MIGRATION OF THE GAULS. CONQUEST OF ROME.
No one had any foreboding of what was now impending upon Rome. She had become great, because the country which she had conquered had been weakened by its oligarchical constitution; the subjects also of the other states willingly went over to her, as they would thus be so much better off, and moreover, in all likelihood, they were sprung from the same stock. But even as Basil subjected the Armenians when they were threatened by the Turks, and soon afterwards the whole of the Greek empire was assailed by the latter, who took much more from it than it had gained before; thus it was also with the Romans.
The inroad of the Gauls into Italy is to be looked upon as a migration, not as a conquest. For what is historical in it, we must depend upon Polybius and Diodorus, who place it shortly before the taking of Rome by the Gauls. To Livy’s statement, that driven from their own country by a famine, they had already come to Italy in the age of Tarquinius Priscus, no credit is to be given. It originated in the fact that some Greek historian or other, perhaps Timæus, connected this migration with the settling of the Phocæans at Massilia. Livy has, perhaps, in this instance borrowed from Dionysius, and the latter from Timæus; for as he certainly made use of Dionysius in his eighth book, why should he not also in the fifth? He himself knew very little of Greek history.[118] But this account is evidently contradicted by that of Justin. Trogus Pompeius was born near Massilia, and had also apparently used for his forty-third book native chronicles; as from them only he could have got the account of the decreta honorifica of the Romans to the Massiliotes, in return for the friendship shown them during the Gallic war, and likewise of the sea-fights of Massilia with the Carthaginians. Trogus knows nothing of the circumstance that the Gauls assisted the Phocæans; but according to him, these merely met with a friendly reception among the Ligurians, who also dwelt there for a long time. About the year 350, fifteen years therefore before this, Livy himself says, gentem invisitatam, novas accolas, Gallos comparuisse. Even the story of that Lucumo, who had called in the Gauls, pleads against it: referred to Clusium alone, it is absurd. Polybius dates the passage over the Alps from ten to twenty years before the conquest of Rome; Diodorus makes the Gauls burst upon Rome in one uninterrupted onslaught. Moreover, it is said that Melpum, in the country of the Insubrians, had been destroyed on the same day with Veii; and though we may not positively assert this exact coincidence, there can yet be no doubt but that the statement, on the whole, has hit the truth. Cornelius Nepos wrote it, who, as a native of the country beyond the Po, might have known the facts, and whose chronological accounts were very highly valued among the Romans. The Gauls can only have passed, either over the little St. Bernard, or over the Simplon. The former is not likely, because their country reached to the Ticinus only; if they had crossed over the little St. Bernard, they must needs also have occupied the whole of the territory between that mountain and the Ticinus. Now, the Salassians, for aught that we know, may have been a Gallic people; but this is not certain, and moreover, on the banks of the Ticinus, between them and the Gauls who had come over the Alps, there still dwelt the Lævians; surely then, there were still at that time also Ligurians on the Ticinus.
Melpum must have stood near the spot where Milan is now. The situation of Milan is exceedingly favourable, and often as it has been destroyed, it has been always restored; so that it is not impossible that Melpum was the same town. Without doubt, the Gallic migration came sweeping on with headlong impetuosity, like the billows of a stormy sea; how then can we suppose that Melpum had withstood the barbarians for two hundred years, or that they had conquered it, and had left the Etruscans undisturbed during the whole of that time? It is absurd to believe this, merely to bear out an uncritical assertion of Livy’s. Twelve years after the taking of Rome, as is usually computed; or, according to a more correct chronology, nine years later, the Triballians, who in the times of Herodotus abode in Lower Hungary, were seen in Thrace, having been driven out of their own country by the Gauls. It is evident that the same movement which led them to the Middle Danube, extended likewise to the Po. And should they who in a few days came from Clusium to Rome, and afterwards appeared also in Apulia, have sat still in a corner for two hundred years?
These Gauls were partly Celts, but the great body of them were Belgians or Cymri. This may be gleaned from the fact that their king, as well as he who appears before Delphi, is called Brennus; Brenin, according to Adelung in Mithridates, means in Welsh and Bas Breton a king. But what gave rise to the whole migration? The statement of Livy that a famine had driven forth the Gauls, is quite in the character of all those traditions about national migrations which we find in Saxo Grammaticus, in Paul Warnefrid from the Swedish lays, in the Tyrrhenian legends concerning Lydia, and elsewhere. In the case of a people however, like the Celts, any special account of this kind, in which, as here, even the leaders are named, is no more worthy of belief than all other legends among nations who have not the use of writing. It is indeed certain that the Celts had Greek letters; but they may only have used them for the purposes of every day life, and it is well known that they were not allowed to commit the old lays to writing. The Celts, however, had a tradition which we meet with in Ammianus Marcellinus, that Britain had been one of their most ancient seats. We now find them in Britain, Ireland, in different places in Spain, and in two places in Portugal. For the Celticans and Celts in Portugal, who dwelt in Algarve and Alemtejo, and between the Mincio and Douro, are pure Celts; the Celtiberians in Spain are a mixture of Celts and Iberians: they live in the heart of the mountain range between Saragossa and Madrid, which is connected with the Pyrenees.[119] Of these Celts in Spain the same tradition has been preserved, as of their appearance in Italy: they are said to have been driven thither by famine, and to have spread by conquest. Yet here is again a confusion of the two opposite poles in the tradition. In no instance where a national migration has taken place, is the invading people to be found in scattered spots; but the inhabitants of such districts, especially in mountains, are the remnants of the ancient population which has emigrated, or been changed. Among the Celtiberians, the Iberians prevail; the Celts are the indigenous people which amalgamated with the Iberians who broke in from Africa: there may have arisen a sort of mixed language; the names of places are Iberian. Similar transformations of a people are sometimes met with in history. The Wendes in Germany, owing to the insignificance of their colonies, have for the most part adopted the German language, without there having been any German conquest or German princes; and yet they were originally Sclavonians, as well as the Cassubians who speak Wendish to this day. That the Iberians spread across the Pyrenees, is proved by the existence of the Aquitanians, who were pure Hispanians, as Cæsar informs us; nor is there any reason to suppose that this was only a change of later times. Basques are still dwelling north of the Pyrenees. And there is, moreover, the statement of Scylax, that the people from the Pyrenees to the Rhone was a mixture of Iberians and Ligurians. The Celts once possessed the whole of Spain, with the exception of Andalusia; and besides this, Southern France, Ireland, and part of England. The boundary of the Iberians in the north, we cannot lay down with certainty; in the earlier ages, it was the Sierra Morena. In the south, we find them in Southern Spain; in the Balearic isles; in Sardinia, Corsica, and Western Sicily; and lastly also, in Africa.
Distinct from the Celts, but of the same stock, are the Cymri or Belgians: this distinction, concerning which I have given my opinion years ago, is of essential importance. Cæsar’s notion that the Belgians were a mixture of Germans and Celts, is erroneous: there is a wide difference between them and the Germans, although a small number of words in their language are Germanic. In Cæsar’s time, they were undoubtedly Cymri, with a sprinkling of Germans whom they had met with in their migration. Cymri lived also in a part of Britain: probably they were the older inhabitants, who had been dislodged by the Gales. The Gales were pushed on by the Iberians; the Cymri by the Gales; and the Germans by the Cymri, who at that time were settled in the north of France and in the Netherlands, where Celts had afterwards their abode.
Southern France from the Pyrenees, Lower Languedoc, and the valley of the Rhone, the Piemontese country, and Lombardy also as far as the Etruscans, were inhabited by the Ligurians, a great European nation. Scylax already says, that in Lower Languedoc, Iberians and Ligurians were living mixed up together. In later times which cannot be particularised, the Celts drove the Iberians from Spain to the Garonne; and the latter pushed on the Ligurians to the neighbourhood of Aix in Provence;—an event which may be traced in its consequences. By this impulse the Gauls and Cymri together were driven into emigration: some of the Cymri part from the Gauls, and go on migrating; others march with them. Gauls and Cymri differ very much from each other: their grammar and language are quite distinct. The two great migrations of Bellovesus and Sigovesus, mentioned by Livy, are to be considered as true, although the leaders may be looked upon as mere personifications. Of these expeditions, the one, penetrating through the Etruscan Alpine tribes and the Ligurians into Italy, overthrows the Etruscan towns in the Lombard plain; the other proceeds northward from the Alps. The Rhætians, the Lepontines, the Camunians, the Stonians and other Alpine peoples in the Tyrol and in the country of the Grisons, including Verona, stand out alone like islands, amid the immigrating Gauls who poured round them like a sea; and they remind us of the Celts in Spain. This migration, in which the Helvetians did not join, I have already sufficiently discussed in my little historical writings, in the essay on the Scythians and Sarmatians. It first proceeds round the Black forest, then stops a while, and then goes on to the middle Danube, Hungary and Lower Sclavonia: here they undertake the difficult conquest of the highlands, spread from thence into Macedonia, Thrace, Bulgaria, and then across the Danube as far as the Dnieper; and then, pushed back by the Sarmatians, they again throw themselves into Europe. It is the only known instance, in which it is apparent that such a torrent rushes forth until it meets with insurmountable obstacles, and then returns again with unabated violence. As late as the times when Herodotus still wrote, about 320 A. U. C. the nations on the banks of the middle and lower Danube were living undisturbed in their abodes. The Scythians inhabited Moldavia and Wallachia as far as Transylvania; there the Agathyrsians were settled, and the Triballians in Sclavonia and Lower Hungary. But nine years after the taking of Rome by the Gauls, the Triballians make their appearance near Abdera in Thrace, and afterwards they are seen on the banks of the southern Danube in Bulgaria. The Scythians, on the other hand, are found as early as the reign of Philip to have been limited to Bessarabia; at the time of Alexander the Getæ are in possession of Moldavia and Wallachia. The people, who effect these changes, are the Gauls, and by means of the same emigration as that in which they poured themselves over Italy.
Scylax (Ol. 106.) knows of Gauls in the inmost recesses of the Adriatic, the Carnians and Noricans of later times. They did not, he says, join the migration: part of the Gauls, who had advanced further, lived in Sirmium; from thence, under the name of Bastarnians, they cross the Danube, and compel the Getæ to throw themselves into Hungary and Transylvania; afterwards they spread in the Ukraine. From the important inscription of Olbia, which Köhler has edited, we see that the Galatians, and, together with them, the Scirians, afterwards a German people, are dwelling near the Dnieper; and this agrees perfectly well with the fact, that the Scythians now vanish. For in the east also there is a national migration, that of the Sarmatians, a people which Herodotus only knows as dwelling beyond the Tanais. Scylax, seventy years afterwards, speaks of them as being settled on this side of it; according to the Olbian inscription, they are on the other bank of the Dnieper; under Augustus, they are in Wallachia: they destroy the Greek towns in that neighbourhood. This movement was afterwards the cause of the irruption of the Cymri or Cimbrians, as in the migrations of the Celts the Cymri were always included. To them belong the Bastarnians, who dwelt in Southern Poland and in Dacia, and were driven out by the Sarmatians. Johann von Müller indeed was the first to recognise the truth of Posidonius’ statement, that the Cimbrians did not come from Jutland but from the East; but he saw not yet, that they were originally Belgians, or, as the Greeks called it by a general name, Κέλται. To claim the victories of the Cimbrians for the German nation is foolish.
The extent of these emigrations reached in Germany as far as the Mayne and the Thuringian forest. Celts, before Cæsar’s days, were settled even in Bohemia, and some tribes of them remained in the time of Tacitus; the Gothinians at that time still spoke Gallic; the Noricans in Austria were of Celtic descent. The Rhætians were Etruscans; the Vindelicians, Liburnians. The Helvetians conquered the greatest part of Switzerland; yet near the St. Gotthardt some of the old population were left. The Gauls penetrated into Italy by a very narrow track, very likely across the Simplon: it was only by means of the Valais that they kept up the connection with the people of their own stock beyond the Alps. As far as Aosta, the ancient inhabitants stood their ground: for, the Salassians, Taurinians, &c., were Ligurians, and the tribes towards the St. Gotthardt Etruscans. The Ligurians were a warlike race and held their own; they dwelt on both sides of the Alps: the Allobroges, however, were pure Celts. On this account, Cisalpine Gaul appears too large on the maps, even on that of d’Anville: it did not contain Piedmont, but only the Austrian Milanese, Bergamo and Brescia, Lombardy south of the Po to the Adriatic, and north of the Po to the neighbourhood of Lake Garda. All the country, therefore, which they conquered, was in the plain; and even for this reason their migration cannot have lasted as long as Livy states.
In the history of the Gallic migration it is again shown how little we know of the history of Italy in general. Our knowledge is limited to Rome: it is just the same as if of all the historical sources of the whole of the German empire, the annals of one imperial town only had been preserved. From Livy’s account, it might appear as if the Gauls had advanced against Rome alone, and as if this had been their only object. And yet this immigration has changed the whole aspect of Italy. For when once the Gauls had crossed the Apennines, there was nothing to hinder them from marching by any road into Southern Italy; and indeed we find some mention of their further progress to the south. The Umbrians still dwelt as far as the lower Padus in the present Romagna and Urbino, in parts of which Liburnians also were living. Polybius says, that many nations there had become tributary to the Gauls; of the Umbrians this is certain. In history, we first find the Gauls in Clusium, where they are said to have made their appearance immediately on their immigration, owing to the revenge of a high-born citizen of the place who called them in against the town of his birth. Yet this remains doubtful: if there should be any truth in it, it is much more likely that the offended man crossed the Apennines, and fetched the avengers from thence. Clusium had been no more spoken of since the time of Porsena; that its people seek assistance with Rome, is a proof how little this northern town of Etruria shared in the fate of the southern ones; even an alliance with Rome may be conjectured. The danger was, however, so great, that every jealousy must have been hushed by it. The natural road for the Gauls would have been down by the shores of the Adriatic; then through the country of the Umbrians, who were tributary to them, and already completely broken down; and through the Romagna, across the Apennines. The Apennines, however, which separate Tuscany and the Romagna, are very difficult to pass over, and particularly troublesome for beasts of burthen. As from this side, therefore, which the Etruscans moreover had purposely allowed to grow wild, the Gauls could not break in, though they had made an attempt to do so, they then crossed the Apennines near Clusium, and appeared before this town. Clusium is the key of the valley of the Tiber; if it were taken, this as well as the road on the Arno would be open to the Gauls, who might then advance upon Arezzo in its rear. The Romans therefore looked upon the fate of Clusium as decisive of their own. The people of Clusium solicit the alliance of powerful Rome; the Romans with well-judged readiness accede to it, and send an embassy to the Gauls, ordering them to go away. According to a more probable account, the latter had demanded from the Clusians the division of the land, as a condition of peace; not, as it was customary among the Romans, as a charge imposed upon a people already conquered: if this be correct, the Romans sent that embassy trusting to their might. But the Gauls treated the ambassadors with scorn, and these allowed themselves to be carried away by their military ardour to join the Etruscans in fighting against them: it may perhaps have been only a small isolated affray. This is what Livy tells us; and he proceeds to state, that the Gauls, as soon as they had become aware of this violation of the law of nations, had caused the signal for retreat to be sounded, and had called upon the gods for vengeance, intending forthwith to march against Rome. Here is evidently a mere legend. A barbarous people could not possibly have entertained such regards; nor was there in this case any real violation of international law, as the Romans stood in no connexion whatever with the Gauls. But the fall of Rome must needs be laid to the account of a Nefas, against which no power of man could avail. Roman vanity besides plays its part; and the ambassadors were said to have so greatly distinguished themselves, that they were more conspicuous than the Etruscans. In contradiction to these events, it is now stated that the Gauls had sent to Rome to demand the giving up of those ambassadors; that the senate hesitated and left the decision to the people, on which the latter not only refused compliance, but even appointed the same ambassadors as military tribunes; and that in consequence the Gauls with all their force immediately marched against the surprised city. Livy here again speaks of the Populus, to which the senate refers the decision; yet this can only be the patrician community, as it alone could have decided on the fate of those who belonged to that class. The Romans have, in this instance, been unfairly charged with want of honesty. But the whole story is certainly derived from later writers, who conferred upon barbarians a right, to which none but a people within the pale of international law could lay any claim. Nor is the statement by any means a general one, that the three ambassadors, the Fabii, were chosen military tribunes. A different account is found in Diodorus, who in this place must have made use of Roman sources written in Greek, that is to say, of Fabius; as he calls the people of Cære Καίριοι, and not Ἀγυλλαῖοι. He speaks of one single ambassador, who as a son of a military tribune had fought against the Gauls. This at least shows how little the history can as yet be relied upon. The battle of the Alia was on the sixteenth of July, and the military tribunes entered upon their office the first of the same month, whilst Clusium is only a good three days’ march from Rome.
The Gauls marched in innumerable hosts from Clusium to Rome. They were for a long time the people most dreaded by the Romans, even so late as in the Cisalpine war of 527; and likewise by all the nations with which they came into contact, as far as the remotest East and the Ukraine. For the knowledge of their manners and customs, Polybius and Diodorus are our best guides: under Cæsar they were already changed. In the description of their persons, we have a glimpse of the Gael, or Highlander of the present day;—tall bodies, blue eyes, coarse hair. Their very dress and arms are those of the Gael; their clothing being checkered and variegated tartans (sagula virgata versicoloria), their weapons the Highland claymores, broad war-swords without points. They had an immense number of horns, such as were long to be met with in the Highlands; and they threw themselves in huge irregular masses, and with terrible fury upon the enemy, those in the rear pushing on those in front, so that no line of battle then in use could withstand the shock. Against them the Romans should have employed the phalanx, and doubled it, until they became accustomed to such a foe, and gained the mastery by dint of their superior skill. If they could stand the first onset, then the Gauls were sure to fall into confusion, and were afterwards easily routed. The Gauls who in later times were defeated by them, were the descendants of those who had been born in Italy, and had very much fallen off in courage and strength. The Goths under Vitigis, not fifty years after Theodoric’s immigration into Italy, were cowards, and did not hold their ground against the twenty thousand men of Belisarius: thus quickly do barbarians degenerate in such a climate. Terrible also were the Gauls for their appalling cruelty! Wherever they settled, the original towns and their inhabitants utterly vanished from the face of the earth. In their own homes they had the feudal system and a priestly government. The Druids, who were their only rulers, avenged the oppressed people upon the chiefs, and in their turn were its tyrants. The whole of the people were serfs; which proves that the Gauls, even in their own country, were a race of conquerors who had enslaved an older population. Their wealth in gold is much talked of; and yet there are no rivers in France by which gold is washed, and the Pyrenees were at that time no more in their possession: the gold must, therefore, have been bartered. Much of it may be only exaggeration; and when individual chieftains wore golden chains, the ancient poets may have extended this to the whole nation, as popular poetry, particularly in such embellishments, is apt to give itself great license.
Pliny says, that the census before the Gallic calamity had amounted to 150,000; but this only includes the men who had votes, and neither women, children, slaves, nor foreigners. When we take this into the account, the number of inhabitants was immense. Should this statement, however, be well founded, it must not be understood of the residents in the city alone; for these were much fewer. When we read in Diodorus that every one was called out to fight against the Gauls, and that forty thousand men assembled at the summons, this is very probable: there is the testimony of Polybius that Latins and Hernicans were included in the host. According to another account, the Romans took the field against the Gauls with twenty-four thousand men; that is to say, with four country, and four city legions. The country legions were raised from the plebeians only; they served in the order of the classes, very likely in maniples. The city legions contained all those who did not belong to the plebeians and patricians, all the ærarians, proletarians, freedmen, artisans, who at other times had never yet faced the enemy; they were certainly not armed with the pilum, nor arrayed manipulatim, but provided with pikes, and drawn up in phalanx. As to the country legions, they consisted half of Latins and half of Romans, there being in each maniple a Roman and a Latin century; and if in those days there were four of these legions, this would be twelve thousand men, as the legion together with its reserve was then three thousand strong. When therefore one statement gives twenty-four thousand, we see that it implies four country, and four irregular city legions. Thus there were only six thousand plebeians, so that, had the legions contained Romans exclusively, there would not indeed have been more than twelve thousand of them; but if to these we add twelve thousand irregular troops and sixteen thousand allies, the number of forty thousand is then correct. If so, the population of Rome was not so large as that of Athens in the Peloponnesian war, which is very likely. The horsemen are not reckoned in this calculation; forty thousand men must, however, be deemed the maximum of the whole army. There seems to be no exaggeration in this; so that on the whole, the battle on the Alia ranks among those events which are historical. It is surprising that the Romans elected no dictator for the battle; they cannot be said to have looked upon that war as quite an ordinary one, as in that case they would not have summoned all their forces to the fight. Yet they did not estimate the danger to its full extent. There were always fresh swarms crossing the Alps; the Senonians also now make their appearance, seeking out places where to dwell. They, like the Germans afterwards, asked for land, on beholding the Insubrians, Boians, and others already settled in the country. They had taken up their abodes in the Umbrian district near the sea; but only till they should find larger and more convenient ones.
The river Alia has no remarkable features. It would almost seem that the country in the neighbourhood has changed; it is only by the distances which are given, that we can tell what river it was. The ancients describe it as a stream with high embankments; but the river which we must now take for it, has none. The name is now obsolete. In the summer, however, all these rivers have very little water; and therefore the position behind it could not have availed much. The Romans committed the great fault of giving battle with troops swept together in haste, to an enemy hitherto invincible. The hills near which the right wing is said to have been placed, are no more to be recognised: they may perhaps have been only small mounds of earth.[120] At all events, the opposing a long line to the huge masses of the enemy was quite absurd. The Gauls, on the other hand, could without any trouble turn off to the left; and, passing the river higher up, where it was more easy to be forded, they very judiciously threw themselves with the whole of their might on the right wing, which consisted of the irregulars. These at first stood their ground, but not for long; and when they fled, all the rest of the line, which as yet seems to have stood quite useless, was seized with panic. Fright preceded the Gauls, as, like the Turks, they devastated every thing wherever they went. (Throughout the Cispadana they destroyed the towns, they themselves dwelling in villages only: when the Romans afterwards conquered the country of the Insubrians, they found not a trace any where of the former population.) This, instead of calling forth a desperate resistance, paralysed the courage of the Romans. Thus they were defeated on the Alia in the most inglorious manner. The Gauls had attacked them in the rear, and cut them off from the road to Rome: part of them fled to the Tiber, of whom some escaped through the river, and others were drowned; and part took refuge in a forest. Yet the slaughter must have been immense; and it is inconceivable, how Livy could speak only of the disgrace. Had not the Roman army been all but annihilated, it would not have been necessary to have given up the defence of the city so entirely, as was done: for it was left undefended and abandoned by all. Many, instead of returning to Rome, ran away to Veii; some few only, who had fled along the high road, entered the city by the Porta Collina. Rome was exhausted; its force was scattered to the winds, its legions powerless; its allies also who could bear arms had most of them shared in the defeat, and they partly expected the dreadful enemy in their own homes. In Rome it was believed that the whole of the army was destroyed: nothing was known of those at Veii. Within its walls were only old men, women and children; defence was not to be thought of. It is not, however, to be supposed that the gates were left open, and that the Gauls, fearing an ambush, had waited several days before the town. More likely is what others relate, that the gates were barricaded. We may form a very lively image of the condition of Rome after this battle, by comparing it with the similar situation of Moscow just before the fire. People were convinced that a long defence was impossible, as in all likelihood provisions were scarce. Livy has a false idea of the evacuation of the city, as if the defenceless inhabitants in their consternation had remained immoveable, and part of them had been received into the Capitol. But it had been resolved to defend the Capitol. The tribune Sulpicius, with about a thousand men had taken refuge in it. There was an old well there, which is still in existence, and without which the garrison would soon have died of thirst. No antiquary knew of it; but I discovered it from the accounts of the people living there: it is sunk through the rock to the level of the Tiber, yet its water is not fit to drink. The Capitol was scarped, and thereby inaccessible: the way to it, leading from the Forum and the Via Sacra, was a clivus, which was shut by a gate at the bottom and on the top. The rock was not as steep as in later times,—this is shown by the account of the assault,—but it was still very strong. Whether, as was the case in Moscow, some remained behind in the town, who, in their confusion, did not consider what an enemy they had to deal with, we cannot decide. The story is very fine, and reminds us of the taking of the Acropolis by the Persians, where also the old men allow themselves to be put to the sword by the enemy. Yet, in spite of the improbable character of the incident, I am inclined to believe, that several old patricians,—the number may not be quite historical,—seated themselves in their robes of office on the curule chairs in the Forum; and that the Pontifex Maximus consecrated them for death. Such consecrations were a well-known Roman custom. And, surely, it is also true, that the Gauls were astounded at finding the town forsaken, and only those old men immoveably sitting; and that, mistaking them for images or phantoms, they did nothing, until one of them struck a Gaul who touched him; whereupon all were slain. To lay hand on themselves, was at variance with the habits of the Romans, whose feelings, on the whole, were in many things much more correct, and much more akin to ours, than those of many other nations of old. All hope for their fatherland had indeed been given up by the old men; but the Capitol was still tenable, and people chose rather to die in an attempt at resistance, than to flee away to Veii, where, after all, they would not have been able to hold out. The sacred things were taken to Cære. The hope of the Romans was now, that the barbarians would get tired of the siege. The Capitol had been provisioned for some time to come; there may have been a couple of thousand persons in it; public and private buildings, all the temples were used as dwellings. The Gauls made dreadful havoc in Rome, still more so than the Spaniards and Germans did in 1527. The soldier sacks, destroys, when he finds no men; he gets drunk, and fire breaks out quite undesignedly, as at Moscow;—the whole town was laid in ashes, with the exception of some houses on the Palatine where the chiefs of the Gauls were living. It is to be wondered at, that single monuments of the earlier times outside of the Capitol are still talked of; statues were said to have been preserved: it is true that the Travertino is tolerably fireproof. That Rome was burnt down, is certain; at the rebuilding of the city, the old streets were not even restored.
The Gauls were now lying in the town. At first they made an assault on the clivus, and were repulsed with loss; which is rather surprising, as we know that the Romans had before succeeded in an attack upon the same clivus against Appius Herdonius. Afterwards they discovered the footsteps of a messenger, who had been sent from Veii to provide for the affairs of the city in the due forms of law. For, the Romans on the Capitol were patricians, they represented the curies and the government; those who had gathered together at Veii, represented the tribes, but had no leaders. The tribes had decided upon recalling Camillus and making him dictator; Pontius Cominius was therefore sent to Rome to obtain the consent of the senate and the curies. This was quite in the spirit of the olden times. If the curies had interdicted him aqua et igni, they only could recall him after a previous decree of the senate. But, if he had gone into voluntary exile, and, by accepting the right of citizenship at Ardea, had renounced the Roman one before a decree of the centuries had been passed against him, it again rested,—he being a patrician,—with the curies alone, to receive him anew as a citizen; otherwise he would have been no dictator, nor would he have considered himself as such.
It was in the dogdays that the Gauls came to Rome. But summer has at all times been pestilential at Rome, especially the two months and a half until September; and, a thing which Livy also tells us, as the barbarians bivouacked in the open air amid the ruins, they could not fail to be attacked and destroyed by diseases like the army of Frederic Barbarossa before the castle of St. Angelo. Yet it was not the whole host of the Gauls which was encamped there, but most likely no more than were necessary to keep the garrison on the Capitol blockaded: the rest were overrunning the neighbourhood and devastating the flat country in Latium, all the open places and the isolated houses. Many a place which existed in the early ages and is no more met with now, may have been destroyed at that time. Ostia was a strong town, and held out; for it was able to get provisions by sea, whilst the Gauls were no adepts in the art of besieging. The Ardeates, the territory of which the Gauls likewise invaded, made head against them under the command of Camillus.[121] The Etruscans seem to have caught at this opportunity of regaining Veii; for it is said that the Romans in Veii under the command of Cædicius won a battle against them, and were thus encouraged to reconquer Rome, as they were now in possession of arms.
A Roman, Fabius Dorso, is said to have offered in broad daylight a gentilician sacrifice on the Quirinal, and the astonished Gauls to have done him no harm: a tradition which is by no means improbable.
The provisions in the Capitol were about to be exhausted; but the Gauls, being themselves troubled by contagious diseases, were tired of their conquests, and not inclined to settle so far from their homes. They tried yet once more to storm the Capitol, having observed, how the messenger had gone up and come down again near the Porta Carmentalis below Araceli, which is in the direction of the Venetian palace. Now the old rock is covered with rubbish, and is therefore no more to be recognised. The besieged never dreamed of an attack being made from that side. There may have been masonry there which had become ruinous; in southern countries there is always some vegetation springing up about walls (Virgil says, Galli per dumos aderant, Livy also speaks of virgulta); and if this were not attended to, it might easily be climbed. They had already gained fast footing, as there was no wall on the top (it was not the Tarpeian rock which they tried to climb, but the Arx), when Manlius, who lived there, roused by the cackling of the geese, hastened to the spot, and hurled the assailants down. This made the Gauls still more ready to treat: they were besides called back by an irruption of the Alpine peoples into Lombardy where they had their wives and children. They were willing to withdraw on payment of a ransom of one thousand pounds of gold, about fifty thousand Frederics d’or (for, the Roman pound is very light, weighing nearly twenty-three half-ounces of Cologne), which, surely, were to be taken from the treasure on the Capitol. This was a vast sum for that age: in Theodosius’ time, there were indeed people in Rome who are said to have had a revenue of several hundred weight of gold; one even, who had as much as ten tons. That that sum was paid the Gauls, and that in consideration of it they left Rome, is historical truth; that in weighing it they practised a scornful fraud, is very possible. The væ victis also may be true: we Germans have also lived to see the same thing previous to the year 1813. Not true, however, is the rest of Livy’s story, that while they were disputing about it, Camillus made his appearance with an army, and forbade the fulfilment of the bargain, as the military tribune had no right to agree to it; and moreover, that he then drove the Gauls out of the city, and afterwards in a twofold battle so discomfited them, that not a messenger escaped. Beaufort, inspired by Gallic patriotism, has most ably shown the utter groundlessness of this tale. It is quite childish to try and hide the calamities of one’s ancestors by means of fables. Livy did not invent that story; he merely copied it from others. At the same time, he would not let his own better conviction get the upperhand here, as it is his way to look upon the whole of the earlier history with a kind of irony: he has half a mind to believe, and yet for all that, he has no belief in it. Another account, that in Diodorus, is that the Gauls besieged a town then in alliance with the Romans (the name of which, indeed, must have been wrongly written, and is said to have probably been Vulsinii); and that the Romans delivered it, and took back again from the Gauls the gold which had been paid them: Livy, however, knows nothing of this siege of Vulsinii. A third account, in Strabo, and also in Diodorus, does not allow the honour to belong to the Romans; but will have it that the Cærites pursued the Gauls, and attacked and cut them to pieces in the country of the Sabines. Just in the same way did the Greeks endeavour to disguise the fact that the Gauls took the money from the treasury of Delphi, and that in quite an historical age (Ol. CXX.). The true explanation is surely the one which is found in Polybius, that the Gauls were induced by the rising of the people of the Alps to withdraw from Rome, and that Rome on the other hand had suffered its full meed of humiliation. What booty the enemy had taken, was spent; conquests they had made none, they had merely pillaged and devastated everything; and now they had been lying there for eight months, and there was nothing more which they could gain but the Capitol, and that very money which they also thus obtained. From Polybius’ version, many discrepant accounts may be sifted and reconciled, Livy’s romantic embellishments included. As a proof of the Gauls having been really beaten, it was asserted in Rome, that the money taken from them and buried in the Capitol, amounted to twice as much as the city’s ransom. Yet it is much more likely that the Romans paid their ransom from the treasure of the Capitoline Jupiter, and of other temples, and that this was afterwards made up double by a tax; and this tallies with a notice in the history of Manlius, that a rate was levied for the payment of the Gallic ransom. This, however, could not indeed have been done whilst the Romans were scattered every where during the siege; but afterwards, to replace the gold which had been taken away. Now, if such a mass of gold was hoarded at the Capitol, it is evident that people might have thought that they saw in it a proof that the Gauls had not kept the treasure.
As late as in Cæsar’s times, they used to show in Rome the spot near the Carinæ where the Gauls piled up and burnt their dead. It was called busta Gallica, which during the middle ages was corrupted into Portogallo; hence the church which now stands there, is properly called S. Andreas in bustis Gallicis, or, according to later Latinity, in busta Gallica. The Gauls marched off with the gold, and the Romans were reduced to pay it, being so pinched with hunger, that they stripped off the leather from their shields, and cooked it. Annihilated the Gauls certainly were not. We find in Justin the remarkable statement that the self-same Gauls who had destroyed Rome, marched into Apulia, and from thence offered the elder Dionysius their aid for money. From this important account it is manifest, that at all events they marched through the whole of Italy, and then perhaps returned along the Adriatic. Their devastations extended far into Italy; and it is an undoubted fact, that the Æquians received from them their deathblow, as from henceforth there is no more mention of any hostilities of the Æquians against Rome: on the other hand, Præneste, which must formerly have been subdued by the Æquians, appears as an independent city. During the passage therefore of the Gauls, the Æquians who inhabited small towns which might easily be destroyed, must no doubt have been crushed.