Camillus

Veii, an Etruscan city a short march from Rome, held out against Roman siege for a full decade before falling around 396 BCE under Camillus's command, a length of resistance Roman tradition treated as extraordinary and explained in religious as much as military terms. Ancient accounts describe Camillus, before the city's final capture, performing evocatio, formally calling upon Veii's own tutelary goddess, Juno Regina, to abandon her people and accept a new and better home at Rome, addressing her by every name and title that might apply on the premise that a deity's protection could genuinely be persuaded away from a city it no longer wished to defend. Whether the rite preceded the city's fall or interpreted it afterward, ancient sources present the two as connected: Veii's capture and Juno's departure from it as a single religious and military event, with the goddess's cooperation treated as a necessary condition of Roman success rather than a mere afterthought. Following the victory, Camillus is credited with formally establishing Juno Regina's cult in a new temple on Rome's Aventine Hill, physically enacting the relocation the evocatio had proposed and giving Rome a visible token that the ritual had worked.

Modern historians of Roman religion treat the episode as the best documented ancient instance of evocatio precisely because it comes with this before and after structure, a named performer, a named deity, and a physical temple marking the transfer, rather than the more fragmentary references that survive for the rite's few other attested uses, including the later destruction of Carthage.

Camillus's triumph over Veii was followed almost immediately by disgrace: accused of taking more than his share of the captured city's wealth, and resented for a vow that diverted a tenth of the spoils to Apollo at Delphi rather than to the soldiers who had won them, he was condemned and went into exile at Ardea. Roman tradition treats what happened next as poetic justice for the city that had rejected him. In 390 BCE a Gallic army under Brennus defeated Rome's forces at the Allia and sacked the city itself, holding it, apart from a besieged garrison on the Capitoline Hill, for months.

With Rome in ruins and its people ready by some accounts to abandon the site altogether and resettle at Veii, the Senate recalled Camillus, who is credited with rallying what remained of Roman military strength, driving the Gauls out, and, more consequentially for how Romans remembered him, arguing successfully against relocation and for rebuilding the city where it stood. That intervention earned him the title later writers gave him, the second founder of Rome, a designation resting less on any single battle than on the claim that Roman continuity itself, the decision to remain Rome rather than become something else, ran through him. He went on to hold the dictatorship five times in total, and later Roman tradition credited him with helping resolve the long running Struggle of the Orders between patricians and plebeians, dedicating a temple to Concord to mark the settlement.