The inroad of the Gauls into Italy is to be looked upon as a migration, not as a conquest. For what is historical in it, we must depend upon Polybius and Diodorus, who place it shortly before the taking of Rome by the Gauls. To Livy’s statement, that driven from their own country by a famine, they had already come to Italy in the age of Tarquinius Priscus, no credit is to be given. It originated in the fact that some Greek historian or other, perhaps Timæus, connected this migration with the settling of the Phocæans at Massilia. Livy has, perhaps, in this instance borrowed from Dionysius, and the latter from Timæus; for as he certainly made use of Dionysius in his eighth book, why should he not also in the fifth? He himself knew very little of Greek history.[118] But this account is evidently contradicted by that of Justin. Trogus Pompeius was born near Massilia, and had also apparently used for his forty-third book native chronicles; as from them only he could have got the account of the _decreta honorifica_ of the Romans to the Massiliotes, in return for the friendship shown them during the Gallic war, and likewise of the sea-fights of Massilia with the Carthaginians. Trogus knows nothing of the circumstance that the Gauls assisted the Phocæans; but according to him, these merely met with a friendly reception among the Ligurians, who also dwelt there for a long time. About the year 350, fifteen years therefore before this, Livy himself says, _gentem invisitatam, novas accolas, Gallos comparuisse_. Even the story of that Lucumo, who had called in the Gauls, pleads against it: referred to Clusium alone, it is absurd. Polybius dates the passage over the Alps from ten to twenty years before the conquest of Rome; Diodorus makes the Gauls burst upon Rome in one uninterrupted onslaught. Moreover, it is said that Melpum, in the country of the Insubrians, had been destroyed on the same day with Veii; and though we may not positively assert this exact coincidence, there can yet be no doubt but that the statement, on the whole, has hit the truth. Cornelius Nepos wrote it, who, as a native of the country beyond the Po, might have known the facts, and whose chronological accounts were very highly valued among the Romans. The Gauls can only have passed, either over the little St. Bernard, or over the Simplon. The former is not likely, because their country reached to the Ticinus only; if they had crossed over the little St. Bernard, they must needs also have occupied the whole of the territory between that mountain and the Ticinus. Now, the Salassians, for aught that we know, may have been a Gallic people; but this is not certain, and moreover, on the banks of the Ticinus, between them and the Gauls who had come over the Alps, there still dwelt the Lævians; surely then, there were still at that time also Ligurians on the Ticinus.