How Much Of Ancient History Is Wrong?

Livy's version starts with a grudge, as so many good narratives do.

An Etruscan nobleman from the city of Clusium named Arruns had been humiliated by a younger man who seduced his wife.

He supposedly took revenge by carrying wine and Italian goods north over the Alps to show the Gauls what they were missing.

They followed him back, tasted everything in northern Italy, and decided to keep as much of it for themselves as possible.

Livy himself doubted that part, since Gauls had been crossing the Alps for generations.

Livy dated the first migration to the reign of Rome's fifth king, Tarquinius Priscus, roughly two hundred years earlier.

He figured that the narrative of the slighted nobleman was simply a way to add drama to the narrative.

Modern archaeology puts the real Gallic settlement of the Po Valley in the fifth and early fourth centuries BC, but Livy's point stands.

They'd been pushing the Etruscans out of northern Italy for a long time, and Clusium was simply the next town in the way.

Clusium is where the story turns from migration to a full-blown disaster for the Romans.

The Clusines appealed to Rome, which had no treaty with them and no obvious reason to care, and the Senate sent three brothers from the Fabian clan, sons of Marcus Fabius Ambustus, to negotiate.

In Livy's telling, the Gauls asked for land and were told to leave, and when fighting broke out, the three ambassadors joined it.

One of them, Quintus Fabius, rode out in front of the Etruscan line and ran a Gallic chieftain through with his spear, and the Gauls recognized him while he was stripping the body.

An envoy picking up a weapon violated the rules that governed war between peoples, and the Gauls knew it.

They sent envoys to Rome and asked, quite reasonably under the circumstances, for the brothers to be handed over as criminals.

Rome refused, and the three brothers were elected military tribunes with consular power for the following year.

This meant the men the Gauls wanted punished were now running the Roman state.