proportion to the awe that had at first struck them, they rushed on the
old senators, and slew each one in his curule chair.

Then they dispersed through the city, burning, plundering, and
destroying. To take the Capitol they soon found to be beyond their
power, but they hoped to starve the defenders out; and in the meantime
they spent their time in pulling down the outer walls, and such houses
and temples as had resisted the fire, till the defenders of the Capitol
looked down from their height on nothing but desolate black burnt
ground, with a few heaps of ruins in the midst, and the barbarians
roaming about in it, and driving in the cattle that their foraging
parties collected from the country round. There was much earnest faith
in their own religion among the Romans: they took all this ruin as the
just reward of their shelter of the Fabii, and even in their extremity
were resolved not to transgress any sacred rule. Though food daily
became more scarce and starvation was fast approaching, not one of the
sacred geese that were kept in Juno's Temple was touched; and one Fabius
Dorso, who believed that the household gods of his family required
yearly a sacrifice on their own festival day on the Quirinal Hill,
arrayed himself in the white robes of a sacrificer, took his sacred
images in his arms, and went out of the Capitol, through the midst of
the enemy, through the ruins to the accustomed alter, and there
preformed the regular rites. The Gauls, seeing that it was a religious
ceremony, let him pass through them untouched, and he returned in
safety; but Brennus was resolved on completing his conquest, and while
half his forces went out to plunder, he remained with the other half,
watching the moment to effect an entrance into the Capitol; and how were
the defenders, worn out with hunger, to resist without relief from
without? And who was there to bring relief to them, who were themselves
the Roman State and government?