Alésia, Mont Auxois

Caesar stayed in his seat

Caesar tells the surrender in a handful of words. The day after the Gaulish relief army was routed, in late September 52 BC, he sat on the siege works in front of his camp while the chiefs were brought out to him. "Vercingetorix deditur, arma proiciuntur": Vercingetorix is handed over, the weapons are thrown down.

Plutarch, writing some 150 years later, added theatre. In his version the Gaulish leader put on his finest armour, rode a carefully groomed horse around Caesar's seat, then dismounted and sat in silence at the Roman's feet. Caesar gives no date; late September is inferred.

Two rings of earthworks around one hill

Alesia was the oppidum of the Mandubii, on the flat top of Mont Auxois in Burgundy. By Caesar's count 80,000 Gaulish fighters were shut inside with the townspeople.

Rather than storm it, he starved it. An inner line of 11 Roman miles, about 16 km, faced the town; an outer line of 14 Roman miles faced the relief army he knew was coming. On the marshy plain of Les Laumes, excavation has found what he described: a ditch 4.5 metres wide and as deep that filled with water almost as soon as it was dug, a turf rampart 3.5 metres high with a palisade, towers every 24 metres, and hidden stakes in front.

The Mandubii paid first. To save food they sent their women and children out of the town. Caesar refused to let them through, and they were left to starve between the lines.

One captive for every soldier

The relief army's last assault, 60,000 picked men under Vercassivellaunus against a Roman camp on awkward ground to the north, failed. The next morning Vercingetorix called his council and offered himself to the Romans, dead or alive.

Caesar paid his army in people. Apart from the Aedui and the Arverni, whose loyalty he hoped to win back, the prisoners were handed out as plunder, one to each soldier. Vercingetorix was held for five years, paraded through Rome in Caesar's triumph of 46 BC and then put to death in the Tullianum prison.

Why France still argues about the hill

For French children, national history starts here: the CM1 year of primary school opens with the Celts, Gauls, Greeks and Romans. The legend is younger than the battle. Napoleon III, who wrote a history of Caesar, paid for excavations from 1861, and in 1865 set a seven-metre bronze Vercingetorix by Aimé Millet on the summit, modelled on the emperor's own features. After the defeat of 1871 the Gaul became France's noble loser.

The site was long contested, with rivals proposed across eastern France, above all Chaux-des-Crotenay in the Jura. Franco-German excavations at Alise-Sainte-Reine from 1991 to 1997 confirmed what Napoleon III's officers had found, and archaeologists now accept the site, though a local minority still does not.

The quarrel has reached the comic books. In Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield, the village chief insists that nobody knows where Alesia is. Since 2012 a museum has stood on the plain where the Roman lines ran.

Sources

• Wikipedia (en): Battle of Alesia
• Wikipedia (fr): Siège d'Alésia
• thelatinlibrary.com
• eduscol.education.fr