kept there.  Others say that the Samothracian gods are there, whom Dardanus brought to Troy after he had founded it, and caused to be worshipped there, which, after the fall of Troy, Aeneas carried off and kept until he settled in Italy.  But those who pretend to know most about such matters say that there are two jars of no great size in the temple, one open and empty, and the other full and sealed, and that these may be seen only by the holy virgins.  Others think that this is a mistake, arising from the fact that, at the time of which we are treating, the Vestal virgins placed most of their sacred things in two jars and concealed them in the earth under the Temple of Quirinus, which place even to the present day is called the Doliola, or place of the jars.

XXI.  However this may be, the Vestals took the most important of their holy things and betook themselves to flight along the Tiber.  Here Lucius Albinus, a plebian, was journeying among the fugitives, with his wife and infant children and their few necessaries in a waggon.  When he saw the Vestal virgins, without any attendants, journeying on foot and in distress, carrying in their bosoms the sacred images of the gods, he at once removed his wife, children, and property from the waggon and handed it over to them, to escape into one of the Greek cities in Italy.  The piety of Albinus and his care for the duties of religion at so terrible a crisis deserve to be recorded.

The rest of the priests and the old men who had been consuls, and been honoured with triumphs, could not bear to leave the city.  At the instance of Fabius, the Pontifex Maximus, they put on their sacred vestments and robes of state, and after offering prayer to the gods, as if they were consecrating themselves as victims to be offered on behalf of their country, they sat down in their ivory chairs in the Forum in full senatorial costume, and waited what fortune might befal them.

XXII.  On the third day after the battle Brennus appeared, leading his army to attack the city.  At first, seeing the gates open and no guards on the walls, he feared some ambuscade, as he could not believe that the Romans had so utterly despaired of themselves.  When he discovered the truth, he marched through the Colline Gate, and captured Rome, a little more than three hundred and sixty years after its foundation, if we can believe that any accurate record has been kept of those periods whose confusion has produced such difficulties in the chronology of later times.  However, an indistinct rumour of the fall of Rome seems at once to have reached Greece:  for Herakleides of Pontus, who lived about that time, speaks in his book ‘On the Spirit,’ of a rumour from the west that an army had come from the Hyperboreans and had sacked a Greek colony called Rome, which stood somewhere in that direction, near the great ocean.  Now, as Herakleides was fond of strange legends, I should not be surprised if he adorned the original true tale of the capture of the city with these accessories of “the Hyperboreans” and “the great ocean.”  Aristotle, the philosopher, had evidently heard quite accurately that the city was taken by the Gauls, but he says that it was saved by one Lucius:  now Camillus’s name was Marcus, not Lucius.  All this, however, was pure conjecture.