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In 225 BC Gallic tribes again threatened Rome, but this time they faced an empire, not a city-state.
Near the end of the 4th century BC, scenes of demons and monsters of the underworld replaced Etruscan tomb frescos once radiant with depictions of joyous banquets, dancers and musicians. For the Etruscans the writing was literally on the wall. Their once thriving civilization was caught between the burgeoning Roman republic of peninsular Italy and the violent inroads of Celtic Gauls into the northern Italian plain.
In 390 BC the barbaric Gauls had appeared from the north to crush the legions and put the torch to Rome itself. It was the dies ater, the "black day" of Roman history. In 284 BC a foray by the Senones put Etruscan Arretium under siege, wiped out a Roman relief force and killed its praetor (army commander). In reprisal the Romans struck into the invaders' homeland. The Senones were expelled from their land, which was so thoroughly scorched that it remained a wasteland for 50 years thereafter.
But another Gallic tribe, the Boii, watched the Roman actions with smoldering hatred, while beyond the Alps there awaited other ferocious Celts hungry for war and loot. Even the mystic Etruscan seers could not predict whether the ultimate masters of northern Italy would be Romans or Gauls.
Fruitless invasions by the Boii in the early 3rd century BC had led to a prolonged peace with Rome. Nearly 50 years later, however, a new generation of Gallic warriors had grown up, "full of unreflecting passion and absolutely without experience of suffering and peril," as the Greek historian Polybius put it. Their chiefs invited tribesmen from Gallia Transalpine (Gaul beyond the Alps) to aid in a new assault on Rome. A Roman army was hastily sent to intercept them, but the invasion proved to be a false alarm. Quarrels between the suspicious Boii and the newcomers boiled over into a pitched battle in which the Transalpine kings Ads and Galatus were killed.
Nevertheless, the Boii refused to let the matter rest At the heart of the problem was Roman expansion into the former Senones territory. To begin with, the Roman colony of Sena Gallacia had been founded along the coastal strip. And now the...