Historical-person source survival · Record 4
Hannibal: the person and the accounts that remain
A famous name can survive while the route back to the person is partial, mediated and uneven. This page follows two ancient works through bounded modern reading/index surfaces and keeps the point where our inspection stops visible.
Historical human conventionally called Hannibal Barca
Polybius English reading surface + bounded Greek token check · Nepos Latin
Greek/Roman-mediated and incomplete
The person is not the surviving account
When we read about Hannibal now, whose account are we reading?
These accounts come from different generations. Dickinson College's commentary dates Polybius to about 200–118 BC. Its introduction places Nepos around 100–27 BC, writing more than a century after the Second Punic War. Polybius says he could question people who had been present; Nepos writes from a greater distance.
Polybius describes Hannibal's descent from the Alps into Italy. He also tells readers how he says he obtained some of his information. Our evidence here is his surviving account on a modern reading page, not the interviews, journey or ancient carrier themselves.
Follow the claims back to the passages
- Polybius 3.48.12 — inquiry and inspectionRead the passage. Polybius says he questioned men who had been present, inspected the country and crossed the Alps himself. THR records this as Polybius' claim about his method, not as our direct observation of those events.
- Polybius 3.33.17–18 — reported tabletRead the passage. Polybius says he used troop lists on a bronze tablet at the Lacinian promontory. THR has not observed that ancient carrier.
- Polybius 3.56.3–4 — descent and troop figuresRead the passage. The same reading surface reports the post-crossing force and refers to an inscription or column at Lacinium.
Silenus and Sosylus appear through later testimony
Cornelius Nepos reports that Silenus and Sosylus lived with Hannibal in camp and wrote about the war, and identifies Sosylus as Hannibal's teacher of Greek literature. Read Nepos, chapter 13.
That gives this record a report about people close to Hannibal. It does not give us their own inspected works. Polybius, meanwhile, sharply criticises Sosylus and Chaereas in 3.20.5. That criticism belongs to Polybius; recording it is not adopting his judgement.
Recoverability: the exact DCC chapter-13 webpage has not been established as archived. The related Bret Mulligan Dickinson College Commentaries book edition has institutional recovery routes through Open Book Publishers and the Library of Congress. RELATED EDITION RECOVERABLE ≠ EXACT WEB REPRESENTATION PRESERVED.
Polybius recoverability: Internet Archive / New York Public Library provides a public Volume II carrier for W. R. Paton's Polybius in the printed-edition family named by the Thayer Book III page. Internet Archive currently identifies Volume 2, Harvard University Press / Heinemann and publication date [1922]. THR has not established the exact physical printing/reprint state of the scanned copy or byte/text identity with the Thayer HTML. PRINTED EDITION ROUTE IDENTIFIED ≠ EXACT WEB REPRESENTATION PRESERVED.
The person is not the account that survives of him.
This page follows two surviving accounts and shows where our inspection of them stops. The current reading path is Greek/Roman-mediated. It is not a balanced collection of Carthaginian testimony and not a complete genealogy of the surviving writers.
The translation describes a bronze tablet in 3.33 and an inscription on a column at Lacinium in 3.56.4. This record has not established that they are the same physical object.
The Polybius website presents a 1922 English translation and warns that the page has not yet been proofread. Separately, a Perseus Greek-edition passage-vocabulary index at 3.33.17–18 associates both sections with the lemma Ἀννίβας. That index does not establish the inflected Greek source-text spelling and is not a manuscript inspection or a complete Greek-text audit. The exact Alpine pass, Hannibal's appearance, the complete source genealogy and all surviving fragments remain outside this bounded inspection.
Why preserve this encounter?
HISTORICAL PERSON ≠ SURVIVING BIOGRAPHY
Preserving an account of a person involves more than preserving their name. It means keeping the route back to particular evidence visible, including the point where that route stops. A later reader should be able to distinguish what an author reports, what this record checked and what remains open.
Hannibal was selected as a historical-person/source-survival stress case after the first three public records had tested different preservation problems. The selection-time candidate pool and alternatives were not preserved. That missing history is recorded as missing rather than reconstructed now. Selection does not establish importance, representativeness or entitlement to become record 4.
Hannibal Barca is this record's conventional modern display label. The Nepos Latin passage attests Hannibal; the checked Polybius English surface renders the name as Hannibal. A separate Perseus passage-vocabulary index at 3.33.17–18 associates both sections with lemma Ἀννίβας. That does not establish the inflected Greek source-literal spelling or prove historical identity.
Go back to the evidence
A correction can narrow this account as well as add to it. This record is not a historical oracle, a biography, reader testing, or evidence that THR improves on specialist source criticism.
View basis: record version 0.1.3; aligned 25 September 2026 to cases/hannibal-barca.md@fb3948a1cbf9… and cases/hannibal-barca.json@ae92dde029c0…. Git blob identity establishes bytes, not historical truth. If either source record changes, this human view must be reviewed again before its freshness is assumed.