Comment by Archelaos

9 days ago

Quite unlikely. For an army on the move, especially one that had to cover such a long distance, a considerable portion of the troops was assigned to procure provisions anyway.

Bret C. Devereaux has written a series of three blog posts on the topic of pre-modern army logistics that explains that in detail. See: https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...

Anything in particular in there, that says rather wait for a mountain pass to become unpassable, than leave some meat behind?

(I don't claim this is what happened, I claim a army sometimes has other needs and might have already all the food it can carry)