testimony to the story of Livy as weak as its improbability is great. Thus Polybius does not expressly mention any ransom : while Dionysius represents Camillus as attacking the Gauls on their march, without being present at the weighing out of the gold.(16) Pliny supposes the gold paid voluntarily by the Romans to Brennus, and that plundered by them from the temples to have been recovered by Camillus in battle, and dedicated by him in the temple of Capitoline Jupiter.(169) Diodorus describes it as having been recovered by Camillus in a battle fought in Etruria. Other accounts suppose the gold to have been delivered to the Gauls and carried away by them, but to have been recovered by Livius Drusus, or by the Cærites. An entirely different account of the conditions imposed upon the Romans by the Gauls, when they evacuated the Roman territory, is given by Polyænus.

Diodorus, in his narrative of the capture of Rome by the Gauls (which is unusually copious, in comparison with his other notices of Roman history at this period), makes no mention of Camillus, until the Gauls have left the city with their ransom. He is then appointed dictator, and he defeats the Volscians and the Etruscans, and takes the Etruscan town of Sutrium; after which he defeats the Gauls, and recovers the gold. He then triumphs for his victory over the Etruscans with four white horses, and two years afterwards is fined by the people. This account confounds together events which the received narrative places in a wholly different order. The triumph with the four white horses, and the fine of Camillus, belong to the siege of Veii; and are antecedent to the arrival of the Gauls while the victories of Camillus over the Volscians and Etruscans, and the capture of Sutrium, are subsequent to the defeat of the Gauls by Camillus, and belong to a different campaign. (170) This confusion and translocation of events,

(168) xiii. 8.

(169) The passage of Servius cited above, p. 334, n. 127, supposes the gold to have been recovered by Camillus near Pisaurum, on the coast of the Adriatic.

(170) The campaign of Camillus against the Volscians, in Diodorus, is

renders the entire narrative of Diodorus suspicious; though it is free from several of the improbable circumstances which occur in the relation of Livy. The remark of Diodorus, that the people, having previously been in all things obedient to the Senate, began for the first time to overrule their decisions at the time of the Gallic invasion,(171) is moreover wholly repugnant to all that we hear of the earlier Roman history.

'In the life of Camillus (says Dr. Arnold), there meet two kinds of fiction, equally remote from historical truth, but in all other respects most opposite to one another; the one imaginative, but honest, playing, it is true, with the facts of history, and converting them into a wholly different form, but addressing itself also to a different part of the mind; not professing to impart exact knowledge, but to delight, to quicken, and to raise the perception of what is beautiful and noble; the other, tame and fraudulent, deliberately corrupting truth in order to minister to national or individual vanity, pretending to describe actual events, but substituting in the place of reality the representations of interested or servile falsehood. To the former of these classes belongs the legend of the fall of Veii; to the latter, the interpolation of the pretended victory of Camillus over the Gauls.'(172) The same view of the supposed victory of Camillus had been previously taken by Beaufort, who represents Livy as desirous of concealing the disgraceful ransom of Rome, and as admitting a manifest fiction into his history, taken from some fabulous writer, without adequate examination of its evidence. Perhaps, he adds, it was mentioned only in the memoirs of the Furian family, which, like other family memoirs, were full of falsehoods.(173) Beaufort and Dr. Arnold agree in thinking that the true version of this famous event has been preserved by Polybius, who says that the Gauls returned unhurt, with all

identified with that in Livy and Plutarch, by the place, which in Diodorus is Tò Kaλоúμevov MáρRiov, xiv. 117, while Livy, vi. 2 calls it ad Macium or Mecium, and Plutarch, Cam. 33, rò Máρkiov opoç.

their spoil, to their own country, having imposed upon the Romans such conditions as they thought fit to dictate: they likewise reject the account of the defeat of the Gauls by Camillus, and of the recovery of the plunder and ransom, as a figment of national and family vanity.

A similar view is taken by Niebuhr.(174) It cannot be disputed that, if we judge merely from grounds of internal probability, the account of Polybius, which is less romantic than the common story, and less flattering to the national vanity of the Romans, is the more entitled to belief. But we are in entire ignorance as to the source of his information. The lifetime of Polybius extended from about 204 to 122 B.C.;(175) and he may be supposed to have composed his history about 150 B.C. This date is two hundred and forty years after the capture of Rome by the Gauls; and is therefore beyond the reach of faithful oral tradition. We know that Rome had not at that time any native historians, and the expeditions of the Gauls in Italy did not enter into Grecian history. How far this event was noticed by Hieronymus or Timæus, who, according to Dionysius, touched cursorily upon the early Roman history, we have no means of ascertaining. We cannot therefore trace the account of Polybius, even conjecturally, to any trustworthy source. The version of Livy may savour of national vanity, but the defeat of the Gauls by Camillus is reported by Dionysius and Diodorus, Greek historians, not less than by the Roman writers;(176) and we may

(174) Hist. vol. ii. p. 550-2; Lect. vol. i. p. 270.

(175) See Clinton, ad ann. 181, 129; Beaufort, Diss. p. 286, considers the authority of Polybius decisive on this point, remarking that he wrote his history about a century and a half after the taking of Rome. He mistakes the age of Polybius by nearly a century. See above, vol. i. p. 32. Speaking of the campaigns against the Gauls, soon after the capture of Rome, Niebuhr says: The unconditional confidence which is due to Polybius in the times near his own, cannot be extended to so early a period, respecting which he could only seek for information in the annals;' Hist. vol. iii. p. 76.

(176) Dr. Arnold remarks that it is through the Greek writers only that we can learn the real issue of the Gaulish invasion;' vol. i. p. 391. By the Greek writers,' Polybius alone seems to be meant. Dionysius and Diodorus both describe the Gauls as defeated by Camillus on their

reasonably assume that this story was related by native historians anterior to Polybius. The account mentioned by Suetonius, which transfers the glory of recapturing the gold from Camillus to a certain Livius Drusus, whose lifetime is unfixed, and of whom nothing is known-a supposed ancestor of the great family which gave a wife to Augustus and four emperors to Rome is certainly not more worthy of credit than the received story recounted by Livy.

The capture of Rome by the Gauls-a strange and formidable race of barbarians-is the first event in Roman history which, so far as we know, attracted the notice of the contemporary Greeks. Plutarch says that an indistinct rumour of this great calamity soon reached Greece, and Heraclides of Pontus, in a philosophical dissertation, spoke of a report from the far west, which described an Hellenic city called Rome, situated somewhere near the great sea, as having been taken by an army from the distant land of the Hyperboreans. Heraclides was a disciple of Plato, and is said to have been left in charge of his school during his visits to Sicily; the first of which was in the year after the capture of Rome. Aristotle, who was born in 384 B.C., and who may be presumed to have collected the materials for his constitutions of Greek and barbarous states about 340 B.C., had obtained more accurate information on the subject. He stated that Rome was taken by the Celts, but he attributed the merit of saving it to a certain Lucius; whereas, says Plutarch, the name of Camillus was Marcus, not Lucius.(177)

way homewards. The uncertainty of the received accounts as to the assistance rendered by Camillus during the Gallic occupation of Rome is pointed out by Dr. Arnold, vol. ii. p. 3.

(177) Cam. 22. Aristotle died in 322 B.C. Speaking of the year in which Manlius was executed, Gellius says: 'Eoque ipso anno, qui erat post recuperatam urbem septimus, Aristotelem philosophum natum esse, memoriæ mandatum est;' xvii. 21, § 25. The execution of Manlius, according to Livy, falls in the seventh year after the capture of the citythat is, if 390 B.C. is taken as the date of that event, in 384 B.C. This agrees exactly with the statement of the Greek writers, who place the birth of Aristotle in Olymp. 99.1. See Stahr's Aristotelia, vol. i. p. 29. Clinton, ad ann. Gellius, ib. § 20, makes the capture of Veii nearly contemporary with the death of Socrates; which again agrees with our chronology for the death of Socrates was in 399 B.C., and the capture of Veii is placed in 396 B.C.

:

Theopompus the historian, who was born about 378 B.C., and whose history of Philip ended with the year 336 B.C., mentioned the fact that Rome had been taken by the Gauls: the event could only have been introduced by him incidentally.(178) Another notice, which was probably derived from some of the Greek historians of the period, is that Dionysius the elder, when engaged in his wars in Sicily and Southern Italy, received a friendly embassy from a party of the Gauls, who a few months before had burnt Rome. He is stated to have accepted their offers of assistance, and to have taken them into his service. (179) With respect to native reminiscences of this event, the anniversary of the battle, the dies Alliensis, the 18th of July, which was marked in the calendar as an unlucky day, may be considered as having been faithfully preserved, by uninterrupted national observance, as a memorial of the capture of the city. (180)

(178) Theopompus, ante quem nemo mentionem habuit, urbem duntaxat a Gallis captam dixit; Pliny, N. H. iii. 9. Pliny probably was not aware of the passages of Heraclides and Aristotle, cited by Plutarch. Compare Fragm. Hist. Gr. vol. i. p. 303, Didot.

(179) Justin, xx. 5. Celts and Iberians in the service of Dionysius are mentioned by Xen. Hell. vii. 1, § 20. Compare Grote, Hist. of Gr. vol. xi. p. 35.

(180) Livy says of this day, 'insignem rei nulli publice privatimque agendæ fecerunt;' vi. 1. Virgil mentions the ill-omened name of Allia : Quosque secans infaustum interluit Allia nomen; Æn. vii. 717. Lucan alludes to the antiquity of the observance :

Cedant feralia nomina Cannæ,

Et damnata diu Romanis Allia fastis.-vii. 408-9. 'Dies Alliensis ab Alliâ fluvio dictus; nam ibi exercitu nostro fugato Galli obsederunt Romam;' Varro de L. L. vi. 32. Exercitum Romanum apud Alliam fluvium ceciderunt, die xvi. Kalendas Augusti; qui dies inter nefastos relatus, Alliensis dictus; Victor de Vir. Ill. 23. Compare Lachmann de Die Alliensi, p. 21. The sanctions connected with this day were strict, and were religiously observed. Tacitus and Suetonius speak of the Emperor Vitellius as a man devoid of all respect for human an i divine law, for having performed some acts connected with his chief Pontificate on the dies Alliensis; Hist. ii. 91, Vit. 11. Cicero describes the observance of the dies Alliensis as having been instituted by his ancestors. Majores nostri funestiorem diem esse voluerunt esse Alliensis pugnæ quam urbis captæ; quod hoc malum ex illo; itaque alter religiosus etiam nunc dies, alter in vulgus ignotus;' Ep. Att. ix. 5. Alliensis dies dicebatur apud Romanos obscœnissimi ominis, ab Alliâ fluvio scilicet, ubi Romanus fusus a Gallis exercitus est; Festus, p. 7. Dies religiosi quibus, nisi quod necesse est, nefas habetur facere; quales sunt sex et triginta atri qui appellantur, et Alliensis, et ii quibus mundus patet. Id. in