Brennus
Brennus sacked Rome around 390 BC and is the source of the phrase woe to the vanquished. He led the Senones, a Gallic people who had settled on the Adriatic side of Italy, and the war began at Clusium, where Roman envoys sent to mediate joined the fighting on the Etruscan side - a breach of the law of nations that Rome then refused to punish. The Gauls marched on Rome instead and destroyed the army sent against them at the Allia, eighteen kilometres from the city, on a day the Roman calendar marked as unlucky ever afterwards. The city was open. Most of the population fled, the older senators are said to have waited in their courtyards to be killed, and the survivors held out on the Capitol for months while the rest of Rome burned. The geese of Juno, according to the tradition, woke the garrison during a night assault. The siege ended in a negotiated ransom of a thousand pounds of gold, and when the Romans complained that the weights were false he is said to have thrown his sword onto the scale and said vae victis - woe to the conquered. Livy then has Camillus arrive, refuse the treaty and drive the Gauls out, which reads as a later addition to save the story. The name may be a title rather than a name, since a different Brennus attacked Delphi a century later, and almost nothing else about him survives. The sack itself is not in doubt - the archaeology shows a destruction layer - but the date is given as 390 by Roman reckoning and 387 by Greek, and Rome's own early records were said to have burned in it, which is convenient for everything the annalists wrote afterwards.
- Nationality: Senone
- Roles: military
