Description of Greece

​Therefore, taking up their arms and splitting into two, they began to kill one another and were killed in turn, understanding neither their native tongue, nor recognizing one another’s forms, nor discerning the shapes of their shields. Rather, to both divisions alike, because of their present delusion, the men standing against them seemed, both themselves and their weapons, to be Greeks and to be speaking the Greek language; and the madness from the god brought about the greatest slaughter among the Gauls by one another’s hands.

​And those of the Phocians who had been left behind in the fields for the guarding of the cattle were the first to perceive it, and they reported to the Greeks the events that had overtaken the barbarians in the night. Having taken courage, the Phocians pressed upon the Celts even more eagerly; they kept their farmsteads under greater guard and did not allow them to take the necessities of life from the country without a fight, so that there arose immediately for the Gauls throughout the whole army a severe shortage of corn and of all other things for food.

​And the number of them destroyed in Phocis was as follows: those in the battles were slightly fewer than six thousand, while those who perished in the stormy night and afterwards in the Panic fear became more than ten thousand, and just as many others also died of hunger.

​And men of the Athenians arrived at Delphi to reconnoitre; and returning at that time, they reported both other things that had happened to the barbarians and the calamities from the god that had overtaken them. And they themselves marched out, and as they passed through Boeotia, the Boeotians mingled with them; thus indeed both, following after the barbarians, laid ambushes and kept killing those who were always at the rear.

​And with those who were fleeing together with Brennus, Akichorios and his men also mingled during the previous night; for the Aetolians had made their march slow, using their javelins unsparingly against them and whatever else they happened to have, so that no large portion of them escaped to the camp near Heracleia. For Brennus, as far as his wounds were concerned, there was still hope of recovery; but they say that through fear of his fellow-citizens, and still more through shame, as being the cause of the disasters in Greece, he voluntarily departed this life by drinking unmixed wine.

​And after this, the barbarians were conveyed with difficulty as far as the Spercheius, with the Aetolians violently pressing upon them; and when they arrived at the Spercheius, the Thessalians and the Malians lying in wait there fell upon them so greedily that not one of them was saved back home.

​And the expedition of the Celts against Greece and their destruction took place when Anaxicrates was archon at Athens, in the second year of the hundred and twenty-fifth Olympiad, in which Ladas of Aegium won the stadion race; and in the following year, when Democles was archon at Athens, the Celts crossed over again into Asia.