XIX. This battle took place about the summer solstice at the time of full moon, on the very day on which in former times the great disaster befel the Fabii, when three hundred of that race were slain by the Etruscans. But this defeat wiped out the memory of the former one, and the day was always afterwards called that of the Allia, from the river of that name. It is a vexed question whether we ought to consider some days unlucky, or whether Herakleitus was right in rebuking Hesiod for calling some days good and some bad, because he knew not that the nature of all days is the same. However the mention of a few remarkable instances is germane to the matter of which we are treating. It happened that on the fifth day of the Boeotian month Hippodromios, which the Athenians call Hekatombeion,[A] two signal victories were won by the Boeotians, both of which restored liberty to Greece; one, when they conquered the Spartans at Leuktra, and the other, when, more than two hundred years before this, they conquered the Thessalians under Lattamyas at Kerêssus. [Footnote A: Plutarch himself was a Boeotian.] Again, the Persians were beaten by the Greeks on the sixth of Boedromion at Marathon, and on the third they were beaten both at Plataea and at Mykale, and at Arbela on the twenty-fifth of the same month. The Athenians too won their naval victory under Chabrias at Naxos on the full moon of Boedromion, and that of Salamis on the twentieth of that month, as I have explained in my treatise 'On Days.' The month of Thargelion evidently brings misfortune to the barbarians, for Alexander defeated the Persian king's generals on the Granicus in Thargelion, and the Carthaginians were defeated by Timoleon in Sicily on the twenty-seventh of Thargelion, at which same time Troy is believed to have been taken, according to Ephorus, Kallisthenes, Damastes and Phylarchus.