Vercingetorix

In 52 BCE a young noble of the Arverni, a people of central Gaul, brought together the largest coalition the Gauls had ever formed and came close to driving Julius Caesar out of their country. Vercingetorix's revolt ended in surrender at Alesia, captivity and execution in Rome, but in the nineteenth century he was reborn as a French national hero. Almost everything known of him comes from Caesar himself and from later Roman and Greek writers.

Vercingetorix may not have been a personal name at all. In Gaulish it means something like "great king of warriors", and scholars generally treat it as a title. He was probably born at Gergovia, the chief town of the Arverni in what is now Auvergne. His birth is traditionally placed around 82 BCE because Caesar calls him a young man in 52 BCE, though the Latin term could also describe men past thirty. His father, Celtillus, was a leading Arvernian noble who was killed by his own people, perhaps in the 60s BCE, for trying to make himself king.

Caesar had been conquering Gaul since 58 BCE. Early in 52 BCE, while he was in Italy, the Carnutes massacred Roman traders at Cenabum and revolt spread. Vercingetorix tried to raise the Arverni, but his uncle Gobannitio and other nobles expelled him from Gergovia. He gathered followers from the countryside, returned, drove out his opponents and was proclaimed king. A group of peoples between the Seine, the Loire and the Atlantic then made him supreme commander, and he enforced strict discipline on their forces.

When Caesar returned and seized the initiative, Vercingetorix changed strategy, avoiding pitched battles and burning settlements and stores so that the Romans would starve, while his cavalry attacked their foraging parties. The Romans nevertheless besieged and stormed Avaricum, chief town of the Bituriges; by the ancient figures only about 800 of some 40,000 inhabitants escaped the massacre. Vercingetorix then fell back to Gergovia, where Caesar's assault was beaten off with heavy losses, one of the few Roman defeats of the Gallic Wars. The victory brought over the Aedui, until then Rome's chief allies, and at an assembly at Bibracte almost all of free Gaul confirmed Vercingetorix as sole commander.

After a costly cavalry battle he withdrew with his infantry into the hill town of Alesia. Caesar surrounded it with a ring of forts, ditches, ramparts, towers and hidden obstacles. As food ran short, the defenders expelled the women, children and old people, whom the Romans refused to let through, and they starved between the lines. A great relief army arrived, but its attacks were beaten back. With no hope left, Vercingetorix gave himself up in September 52 BCE at the Battle of Alesia. Plutarch describes him riding out in his finest armour, circling Caesar's seat, dismounting, laying down his arms and sitting silently at Caesar's feet.

He was held in the Tullianum, Rome's state prison, for six years. In 46 BCE, after the civil wars, he was paraded in Caesar's triumph and then put to death, possibly by strangling. Killing captives after a triumph was not usual Roman practice, and historians suggest that Caesar acted under pressure from Romans who still regarded the Gauls as enemies.

Largely forgotten in the Middle Ages, Vercingetorix was rediscovered when Caesar's writings were revived in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century French historians began to locate the nation's roots in Gaul, and he became a symbol of resistance, often set against the German hero Arminius. Napoleon III paid for excavations at Alesia and commissioned a 7-metre bronze statue of him there. After the defeat of 1871 he became the image of the noble loser, and he still appears, gently mocked, in the Asterix comics.

Our 100 BCE map shows the patchwork of Gallic peoples, including the Celts of present-day France, before Caesar's conquest; the 1 BCE map shows the region after the conquest.