"All things belong to the brave": Gauls, Romans, and the Battle of the Allia
A close reading of Livy's epic historical account
As the Romans looked down from their fastness and saw the City full of enemies running up and down in all the streets, while first in one quarter and then in another some new calamity would be occurring, they were unable, I do not say to keep their heads, but even to be sure of their ears and eyes. Wherever the shouting of the invaders, the lamentations of the women and children, the crackling of the flames, and the crash of falling buildings drew their attention, trembling at each sound, they turned their thoughts and their gaze that way, as though Fortune had placed them there to witness the pageant of their dying country.
Livy, History of Rome, V.xlii.1
Rome burns. The city swarms with invaders, fills with the cries of women and children. The country, as Livy so vividly describes, is “dying.”
You might be thinking this passage depicts the infamous sack of Rome in AD 410, that moment when the Visigoths rampaged through the city, signaling the beginning of the end for the western half of the Roman Empire. But this is, in fact, recounting an event that transpired nearly eight hundred years earlier. Long before the Visigoths, long before even the rise of the Caesars and the establishment of the Roman Empire, back in the early days of the Roman Republic, Rome was sacked by an entirely different group of barbarians: the Gauls. Of all the civilizations the Romans fought — Carthaginians, Parthians, Germans — perhaps none were as constant an enemy as the Gauls. Certainly few loom as large in the histories left to us by the Romans.
While writing my novella, Son of the Thunder Goddess, a story that takes a ton of inspiration from Celtic histories and mythologies, I immersed myself as much as possible in the world of the ancient Celts. But finding accurate accounts proved difficult. Like many of the early inhabitants of Europe, the Celtic peoples of the Bronze and Iron Ages did not leave behind written records of their own. Instead, what we know of them comes to us from the writings of Greco-Roman historians like Livy, Polybius, Plutarch, Tacitus, and the military-commander-turned-dictator Julius Caesar. With this separation from the actual culture come a host of interpretive issues. For one thing, the Romans were at war with their Celtic neighbors in Gaul for hundreds of years until Julius Caesar’s final conquest in the late first century BC. As we might expect, given this long-lasting historical enmity, Romans historians often exhibit extreme prejudice against the Celts. Writers such as Livy casually term the Gauls, Rome’s closest Celtic neighbors, as “barbarians.” And while this term was used for any peoples who were not Greek or Roman, the Gauls especially seem to embody all that the word “barbarian” connotes. They leap from the pages of Roman history as mortal enemies, savages beyond the pale of civilization. Taller, stronger, and wilder than the Romans, the Gauls are a constant cause for fear and target of disdain.
But, as we see with so many empires, Roman attitudes towards their barbarian foes, extend beyond mere derision and fear. If we look more closely at their writings, we see also a kind of grudging respect of Gallic valor and fighting prowess. The Romans feared and respected their Celtic opponents, whose battle frenzy and wild courage often saw them triumph in single combat and on the battlefield, even against the famous discipline of Rome’s legions. Derision, fear, respect — all three characterize the way the Romans understood the Celts. And for us, forced as we are to study them through the lens of their conquerors, we are left with the difficult prospect of disentangling truth from Roman prejudice and propaganda.
In these next two Substack posts, I intend to examine the very first meeting between Gauls and Romans: the Battle of the Allia (c. 390 BC). In this battle, as recorded by Titus Livius (aka Livy) in his History of Rome, the Gauls are far from a vanquished people. Here they are not conquered but conqueror, putting the Roman legions to flight and pillaging their way through the sacred city of Rome itself.
As a historian, Livy was removed from these events by nearly four centuries, writing during the early days of the Roman Empire, whose establishment he saw as a terrible tragedy, a betrayal of the Roman Republic’s ancient and venerable virtues. Looking back as he does on these early days of Rome’s history, about a hundred years after the overthrow of the Etruscan monarchs and the formation of the Republic, Livy affords this great and terrible moment the full epic treatment. His account of the Battle of the Allia, the tragic pillaging of Rome which follows, and the triumphant vengeance of the Roman army, takes as its principal focus the Roman people. But through Livy’s narrative, we also get glimpses into the lives of the early Celts — their valor in battle, their sense of honor, and the deadly combination of ferocity and cunning that sees them enter into the very heart of Rome.
Livy begins the story of the Allia in suitably dramatic fashion, recounting how a plebeian named Marcus Caedicius receives divine warning of a coming Gallic invasion. Standing near the temple of the goddess Vesta, he “heard in the silence of the night a voice more distinct than a man’s, which bade him tell the magistrates that the Gauls were approaching.” Omens, auguries, a warning from the gods — already this story possesses the trappings of a Classical epic or tragedy. Like the legendary fall of Troy, presaged by signs and dire prophecies, the sack of Rome must also be portended by omens. The magistrates, however, do not take Caedicius’s warning seriously, because “of the informant’s humble station” and because the Gauls are a faraway and foreign people to the Romans, an unlikely threat at present.
With the ominous shadow of Gallic invasion looming, Livy raises the stakes of his narrative by introducing a second event: the unfortunate exile of Rome’s greatest protector, Marcus Furius Camillus, a military commander and hero of Rome’s many previous wars against neighboring peoples. Due to political infighting, Furius is indicted and forced to leave the city, despite his protestations of innocence. Furius prays, ominously, that the gods “would make his thankless fellow citizens wish to have him back.”
It doesn’t take long for Furius’s prayer to be answered. The problems begin when the Romans receive envoys from the city of Clusium, asking for help against the Senones, a Gallic tribe who have shown up suddenly on their doorstep. Livy adds that the people of Clusium “had no rights of alliance or of friendship with the Romans.” Even so, the Senate agrees to help the Clusians with their Gallic problem, sending members of the illustrious Fabii family to enter into diplomatic conversations with them.
The negotiations begin as a “peaceful assembly,” and represent the first meeting between the Romans and the Gauls. The Gallic envoys agree to peace, but only if the Clusians surrender “a portion of their territory.” The Roman envoys shoot back, asking what right they have to demand this land. And the Senones tell them that “they carried their right at the point of the sword and that all things belonged to the brave.” Livy often puts such words in the mouths of his Gauls, having them espouse an essentially “might makes right” moral framework. As barbarians, they are ignorant of Roman law, and are, in Livy’s eyes, without the tempering effects of civilization.
Things turn heated at this point, and both Gauls and Clusians enter into armed conflict. Unfortunately, the Fabii also participate in this skirmish, thereby acting “in defiance of the law of nations” whose rules guarantee the safety of diplomats but also demand they refrain from violence.
The Gauls are angered at the Roman envoys’ breach of decorum and international law. They send envoys of their own to Rome, demanding the Fabii be handed over to them for punishment. And while the senate recognizes “the demands of the barbarians to be just,” they are unwilling to punish such influential men. Instead, they put it to the Roman people, who, adding further insult to the Senones, elect the Fabii envoys to be consular tribunes. In response to this promotion of the lawbreakers, the Gauls are justifiably angry:
At this the Gauls were enraged, as they had every right to be, and returned to their people with open threats of war.
The Romans now find themselves at war based on their unjust treatment of the Gauls. Moreover, they lack proper leadership. Normally, Livy observes, in such cases as this, the Republic would elect a dictator, a single man who takes command of Rome’s armies, and under whose iron leadership the city is able to weather a crisis. In this case, however, instead of a single, competent commander (like the exiled Furius Camillus), the Roman legions are commanded by the very same Fabii tribunes whose promotion provoked the Gauls to war. And these tribunes, it quickly becomes clear, are not well suited to the task of defending Rome:
The tribunes whose rashness had brought on the war were in supreme command; they conducted the levy with no greater care than had usually been employed in preparing for ordinary campaigns, and even disparaged the rumoured seriousness of the danger.
Facing these rash, careless commanders is the barbarian host, “consumed with wrath (a passion which their race is powerless to control).” Notice the terror their army inspires as it marches towards the city of Rome:
Straightway catching up their standards, [they] set their column in rapid motion. As they marched swiftly and noisily on, the terrified cities armed in haste, and the peasants fled; but they signified with loud cries, wherever they came, that Rome was their goal, and their horse and foot in an extended line covered a vast tract of ground.
In Rome, meanwhile, the mood is one of outright panic, and there is a breakdown of order and discipline. Concerned by the “enemy’s swiftness,” the army is “levied as it were en masse and hurriedly led out.” From the outset, the Gauls have the upper hand, putting the Republic’s famed legions on the backfoot. The two armies meet about eleven miles from the city, at the place where the river Allia meets the “waters of the Tiber.” As the two sides come face-to-face, the Gauls have the advantage of intimidation:
The Gauls had already overrun all the ground in front and on both sides, and — the race being naturally given to vainglorious outbursts — their wild songs and discordant shouts filled all the air with a hideous noise.”
The tribunes in command of Rome’s thrown-together force, the same notorious Fabii, display uncharacteristic lack of discipline. Livy catalogues their omissions and oversights as follows:
The tribunes of the soldiers, without having selected a place for a camp or fortified a position to which they might retreat, and, forgetting even the gods, to say nothing of men, without auspices or sacrificial omens, drew up their line with the wings extended to prevent being outflanked by the numbers of the enemy.
The Fabii tribunes’ error is threefold. First, they neglect to make camp. Roman camps were a fearsome thing, a fortification of trench and palisade, built every time the legion halted their marching for the day. This meant that in the event that the army suffered defeat in the field, the soldiers could retreat and continue the fight from a safer, more defensible place.
Second, continuing the theme established with the failure to take seriously the plebeian Marcus Caedicius’s warning from the gods, the Fabii tribunes disregard proper religious observance. Again, common Roman practice dictated that before any significant event, especially a battle, the will of the gods should be sought through the consulting of auspices, usually in the form of a sacrificial animal. The augurs, priests trained in the reading of omens, would poke through the entrails of the freshly slaughtered animal and there discover either triumph or doom for their army. If the Fabii had only done this, Livy implies, they could have seen that fate was against them and avoided open battle against the numerically superior force of the Senones.
Third, the Fabii are poor tacticians, a fact that seems to take even the Gauls by surprise. Livy relates how “Brennus, the Gallic chieftain, seeing the Romans to be so few, was especially apprehensive of a stratagem.” He worries that if his men attack the Roman front, “the reserves might assail them in the flank and rear.” Ingeniously, Brennus counters the potential counter, choosing to attack the Roman reserve before it can spring a surprise attack on his forces. “Thus,” Livy concludes, “not only luck but generalship as well were on the side of the barbarians.”
It seems inconceivable to the Roman Livy that in a true contest between Roman and Gaul, civilized and savage, the barbarian might emerge as superior, winning through courage as well as cunning. Thus, he makes Brennus think and act like a true Roman, while the Romans behave unlike their true selves. Among the Roman army, he says, “there was no resemblance to Romans, either amongst officers or private soldiers.”
Indeed, the very sight of the Gauls — strange, tall, and powerful men who enter battle with “songs and discordant shouts” — fills the Romans with “terror and dismay.” The army’s reserves manage to hold out for a short while, but the rest of the soldiers in the field panic and flee: “they ran away from their strange enemies, almost before they had caught sight of them.”
The Gauls give chase, and a terrible slaughter ensues. Typically, in ancient battles, so long as both sides remain committed to defeating the other, the death rate remains relatively low. It is only after one side breaks and attempts to flee that the victor is able to visit terrible slaughter on their enemies. At the Allia, the Romans yield the advantage after only a brief contest, allowing the Gauls an almost unearned victory and the opportunity to inflict severe losses on their fleeing enemies.
Despite the slaughter, many Romans escape safely to Veii, a town roughly sixteen kilometers north of Rome. Fewer survivors make their way to Rome itself, seeking refuge in the Citadel, located on the Capitoline Hill.
The Gauls, meanwhile, are unable to believe their tremendous good fortune. Livy writes, “The very Gauls themselves, stunned by the marvelous victory they had so suddenly gained, at first stood rooted to the spot with amazement, like men that knew not what had happened.” The Romans have a fearsome reputation for valor and for tactics, but the Roman army they have just fought and so easily routed, did not live up to that reputation. Like Brennus before the battle, they suspect some deeper stratagem, fearing the Romans wait for them in ambush. When no ambush comes, however, they “fell to collecting the spoils of the slain and erecting piles of arms, as their custom is.” Meeting no opposition, they march on Rome, where they find the gates open, the city seemingly bereft of defenders.
In the next post, we will walk through the second half of this story. We will see how the Gauls enter Rome, pillaging the city yet failing to take the Citadel. And we will follow the triumphant return of Marcus Furius Camillus, the exiled general, who alone can save Rome from its enemies and exact retribution from the barbarians.
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Throughout this post, I am citing the Loeb Classical Library version translated by B. O. Foster.
Just discovered your Substack through the part 2 of this post. Really enjoyed reading this.