A milestone on Hannibal's road
Polybius measured Hannibal's march across southern Gaul by Roman milestones, but Hannibal never saw them. They went up about a century after he passed. This is one of them: it gives the name of the general who built the road, his victory title, and a distance, XX, twenty miles to Narbo.
Based on the original, in Narbonne.
Found: the bed of the Rieu de Treilles stream at Pont-de-Treilles (Aude), southern France, found September 1949.
What is written on it
Cn. Domitius Cn. f. Ahenobarbus imperator, and the number XX. Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, son of Gnaeus, hailed imperator by his troops after beating the Gauls in 121 BC, built the Via Domitia from the Alps to the Pyrenees, the first Roman road in Gaul. The stone stood twenty miles from the new Roman colony at Narbo, modern Narbonne. It is the oldest Roman milestone yet found in Gaul.
What a milestone is for
Partly distance. Mostly credit. A Roman milestone tells you how far you have come from a named place, and, before that, whose road you are on. This one names a general. Later milestones name the emperor who paid for the repairs. The roads were built to move armies before they moved anything else.
Where it touches Hannibal
Polybius, writing late in the second century BC, gave the distances of Hannibal's march of 218 BC from Spain to the Rhône, and added that the stretch from Narbo to the river had "now" been measured by the Romans and marked with a stone every eight stades, which is one Roman mile. He was measuring a march through country that had no Roman roads with the Roman road built over it afterwards.
- Polybius 3.39.8: the road from Narbo to the Rhône 'measured by the Romans and marked with milestones at every eighth stade'
- Campardou, 'Un milliaire de Cneus Domitius Ahenobarbus Imperator découvert à Treilles (Aude)', Gallia 7.2 (1949)
- Laurence, The Roads of Roman Italy (1999)
- Picture: made with AI for The Ember Atlas, an imagining, not a record of how it looked.