The Gallic Sack of Rome
A History of Mankind (129)
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Under the leadership of Marcus Furius Camillus (446-365 BC), five times elected dictator, Rome in 396 BC had conquered nearby Veii, an Etruscan city with which it had long disputed the Tiber’s western bank.
This allowed the republic to massively expand its available farmland: a great turning point for a republic that hadn’t celebrated a triumph – a parade celebrating a military victory – since 426 BC1. Three years later, a law passed by the Roman senate (senatus consultum) arranged for the distribution of new territory to all free adult males in Roman households, and not simply to the ”patres familias,” the heads of Roman households.
There was a catch: the new laws allowed for “nexum,” a form of debt-bondage, to become a central component of the early republican economy. This was the case largely because the laws also provided for some debt cancellations, again, on the Greek model2. The result was lowered social tension and fewer peasant revolts, since credit and debt were ubiquitous in the countryside, and debt only became a worse problem after many free men took on large estates in Veii that required significant upfront investments.
A key point in the legislation was that nexi, indebted peasants who entered into the “nexum” condition of subservience regarding their creditors, remained different from slaves, including the tens of thousands of former Veii citizens who had been enslaved, on a temporary or permanent basis.
Even if many nexi were mistreated and even killed, nexi as a rule stayed free men with at least some of the benefits that this condition entailed – which resulted in widespread clientage in Rome, a characteristic of the city for centuries to come, as powerful men relied on clients to agitate, vote and even fight for them when needed.
In around 388 BC, one of the Celtic tribes in northern Italy, the Sennones, tried its luck south of the Po and into Etruscan territory. As thousands of hardened Gallic warriors besieged the city of Clusium in modern Tuscany, Etruscan notables asked for Roman help. In a fateful decision, the Roman senate sent three brothers from the Fabii clan, one of its most illustrious, to deal with the barbarians.
When the barbarians urged Clusium to settle by giving them part of their territory, the Romans objected, and received the explanation that, as Thucydides had reported a few years earlier unbeknownst to all involved, the Athenians had given the Melians: that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, and the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. As a fight broke between the envoys and the Gauls, a certain Quintus Fabius killed a Gallic chieftain, creating a blood-feud between the Sennones and the Romans.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Suddenly, the Gauls lost all interest on Clusium, lifted their siege and marched straight for Rome, 130 kilometers to the south, instead. Well over 10,000 Roman part-time soldiers met the Gallic force, probably around the same size or even smaller, about 20 kilometers north from the city.
The Romans formed a thin, long line, looking to envelop the barbarians, with a reserve including their weaker soldiers on a nearby hill. Brennus, the experienced Gallic leader, countered the Roman strategy by launching an immediate assault that routed the reserve on the hill. As hundreds of the survivors escaped into the Roman lines, the Gauls followed up with a frontal assault that crushed the Roman army entirely.
Panic in Rome was so swift that there wasn’t even time to elect a dictator. With the city undefended, the Sennones were allowed inside the walls, and stole much of its valuables. Later Roman authors may have exaggerated the physical impact of the sack, as much of the city went unspoiled in exchange for the payment of 1,000 pounds of gold, but the moral and psychological impact was enormous and left the ruling class’ prestige in tatters3. News of the sack was so shocking that it reached Greece, being commented upon by Aristotle, in the oldest recorded reference to Rome in Greek sources.
An unlikely legend later developed that the famous Camillus was in exile during this episode, following a dispute with his rivals in the senate, and was appointed dictator after the fall of the city, having the time to rush with a new army and defeat the Gauls. This was so unbelievable that, for centuries, the most oft-repeated anecdote about the sack wasn’t anything related to Camillus’ alleged last-minute glorious victory4, but the response that Brennus gave when Romans complained about the way he weighed the booty he was owed: “vae victis” (“woe to the vanquished”) practically became the slogan of the Roman army from that point on.
The mark left on the Roman consciousness was as broad as it was deep. Almost a millennium later, Macrobius reports5, the Nones of July festival celebrated the alleged courage of female slaves who had allegedly been sent over to the Gauls in disguise, in place of the free women the victors had requested – and then allegedly got the Gauls drunk before they gave their Roman masters a signal so Roman soldiers could slay the enemy by surprise.
Beyond the legendary, a flurry of factual changes, possibly including further rounds of debt cancellation, upended everything in the city over the following two decades. Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, a prominent patrician who had held out with a small garrison in the Capitoline during the Gaulish sack, looked to cash out on his popularity by supporting plebeians in dire straits. Having worried his fellow patricians that he might try an Herdonius-style takeover on the basis of his growing influence, he was condemned to death by the senate and thrown from the Tarpeian Rock6 in 384 BC.
The construction of the republican circuit walls in 378 BC was an expensive endeavor that wouldn’t have been possible if the lower classes that actually put the bricks in place hadn’t seen some of their grievances addressed7; new monumental construction sprung across the city thanks to the Grotta Oscura quarries formerly controlled by Veii8.
Passage in 367 BC of the Lex Licinia Sextia – facilitated by Camillus’ last dictatorship that very year – restored consular power in place of larger government councils and establishing some restrictions on landholding9 and limits to debt interest rates, all of which represented an additional show of Republican support for the poorer segments of society.
The limits on interest were small and, in effect, temporary steps, since the law merely established that outstanding debts at the time should have interest rates deducted from the principal, and the remainder paid in three annual installments; this was followed by various laws in following years built on the same theme of temporary fixes at times of credit crunches.
When the Genucia Law of 342 BC banned interest charges altogether, it became effectively impossible to enforce, as other legislators elsewhere in the world would notice time and time again when they tried similar moves. So, in 326 BC, the Poetelia Law formally abolished the voluntary nexum form of regulated debt bondage, leaving it only for defaulting debtors. All in all, these moves represented key, albeit often minor and calculated concessions by patricians that allowed plebeians to join the Roman expansionist project – the source for the slaves that would replace the former nexi serfs on the fields – with fewer misgivings10.
See Tim Cornell’s Chapter 6 in The Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd edition, Volume VII, Part 2. The occupation of Veii included an archaic touch of godly favor, since Iuno Regina – Veii’s goddess – was supposedly persuaded to abandon the city and go over to Rome; superstitious Romans later claimed that the goddess’ statue was transported to the city with miraculous ease.
Later, when Dionysius II succeeded his father in 367 BC, the new Syracusan tyrant freed 3,000 debt-bondsmen.
Livy attributes the debt crisis that ultimately brought about the very influential Lex Licina Sextia to the site-wide rebuilding efforts following the sack.
Camillus did return to prominence after the sack, and is credited with three consulates and three dictatorships between 389 and 367 BC.
Saturnalia, Book 1, Chapter 11.
A 25-meter cliff south of the Capitoline Hill, it apparently was used for rare executions of the most notorious traitors since ancient time and well into the imperial era.
See S. Bernard’s 2018 “Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy. New York: Oxford University Press: “The Roman state may have made unprecedented grants of land in its desire to increase the supply of citizen labor… This will have effectively created a substantial class of…potential debtors. That is, a relatively larger proportion of Rome’s voting population, particularly in the new rural tribes, were in debt, and this may have forced the issue at the level of public legislation.”
Bernard, Op. Cit.
There’s a story in Livy (16.9) that C. Licinius Stolo, one of the legislators of 367 BC, was later fined for occupying more ager publicus than had been permitted by his own law.
Livy reports that a law passed in 357 BC set a 5% tax on slave manumission, which indicates that Rome already had significant numbers of slaves even at such an early date, well before it embarked on the main campaigns to conquer the rest of Italy. See “War and society in the Roman world” (Routledge, 2002), ed. by John Rich and Graham Shipley.