The panic in the city was great.

The alarm was given to take up arms; persons ran together to the walls and gates, and at length turning from sedition to war, they created Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus dictator.
He appointed Aulus Sempronius Atratinus his master of the horse.

When this was heard, (such was the terror of that office,) the enemy retired from the walls, and the young Romans assembled to the edict without refusal.

Whilst the army is being levied at Rome, in the mean time the enemy's camp is pitched not far from the river Allia: thence laying waste the land far and wide, they boasted one to the other that they had chosen a place fatal to the Roman city; that there would be a similar consternation and flight from thence as occurred in the Gallic war.

For "if the Romans dread a day deemed inauspicious, and marked with the name of that place, how much more than the Allian day would they dread the Allia itself, the monument of so great a disaster.