The twenty-first day of that month is also observed by the Carthaginians as that which has always brought the heaviest misfortunes upon them.  And I am well aware that at the time of the celebration of the mysteries Thebes was destroyed for the second time by Alexander, and that after this Athens was garrisoned by Macedonian soldiers on the twentieth of Boedromion, on which day they bring out the mystic Iacchus in procession.  And similarly the Romans, under the command of Caepio, on that same day lost their camp to the Gauls, and afterwards, under Lucullus, defeated Tigranes and the Armenians.  King Attalus and Pompeius the Great died on their own birthdays.  And I could mention many others, who have had both good and evil fortune on the same anniversaries.  But the Romans regard that day as especially unlucky, and on account of it, two other days in every month are thought so, as superstitious feeling is increased by misfortune.  This subject I have treated at greater length in my treatise on ‘Roman Questions.’

XX.  If, after the battle, the Gauls had at once followed up the fugitives, nothing could have prevented their taking Rome and destroying every one who was left in it; such terror did the beaten troops produce when they reached home, and such panic fear seized upon every one.  However the barbarians scarcely believed in the completeness of their victory, and betook themselves to making merry over their success and to dividing the spoils taken in the Roman camp, so that they afforded those who left the city time to effect their escape, and those who remained in it time to recover their courage and make preparations for standing a siege.  They abandoned all but the Capitol to the enemy, and fortified it with additional ramparts and stores of missiles.  One of their first acts was to convey most of their holy things into the Capitol, while the Vestal virgins took the sacred fire and their other sacred objects and fled with them from the city.  Some indeed say that nothing is entrusted to them except the eternal fire, which King Numa appointed to be worshiped as the origin of all things.  For fire has the liveliest motion of anything in nature; and everything is produced by motion or with some kind of motion.  All other parts of matter when heat is absent lie useless and apparently dead, requiring the power of fire as the breath of life, to call them into existence and make them capable of action.

Numa therefore, being a learned man and commonly supposed on account of his wisdom to hold communion with the Muses, consecrated fire, and ordered it to be kept unquenched for ever as an emblem of the eternal power that orders all things.  Others say that, as among the Greeks, a purificatory fire burns before the temple, but that within are other holy things which no man may see, except only the virgins, who are named Vestals; and a very wide-spread notion is, that the famous Trojan Palladium, which was brought to Italy by Aeneas, is