The Celts
Archaeologist Vincent Guichard on the battle of Alesia …
Alesia is the location of a turning point in European history. Here, in the autumn of 52 BC, the Roman armies of Julius Caesar defeated the Gauls. This marked the end of the Gallic wars, which had begun six years earlier.
The site and the troops
Alesia is on a large plateau nearly 1.5 kilometres (0.9 mile) wide. Little is left of the Gallic occupation of the 1st century BC; Roman activity destroyed the archaeological remains of the earlier period. But what we have got is the site itself. Julius Caesar organised a siege of the Gallic settlement by digging ditches all around the hill – more than 24 miles of them. These Roman fortifications were dug in just a few days by thousands of Roman legionaries.
It’s impossible to give precise figures, but on each side, we are dealing with tens of thousands of people – maybe 80,000 on the Gallic side, 50,000 on the Roman. It’s a huge number of troops concentrated on a very small piece of land.
Julius Caesar himself said that his enemy numbered 80,000. He could have been exaggerating, but it’s unlikely that he inflated these figures. Around him, on his staff, were people who were not on his side politically and who would have sent critical reports about him to Rome if he had given the wrong data. Archaeologists today believe that the figures given by Caesar give a good idea of how many troops were here.
Tribal unity
The Gauls consisted of lots of different tribes. It may be surprising that they were able to raise an army that was larger than Julius Caesar’s. However, Caesar had made himself very unpopular with the Gauls. This had not been the case in the previous years of the Gallic wars. It’s clear that all these tribes had been on his side until 53 BC. However, after that, he made a lot of very unpopular decisions, and in the first half of 52 BC, all the tribes slowly became his opponents.
How Vercingetorix was able to unite against Rome all the people who had previously been fighting each other is a fascinating story. We are dealing with organisation on a regional scale. Those who joined together to fight with Vercingetorix came from many different places in central and eastern Gaul. However, there was close contact between them because of language and a shared culture. In addition, we know that there were yearly meetings of the Druids from all the different tribes of Gaul.
However, although there were some kinds of regular contact between all these people, we also know that each tribe was very jealous of the boundaries of its own territory.
Would this Gallic alliance have lasted if the Gauls had won? That’s the big question. Some modern French political leaders have imagined that the Gauls’ unity in autumn 52 BC would have endured and the French nation would have been created much earlier than it actually was. But I think that’s pure fantasy. The unification was made for a very precise reason, and no way were the Gauls ready to become a nation as such.
Caesar’s advantage
So why, if they managed to unite and had a bigger army, did they lose? It could have been the reverse actually. A few weeks before Alesia, at the battle of Gergovia, Julius Caesar attacked the Gauls but was beaten back by Vercingetorix and his army. Much of that battle was similar to Alesia, with Vercingetorix and his troops inside a fortification inside a big town on a hilltop, with Roman troops surrounding them.
Things turned to Caesar’s advantage at Alesia probably because he was more prepared and very certainly because he had in mind his defeat at Gergovia. He had tried to attack there too quickly, when the Gallic troops were still quite fresh and had enough to drink and eat. At Alesia, he completely isolated the Gauls on the hilltop by creating a continuous line of defence around it. He then waited a few weeks until people began dying of hunger and thirst.
It was a huge technical undertaking to build a wall that long. It’s clear that the Romans had military techniques of Greek origin that were not in use by the Gallic army. All the siege machines – ballista, catapulta, onager – were never, as far as we know, used by the troops led by Vercingetorix. So technically the Romans were in a better position than the Gauls.
Reinforcements
The Romans didn’t win immediately. Just before they were completely locked inside Alesia, Vercingetorix managed to send some of his troops on horseback to different parts of the country to ask for reinforcements to help those caught inside the city.
So there were maybe 80,000 people inside Alesia and tens of thousands coming up behind the Romans. The battle was very close. At any time, it could have turned to the disadvantage of the Romans, especially on the hill at their backs, which was their weakest position. The Gallic troops tried to come down that slope, above the Roman fortifications, and nearly broke the Roman line. However, at the end, this was turned to the Romans’ advantage.
The troops caught inside Alesia understood very well that, if they didn’t stop the ‘game’, they would all be killed by the Romans. So they decided to take the chiefs, including Vercingetorix, to their enemies at the bottom of the slope, with all their weapons. They were surrounded and that was the end. These troops were not killed, but they were certainly sold as slaves.
Losing and winning
Vercingetorix was taken to Rome and imprisoned in a cellar of the Forum. It was extremely humiliating for a warrior like him. Lots of 19th-century French paintings have the surrender of Vercingetorix as their subject, showing the Gallic general as a very proud person coming to face Caesar. This was certainly not the way things happened.
I don’t think that the people who lost the battle that day felt that they had lost anything very important for their future and the future of their children. Historically speaking, they had no idea of ‘nation’. They also didn’t have any concept of being turned into Roman province – that would happen 30 years later. Nobody at that time, not even Caesar, had a clear idea about the way history would develop in this region in the coming decades.
Caesar must have thought that it was just a very important battle that showed that he was a very bright general. But in fact, he gained a lot of money and prestige from it. He took back with him to Rome tens of thousands of captives who could be sold as slaves. But I don’t think that the future of Gaul was really his concern at the time.
A Celtic identity?
Today there is a big argument about the concept of a Celtic identity. Caesar himself tells us that the people who were living in central Gaul called themselves ‘Celts’. So there was certainly some idea that each of these tribes belonged to something bigger. We don’t know exactly what that entity was, but it existed in some way, and it can be seen very strongly in terms of art – for example, what archaeologists call La Tène art.
Certainly that identity might have developed much more if the events of the 1st century BC hadn’t taken place. Because of them, a lot of the Gauls died or were taken away and sold as slaves – a total of about one million people. This was a huge percentage of the population, maybe 10% or 20%, we don’t know precisely. It was not officially a genocide but a massive decrease in population.
However, I think that, by the end of the 2nd century BC, La Tène art had already started to decay, and the following century was a period of degradation. So the battle of Alesia was not the cause of all that – it was one in a chain of events in the 1st century BC that made these things disappear.
A new world
The remaining Gauls became ‘romanised’ and created the Roman province of Gaul. It’s fascinating to see how quickly they turned to Roman habits, to a Roman way of life. They quite rapidly lost their language and became integrated into a new world. I don’t think it was a deliberate policy of the Romans to completely eradicate the Gallic culture. It was just that Roman culture was so powerful that it completely overwhelmed everything it touched. It was the descendants of the people who fought at Alesia who, half a century later, built the monumental buildings that can still be seen there. Among the elite, there was a fascination for Rome and a desire for more prestige, which led them to behave like proper Roman citizens.
The Roman settlement of Alesia was full of Gauls. Very few Romans from Italy ever stayed there. Only at the very beginning, after the Gallic wars, did some Roman troops live there – but a large proportion of them were actually Gauls from northern Italy. Roman Gaul was built by Gauls, not by Romans.
Romantic idea
For modern France, Alesia is quite important. But it’s a very ambiguous symbol for us because it was a battle that was lost by people living in what would later become France. At the same time, it is considered the date of France’s entry into ‘civilisation’, if we define ‘civilisation’ as all that was brought by the Romans and the Greeks.
Excavations were carried out at Alesia by the emperor Napoleon III between 1855 and 1870. He went there to understand the way Caesar fought, his techniques as a general. At the same time, he erected a massive statue of Vercingetorix at the edge of the cliff. He was obviously making a connection between modern France and probably the earliest character of French history that one can give a name to.
Why do people yearn for this romantic idea about the Celts? We have little historical evidence for this very ancient people. Whatever archaeological discoveries have been made – and we’ve had lots of spectacular discoveries, especially in this country – we can’t rewrite history when the original written sources have been lost. But we’ve got enough information to show that this was a very powerful and dynamic world, with art that was completely different from the Mediterranean tradition.
So the Celts are attractive because we know very little about them and, at the same time, what we do know tells us that they had values that are very different to the common ones of modern European societies.
