672 HannibaVs Passage over the Alps. of two hypotheses different from that which now enjoys the monopoly of public favour. One of these we are tempted to mention, rather by its singularity, than by its intrinsic merit, or by the force of the arguments employed in supporting it. The other deserves to be reconsidered, because it has been very lately defended with great ability by a writer whose opinion on the subject carries with it high authority, and in a work dedicated to the illustration of ancient geography. We must presume the reader to be sufficiently familiar with the principal points of the controversy to dispense with a great deal of preliminary explanation which may be found in a multitude of books, and which would detain us from the essential features of the question on which alone we have here room to dwell. The first of the two hypotheses we are about to consider was proposed, we believe for the first time, in the Wiener Jahrhuecher for 1823, by a writer named Arneth, who at the same time examines at considerable length the opinions and arguments of the principal authors who had discussed the question before him. He recognizes the authority of Polybius as supreme in this inquiry, but contends that we cannot rely on the numbers which express the distances in stadia according to the present text. He quotes with approbation the remarks of the Oxford writer, who to get rid of the objection raised by Strabo'^s enumeration of the passes of the Alps according to Polybius, supposes, as Cluverius had done before, that the words Yiv !Ai/i///3a9 SirjXOev^ which follow the mention of the pass ^Lci Tavpipcov^ belong not to Polybius but to Strabo, and only express an opinion of the latter, which he had probably adopted from Livy. But he rejects the argument which De L.UC draws from the later Roman roads across the Alps as fallacious. He observes that De Luc himself appears to acknowledge its weakness, when he admits that most of these roads were made in the time of the emperors. What inference, he asks, can be drawn, as to an event about the circumstances of which authors disagreed even at the time, from the exist- ence of roads made some centuries later. The Edinburgh Heviewer rests his whole argument on this ground: for after mentioning the four roads which Strabo enumerates from Poly- bius, though without noticing the existence of the words, tyV
