Camillus Restores Rome After the Gallic Sack
The Gauls sacked Rome about 390 BC and the tradition credits a single man with rebuilding it. The disaster began with a diplomatic failure. A Gallic force under Brennus was besieging Clusium in Etruria, Roman envoys were sent to mediate and joined in the fighting instead, and Rome refused to hand them over. The Gauls marched on the city and destroyed the army at the Allia in a rout so complete that the date was marked as unlucky in the calendar for centuries. Rome was taken and burned except for the Capitol, which held out — the geese of Juno waking the garrison during a night assault is the story everyone remembers — and the city bought them off with a thousand pounds of gold, weighted with false measures, at which Brennus is supposed to have thrown his sword onto the scale and said woe to the vanquished. Camillus, a former dictator living in exile after a quarrel over the plunder of Veii, was recalled and, in the version Livy gives, arrived at that moment and declared that Rome ransomed itself with iron and not with gold. The historicity of nearly all of it is doubtful. What is solid is that the city was sacked, that it recovered within a generation, and that it built the wall traditionally called Servian afterwards. Camillus was given the title of second founder of Rome, and the whole episode became the standard Roman lesson about not negotiating. The sack also produced a documentary catastrophe. Rome's early records were burned, which is why everything before 390 BC in Livy is reconstruction, and why the fifth century of the Republic is a matter of family traditions written up four hundred years later.
- Year: 386 BCE
- Category: Political
