1While the consul was busy appeasing the gods at Rome and holding the levy, Hannibal, setting out from his winter quarters, since report had it that the consul Flaminius had already reached Arretium, although another route was pointed out to him, longer but otherwise more convenient, makes for the nearer road through the marshes, where the river Arno had in those days flooded more than usual. 3He ordered the Spaniards and Africans and all the strength of his veteran army to go first, with their own baggage mixed in among them, so that, wherever they were forced to halt, they should not lack what they needed; the Gauls to follow, so as to form the middle of the column; the cavalry to go last; and then Mago with the light-armed Numidians to bring up the rear, keeping in check above all the Gauls, if from weariness of the toil and the long march, being a people soft in the face of such things, they should slip away or stop.
5The leading troops, wherever the guides merely led the way, through the very deep and bottomless pools of the river, though almost swallowed by the mud and sinking into it, still followed the standards. 6The Gauls, once they had slipped, could neither hold themselves up nor rise out of the pools, nor did they sustain either their bodies with their spirits or their spirits with hope, some barely dragging their weary limbs, others, once they had sunk down with spirits overcome by weariness, dying here and there among the pack animals, which themselves lay fallen too; 7and most of all, lack of sleep wore them out, endured now for four days and three nights.
8Since, with the waters covering everything, no place could be found where they might lay their weary bodies on dry ground, they lay on top of their packs heaped up in the water, or else heaps of pack animals, which had fallen everywhere along the whole route, gave those who sought only something that stood out of the water the bed they needed for a little rest. 10Hannibal himself, whose eyes were diseased, at first from the spring weather alternating between heat and cold, rode on the elephant which alone had survived, so as to be higher above the water; yet with lack of sleep and the night damp and the marsh air weighing on his head, and because there was neither place nor time for treatment, he loses the sight of one eye.