Camillus

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.

Still, even in what I am now writing, the mention of a few examples may not be amiss. To begin with, then, it was on the fifth day of the month of Hippodromius (which the Athenians call Hecatombaeon) that the Boeotians won two illustrious victories which set the Greeks free: that at Leuctra, and that at Ceressus more than two hundred years earlier, when they conquered Lattamyas and the Thessalians.