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Vae Victis!

In 390 BCE, a tribe of Gauls (modern France) made their way south across the Alps toward Rome. They put the Romans to flight at the River Allia, 11 miles from Rome, and laid siege to the city. The Romans sent their women, children, and religious items out of the city for safekeeping, while the men of military age took up a position on the Capitoline hill, the highest and most easily defended of Rome’s seven hills. Eventually the defenders ran short on food and negotiated surrender terms with the Gauls: in exchange for an agreed sum of gold, the Gauls would depart from the city.

To add insult to injury, the Gauls used unequal weights as the gold was being measured, so that the Romans would end up paying more than the agreed sum. When the Romans objected, the Gallic leader threw his sword on the weights, making the Romans add extra gold to cover its weight as well. As he did so, he uttered the words “Vae victis (Woe to the conquered)!” reminding the Romans that those defeated in war have no bargaining power.

Livy describes what happened next:

By good fortune it happened that before the infamous ransom was completed and all the gold weighed out, the Dictator [Camillus] appeared on the scene and ordered the gold to be carried away and the Gauls to move off.… Fortune now turned, divine aid and human skill were on the side of Rome. At the very first encounter the Gauls were routed as easily as they had conquered at the Allia (Livy, 5.49).

Diodorus Siculus, a Greek contemporary of Livy, tells a different story however:

[when] the Romans sent ambassadors to negotiate a peace, they [the Gauls] were persuaded to leave the city and to withdraw from Roman territory in exchange for one thousand pounds of gold (Diodorus, 14.116).

Diodorus knows nothing of the miraculous arrival of the Roman dictator, and neither does the very brief mention of Polybius, another Greek who is our earliest surviving source on this episode. And even Roman sources, including Livy, acknowledge the devastation to the city caused by the Gauls. The image that emerges from all of our sources is more consistent with the notion of the Gauls plundering the city and then moving off.

Even if the Greek accounts provide a useful corrective, Livy’s account is still valuable. It reveals an attempt to save face, to avoid having to admit that Rome had once paid bribes to secure its survival. More than that, Livy’s account helps us understand Roman imperialism. The story of Vae victis became an important part of the Roman mentality: if losers have no bargaining rights, the Romans resolved never to suffer this fate again and so developed a stronger military that they used to engage anyone who even remotely threatened their security.

That does not automatically make Greek sources more reliable. Plutarch had his own purposes in writing. In his commentary on the character of Romulus, Plutarch made clear that he saw Romulus as a tyrant, guilty “of unreasoning anger or hasty and senseless wrath,” but he also includes the unlikely account of Romulus’ assassination. His version seems less concerned with Caesar, perhaps because he was writing 200 years later. Instead his text serves to reinforce his moralizing critique: Romulus was deservedly killed because he was a tyrant. Moralizing aims can affect a historian’s account as much as contemporary politics or a desire to paint a founder in a positive light.