ng the festal games with a "sale of Veientes," at
which, among the mock spoils submitted to auction, the most wretched
old cripple who could be procured wound up the sport in a purple
mantle and ornaments of gold as "king of the Veientes." The city was
destroyed, and the soil was doomed to perpetual desolation. Falerii
and Capena hastened to make peace; the powerful Volsinii, which with
federal indecision had remained quiet during the agony of Veii and
took up arms after its capture, likewise after a few years (363)
consented to peace. The statement that the two bulwarks of the
Etruscan nation, Melpum and Veii, yielded on the same day, the former
to the Celts, the latter to the Romans, may be merely a melancholy
legend; but it at any rate involves a deep historical truth. The
double assault from the north and from the south, and the fall of
the two frontier strongholds, were the beginning of the end of the
great Etruscan nation.

The Celts Attack Rome--
Battle on the Allia--
Capture of Rome

For a moment, however, it seemed as if the two peoples, through whose
co-operation Etruria saw her very existence put in jeopardy, were
about to destroy each other, and the reviving power of Rome was to
be trodden under foot by foreign barbarians. This turn of things,
so contrary to what might naturally have been expected, the Romans
brought upon themselves by their own arrogance and shortsightedness.

The Celtic swarms, which had crossed the river after the fall of
Melpum, rapidly overflowed northern Italy--not merely the open country
on the right bank of the Po and along the shore of the Adriatic, but
also Etruria proper to the south of the Apennines. A few years
afterwards (363) Clusium situated in the heart of Etruria (Chiusi, on
the borders of Tuscany and the Papal State) was besieged by the Celtic
Senones; and so humbled were the Etruscans that the Tuscan city in
its straits invoked aid from the destroyers of Veii. Perhaps it would
have been wise to grant it and to reduce at once the Gauls by arms,
and the Etruscans by according to them protection, to a state of
dependence on Rome; but an intervention with aims so extensive, which
would have compelled the Romans to undertake a serious struggle on the
northern Tuscan frontier, lay beyond the horizon of the Roman policy
at that time. No course was therefore left but to refrain from all
interference. Foolishly, however, while declining to send auxiliary
troops, they