Stones of Rome IV

Numidian Yellow, or giallo antico

“… [Hannibal] took the Numidians in relays to work at building up the path, so that with great difficulty in three days he managed to get the elephants across, but in a wretched condition from hunger; for the summits of the Alps and the parts near the tops of the passes are all quite treeless and bare owing to the snow lying there continuously both winter and summer, but the slopes half-way up on both sides are grassy and wooded and on the whole inhabitable.”

Polybius, The Histories, Book III, 55.

Numidian yellow repurposed in the “Cosmatesque” floor of San Benedetto in Piscinula, Trastevere

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in idle contemplation of Hannibal crossing the Alps. In 218 BCE did an Alpine shepherd look up and, blinking in bewilderment, witness weary and under-nourished elephants negotiating the mountain passes? Or was our putative shepherd perhaps looking the other way, oblivious to the momentous events unfolding behind him? This scenario always reminds me of Bruegel’s glorious painting of the Fall of Icarus, his legs disappearing beneath the waves as everyday life carries on all around regardless.

A column of Numidian Yellow languishing in the dust of the Domus Flavia on the Palatine Hill.

Two years later, in the heat of early August at Cannae in Puglia, Hannibal defeated the largest Roman army ever assembled. According to Polybius seventy thousand Roman soldiers were killed, if this number is to be believed the second of August of 216 BCE was the bloodiest day in the history of warfare. Today Canne della Battaglia is the name of a motorway service station, which is just the sort of bathos I’m very much here for.