Plutarch, a Greek from Chaeronea writing under the Roman Empire, made Parallel Lives: paired Greek and Roman biographies of character, virtue, and vice. This is Camillus, the Roman life he set beside Themistocles: two men who saved a city that had already discarded them. The story belongs to early Rome on the Tiber in what is now Italy.

Marcus Furius Camillus took Veii, the Etruscan rival across the Tiber, after a ten-year siege and rode in triumph on four white horses, a display Rome thought too close to a king. They exiled him for the spoils. Then the Gauls, peoples from the lands we now call France and neighbors, came. The army broke at the Allia; the Capitol, the hill citadel, starved. Brennus threw his sword on the ransom-scales and said vae victis: woe to the beaten. Camillus came back from Ardea, drove the Senones from the Forum, Rome’s central square, and forbade the people to abandon the ashes for Veii’s standing houses. He died of plague, called a second Romulus.