Camillus

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.