towards the city, alarming all who came in their way by their numbers,
their fierceness, and the violence with which they swept away all
opposition. There was little need of fear, however, for the rough men
took nothing from the fields, and, as they passed the cities, cried out
that they were on their way to Rome, and that they considered the
inhabitants of all cities but Rome friends who should receive no harm.

The Romans had a proverb to the effect that whom the gods wish to
destroy they first make mad, and, according to their historian Livy, it
was true in this case, for when the city was thus menaced by a new
enemy, rushing in the intoxication of victory and impelled by the fury
of wrath and the thirst for vengeance, they did not take any but the
most ordinary precautions to protect themselves; leaving to the usual
officers the direction of affairs, and not bestirring themselves as
much as they did when threatened by the comparatively inferior forces
of the neighboring states. They even neglected the prescribed religious
customs and the simplest precautions of war. When they sent out their
army they did not select a fit place for a camp, nor build ramparts
behind which they might retreat, and they drew up the soldiers in such
a way that the line was unusually weak in the parts it presented to the
on-rushing enemy.

Under such unpropitious circumstances the impetuous Gauls were met on
the banks of the river Allia, ten miles from Rome, on the very day on
which the Fabii had been destroyed by the Etruscans the century before
(July 16, 390). The result was that terror took possession of the
soldiers, and the Gauls achieved an easy victory, so easy, indeed, that
it left them in a state of stupefied surprise. A part of the Romans
fled to the deserted stronghold of Veii, and others to their own city,
but many were overtaken by the enemy and killed, or were swept away by