They proceeded about eleven miles from the city, and halted for the
night on the banks of the river Allia, which joins the Tiber not far
from where their camp was pitched. Here the barbarians appeared, and,
after an unskilfully managed battle, the want of discipline of the
Romans caused their ruin. The Gauls drove the left wing into the river
and destroyed it, but the right of the army, which took refuge in the
hills to avoid the enemy's charge on level ground, suffered less, and
most of them reached the city safely. The rest, who survived after the
enemy were weary of slaughter, took refuge at Veii, imagining that all
was over with Rome.

XIX. This battle took place about the summer solstice at the time of
full moon, on the very day on which in former times the great disaster
befel the Fabii, when three hundred of that race were slain by the
Etruscans. But this defeat wiped out the memory of the former one, and
the day was always afterwards called that of the Allia, from the river
of that name.

It is a vexed question whether we ought to consider some days unlucky,
or whether Herakleitus was right in rebuking Hesiod for calling some
days good and some bad, because he knew not that the nature of all days
is the same. However the mention of a few remarkable instances is
germane to the matter of which we are treating. It happened that on the
fifth day of the Boeotian month Hippodromios, which the Athenians call
Hekatombeion,[A] two signal victories were won by the Boeotians, both of
which restored liberty to Greece; one, when they conquered the Spartans
at Leuktra, and the other, when, more than two hundred years before
this, they conquered the Thessalians under Lattamyas at Keressus.

[Footnote A: Plutarch himself was a Boeotian.]

Again, the Persians were beaten by the Greeks on the sixth of Boedromion
at Marathon, and on the third they were beaten both at Plataea and at
Mykale, and at Arbela on the twenty-fifth of the same month. The
Athenians too won their naval victory under Chabrias at Naxos on the
full moon of Boedromion, and that of Salamis on the twentieth of that
month, as I have explained in my treatise 'On Days.'

The month of Thargelion evidently brings misfortune to the barbarians,
for Alexander defeated the Persian king's generals on the Granicus in
Thargelion, and the Carthaginians were defeated by Timoleon in Sicily
on the twenty-seventh of Thargelion, at which same time Troy is believed
to have been