Camillus

Others still, pretending to have larger knowledge in these matters, say that two small jars are stored away there, of which one is open and empty, and the other full and sealed up, and that both are visible only to the holy virgins. But others think that these knowing ones have been led astray by the fact that the virgins, at the time of which I am now speaking, cast the most of their sacred treasures into two jars, and hid them underground in the temple of Quirinus, whence that place, down to the present time, has the name of Doliola, or Jars.

However that may be, these virgins took the choicest and most important of the sacred objects and fled away along the river. There it chanced that Lucius Albinius, a man of the common people, was among the fugitives, carrying off his wife and little children, with the most necessary household goods, upon a waggon. When he saw the virgins with the sacred symbols of the gods in their bosoms, making their way along unattended and in great distress, he speedily took his wife, with the children and the household goods, down from the waggon, and suffered the virgins to mount upon it and make their escape to a Greek city.

This pious act of Albinius, and the conspicuous honour which he showed the gods in a season of the greatest danger, could not well be passed over in silence. But the priests of the other gods, and the aged men who had been consuls and celebrated triumphs, could not endure to leave the city. So they put on their robes of state and ceremony, following the lead of Fabius, the pontifex maximus, and vowed the gods that they would devote themselves to death in their country’s behalf. Then they sat themselves down, thus arrayed, on their ivory chairs in the forum, and awaited their fate.