The Boii Attack the Romans and Lose
Seeing the expulsion of the Senones, and fearing the
note
same fate for themselves, the Boii made a general levy, summoned the Etruscans to join them, and set out to war. They
mustered their forces near the lacus Vadimonis, and there gave
the Romans battle; in which the Etruscans indeed suffered a loss
of more than half their men, while scarcely any of
the Boii escaped. But yet in the very next year
the same two nations joined forces once more; and arming even
those of them who had only just reached manhood, gave the
Romans battle again; and it was not until they had been utterly
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defeated in this engagement that they humbled themselves so
far as to send ambassadors to Rome and make a treaty. note
These events took place in the third year before Pyrrhus
crossed into Italy, and in the fifth before the destruction of the
Gauls at Delphi. For at this period fortune seems to have
plagued the Gauls with a kind of epidemic of war. But the
Romans gained two most important advantages from these
events. First, their constant defeats at the hands of the Gauls
had inured them to the worst that could befall them; and so,
when they had to fight with Pyrrhus, they came to the contest
like trained and experienced gladiators. And in the second
place, they had crushed the insolence of the Gauls just in time
to allow them to give an undivided attention, first to the war
with Pyrrhus for the possession of Italy, and then to the war
with Carthage for the supremacy in Sicily.
