaps near Lomello, and rejected the attempt to put it near the later Victumulae between Biella and Ivrea. Mommsen also put it between the Ticino and the Sesia, but near Vercelli. Dodge argued instead for the east bank of the Ticinus, about 25 miles up from the Po. De Sanctis himself admitted that the exact spot cannot be fixed with any precision.32
No ancient source gives the date either. Kozák dates the battle to November 218 BC and Dodge to the middle of that month. De Sanctis, working from Scipio's journey back from the Rhone and the day counts Polybius gives for the campaign, reached the end of September: setting Scipio's arrival at the Ticinus on 25 September only “for convenience of calculation”, he put the clash on the 28th. What is certain is the order of events: the Ticinus came first, in the autumn, and the Trebia followed in December.33
