Hannibal, on the other hand, did not meet with all the favor and all the enthusiasm he had anticipated.  Between the Pyrenees and the Alps several peoplets united with him; and several showed coldness, or even hostility.  In his passage of the Alps the mountain tribes harassed him incessantly.  Indeed, in Cisalpine Gaul itself there was great division and hesitation; for Rome had succeeded in inspiring her partisans with confidence and her enemies with fear.  Hannibal was often obliged to resort to force even against the Gauls whose alliance he courted, and to ravage their lands in order to drive them to take up arms.  Nay, at the conclusion of an alliance, and in the very camp of the Carthaginians, the Gauls sometimes hesitated still, and sometimes rose against Hannibal, accused him of ravaging their country, and refused to obey his orders.  However, the delights of victory and of pillage at last brought into full play the Cisalpine Gauls’ natural hatred of Rome.  After Ticinus and Trebia, Hannibal had no more zealous and devoted troops.  At the battle of Lake Trasimene he lost fifteen hundred men, nearly all Gauls; at that of Canine he had thirty thousand of them, forming two thirds of his army; and at the moment of action they cast away their tunics and checkered cloaks (similar to the plaids of the Gals or Scottish Highlanders), and fought naked from the belt upwards, according to their custom when they meant to conquer or die.  Of five thousand five hundred men that the victory of Cannae cost Hannibal, four thousand were Gauls.  All Cisalpine Gaul was moved; enthusiasm was at its height; new bands hurried off to recruit the army of the Carthaginian who, by dint of patience and genius, brought Rome within an ace of destruction, with the assistance almost entirely of the barbarians he had come to seek at her gates, and whom he had at first found so cowed and so vacillating.

When the day of reverses came, and Rome had recovered her ascendency, the Gauls were faithful to Hannibal; and when at length he was forced to return to Africa, the Gallic bands, whether from despair or attachment, followed him thither.  In the year 200 B.C., at the famous battle of Zama, which decided matters between Rome and Carthage, they again formed a third of the Carthaginian army, and showed that they were, in the words of Livy, “inflamed by that innate hatred towards the Romans which is peculiar to their race.”

This was the third period of the struggle between the Gauls and the Romans in Italy.  Rome, well advised by this terrible war of the danger with which she was ever menaced by the Cisalpine Gauls, formed the resolution of no longer restraining them, but of subduing them and conquering their territory.  She spent thirty years (from 200 to 170 B.C.) in the execution of this design, proceeding by means of war, of founding Roman colonies, and of sowing dissension amongst the Gallic peoplets.  In vain did the two principal, the Boians and the Insubrians, endeavor