CHAPTER ONE
I
FOURTEEN KILOMETRES NORTH of Rome where the river Tiber winds and turns through a small plain, it is joined by a tiny tributary – no more than a brook – called the Allia. These days it is a hard spot to notice. Beyond the Tiber trucks roar down the A1 motorway and high-speed trains hurry north to Florence and Milan. A dose of imagination – and probably a set of earplugs, too – is required to see this for what it once was: a battlefield. Here, in the year 387 BC on the 18th of July, a day the Romans would long consider unlucky, the full army of the Roman Republic, of between six and a half and nine thousand men, drew up to fight. Before them advanced an army of Gauls.
The Romans would have looked more impressive. Their soldiers were in formation and equipped with metal helmets, armour, long spears and large round shields. They used tactics invented by the Greeks, in which shields and spears formed a formidable barrier. As the enemy struggled to break through, the Romans would strike low with their spears, jabbing at legs, stomachs and groins, and then stab from up high, at necks and faces. Warfare two and a half thousand years ago was brutally up close.
By comparison, the Gauls were an undisciplined horde. Few, if any, women and children would have held back to watch the battle. This was not a tribe on the move but a war band looking for trouble, glory and treasure. Like any wandering army of this time its warriors would have stunk and been infested with lice. Though little can be said with absolute certainty about this early period, we can surmise a good deal about them. Some would have been on foot, some on horseback and others would have ridden two-man chariots that could whisk them to a key part of the battlefield. They would have been armed with small rectangular shields, swords and spears, and worn finely crafted helmets. They would have had long hair, moustaches and worn torques around their necks. Yet more noticeable was what they were not wearing. While some would have been clothed, others probably wore nothing but a belt or cloak. Later sources confirm that Gauls sometimes fought naked as they believed that this would make them more terrifying to the enemy.
Finally, they would have been confident. At this moment Celtic-speaking Gauls dominated Europe. To get an idea of the extent of their territories one has only to look to regions named Galicia, meaning land of the Gauls. One Galicia can be found in north-western Spain, a second in the Ukraine and a third in Turkey. And, of course, there is Wales, whose French name is the same again: Pays des Galles. During the two centuries before the battle on the Allia, Gallic peoples had seized northern Italy’s Po valley from the Etruscans. Around 391 BC one of these peoples, the Senones, who had settled along Italy’s Adriatic coast close to the modern seaside resort of Rimini – less than 200 kilometres from Rome – crossed the Apennines and raided the Etruscan city of Clusium. Four years later they were back. It was Rome’s turn.
The Gauls’ successes owed much to two skills in which they excelled. As the smiths of Europe, they were famous for their ironworking, and produced beautiful ornaments with complex geometrical patterns, often intertwined with animals. They were also renowned for their wheeled vehicles and the few Celtic words that managed to infiltrate Latin were mostly terms for these, from handcarts to carriages. War chariots and finely crafted weapons had carried the Celts across Europe.
When it comes to everyday life among the Senones, we rely on written sources that date from several centuries after the battle on the Allia, yet these offer some intriguing clues. Later Celtic peoples were far less male-dominated than the Romans. Female rulers were relatively common and there were even female druids. The Celts also had a certain amount in common with their distant cousins in India. They had a caste system which, like that of early Hinduism, included separate classes of priests, warriors, artisans and poor farmers. Celtic druids, who were not magician healers but priest judges and royal advisors, enjoyed the same high status as Indian Brahmins. Celts also believed in reincarnation. Julius Caesar – who became something of an expert during his years conquering them – tells us so, while early Irish legends have stories of butterflies and mayflies that are reborn as humans.
It is doubtful that any of this would have impressed the Romans. Once again our knowledge of what the Romans thought of Gauls comes from later centuries, but there is no particular reason to believe that their prejudices did not already exist in 387 BC. Later Romans saw the Celts as eloquent speakers but as primitive, woefully lacking in self-control, obsessed with war, feckless, drunken and greedy for gold. Scathing though these views were, some had an element of truth. The Gauls enjoyed a drink and their graves in northern Italy were filled with sophisticated wine-serving vessels. They had a strong liking for both fighting and gold and when possible they combined the two. They were probably doing precisely this when they marched on Rome. Just a few months after the battle on the Allia, a group of Gauls appeared in Sicily, where they fought as mercenaries for the Greek ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius, and it seems highly likely that this was the same war band who charged at the Romans on 18 July. Rome was not the Gauls’ intended destination, it seems, but it offered a chance to break a long journey with a little profitable violence.
Although later Romans may have felt superior to the Gauls they had rather more in common with them than they knew. The early Gallic and Latin languages were extremely similar, so much so that it is thought that they had a common origin around sixty generations earlier. In other words, only 1,500 years before they met by the Allia the Celts and Romans had been a single people.
But now they were strangers and enemies, embroiled in a furious battle. One would have expected the Romans to do well. Their army was at its best on flat, open ground where they could keep formation: exactly the kind of place where they now found themselves. Their tactics were far more sophisticated than those of the Gauls, who relied on the shock of a sudden charge. Yet everything went wrong for the Romans that day. The fullest account comes from the Roman historian Livy. Livy was not a dispassionate narrator. He wrote three and a half centuries after the battle, by which time Rome ruled the whole Mediterranean world, yet he felt that much had been lost during the city’s extraordinary rise. He looked back with nostalgia to an era when, as he believed, Romans had been tougher, plainer, more frugal, moral and selfless. He sought to inspire contemporary Romans with stirring tales of their ancestors’ courage.
Unfortunately, the battle of the Allia offered little in the way of inspiration. Livy did the best of a bad job and tried to find some excuses. He wrote that the Romans were greatly outnumbered, though, as we have seen, the Roman army was far from small. He may have been closer to the mark when he suggested the Romans were shocked by the strangeness of the Gauls. The two appear never to have met in battle before. The Romans may have been shaken by the speed and mobility of the Gauls hurtling towards them on horses and in chariots with their long, razor-sharp swords. And there was their nakedness. One could hardly blame the Romans for feeling intimidated by the sight of a horde of huge, mustachioed, barely clothed warriors, yelling and gesticulating and filling the air with the strange sound of their war horns.
The Romans may also have been let down by their strategy. Fighting a battle in front of a deep river was unwise. Livy wrote that their commander was worried that his army would be outflanked and so decided to split his forces in two, placing a force of reserves to their right where the ground was a little higher. The Gallic leader, Brennus – probably not his actual name, as it is very similar to the Gallic word for king – sent his full force tearing into the Roman reserves. The soldiers of the main Roman army watched as their comrades were cut down. As Livy relates, they did not wait to see if they would fare any better:
The main body of the army, at the first sound of the Gallic war-cry on their flank and in their rear, hardly waited even to see their strange enemy from the ends of the earth; they made no attempt at resistance; they had not courage even to answer his shouted challenge, but fled before they had lost a single man. None fell fighting; they were cut down from behind as they struggled to force a way to safety through the heaving mass of their fellow fugitives. Near the bank of the river there was a dreadful slaughter; the whole left wing of the army had gone that way and had flung away their arms in the desperate hope of getting over. Many could not swim and many others in their exhausted state were dragged under water by the weight of their equipment and drowned.1
Later that same day the Gauls reached Rome. The city was at their mercy. The stage was set for some of the most famous stories of antiquity, which would be told and retold over the centuries, shaping the Romans’ views of themselves, and others’ views of the Romans.
II
Before coming to these stories, and trying to piece together what really happened that summer, we should pause for a moment and see what kind of Rome the Gauls had reached. To modern eyes it hardly seems like a city that would grow into a great power. In the 380s BC it was still a small town with a population of probably no more than 25,000, and it may have been a good deal smaller. It was also primitive. At this time the Athenians had already built the Parthenon, a huge stone building with dazzlingly sophisticated friezes. By contrast, Rome, like other central Italian cities, was a city of bricks, timber and simple terracotta statues. Some parts were very simple indeed: archaeological excavations have revealed that only a century before the battle of the Allia, Rome had numerous daub and wattle, African-style huts with thatched roofs. Nearby cities had huts of this type around 387 BC and it is highly likely that Rome still had them, too. We know that at least one stood at this time: on the Palatine a hut was carefully maintained by priests as ‘The hut of Romulus’.
It was in huts of this kind that the very first Romans had lived. We can set aside the legends of Romulus and Remus, the royal princes turned shepherd bandits who were suckled by a she-wolf. Stories of newborn heirs to kingdoms cast adrift were fairly common in the archaic world, as were founder stories involving ferocious animals. Equally spurious is the later tradition that Rome was founded on 21 April 753 BC. Rome’s origins were both earlier and more gradual. People were already living on the site by 1500 BC, probably as itinerant pastoralists who stayed only for some seasons of the year. By 1000 BC they were more settled, and buried their dead in the marshy valley between the hills. They lived in two villages of huts on the Palatine and Esquiline hills. Far from being romantic shepherd bandits the first Romans were farmers who grew crops and kept pigs.
Whether they knew it or not, they could hardly have picked a better spot. Their villages looked down on one of Italy’s key trade routes, which led up the Tiber valley, and along which salt was carried from the coast to people in the hills. They also overlooked a place where the Tiber was both navigable and relatively easy to cross, by the Tiber Island. The high ground on which the villages were built – which later became known as the seven hills, though in reality some were more like ridges – offered protection from marauding enemies. And it was less prone than the lowlands to malaria, which, though it probably was not present in 387 BC, soon would be.
If the stories of Romulus and Remus are myths, one detail holds some truth. Rome’s first king Romulus is said to have shared power for several years with Titus Tatius, the king of the Sabines. Romulus and his Latins lived on the Palatine Hill and Titus Tatius’ Sabines lived on the Esquiline: two peoples, diverse yet united. Intriguingly, archaeological discoveries and early traditions support the idea that Rome was originally inhabited by two separate peoples. The hut village on Palatine Hill was populated by Latin speakers from the area southeast of Rome around the Alban Hills, while the Esquiline Hill was peopled by Sabines from hills to the north. In other words, from its very beginnings Rome was a cosmopolitan place formed of two nations.
Or rather, three. Early Rome was a frontier city. Just across the river Tiber on the Gianicolo Hill – where, on a hot summer night, today’s Romans go for an ice cream and to enjoy the view – lived Etruscans. The Etruscans could hardly have been more different from the Romans. Their language, which is still little understood, was not Indo-European and so was as distant from Latin or Sabine as modern English is from Mandarin Chinese. It is thought that the Etruscans may, like the Basques, have been an ancient aboriginal people who inhabited Europe long before Indo-Europeans arrived. They would have a huge influence on early Rome, contributing kings, noble families and numerous cultural traditions, from the bundles of rods (fasces) that symbolized a state officer’s power, to purple-bordered togas for high officials, to gladiator fights.
If life were not already complex enough, two other peoples can also be added to the mix. Soon after the first villages grew up on the Palatine and Esquiline hills, Phoenicians from today’s Lebanon appeared on the Italian coast and they almost certainly traded with the Romans. Next came Greeks, who from 800 BC established cities in southern Italy and Sicily, and sold high-quality banqueting items across the peninsula. Pottery finds reveal that a small Greek colony may have existed below the Palatine Hill as early as the eighth century BC, when the Romans were still living in huts. Some of Rome’s earliest temples were to Greek gods.
It was almost certainly the Greeks who inspired the Romans to move on from village life and build a city. This did not happen through gradual evolution but seems to have been the result of an epic, planned effort. In the mid-seventh century BC the swampy valley between Rome’s first villages was cleared of huts, drained, filled with earth by the ton and paved over. The Roman Forum was born. At the time of the battle on the Allia, some 250 years later, many of the city’s first monuments – though some had burned down and been rebuilt – still existed. These included the Senate, a hall where Rome’s parliament of aristocrats met, the temple of Vesta – the goddess of the hearth and the family, whose staff of virgins were responsible for tending a perpetual fire to help keep Rome safe – and a complex of buildings that appears to have been a royal palace.
Yet the complex had no royal occupant at the time of the battle by the Allia. In the 380s BC Rome had been a republic for over a century. The fact that they had freed themselves from royal rule was a source of great pride to early Romans, much as it is to modern Americans. Livy, who wrote this first part of his great history in the early 20s BC, when Romans were slipping back into autocratic rule – now under emperors – did his best to glorify the moment when the city’s kings were thrown out. He depicted Rome’s last king, Tarquin, as a kind of Macbeth figure, brave but murderous and with an evil, scheming queen. When King Tarquin’s son raped the beautiful wife of a nobleman, Tarquin’s nephew, Brutus, led angry Romans in rebellion in 509 BC. Desperate to regain power, Tarquin treacherously allied with an enemy of Rome, the Etruscan warlord Lars Porsena, and fought against his own people, only to meet a well-deserved defeat.
The truth, as far as it can be reassembled, seems to have been rather less romantic. Rome’s kings were probably thrown out not by American-style popular patriotism but by the city’s rich, quite possibly in alliance with the same Lars Porsena with whom King Tarquin was supposed to have sided. Aristocratic takeovers were common in Italian and Greek city states in the late sixth century BC. The ranks of their heavy infantry armies were filled by the rich, as only they could afford the expensive equipment required. Knowing they were the power behind the state, aristocrats sought to flex their political muscles.
But that was probably not the only reason for the fall of Rome’s kings. Another could be seen from any part of Rome in 387 BC. Perched on the Capitoline Hill, it dominated the city’s skyline, as the Parthenon did Athens. The temple to Rome’s most celebrated god, Jupiter Best and Greatest, was built not from stone but from timber and brick, and was crude compared to Greek temples of the time – whose overall design it copied – but it made up for this in size. When first constructed it was one of the largest temples, if not the largest, in the central Mediterranean. It was built by King Tarquin, and, according to Livy, the Romans resented being forced to work on the building. No doubt they also resented paying for it. Livy describes how the temple was almost complete when Tarquin fell from power in 509 BC. He would not be the last ruler to fall victim to extravagant architectural ambitions.
Tarquin would have built the temple to give him and his city prestige, yet, like Rome’s other temples, it also had a practical role: it was expected to give the Romans insider knowledge of the future and help them avoid nasty surprises. Like other early societies, Romans did not believe in paradise. Their religion was concerned firmly with the here and now. They hoped their gods would give them information to help them make good decisions, whether in their personal lives, their politics, their farming or their military campaigns. Roman priests looked for signs from the gods, which might be found by looking into the sky and watching in which direction birds flew, or by sacrificing animals on temple altars and then carefully studying their intestines.
Like those of other early religions, Roman beliefs had a distinctly anxious side. Bad omens were constantly watched for and could be found in anything from the birth of a deformed lamb to a fox straying into the city. Rituals to placate the gods and ward off threatened disaster were complex and if a single mistake was made then all had to be redone. Romans also feared one another. They feared their neighbours might chant an evil charm that would harm them, or make someone close to them fall in love, or that would steal the fertility of their land. The classical era is often seen as a time of rationalism, at least compared to the medieval period that followed, and so it was for some of the educated elite, but for many sorcery was – and would continue to be – a cause of profound unease.
Early Rome’s priests were responsible for trying to ease people’s fears. The city’s first kings may have evolved from priest kings and in the early 380s BC their successors came from the Roman nobility, some of whom would have lived in the city’s most desirable area, on the Palatine Hill. One home of this era has been excavated and it was palatial: a spacious villa with a garden, a reception room and a vast hall with an opening in the roof so rainwater landed in a pool, from which it was stored in a cistern below. The design became a classic in Italy and wealthy Pompeiians were still living in homes like it six centuries later, when Vesuvius erupted. In 387 BC, Rome was already a city of the very rich and the very poor: a pattern which was distinctly Italian. Excavations of another fourth-century city, Olynthos in Greece, have revealed an arrangement that is, to modern eyes, rather suburban: long rows of houses identical in shape and size. The free inhabitants of Olynthos – and many were not free – lived in relative equality. Not so the Romans. Little is known of the homes of Rome’s poor but they would have been modest. As we have seen, some were almost certainly daub and wattle huts.
Strange though it may seem, the wide gap between rich and poor was probably widened by Rome’s revolutionary ejection of its kings. The city’s kings were not members of the wealthy patrician class and so would have felt a certain kinship with the poor, who were their natural allies against powerful nobles. After the kings, Rome entered economic hard times and many of those who were outside the noble elite – the plebeians – struggled badly. Crippled by debts and barred from many political offices, they fought back as best they could, using a tactic that seems distinctly modern: strike action. They abandoned Rome en masse and camped out on a hill outside the city. They also formed themselves into a kind of state within the state, with their own organization and even their own temples where they kept their records.
Among the concessions that the plebeians managed to squeeze from reluctant patricians, one in particular offers a fascinating glimpse of Roman life in these early times. This was Rome’s first written law code: the Twelve Tables. Compiled around 450 BC, or sixty years before the battle on the Allia, it was written in an archaic Latin that was hard even for classical Romans to understand, but it is comprehensible enough to reveal what seems, to our eyes, a rather brutal society.
Roman life was intensely male-controlled and the eldest male in every family – the paterfamilias – ruled over his relatives like a king ruling over slaves. He owned all the family’s property and made all key decisions. He could lawfully sell members of his family or kill them, if he chose. On the birth of a new child he decided whether it would live or die and if the child was deformed he was expected to select death. For all the efforts of the plebeians, the Rome of the Twelve Tables was still very much a rich man’s world. Any debtors who could not pay their debts became bonded labourers of their creditor, who could take them abroad – just across the Tiber – and sell them into slavery. Rome would have had its own slave market where foreigners could be bought and sold, though it was still a long way from the fully-fledged slave society it would become in later centuries. The great majority of the city’s inhabitants were still free.
Yet most Romans were not from the city at all. In the 380s BC most were farmers who lived in the nearby countryside. Rome was a country town and its main market, the Forum Boarium, beside the river just below the Palatine Hill, sold every kind of animal – from horses to ride, to oxen to pull one’s plough and sheep to sacrifice. Most Romans would have purchased animals as investments not food, as their daily diet was plain and largely vegetarian. They ate cereal raw or cooked into polenta gruel or unleavened bread, along with herbs, hazelnuts, chestnuts, figs, olives and grapes. If the rich enjoyed meat at banquets, for most Romans it was a rare treat that was eaten only after a sacrifice, and even then it would have been tough, as it was the meat of working animals.
Another rare treat could be found just round the corner from the Forum Boarium, in the valley between the Palatine and the Aventine hills. Here, on simple wooden stands, Romans watched chariot races in the Circus Maximus, perhaps making a bet or two. In the early 380s BC races were rare events, held to celebrate a military victory, but within a few decades they would be held regularly, for several days each September. The games were closely tied to religion. The Circus Maximus was lined with temples and shrines, while in later centuries – and probably already in 387 BC– races were preceded by a procession of floats carrying images of gods, which set out from the great temples on the Capitoline Hill and wended its way down Via Sacra to the chariot course.
Among the gods closest to Roman hearts was Victory, which takes us to an aspect of early Rome that would eclipse all others in later memory. It was a city that was extremely interested in war, and as early as the 380s BC it had an impressive record in this area. In some ways Rome’s successes were not so very surprising. Though it would have seemed a small, primitive town to modern eyes, it was already the largest city in central Italy and had long dominated other Latin-speaking city states to the south. In 396 BC, only nine years before the disaster at the Allia, Rome had achieved what was easily its greatest military triumph to date, when it defeated the Etruscan city of Veii.
It is worth pausing for a moment to take a look at the Veiian war, as it says much about what kind of people the Romans were. The Veiians, like other Etruscan peoples, were skilled in the arts – never the Romans’ strong point – and were responsible for some of Rome’s finest landmarks. The terracotta god in Rome’s great temple to Jupiter Capitolinus was made by a Veiian sculptor, Vulca, as were the statues that decorated the temple’s roof. For the most part, though, the two cities regarded one another as enemies. They had far too much in common. Veii lay just fifteen kilometres north of Rome – not far from the Allia battlefield – and both cities sought control of the same trans-Italian trade route along the Tiber: Rome controlled the left bank and Veii controlled most or all of the right. Veii was in Rome’s way, blocking her so effectively that the city’s expansion had been pushed in the other direction: south towards the Latins. Veii was much more of a force to be reckoned with than Rome’s smaller Latin neighbours. Its location, on a rocky plateau surrounded on almost all sides by sheer cliffs, was defensively far superior to that of Rome. Rome, though, was larger and stronger. At the beginning of the fourth century BC, when the two cities began their third and final war, Rome had close to twice the land territory of Veii.
Today Veii, or what is left of it, is preserved in a small national park surrounded by outer Rome commuter settlements. It is a rather haunting spot, reached by a bridge over a small waterfall that plunges into a deep chasm. Walking into the site one soon comes across a clue as to how Veii met its end: a tunnel cut into the cliff. The volcanic rock that Veii was built upon is soft and easily mined. The Etruscans were masters at digging water channels and one of these, over half a kilometre long, passed directly under the place where the Romans probably set up their camp. Livy describes how, frustrated by a long siege, the Romans dug a tunnel into the city. When it was ready they launched an attack on Veii’s walls, and while the city’s defenders were distracted, Rome’s soldiers poured out from their tunnel:
A fearful din arose: yells of triumph, shrieks of terror, wailing of women, and the pitiful crying of children; in an instant of time the defenders were flung from the walls and the town gates opened; Roman troops came pouring through, or climbed over the defenceless walls; everything was overrun, in every street the battle raged. After a terrible slaughter, resistance began to slacken.2
Rome’s aggression against Veii was not unusual. In this era Mediterranean city states routinely fought wars with their neighbours. Yet in their war with Veii the Romans exhibited a noticeable thoroughness. When other Mediterranean cities suffered defeat they usually continued to exist, but after Veii fell to Rome it all but vanished from history. According to Livy, the very next morning after the city was captured, the Roman commander sold all its surviving inhabitants into slavery. It was the first instance of mass enslavement in Roman history.
III
The Veiians, unlike most of Rome’s later enemies, were at least able to enjoy a little Schadenfreude. Just nine years after their city fell, the Gauls crushed the Roman army at the battle by the Allia and advanced on their city. Livy describes how the Romans watched as they approached. ‘All too soon cries like the howling of wolves and barbaric songs could be heard, as the Gallic squadrons rode hither and thither close outside the walls. All the time between then and the following dawn was filled with unbearable suspense. When would the assault come?’3
Livy claims that the Gauls caught the city so much by surprise that they found the gates open, but the truth is probably simpler. There were no gates. At this time Rome seems to have had little in the way of walls. Its weak points were defended by ditches and earth ramparts, and though its citadel, the Capitoline Hill, may have had some walling, other hills probably relied on their steepness. Rome was virtually an open city.
So we come to Livy’s famous stories of Roman heroism, many of which are still familiar today. One tells of a plebeian, Lucius Albinius, who was fleeing the city in a cart with his family when he saw the Vestal Virgins walking beside the road carrying the sacred objects of their temple. Albinius did not hesitate. Knowing his duty, he ejected his family from the cart and carried the Vestals to the safety of Rome’s chief ally of the time, the Etruscan city of Caere.
There is the story of the venerable senators. As the Gauls approached the city the Romans retreated to their citadel on the Capitoline but realized their supplies would soon be exhausted if everyone took refuge there. The city’s elders who had served Rome all their lives volunteered to remain below, even though they knew this meant certain death. They dressed in all the finery of their rank and then waited in the courtyards of their great houses. When the Gauls found them and saw their ‘grave, calm eyes, like the majesty of gods’, they became entranced. Finally, a Gaul tugged the beard of one of the senators, who struck him on the head with his ivory staff. The Gaul, ‘flamed into anger and killed him, and the others were butchered where they sat’.4
There is the tale of Gaius Fabius Dorsuo, whose family had a solemn religious obligation to make a sacrifice on the Quirinal Hill on a fixed day each year. The Quirinal was now held by the Gauls, yet when the day came Dorsuo did not hesitate. He carefully dressed himself for the ritual and then strode towards the Gauls, who were so amazed at his audacity that they let him pass.
The story that is best known today, of course, is that of the geese. After a frontal attack on the Capitoline was foiled by the bravery of the Romans, the Gauls resorted to stealth. In the dead of night they climbed the steep cliff of the hill, so quietly that not even the Romans’ dogs raised the alarm. But the sacred geese of Juno’s temple heard: ‘The cackling of the birds and the clapping of their wings awoke Marcus Manlius – a distinguished officer who had been consul three years before – and he, seizing his sword and giving the alarm, hurried, without waiting for the support of his bewildered comrades, straight to the point of danger.’5 One Gaul was already clambering on to the hilltop but Manlius hurled him back with a blow from his shield and he fell, dislodging those who were climbing up behind him.
Finally, Livy tells the story of how the Romans, at the very last moment, managed to save their city’s honour. Besieged on the Capitoline they learned that a rescuer was on his way. Camillus, their heroic commander at Veii, who had been driven into exile by false accusations of corruption, was raising an army. Yet time was running out. After their night attack failed, the Gauls determined to starve the Romans into surrender. When the Romans became so weakened that they could hardly hold their weapons they knew they had no choice but to sue for peace. Their leader, Quintus Sulpicius, negotiated with the Gallic leader Brennus, who agreed to end the siege in exchange for a payment of 1,000 pounds of gold. The Gauls then added insult to injury by using over-heavy weights: ‘… and when the Roman commander objected the insolent barbarian flung his sword onto the scale, saying, “Woe to the vanquished!” – words intolerable to Roman ears.’6
Yet help was at hand. At that very moment Camillus appeared with his army and the Gauls were forced to fight a second battle. This time their barbarian impetuosity let them down: ‘… they attacked, but with more fire than judgement. Luck hard turned at last; human skill, aided by the powers of heaven, was fighting on the side of Rome, and the invaders were scattered at the first encounter with as little effort as had gone into their victory on the Allia.’7
If these stories seem like patriotic propaganda, that is exactly what they were. The question is, can any truth be found in them? Other accounts, fragments and archaeological discoveries all offer fascinating clues. Especially useful are later references to the temple to Juno Moneta where the geese were kept. Though nothing of the building survives today we know that it was dedicated by the Roman military hero Camillus, and that inscriptions on its walls listed a couple of names that will now be familiar. One of these was Manlius Capitolinus who, in the temple inscription, was described as Camillus’ cavalry commander. Also mentioned was Fabius Dorsuo, who is named as one of the city’s two consuls: republican Rome’s power-sharing rulers.
Brennus puts his sword to the weighing pan in this nineteenth-century illustration.
Something strange seems to be going on. The last two names are both heroes in Livy’s stories but the details are all wrong. Livy’s Manlius Capitolinus – the officer who drove back the Gauls’ night attack single-handed – was not a cavalry commander. Likewise Livy’s Fabius Dorsuo – who braved the Gallic lines to perform his family’s religious duties – was not mentioned as being consul. This was an impossible omission, the equivalent of failing to mention that a man named Barack Obama was president of the United States.
Yet there is an altogether greater problem. It is known that the temple of Juno Moneta was first dedicated in 345 BC. In other words, it did not exist until forty years after Rome’s struggle with the Gauls. According to Livy, Camillus, to whom the temple was dedicated, commanded the Roman army at Veii, nine years before the Gallic attack. If he had been thirty at this time – young for a Roman commander – he would have been over eighty when the temple of Juno Moneta showed he was still commanding Rome’s forces.
Camillus is real enough. Early records confirm that he led Rome’s military with great success in the era after the Gallic attack. But there is nothing to show he did so at the time of the disaster, let alone during the war with Veii. Livy evidently pushed his career further back into the past. It is easy enough to imagine why: he gave Rome an excuse for her defeat. By making Camillus the hero of Veii and then having him unfairly forced into exile, he presented him as blameless for the Allia disaster. He suggests that the Romans would have won had their hero commander not been absent.
In fairness, Livy simply embroidered stories that would already have existed long before his time. An intriguing explanation has been proposed as to how these first came to life. Romans strolled up to the temple of Juno Moneta and began wondering at its name and at the inscriptions on its walls. They looked at writings they no longer understood and made up stories. The temple’s name, Moneta, had two meanings. It meant advisor, which was probably the relevant meaning, and would have referred to temple priests looking for signs in the skies. But it also meant warner. Romans assumed, wrongly, that it been built as thank-offering for the saving (warning) of the Capitoline citadel. This error led them to believe the temple was forty years older than it actually was, and that the people whose names were inscribed on its walls had been living at the time of the Gallic sack. The story of the geese that quacked and the dogs that failed to bark would also have come into existence thanks to poorly understood antiquities. One of Rome’s earliest public contracts was for the feeding of Juno’s sacred geese, while there was a tradition – probably far more ancient than Rome’s struggle with the Gauls – that a dog be sacrificed on the Capitoline.
As Rome’s early history was not written down until two centuries after 387 BC there was ample room for patriotic misconceptions. These probably crystallized in the late third century – 180 years after the actual events – by which time the Romans had defeated numerous enemies, from Pyrrhus’ Greeks to Hannibal’s Carthaginians, leading them to view themselves as a super-nation, divinely destined to rule the world. By then the Capitoline Hill had acquired a special religious significance in their eyes and so would have been a natural focus of heroic invention.
Yet not all of Livy’s account seems to have been fiction. A couple of elements held some truth. One was the gold. Chance mentions in a couple of other sources are revealing. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who wrote at the same time as Livy, recounts how, after their attack on Rome, the Gauls returned from the south and were attacked by forces of Rome’s ally, Caere, which retrieved gold that Romans had given as ransom. A second story comes from five centuries after the battle on the Allia, in the writer Suetonius’ life of the emperor Tiberius. Suetonius mentions that Tiberius’ family, the Drusii, had an old traditional explanation as to how they got their name. During Rome’s wars with the Gauls in northern Italy – centuries before Suetonius’ time, and centuries after the sack of Rome – one of their ancestors fought and killed a Gallic chief named Drausus in single combat. Afterwards the ancestor was said to have recovered the gold that Rome had paid Brennus.
The meaning of the two stories is clear. The Romans paid up. What’s more, they may have done so without ever defending the Capitoline Hill. A series of references have been found which indicate that the Gauls captured all of Rome. As the city’s defences were negligible it would not be surprising. This version of events also fits with archaeological discoveries. Excavations in the Forum in the later nineteenth century uncovered an extensive burned layer and at first it was assumed that this dated from the Gallic sack. Later, though, when dating methods improved, the layer was found to be much older, dating from the unstable times of the late sixth century, when Romans threw out their last king and formed a republic. No burned layer has been found anywhere from the 380s BC. It seems the city was hardly damaged. So a new narrative offers itself that is altogether less romantic than Livy’s. The Gauls crushed the Romans at the Allia, swept into the city and were paid to go away. Paid promptly, too, judging by the lack of damage.
Even then, it must have been a brutal moment. Though no details have been preserved one could expect nothing else when a large, well-armed horde of young, poorly disciplined males found themselves in a position of unrestrained power. The Gauls would have raided farms around the city to feed themselves. Unless the Romans paid up very promptly indeed, there would have been outrages in the city, too: robbery, violence and sexual attacks.
Another story of Livy’s also seems to hold some truth, though the evidence for this comes by a most convoluted route. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who was born shortly after the Gauls’ attack on Rome, mentioned the sacking in one of his writings. Unfortunately, the writing is lost, but it was briefly referred to by the later Greek historian, Plutarch. According to Plutarch, Aristotle wrote that Rome was saved by a certain Lucius. This is almost certainly the Lucius Albinius who chucked his own family from his cart to give a lift to the Vestal Virgins.
Albinius, it seems, was the true of hero of the hour. Before the myths of heroic Capitoline holdouts emerged, Albinius’ story was probably the one that Romans told to one another to put their humiliating defeat in a better light, much as the British did after their catastrophe in France in 1940 with the story of their valiant escape at Dunkirk. If Rome had been lost, at least her religious treasures were saved. The city’s spirit and the favour of her gods had been preserved. Albinius may have done a great deal more for his city that has been forgotten. There are clues as to why his role became diminished with time. Livy mentions that he was of humble, plebeian origins, a detail that would have reduced his appeal to later history commentators who preferred to ascribe heroism – fake heroism, as it turns out – to members of their own aristocratic class. Another likely victim of downgrading was Rome’s Etruscan ally, the city of Caere, where the Vestals and their treasure were taken. Caere, too, probably had a greater role than is remembered, but it ceased to interest Romans after Caere city turned from ally to enemy, and then to a conquered enemy.
Yet, however much the Romans prettified and fictionalized the events of 387 BC they did not forget what had happened. The Gauls left a permanent mark on the Romans’ worldview, giving them a new sense of fear. Romans had an enduring and increasingly irrational conviction that the Gauls would return one day and finish the job by destroying their city. When Gallic raiders returned to Latium – which they did at least twice – the Romans responded by declaring a state of emergency, a ‘tumultus Gallicus’, under which all exemptions from military service were suspended and officials could recruit soldiers without restraint.
Roman fears also drove them to something decidedly un-Roman: human sacrifice. In later times when Rome suffered alarming defeats involving Gauls, the Romans took two Greeks and two Gauls – one male and one female of each – and buried them alive in the Forum Boarium animal market. This grisly ritual took place on at least three occasions: during wars with the Gauls in 228 BC, in 216 BC after the Romans’ defeat at Cannae by Hannibal – half of whose army were Gauls – and again in 114 BC, when Gallic forces defeated the Romans in Macedonia. As late as AD 21, by which time Rome ruled the Mediterranean and had conquered all of Europe’s Celts except in Britain and Ireland, a minor revolt by two Gallic tribes in France caused panic in Rome.
Yet Rome’s fears also led her citizens to more rational responses, which played a key role in their city’s remarkable rise. After the Gallic attack of 387 BC the Romans belatedly gave their city some proper defences. In a huge undertaking that may have taken as long as twenty-five years to complete, they built a city wall 11 kilometres long, stretches of which can still be seen today. The new wall, now known as the Servian Wall, proved invaluable on several occasions during Rome’s numerous later wars. The Romans also reorganized their army to make it less vulnerable against a mobile, fast-moving enemy like that of Brennus. Infantry were protected by javelin throwers and stone slingers and troops were divided into independent units, so if one part of the line collapsed other sections might hold and rally. With these changes the Roman army became a formidable fighting machine.
So Rome’s shock drubbing by the Gauls made her stronger, as she rose, phoenix-like, from disaster. Bribing barbarians to go away may have seemed shameful to later Romans, and an episode that was best rewritten, but it had been the right decision. The Romans and their state survived. As we have seen, the city’s main monuments, such as the vast temple to Jupiter Best and Greatest, were preserved. Not for the last time, Rome escaped lightly from catastrophe.
The city was soon back on her expansionist path. Though the Latin cities that Rome had dominated rebelled, Rome quickly reasserted control and within a few decades of the Allia defeat Roman armies were campaigning further afield than ever before. In long, gruelling wars against the Samnites of southern Italy, the Etruscans, King Pyrrhus’ Greeks and Hannibal’s Carthaginians, the Romans repeatedly shrugged off disastrous setbacks – and they had quite a few – to rally and fight again. In doing so they acquired the very qualities of courage and no-nonsense gritty determination that Livy prematurely ascribed to them during the Gallic attack. King Pyrrhus spoke for many of Rome’s enemies when he observed that if he won one more victory over the Romans he would be utterly lost.
The Romans’ victories allowed them to enjoy some revenge. The Gauls seem to have seen what was coming and in every one of Rome’s early wars they took the side of Rome’s enemies, yet it did them no good. In 232 BC the Roman commander P. Nasica led his forces into the lands of the people who had sacked their city a century and a half earlier, the Senones, and by the end of his campaign Nasica boasted that he had left only boys and old men alive. The Romans took care to ensure their victory was permanent. The area’s best farming land was seized and given to Roman citizens and their Latin allies. Senone territory was crossed by Roman roads and a military city, Sena Gallica, was built on the coast, dominating the region.
By the early second century BC all of Gallic northern Italy was subdued, and subdued with a thoroughness that was unusual even for the Romans. Large parts of the population were killed, dispersed or enslaved. Afterwards Italy’s Gauls continued to be treated with distrust and they were the very last people in Italy to be granted Roman citizenship.
Eventually, though, the Gauls and the Romans came to terms with one another. The Romans accepted Gauls as participants in their imperial project and, once accepted, the Gauls began to take up the ways of their conquerors. They studied Latin, which, as it was closely related to their own language, they found pleasingly easy to learn. They watched Roman entertainments, gave their children a Roman education, worshipped Roman gods and lived in cities whose temples and amphitheatres were modelled on those of Rome. They were even stirred by Livy’s stories of Rome’s gritty early heroes. Until, eventually, they came to think of themselves as Romans. Rome’s victory could hardly have been more complete.
By then Gauls and Romans were united against a common enemy. The Romans were not the only ones who had defeated the Gauls and taken their territory. As Julius Caesar conquered Gallic France another people was seizing Celtic heartlands in Central Europe. These were the new barbarians on the block.
The Germans were coming.
Rome, 410 AD