SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

This is another case of Roman exaggeration. The various stories, which became commonplaces of Roman cultural memory, offered important patriotic lessons: in placing the claims of country above family, in bravery in the face of certain defeat, and in the dangers of measuring the worth of the city in terms of gold. The catastrophe became so much a part of the Roman popular imagination that some diehards were using it in 48 CE as an argument (or a desperate gambit) against the emperor Claudius’ proposals to admit Gauls into the senate. There is, however, no archaeological evidence for the kind of massive destruction that later Romans imagined, unless those traces of burning now dated to around 500 BCE are in fact, as archaeologists once thought, the remains of a Gallic rampage a hundred years later.