Battle of the Allia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of the Allia was fought around 387 BC, eleven Roman miles north of Rome, which is about 16 kilometres. A Gallic tribe called the Senones, led by a chieftain named Brennus, met a Roman army there and broke it. Rome itself was sacked soon afterwards. Almost everything we know comes from writers who lived centuries later, and they disagree about the details. What drew a Gallic war band so far south? How much of the famous rescue can be trusted? And why would Romans come to dread a single summer day for generations?

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• 2. A Quarrel at Clusium

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  Livy begins the story in Clusium, an Etruscan town now called Chiusi, in Tuscany. The Senones had recently pushed into northern Italy and settled on the Adriatic coast around what is now Rimini. In Livy's telling, a young man of Clusium named Aruns called them in. He wanted revenge on a man named Lucumo, whose son had "debauched his wife". The frightened Clusians sent to Rome for help.

  Rome answered by sending the three sons of Marcus Fabius Ambustus, one of its most powerful aristocrats. These ambassadors warned the Gauls not to attack Clusium and promised that Rome would defend the town. They then offered to negotiate. The Senones would accept peace if the Clusians gave up some land. A quarrel broke out, and then a fight. The ambassadors joined in, and one of them killed a Senone chieftain. That broke the rule that envoys must stay neutral. Another brother killed a Gaul as well.

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus tells it differently. In his version Lucumo was the king of Clusium, and Aruns was the guardian of the king's son. When the son grew up, he seduced the wife of Aruns. The grieving Aruns travelled to Gaul to sell wine, olives and figs. The Gauls had never tasted such things and asked where they grew. Aruns said they came from a large, fertile land with few people, none of them good fighters. He urged the Gauls to drive those people out and enjoy the harvest themselves. Notice that this version assumes the Gauls were still living in Gaul.

  Whichever tale one prefers, the Senones then sent ambassadors to Rome. They demanded that the three Fabii be handed over as punishment. The Senate felt pressure from the powerful Fabia family and did not want to be blamed if the Gauls attacked. So it passed the matter to the people. Livy reports the bitter result: the very men whose punishment was in question were elected military tribunes with consular powers for the coming year. The enraged Gauls marched on Rome, 130 km from Clusium. Livy writes that terrified cities rushed to arms and country folk fled, "but the Gauls signified by their shouts wherever they went that their destination was Rome."

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• 3. Dates and Numbers

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  Livy's account yields the traditional date of 390 BC, within what is called the Varronian chronology. Plutarch offers a different clue. He says the battle came just after the summer solstice, with the moon near full, a little more than three hundred and sixty years after Rome was founded. That points to shortly after 393 BC. The Greek historian Polybius used a Greek dating system and arrived at 387 BC. Modern historians consider c. 387 BC the most probable date.

  The day of the year is just as tangled. Tacitus gives the 18th of July. Other ancient sources say the 16th of July was also seen as ill-omened because of the disaster. Modern scholars noticed that the 18th of July is also the date given for the Battle of the Cremera in 477 BC. Early Roman historians such as Fabius Pictor, born around 270 BC, may have lined the two disasters up on purpose. Plutarch alone ties the battle to the full moon after the solstice. In the archaic lunar-solar calendar, that suggests around the 15th of July.

  The armies are harder to count than the calendar. None of the ancient sources gives reliable figures. Their estimates for each side range from 24,000 to 40,000 men. Modern historians usually go lower. Jeremy Armstrong suggests about 5,000 on each side, which fits both a Gallic mercenary band and the small Rome of that era. Max Cary and H. H. Scullard instead placed about 15,000 Romans against a huge Gallic host of thirty to seventy thousand.

  Peter Berresford Ellis argues from the Roman system itself. Each consul commanded two legions, each legion held 6,000 men, and so he reckons at least 24,000 Romans, perhaps with allied troops besides. He thinks the Senones tribal army could scarcely number more than 12,000. Only two ancient authors, Livy and Diodorus Siculus, describe the fighting in any detail.

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• 4. Rout at the River

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  Livy describes a Rome caught flat-footed. No special measures were taken, and the levy was no larger than in an ordinary campaign. The two forces met at the eastern junction of the Tiber and the Allia brook, and the Romans were probably outnumbered. They built no camp and no defensive rampart. They also skipped the ritual of consulting the gods, which they were supposed to perform. To avoid being outflanked, they stretched their wings wide. That left a thin line whose centre could barely hold together. They put their reserves on a hill to the right.

  Brennus looked at that hill and suspected a trap. He feared the reservists would fall on his rear while he fought on the plain. So he attacked the hill first. The Romans panicked. The left wing threw down its weapons and ran for the Tiber. Soldiers blocking one another's escape were cut down. The weak and those who could not swim were dragged under by their armour. Most of the men still reached Veii, an Etruscan city Rome had recently conquered, on the far bank. They did not even send word to Rome. The right wing, nearer the hill, ran for the city. The Gauls were startled by how easily they had won.

  Diodorus Siculus is the only ancient historian to place the fight on the right bank of the river. In his version the Romans lined up 24,000 of their best men on the plain and put their weakest on the hill. The Celts did the reverse, placing their best men on the hill. They won the clash with ease. Romans fleeing to the river got in one another's way, and the Celts killed the men at the rear. Some tried to swim in full armour, which Diodorus says they prized more than their lives. It dragged them down. The rest threw their arms away and swam while Gauls hurled javelins at them. Most survivors reached Veii, though a few returned to Rome with news that the army was destroyed.

  Plutarch puts the Gallic camp near the meeting of the Allia and the Tiber, about 18 km (11 mi) from Rome. He calls the fight a "disorderly and shameful battle". The Roman left was pushed into the river and destroyed. The right fell back to the hills, and most fled to Rome. The remaining survivors slipped away to Veii at night. Of them Plutarch writes, "They thought that Rome was lost and all her people slain."

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• 5. The Empty City

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  Livy says the victorious Gauls simply stood on the battlefield for a while, dumbfounded, as if puzzled by their luck. Fearing some trick, they stripped the dead, as was their custom. Seeing no sign of a Roman response, they set off and reached Rome before sunset. The gates stood open and the walls had no defenders. That was one more surprise. Unwilling to fight at night in a strange town, they camped between the city and the River Anio.

  Inside Rome, people assumed the only survivors were the few who had run home. They did not know most of the army had fled to Veii. Believing the city defenceless, they sent the men of military age, the able-bodied senators and their families up to the Capitoline Hill with weapons and food. The Flamen of Quirinus and the Vestal Virgins, who were priests, set out to carry off "the sacred things of the State". They could carry only some, so they buried the rest beneath a chapel beside the Flamen's house. On the road, a man named Lucius Albinus was driving a wagon out of the city. He ordered his wife and children down and gave the priestesses and the sacred vessels a ride to Caere, an Etruscan ally on the coast.

  The elderly stayed behind, and former consuls stayed with them to help them accept their fate. Many followed their sons to the Capitoline anyway, and no one had the heart to stop them. Former officers of state put on their ceremonial dress. In Livy's words, they wore "the insignia of their former rank and honour and distinctions", and sat on ivory chairs before their houses.

  The next day the Senones came through the open Colline Gate into the Forum. They left a small guard there in case the Capitoline struck at them, and went looking for plunder. The plebeian houses were barricaded, but the patricians' halls stood open, and the Gauls hesitated more at the open doors. Livy says they stared at the seated old men as if at statues, "wearing the very aspect of gods". Then, as the story goes, a patrician named M. Papirius struck a Gaul on the head with his ivory staff after the man stroked his long beard. That Gaul killed him first, and the rest were butchered in their chairs.

  Plutarch's version is harsher and has the Gauls killing women, children and the elderly as well. In Diodorus, the Senones spent the first day beside the Allia cutting off the heads of the dead. He claims this was their custom. They suspected a trap when they heard the noise in the city, and only on the fourth day did they break down the gates. Even Livy admits the fires were fewer than one might expect on the first day of a captured city. He guesses the Gauls wanted to scare the men on the hill into surrender, not to destroy their homes.

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• 6. Siege and Ransom

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  From the Capitoline, the defenders could hear "the shouts of the enemy, the shrieks of the women and boys, the roar of the flames, and the crash of houses falling in". Day after day it continued, until they became, in Livy's phrase, "hardened to misery". At dawn, after a few days, the Senones tried to storm the steep hill. The Romans let them climb, then flung them back down the slope. The Gauls stopped halfway up, the Romans charged, and the losses were so heavy that the Gauls never tried again.

  The Senones settled in for a siege, split into two groups. One group watched the hill. The other went foraging among neighbouring cities, because the Roman soldiers who fled to Veii had taken all the grain around Rome. Some foragers reached Ardea, where Marcus Furius Camillus lived in exile after accusations of embezzlement. He had captured Veii a few years earlier. Camillus rallied the people of Ardea, marched at night, and massacred the Gallic camp in its sleep. Meanwhile, Livy says the Senones ran the siege "with great slackness". The Fabii even held their yearly sacrifice on the Quirinal Hill. Gaius Fabius Dorsuo walked down from the Capitoline with the sacred vessels, passed through the enemy pickets, performed the rites, and walked back.

  At Veii, the survivors chose a centurion named Quintus Caedicius as their leader. They defeated Etruscan raiders, then another Etruscan force at the salt works. Volunteers from Latium joined them. Caedicius wanted Camillus in command, but that required the Senate's approval. A soldier named Cominius Pontius drifted down the Tiber on a cork float, reached Rome, and climbed a precipitous rock the Gauls had left unguarded. The Senate had the assembly annul the banishment of Camillus and name him dictator.

  The Gauls then spotted either the footprints of Pontius or an easy way up the cliff. They climbed it by night, and only the geese sacred to Juno heard them. The noise woke the Romans. Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, a former consul, knocked the first Gaul down, and he fell on those behind him. The attackers were repulsed. Quintus Sulpicius wanted to court-martial the careless guards, but the soldiers refused. They agreed to blame one man, who was thrown off the cliff.

  Famine struck both sides. The Gauls also suffered pestilence and malaria in the low ground between the scorched hills, and the heat killed many. They began burning their dead in piles. Plutarch counts the siege at seven months, from shortly after the Ides of July to about the Ides of February, the 13th of February. At last Quintus Sulpicius and Brennus agreed on a ransom of a thousand pounds of gold. The Senones cheated with heavier weights. When the Romans protested, Brennus tossed his sword onto the scale and said, "Vae victis", or "Woe to the vanquished!"

  Livy insists that "god and man forbade the Romans to be a ransomed people". Camillus arrived before the weighing was finished and ordered the gold left alone. He argued the deal was void, since an official of lower rank had made it. He offered battle and the Senones were easily beaten. They lost again 13 km east of Rome. Livy says "not even the messenger survived to report the disaster". Plutarch adds that Camillus declared it was Roman custom to deliver the city with iron, not gold. Diodorus has no Camillus at all. His Romans simply accept a thousand pounds of gold to make the Gauls leave.

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• 7. Doubting the Story

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  Plutarch preserves a tantalising scrap of Greek memory. Aristotle wrote about the capture of Rome, and said its saviour was "a certain Lucius", not Camillus. That might be Lucius Albinus, the man with the wagon. Many modern historians see the Camillus rescue as a later addition, because neither Diodorus nor Polybius mentions him. Diodorus says an Etruscan army beat the Gauls at the Trausian Plain, an unidentified place, as they returned from southern Italy. Strabo says the people of Caere defeated them and recovered the ransomed gold. Both claims contradict the idea that Camillus stopped the payment. Caere may have mattered far more than Roman tradition admits.

  The physical evidence is thin. Livy says the city burned and was then rebuilt in a haphazard layout. Cornell notes that Diodorus and Polybius say little about this period. He also points out that archaeologists have found no trace of damage from the sack. Burn marks once linked to the Gauls were later dated to the revolt that ended the Roman monarchy, more than a century earlier. Haphazard streets were normal in ancient cities. Cornell concludes that the Senones ransacked Rome for booty, left most buildings alone and departed once bought off. Piero Treves agrees that the lack of any destruction layer suggests a sack that was only superficial.

  Then there is the question of why the Senones were in central Italy at all. Diodorus says they were uncomfortable in the heat of the Ager Gallicus, so they armed their young men to search for new land. He says 30,000 of them sacked the territory of Clusium. Cornell finds this unconvincing. None of the sources mention wives or children, who would travel with a migrating people. He thinks the Senones were mercenaries. A few months after the sack, Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily, hired Gallic mercenaries for a war in southern Italy. That could explain why the Senones were heading south. It could also explain their defeat on the way back.

  He adds that Clusium may have hired them to settle a quarrel between two political factions. The romantic tale of Aruns and his stolen wife may be only a story. Every account was written centuries after the events, so none of this can be settled with certainty.

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• 8. Walls and Fear

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  A few years after the sack, Rome began a wall 11 km (7 mi) long. The old circuit was built of Cappellaccio tuff, a local stone that is quite friable. The new wall used a yellow tuff called Grotta Oscura, after its main quarry in the territory of Veii. The better stone came at a price. It was harder, and so harder to work. Cornell sees the conquest of Veii as part of Rome's recovery. Its people received citizenship without the right to vote, and the alliance with Caere, which had sheltered Roman priestesses, grew stronger. After the setback, Rome resumed its expansion.

  The fear of Gauls lasted far longer than any damage. In 350 and 349 BC unspecified Gauls attacked Latium, probably in marauding raids. On the second occasion, Marcus Valerius Corvus is said to have beaten a Gallic champion in a duel. Polybius says Rome made peace with the Gauls, who stayed away for 30 years. Rome defeated the Senones at the Battle of Sentinum in 295, during the Third Samnite War of 298-290, yet the popular fear stayed. In 228, 216 and 114, with Gallic attack feared, Romans buried alive a pair of Gauls and a pair of Greeks. Human sacrifice was not a Roman custom. Presumably they hoped to avert another Gallic disaster.

  The defeat also gave Rome an unlucky day, the dies Alliensis, or Day of the Allia. Several ancient authors call it a dies religiosus, a term that here means a ritual prohibition rather than religious observance in the modern sense. By the 1st century BC, writers treated the Gallic sack as the worst outrage in Roman history, a civic trauma kept alive by stories and taboos. Livy says Romans abstained from all public activity and ceremonies that day. Some modern scholars see a lasting, irrational dread of Gauls, called metus Gallicus. Others caution that the sources show no sustained panic during the Republic. They also note that the dies Alliensis is not attested before the mid-1st century BC, so the memory was probably reconstructed later.

  Tacitus gives an example from the imperial age. He says the emperor Vitellius showed ignorance of human and divine law by ordering public ceremonies on that very day.

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