When the Greeks shivered in the cold north-wind, they thought that Boreas, one of their divinities who dwelt beyond the high mountains, had loosened the blast from a mysterious cave. The North was to them an unknown region. Far beyond the hills they thought there dwelt a nation known as Hyperboreans, or people beyond the region of Boreas, who lived in an atmosphere of feathers, enjoying Arcadian happiness, and stretching their peaceful lives out to a thousand years. That which is unknown is frightful to the ignorant or the superstitious, and so it was that the North was a land in which all that was alarming might be conjured up. The inhabitants of the Northern lands were called Gauls by the Romans. They lived in villages with no walls about them, and had no household furniture; they slept in straw, or leaves, or grass, and their business in life was either agriculture or war. They were hardy, tall, and rough in appearance; their hair was shaggy and light in color compared with that of the Italians, and their fierce appearance struck the dwellers under sunnier climes with dread. These warlike people had come from the plains of Asia, and in Central and Northern Europe had increased to such an extent that they could at length find scarcely enough pasturage for their flocks. The mountains were full of them, and it was not strange that some looked down from their summits into the rich plains of Italy, and then went thither; and, tempted by the crops, so much more abundant than they had ever known, and by the wine, which gave them a new sensation, at last made their homes there. It was a part of their life to be on the move, and by degrees they slipped farther and farther into the pleasant land. They flocked from the Hercynian forests, away off in Bohemia or Hungary, and swarmed over the Alps; they followed the river Po in its course, and they came into the region of the Apennines too. [Footnote: No one knows exactly when the Gauls first entered Northern Italy. Some think that it was as long back as the time of the Tarquins, while others put it only ten or twenty years before the battle of the Allia-- 410-400 B.C.] It was they who had weakened the Etruscans and made it possible for the Romans to capture Veii. Afterwards they came before the city of Clusium (B.C. 391), and the people in distress begged for aid from Rome. No help was given, but ambassadors were sent to warn the invaders courteously not to attack the friends of the Roman people who had done them no harm. Such a request might have had an effect upon a nation that knew the Romans better, but the fierce Northerners who knew nothing of courtesy replied that if the Clusians would peaceably give up a portion of their lands, no harm should befall them; but that otherwise they should be attacked, and that in the presence of the Romans, who might thus take home an account of how the Gauls excelled all other mortals in bravery. Upon being asked by what right they