Camillus

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.

On the third day after the battle, Brennus came up to the city with his army. Finding its gates open and its walls without defenders, at first he feared a treacherous ambush, being unable to believe that the Romans were in such utter despair. But when he realised the truth, he marched in by the Colline gate, and took Rome. This was a little more than three hundred and sixty years from her foundation, if one can believe that any accurate chronology has been preserved in this matter, when that of even later events is disputed, owing to the confusion caused by this very disaster.

However, it would seem that some vague tidings of the calamity and capture of the city made their way at once to Greece. For Heracleides Ponticus, who lived not long after that time, in his treatise On the soul, says that out of the West a story prevailed, how an army of Hyperboreans had come from afar and captured a Greek city called Rome, situated somewhere on the shores of the Great Sea.

Now I cannot wonder that so fabulous and fictitious a writer as Heracleides should deck out the true story of the capture of Rome with his Hyperboreans and his Great Sea. But Aristotle the philosopher clearly had accurate tidings of the capture of the city by the Gauls, and yet he says that its saviour was Lucius, although the forename of Camillus was not Lucius, but Marcus. However, these details were matters of conjecture.

When he had occupied Rome, Brennus surrounded the Capitol with a guard. He himself went down through the forum, and was amazed to see the men sitting there in public state and perfect silence. They neither rose up to meet their enemies when they approached, nor did they change countenance or colour, but sat there quietly, at ease and without fear, leaning on their staves and gazing into one another’s faces.