The Rise of Rome

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What is certainly the case is that the Celts were fine warriors and knew how to frighten an enemy army out of its wits. Completely fearless, they rushed naked into battle, with their long hair streaming and strange war cries, accompanied by harsh trumpet blasts. Their cavalry rode with iron horseshoes, a military innovation, and the infantry carried finely tempered slashing broadswords. The Celts were able to muster very large forces and were hard to defeat. The news of their imminent arrival in central Italy was seen, rightly, as an emergency order.

Myriad warriors and even greater numbers of women and children arrived before Clusium, an important Etruscan city and once Lars Porsenna’s base. A foolish story is told that they were tempted there with a promise of Clusium’s large supplies of wine, and that, responding to an appeal from the city, the Romans sent some ambassadors, who met and remonstrated unsuccessfully with the Celtic king, Brennus. The ambassadors then fought alongside the army of Clusium in a vain attempt to repulse the Celts. This broke the principle of diplomatic neutrality, and infuriated Brennus, who ordered a retaliatory march on Rome, only eighty miles away.

What really seems to have happened is that Brennus led a band of marauders intent on plunder, not a people in search of Lebensraum. It is very possible that they were in the pay of the turannos of Syracuse, Dionysius, whose principal aim in these years was to undermine Rome’s ally, the Etruscan trading entrepot of Caere, and the Greek cities of Magna Graecia. If that was so, the Celts were passing through on their way to southern Italy.

The Romans may have sent an advance force north to discover the truth behind the reports of a Celtic advance, but what is certain is that a hastily assembled Roman army confronted the invaders in a great battle at the little river Allia, a tributary of the Tiber. The numbers on each side are uncertain, but perhaps two legions, or about ten thousand Romans faced thirty thousand Celts. To avoid being outflanked, the Roman commander stretched his line out, but too thinly. Presumably, the well-to-do heavily armed legionaries were posted in the center, with the poorer citizens as light-armed troops on each wing. The center could not hold, fractured, and gave way.

It should have been a rout with high casualties, but Brennus had expected a larger enemy army. Suspecting an ambush, he held his men back. Many Romans were able to get away, and a good number escaped to nearby Veii, whose citadel was eminently defensible.

However, the way to Rome lay open.

LIVY DESCRIBES WHAT happened next in one of his great set pieces. It was a mark either of overconfidence or carelessness or both that Rome was not encircled by a protective wall. Earthen ramparts and hills were deemed a sufficient defense. Even worse, most of the army was either dead or cowering in the ruins of Veii. The city was undefended. There was nothing to stop Brennus from marching in and giving the Romans the treatment they had meted out to the people of Veii.

The Celts could hardly believe their eyes and, once again, feared a trap. They watched and waited until evening fell. Inside the beleaguered city, the most was made of a night’s reprieve. The handful of remaining troops took up position on the Capitol, where they should be able to hold out indefinitely. Civilians were allowed to take refuge there, too, but many others, especially of the poorer sort, poured out of the city gates across the wooden bridge, the Pons Sublicius, to the Janiculum Hill and vanished into the countryside. Vesta was goddess of the civic hearth and guarantor of Rome’s permanence. Her priestesses, who were vowed to chastity, the Vestal Virgins, debated what to do with the sacred emblems. It was decided to bury those that could not be moved and to travel with the remainder to the friendly Etruscan city of Caere. The Vestal Virgins’ main task was to tend the goddess’s eternal flame, and presumably they took it with them in the shape of a torch or a brazier. Abandoning their native land, they set off on foot but were given a lift by a patriotic carter. Rome was dead.

With morning came the Celts. The citadel was now safe, but, rather than hide away, senators decided to consecrate themselves to the underworld and death in a strange ritual called devotio (whence, in passing, our word devotion). The sacrifice of their lives would bring the same devotio onto the heads of their enemies—in other words, it would consecrate the Celts to their destruction, too. Only a current holder of state authority (a consul, say) could devote himself, but a former public official could regain his imperium by the ritual gesture of clasping his chin. The senators went home and dressed themselves in their old robes of office. They sat quietly, awaiting their fate in the courtyards of their houses.

The porta Collina, the Colline Gate, at the northern tip of the city, had been left open, and it was here that the Celtic invaders made their entry. They proceeded coolly and calmly down the long, straight street that led from the gate to the foot of the Capitol and then the Forum. They wandered around the square, gazing at the temples and the citadel. After sightseeing, they fanned out through the city in search of booty. To their surprise, they found that while the dwellings of the poor were locked and barred, the mansions of the rich lay unprotected.

They were startled by the senators, sitting stock-still, and one Celt touched the beard of a certain Marcus Papirius, thus interrupting the ritual devotio gesture. The offended Papirius at once hit the man on the head with his ivory staff. The furious Celt butchered him on the spot, and the other senators soon met the same fate. The devotio was complete.

Looting now began in earnest. Houses were ransacked and set on fire. Many public and private records were consumed in the conflagration, greatly hindering the work of Roman historians like Livy. But the citadel held out. The Celts settled down for a siege.

CAMILLUS WAS NURSING mixed feelings. The victor of Veii had been sent into exile because of a disagreement over distribution of the booty. Sensing that he had become old and useless, he seethed with resentment at his lot. He lodged in a small town not far from Rome and watched events from an impotent distance.

Some lucky star brought Celtic raiders to his vicinity, for it aroused his patriotic wrath and he led the townsfolk in a successful sortie. News of this small victory spread quickly. At Veii, the site of his most famous exploit, the Roman soldiery were coming to regret Camillus’s absence, and after consultation with the Senate he was recalled to become dictator for the second time, the Republic’s fatalis dux (its predestined leader), and resume command of the army.

He was lucky not to have arrived too late, for the Capitol very nearly fell to the invaders. What happened was one of the most delightful stories of Roman history. The Celts noticed that the rocky ascent up the hill from where the Temple of Carmenta, the goddess of childbirth, stood could be easily climbed. One starlit night, an unarmed man was sent to reconnoiter the route and a scaling party followed after him. Although it was a scramble, they made it to the top of the cliff not far from the huge Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. The Roman guards heard nothing, and sleeping dogs lay undisturbed.

Livy continues the narrative:

It was the geese that saved them—Juno’s sacred geese, which in spite of the dearth of provisions had not been killed. The cackling of the birds and the clapping of their wings awoke Marcus Manlius—a distinguished officer who had been Consul three years before—and he, seizing his sword and giving the alarm, hurried, without waiting for the support of his bewildered colleagues, straight to the point of danger. One Celt was already up, but Manlius with a blow from the boss of his shield toppled him headlong down the cliff. The falling body carried others with it: many more who dropped their weapons to get a better grip of the rocks were killed by Manlius, and soon more Roman troops were on the scene, tumbling the climbers down with javelins and stones, until every man of them was dislodged and sent hurtling to the bottom of the cliff.

Time passed slowly in the heat of summer. Good hygiene was always difficult to maintain in an ancient army, and an infection spread through the Celtic camp. The invaders lost the energy to burn corpses separately at individual funerals and piled them up in heaps for mass cremation in the Forum Boarium, near the city end of the Pons Sublicius. As late as Livy’s day, the spot was still known as Busta Gallica, or the Celtic Pyres.

As for the defenders on the Capitol, time was no less an enemy. In their case, the challenge was hunger rather than disease. They disguised their shortage of supplies by flinging loaves of bread down into the Celtic outposts. But hope as well as food was beginning to fail. Men were hardly strong enough for guard duty. If only