Camillus

But what most of all confounded their undertakings was the number of their commanders. And yet before this, and on the brink of lesser struggles, they had often chosen a single commander, with the title of Dictator, not unaware how great an advantage it is, when confronting a dangerous crisis, to be of one mind in paying obedience to an authority which is absolute, and holds the scales of justice in its own hands.

Moreover, their unfair treatment of Camillus was in no slight degree fatal to discipline, since it was now dangerous to hold command without paying regard to the pleasure and caprice of the people. They advanced from the city about eleven miles, and encamped along the river Allia, not far from its confluence with the Tiber. There the Barbarians came suddenly upon them, and after a disorderly and shameful struggle, they were routed.

Their left wing was at once driven into the river by the Gauls and destroyed; their right wing was less cut up, because it withdrew before the enemy’s onset from the plain to the hills, from which most of them made their way back to the city. The rest, as many as escaped the enemy’s hands, which were weary with slaughter, fled by night to Veii. They thought that Rome was lost and all her people slain.

The battle[*](390 B.C.) took place just after the summer solstice when the moon was near the full, on the very day of a former great disaster, when three hundred men of the Fabian gens had been cut to pieces by the Tuscans. But the second defeat was so much the worse that the day on which it fell is called down to the present time dies Alliensis, from the river. Now concerning dies nefasti, or unlucky days, whether we must regard some as such, or whether Heracleitus was right in rebuking Hesiod for calling some days good and some bad, in his ignorance that the nature of every day is one and the same,—this question has been fully discussed elsewhere.