Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 5
Benjamin Oliver Foster, Ph.D., Ed.

21. A vast throng went out, and filled the camp.¹ Then the dictator, after taking the auspices, came forth and commanded the troops to arm. [2] “Under thy leadership,” he cried, “Pythian Apollo, and inspired by thy will, I advance to destroy the city of Veii, and to thee I promise a tithe of its spoils. [3] At the same time I beseech thee, Queen Juno, that dwellest now in Veii, to come with us, when we have gotten the victory, to our City —soon to be thine, too —that a temple meet for thy majesty may there receive thee.” [4] These prayers uttered, he set forward with overwhelming numbers to assault the town on every side, that the inhabitants might not perceive the danger pressing upon them from the mine. [5] The Veientes, unconscious that they were already given up by their own soothsayers, and by foreign oracles, that some of the gods had already been invited to share in their despoiling, while others having been entreated to quit their city were beginning to look to new homes in the temples of their enemies, and that this was the [6??] last day they were themselves to live, feared nothing less than that their defences were undermined and their citadel already filled with foemen, and, each for himself, took up arms and ran out to the ramparts; [7] marvelling what it meant that whereas for so many days not a Roman had stirred from his post, they should now, as though they had suddenly gone mad, be rushing blindly against the walls.

[8] At this point men introduce a tale, how, as the King of the Veientes was sacrificing, the Roman soldiers in the mine overheard the soothsayer declare that to him who should cut up² the inwards of that victim would be given the victory, and were [p. 75]moved to open the mine and seize the entrails,³ which they bore off to the dictator. [9] But in matters of so great antiquity I should be content if things probable were to be received as true: this story, more fit to be displayed on the stage, that delights in wonders, than to be believed, it is worth while neither to affirm nor to refute.⁴

[10] The mine, which was then filled with picked troops, suddenly discharged its armed men into the temple of Juno, on the Veientine citadel; some of them assailed the backs of their enemies, who were on the walls; others wrenched off the bars that made fast the gates; others, when the women and slaves cast down stones and tiles from roofs, fetched fire against them. [11] The air resounded with shouts; discordant threats of the attackers and despairing shrieks of the defenders were blended with the wailing of women and children. [12] In a moment the armed soldiers were everywhere hurled from the walls, and the gates thrown open. A part of the Romans poured through them in a body, others scaled the deserted walls; the city was overrun with enemies; the battle raged in every quarter; [13] then, when there had already been great carnage, the fighting began to flag, and the dictator bade the heralds proclaim that those without arms should be spared. This ended the slaughter. [14] The unarmed began to give themselves up, and the Romans scattered, with the dictator's permission, in quest of booty. When this was brought before him, and he saw that it was considerably larger and comprised effects of greater value than he had hoped or thought, it is said that he raised his [15??] hands to heaven and prayed that if any god or man deemed his good fortune and that of the Roman People to be excessive, it might be granted [p. 77]him to appease that envy with the least harm to his⁵ own private interests and to the public welfare of the Roman People. [16] As he turned, while making this prayer, tradition states that he slipped and fell, and that this omen was seen (when men came later to gather its meaning from the event) to point to the condemnation of Camillus himself, and in the second place, to the capture of Rome, a disaster which befell a few years afterwards. [17] So that day was spent in the slaughter of enemies and the sack of a most opulent city.