History of Rome

​While these things were being done in Macedonia, the consuls set out for their provinces.

​Marcellus sent a messenger ahead to the proconsul Lucius Porcius, to move his legions to the new town of the Gauls.

​To the arriving consul, the Gauls surrendered themselves. There were twelve thousand armed men; most of them held weapons snatched from the fields.

​These weapons were taken away from them, though they bore it with reluctance, together with whatever other things they had either seized while plundering the fields or brought with them. They sent ambassadors to Rome to complain about these matters.

​Having been introduced into the senate by the praetor Gaius Valerius, they explained that they, forced by the overflowing population in Gaul and by the lack of land and poverty, had crossed the Alps to seek a dwelling-place, and had settled there without injury to anyone, in places which they saw to be uncultivated throughout the wilderness.

​They had also begun to build a town, which was an indication that they had not come to bring violence to any territory or city. Recently Marcus Claudius had sent a messenger to them, stating that he would wage war with them unless they surrendered. They, preferring a certain, ​even if not a glorious peace, to the uncertainties of war, had surrendered themselves into the good faith rather than into the power of the Roman people.

​When ordered a few days later to depart from both the city and the territory, they had intended to depart quietly to whatever part of the world they could. Then, their arms, and finally all other things which they were carrying and driving, were taken from them.

​They begged the senate and the Roman people not to rage more harshly against them, innocent and surrendered, than against enemies.

​To this speech the senate ordered the following reply to be given: that neither had they done right when they came into Italy and attempted to build a town on another’s land, without the permission of any Roman magistrate who presided over that province;

​nor did it please the senate that those who had surrendered should be plundered. Therefore, they would send ambassadors with them to the consul, who, if they should return to where they had come from, should order all their possessions to be restored to them, and who should go straightway across the Alps and warn the Gallic peoples to keep their population at home;

​that the Alps lay between them as an almost insurmountable boundary, and that it would by no means go better with them than with those who had first made them passable.

​The ambassadors sent were Lucius Furius Purpurio, Quintus Minucius, and Lucius Manlius Acidinus. The Gauls, after everything which they had held without injury to anyone was restored, departed from Italy.