the battle of the Allia and the sack of Rome were written centuries after the events, and their reliability is questionable. That may also account for the discrepancies between Livy and Diodorus Siculus concerning the sack of the city. The rescue of the city by Camillus is seen by many modern historians as an addition to the story since he was not mentioned by Diodorus Siculus and Polybius, another ancient Greek historian. Diodorus said that the Gauls were defeated at the Trausian Plain, an unidentified location, by an Etruscan army when they were on the way back from southern Italy. Strabo wrote that they were defeated by Caere (the Etruscan city, allied to Rome, to which the Vestal priestesses had fled) and that the Caerites recovered Rome's ransomed gold. That runs counter to the notion that Camillus stopped the payment of a ransom to the Senones. As has been noted, Plutarch wrote that Aristotle said that Rome was saved by "a certain Lucius". That could be Lucius Albinus, who was said to have given the priestesses a lift to Caere. The role of Caere in the saga of the Gallic sack is unclear, and it may be that it played a more important role than in the Roman tradition. There is also the question of what the Senones were doing in central Italy. Diodorus Siculus wrote that the Senones were "distressed and eager to move" because they had settled to a place (the ager Gallicus) that was too hot. They armed their younger men and sent them out to seek a territory where they might settle. Therefore, they invaded Etruria, the 30,000 sacked the territory of Clusium. However, Cornell finds that to be unconvincing. Throughout the story, the Senones appear to be a warrior band. There is no mention in any of the accounts of wives and children, who would have been present if the Gauls had been a migrating people in search of land. Cornell thinks that they were mercenaries. A few months after the sack of Rome, Dionysius I of Syracuse, the tyrant of the Greek city of Syracuse, in Sicily, hired Gallic mercenaries for a war in the south of Italy. It may well be that was why the Senones were on their way to the south. The story of their defeat on their way back from the south seems to fit with that hypothesis. It could