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 taken, according to Ephorus, Kallisthenes, Damastes and Phylarchus.

On the other hand, the month Metageitnion, which the Boeotians call Panemos, is unfavourable to the Greeks, for on the seventh of that month they were defeated by Antipater at Kranon and utterly ruined; and before that, were defeated during that month by Philip at Chaeronea.  And on that same day and month and year Archidamus and his troops, who had crossed over into Italy, were cut to pieces by the natives.