Vercingetorix - a Biography

Transcript:  

We're going to be talking about one of those enemies of Rome today.  And for that, we've got a very special guest. Would you like to introduce yourself?  

Yeah. Hi, my name is Dr. Zoe Elise Thomas.  I am a visiting assistant professor in the Greek and Roman Studies Department  at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.  And I am a Roman archaeologist by trade.  And I'm so excited to be here.  

Wonderful. I'm excited too.  Could you tell us what the topic of the day is, please?  We are talking about the man, the myth, the legend, Vercingetorix.  

Awesome. Okay. So I'm British. We know Boudicca.  But as for Vercingetorix, not quite so much. So I'm really excited for this.  Let's set the scene a little bit then. Who is he and where does he come from?  Yeah. So Vercingetorix is a Gallic leader.  So by Gallic, I mean he's from the region of Gaul,  which is also not that useful of a term.  Gaul is more or less a regional, like a geographic region.  We like to say that it's currently, it's sort of mapped onto modern France,  but in reality it actually covers France, Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of Switzerland,  parts of the Netherlands, parts of Germany, and even down into Northern Italy.  So it's not a particularly useful designation, but it is what we have.  He was an aristocratic member of a tribe called the  Arverni.  They were located in southern central France.  So in the modern region of Massif Central, it's a mountainous region in south central France.  And he was a major enemy of Rome for about one year.  

So do we know when he was born?  

We have guesses. So Caesar, we only really know that he shows up on the scene in Caesar in 52,  and he's described as being a young man,  which we somewhat arbitrarily have decided means that he was around 30 years old.  He's certainly not over 40, but there's no real reason why we picked 30 per se.  So if you subtract 30 from 52, you get 82.  So the general accepted birth date is around 82 BCE.  But we don't really know.  

So I'm guessing the  Arverni don't have a lot of sources that they've written themselves  that we've managed to find and read.  

No, that's one of the great tragedies for people like me that study the Gauls,  and especially Gauls in the Roman context,  is we have very, very little writing from any of the Gallic tribes.  They did have language and they did write, but they don't tend to keep records.  They don't have the epigraphic habit that develops in the Greek and Roman world.  Many of our stories about the  Arverni or their rival tribe,  the Aedui or Vercingetorix himself, are coming from Roman narratives about them.  The Arverni, they are just one tribe of many.  

So is it like a patchwork quilt of different tribes  who I'm assuming aren't completely homogenous?  

Yes, exactly. So I kind of liken them to city-states.  They're, as you just said, a patchwork of tribes all across Gaul,  and they have this really complicated international agreement setup.  So there end up being some tribes like the  Arverni or the Aedui  who are in control of other tribes,  and those other tribes do have some level of sovereignty over themselves,  but not full control over what they do.  So it's this very interesting international level of patron-client relationships essentially.  The time that Vercingetorix is born and eventually in 52 when he launches his rebellion,  the  Arverni are on top.  They are one of the most powerful tribes in Gaul,  and their main enemy of the Gallic tribes are the Aedui,  who are going to show up a lot today, partly because they are enemies of Vercingetorix's.  So there's a lot of tension between those groups throughout Vercingetorix's story.  

So are Gallic tribes run by hereditary rulers?  Was he born like a prince who is groomed for power?  

Yeah, it's hard to know the specifics,  but we do know that around the time that Vercingetorix was born,  the Gallic tribes were actually predominantly oligarchic systems,  so rule from an aristocracy and not a specific king.  However, his name, Vercingetorix, R-I-X, is the ending.  There's this potential that that R-I-X ending is a designation of original kingship,  from R-E-X, the Latinate word for king,  and that that could indicate that there used to be this kind of inherited kingship  and that he is directly from that inherited line of kingship.  But at the time that he lived, they were this oligarchic aristocratic ruling system,  which is interesting in part because his dad, actually, is this guy named Celtilus,  which is kind of a silly name because his name is sort of like if my name was Americanus,  like it's the name Celt, but Celtilus.  His dad apparently launched an attempt at seizing kingship again over the Auvergne.  He gets murdered for it when Vercingetorix is a kid.  So yes, at this time, it's this aristocratic oligarchic system,  but with these original roots of monarchy coming through.  

So even as he's a kid, he's got some power imbued in him.  He's being trained up for running the show.  

Yes, absolutely.  From a wealthy family, highly educated, well-traveled, etc.  

So he's living in a mountainous area of southern France.  When he's born, roughly 82 BCE,  how close has the Roman Empire creeped towards where he's living?  Because it's growing rapidly at this time, right?  

So the Roman Empire, small e, right,  because I always tell my students when I'm talking about the Roman Empire before, let's say, 30 BCE,  I always mean small e, they're not an empire with an emperor yet.  Around this time, there's this slow creep.  I guess I would say gradual creep of the Romans into southern France.  So that modern coast, the Mediterranean southern coast of France.  So we actually have pretty early evidence of Roman,  or at least even actually Etruscan, involvement in southern France  centuries before the actual Gallic Wars.  So not necessarily quite so deep up into central France,  but certainly along the southern coast dating back to about the 6th century BCE,  evidence of pretty extensive contact and trade and communication happening  between the Italian peninsula and the Gallic tribes,  which means that there was always going to be some cross-pollination between them.  Most of Rome's involvement in Gaul is limited to that southern coast of France  until around the time of the late 2nd century BCE.  

Around 121 BCE, there is this conflict between the Arverni,  which is of course Vercingetorix's tribe,  and the Aedui, who are a neighboring tribe there in modern-day Burgundy.  And the Aedui are very friendly with the Romans.  The Romans actually call them their kinsmen and blood brothers, essentially.  And they come up with this fake mythology that the Aedui are descended from Trojan,  part of Aeneas' Trojan refugees that get separated and go off and become Gauls.  So there's all kinds of weird, cool kinship things happening.  But the Arverni and the Aedui start fighting,  and the Aedui actually go to Rome and petition Rome for help.  Rome doesn't grant it, so they're not quite ready to get involved in Gallic war yet.  But even a generation before Vercingetorix's time,  there was this push actually from Gallic tribes to get Rome involved in Gaul.  And they really don't start pushing into central Gaul until around 58 with the start of the Gallic Wars itself.  

So when Vercingetorix was growing up, he almost certainly would have known about the Romans,  especially because the rival tribe of the Aedui were so closely knit with the Romans  that there's no way that Vercingetorix wouldn't have been raised  knowing who the Romans were, maybe even meeting some Romans that were merchants on trade missions, etc.  He grew up in a world where it wasn't a surprise that the Romans were going to come mess things up for him.  

So it was pretty inevitable?  

I think it was inevitable for there to be a conflict for a variety of reasons.  First is there's sort of the small, the micro-level inevitability,  which is that Julius Caesar, and we can get into what he was up to, where he was going, why he needed to go to Gaul.  But he needed to go to Gaul, or he needed, let me take that back, he needed to go to war because he was broke.  And a great way to make money is to loot people.  And so he really needed to go to war to make a bunch of money.  So I think that's one level of the inevitability.  The other level of inevitability, in my opinion, is that the way the Roman Republic was formatted, for lack of a better term,  it had to have conquest in order to self-sustain.  And so even if it hadn't been Gaul, the Gallic Wars happened after, as you mentioned,  this explosion of Roman control around the Mediterranean.  And so I think that it was inevitable in the sense that Rome has to conquer in order to actually continue to exist in many ways.  

Do you think that's got something to do with it's because it's still a republic at this time  and you've got loads of politicians who are trying to do one better than the guys sitting next to them in the Senate?  So it's this competitiveness that's driving conquest?  

I think that's definitely part of it.  There's such a core central Roman identity tied up in war.  And so much of the individual's ability to get ahead politically is tied to military service.  I think that there's certainly that pressure on individual actors too.  That's how you get known.  It's weird when Cicero, who's a very famous Republican orator, becomes a successful politician without military experience.  The expectation is that if you become really a good Roman politician, you also have to have been this military leader.  I also think that the Roman state was under a huge amount of pressure  because they made all these promises to their army and their veterans of land.  And the Italian Peninsula is smaller than the state of Mississippi.  And there's just not a lot of land there to grant out to veterans for all the thousands of veterans that needed land.  So I think there's both the individual politicians wanting to get ahead and also we have to follow up on the promises that we have made  lest we have major social and civic upheaval, which they have anyway.  

So just so that I understand, the veterans need land as part of like a retirement package, right?  Here's your bit of land. You can have a farm now that you're retired.  To get them this farmland, they have to go to war with new soldiers who will also eventually need a retirement package farm.  So it's a kind of cycle, isn't it? They're always going to have to move outwards.  Oh my God. So if you're the  Arverni, I'm guessing you must start getting anxious at some point.  Can we see them, before Caesar comes onto the map, as it were…  Can we see them preparing for war?  

So this is where we enter one of the hard parts of talking about this, because so many of our sources are not from the  Arverni themselves.  There seems to have been a fair amount of military preparation not aimed at the Romans.  The bulk of military preparation in this period in Gaul was either directed at other Gallic tribes,  so fighting against your neighbors, trying to take over new lands.  The precipitating events for the Gallic War is a migration of Germanic tribes coming in from modern day Switzerland, the Helvetii, moving in on to Gaul.  And most of the Gallic immediate response is actually militarily directed that direction,  which is actually how Caesar gets involved anyway.  They ask him to come help them defeat the Helvetii, which he does, and then he never leaves.  And that's when they realize that maybe they've made a mistake.  

Sure. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about Julius Caesar.  It's a big name. He doesn't need much of an introduction.  But what stage is he at his career in 52 BCE, and why is he looking towards Gaul beyond trying to one up the guys sat next to him in the Senate?  

Julius Caesar is not quite a fresh politician at this point.  The Gallic Wars start in 58 BCE, and 60 is when he establishes the First Triumvirate.  So this is that secret alliance between himself, Pompey the Great, and Crassus.  And essentially these three big politicians are having a lot of trouble getting their political agendas pushed through legislatively within the Roman state.  And they come up with this not legal secret little agreement between the three of them that they will support each other's legislation and push it through.  They don't actually seem to like each other at all.  They all kind of mutually dislike, distrust each other, which is fair.  So Julius Caesar has just joined or just helped create the First Triumvirate and has just received a fair amount of power.  But he really needs more military conquests. He is younger than the other two.  Pompey the Great has all of this military fame behind him, and Julius Caesar doesn't at this point.  And so he's like, I gotta, I have to go to war because I'm broke and I need money.  And Pompey the Great is a famous military leader and I also need to be a famous military leader to continue my political rise.  So that's kind of where he's at right now.  

So what are his options? Is it pretty much only Gaul or is that just the best of the bunch?  

Part of the reason why Gaul is that he'd actually just been put in charge of the province along that southern strip of Gaul, sort of.  He was technically given control of Cisalpine Gaul, which is the side of Gaul, the geographic region that is actually in northern Italy.  So Cis meaning on this side of and Alpine meaning the Alps.  From the Roman's perspective, when they're south of the Alps, Cisalpine means that it's the area of Gaul closer to the city of Rome.  And Transalpine Gaul, trans across Alpine the Alps.  So Gaul beyond the Alps is another province.  And he's put in charge of Cisalpine Gaul and very helpfully, the man in charge of Transalpine Gaul dies.  And so Julius Caesar is just also given control over that as well.  He's already located in a place where it's really easy to get involved in Gaul.  I don't know if he had any other ideas of where to go.  I know I've seen people say that he might have been planning on going to Dacia.  We don't know. We'll put it that way.  We don't know if he had other irons in the fire in place before Gaul.  So I suspect that it was both a useful happenstance for him and he was also well situated to take advantage of that opportunity when it came.  

So does Caesar start the war or does he just join a conflict that's already started?  

He technically joins a conflict.  So the Aedui are at war with the Helvetii.  There's all this migration happening, invasions coming in from the northeast of modern day France.  And they ask him for help. And he does. He joins.  The Gauls know that the Romans have this really elite military, that they have really incredible amounts of resources and training behind them, even though we're in a semi-professionalized army, but not quite 100% yet.  They think, let's ask the Romans to join us and we will take advantage of their superior resources and equipment.  And they'll handle the situation for us and then they'll leave.  And the Romans, I mean, they take care of the situation very quickly, but they don't leave.  Who could have foreseen that happening?  And Caesar sort of takes an opportunity. There's a tribe in northern Gaul who he doesn't have a real reason to stay in Gaul yet.  He's kind of just camping out in southern France and hanging out.  And one of the tribes to the north starts to get a little bit spooked.  And so they start increasing their fortifications.  And he goes, oh, oh, you're increasing your fortifications? That's a threat to me.  And he uses that as the reason why he's actually allowed to continue to go wage war.  

That doesn't sound familiar at all to anyone living in 2026.  

So he, you know, once he had his little foot in the door or his sandal in the door,  he finds a real way to warm himself in there and keep rampaging around. 

So how long does it take between Caesar joining into this fray and him meeting Vercingetorix?  

So Vercingetorix only shows up at the end of the war basically.  So the Gallic Wars begin in 58 and there's several years of fighting.  And then Vercingetorix arrives on the scene in 52 BCE, so six years into the war.  There's some thought that possibly during the war that Vercingetorix was actually  serving in an auxiliary cavalry unit under Caesar's command.  I don't know. I, you know, this is one of those things that we will never have confirmation of.  But certainly makes for a good story.  Because Gaul is this patchwork of city states and tribes that are at odds with each other,  many of them don't. There is no unified Gallic resistance to Caesar until around 52.  And many of the tribes are on the side of Caesar because they see this as an opportunity  for economic gains, power gains, et cetera.  So it's entirely possible that he was fighting in some way for Caesar for a while.  We know from Cassius Dio from the third century CE that Vercingetorix was apparently friendly with Caesar.  That's sort of our evidence that maybe he knew him as an ally before Vercingetorix' revolts.  But Cassius Dio is writing so much later that we don't know that he's,  he might be thinking that makes a great story.  So it's possible he was fighting in a cavalry unit, an auxiliary cavalry unit.  

He appears to be kind of just laying low, doing something,  maybe fighting for the Romans against these other tribes.  He's pretty young, right?  And if we accept the 82 designation, he's in his mid to late 20s for the first part of the war.  That means that you, I mean, just inherently you're not,  your prefrontal cortex is not fully developed.  But also, you know, he probably doesn't have the same kind of influence and authority  within Gallic society or the Arvernian tribe that he can have when he's 30.  

So what makes him turn from a possible ally of Rome to someone who's revolting against them?  Do we know the cause?  

Not really.  There's a variety of different interpretations.  The sort of French nationalist one is that he, you know, really wanted to unite the Gauls.  It makes a nice story of like he wanted to unite the Gauls  and fight this external invading influence.  And he just had so much national pride.  And that was what drove him to do this.  Another suggestion is that since his dad had tried to lead a monarchic coup  to be a king of the Arverni again and had been murdered for it,  that Vercingetorix sees the chaos that Caesar is wreaking in Gaul  as an opportunity to pursue kingship for himself.  Because we don't know how involved he was in his dad's coup,  but Caesar certainly portrays it as Vercingetorix comes on the scene.  He immediately is trying to convince the Arverni to make him a king.  And they initially reject that and they actually exile him.  And this is all happening in 52.  It happens so fast.  He goes around and according to Caesar, he recruits all the ruffians in the countryside  and then takes his hometown by force and makes himself the king of the Arverni.  So there's a few options, right?  There's the option of he had this really intense sense of identity  and he really wanted to protect the Gauls versus he really wanted more power.  And this was a convenient way to get that power.  And there's other options as well.  I mean, if he was fighting as an auxiliary cavalryman,  you could see a world wherein he got fed up with the kinds of brutality  enacted under Caesar against his sort of fellow Gauls.  There's really no way to know.  And it was probably a combination of many of those explanations, you know.  

You've said the B word, brutality.  I want to talk about that.  Because is it true that we have archaeological evidence for just how brutal Caesar was in Gaul?  What does he write about what he's doing in Gaul?  Because it doesn't sound very nice.  Let's talk about what's happening to the men and women who live in Gaul.  

Caesar is notable for his engagement in extremely violent acts against local Gallic populations.  Some modern scholars refer to it as a genocide.  And I don't know enough about genocide studies to say if there is enough of an ethnic component  to what Caesar is doing to have it qualify as a genocide or not.  But he's certainly killing a huge number of people and noncombatants as well.  One of the things that we'll talk about when we get to the Battle of Alesia  is there's a particularly notable episode where Caesar is partially responsible for the death  of huge numbers of tens of thousands of civilian deaths through starvation.  There is a lot of interesting archaeological work being done right now,  especially on sort of the frontier lines of what kinds of violence  and military damage was done as part of these wars.  So it's kind of an, it's a really interesting evolving feel right now as we speak.  

I just want to kind of emphasize that when we talk about rebellions against Rome,  it's all very adventure novel, right?  But I just want to really emphasize the true human cost for these people  when Rome turns up on your doorstep, it's not pleasant.  I think we can somehow forget that. 

 One of the battles we'll talk about as well, not Alesia, one of the earlier battles.  And Caesar says that he killed, or his armies killed, 41,200 people.  

In a day?  

In a day, including, and that's mostly noncombatants.  It's citizens, it's the elderly, it's women, it's children.  And he says in his text, I mean, he writes in the third person,  but he says the legions were so worked up that they just slaughtered everyone.  So he is responsible for a huge amount of death.  

Such a great guy, that guy.  He sucked, he sucked so hard.  I'm going to have an episode on it one day actually because he sucks.  When does Vercingetorix first meet Caesar on a battlefield, face to face?  

That's a good question.  So, Vercingetorix first encounters Julius Caesar as official combatants  at the Battle of Avaricum, which is located in central France near a city called Bourges, B-O-U-R-G-E-S.  And Avaricum is under a heavy siege from Julius Caesar, it's May of 52 BCE.  And however, even though he sort of has the successful isolation of Avaricum,  we know Julius Caesar loves an isolation siege tactic, which we'll see again and again.  He is actually unable to forage or be resupplied from external sources  because Vercingetorix has established essentially a harassment campaign against Julius Caesar.  So they sort of had a series of little skirmishes where Vercingetorix kept losing.  And this is the first, I guess, real successful meeting head to head.  So, you know, I've only lied a little bit.  This isn't the first, it's the first important one, let's say.  I have the authority to tell you exactly what is important and what is not!!  Essentially, Vercingetorix realizes we do not have the capacity to meet the Romans in one-on-one combat head to head.  We just do not have sufficient military technologies in order to be able to do that.  But, you know, what we can do is scorched earth and guerrilla warfare.  So they start trying to burn all of the potential resupply points.  Avaricum ends up sort of holding out and not getting burned, which is why Caesar is posted up besieging it.  Vercingetorix tries to harass him and he successfully harasses him.  Caesar can't get out. He can't resupply at all.  And basically Caesar is like, I guess the only option I have is to take Avaricum because I need the supplies in Avaricum.  And he builds this massive siege apparatus.  And the Gauls consistently, they do not know how to handle these siege machines that the Romans can build, that the Romans build fast.  And the Gauls cannot figure out how to handle these effectively.  And so Julius Caesar ends up taking the city quite quickly once he has that siege work constructed.  And this is the incident where his men slaughter, you know, 41,000 people.  Julius Caesar says that 800 total people escaped and fled to Vercingetorix and that it was just the 800 people from Avaricum that survived.  

It's a tiny percentage.  

Yeah. And again, that they were slaughtering women and children and the elderly and people for whom now we would say that's a war crime.  

Well, depending on who you speak to nowadays, it's a war crime.  

Per the Geneva Convention, I assume that it is a war crime still.  But shortly thereafter, the Avaricum is sort of, is a defeat for the Gauls.  But it really solidifies for Vercingetorix and the Gauls that they can't, that they have to find ways to avoid these sieges and try and break the sieges.  And they do successfully do that at the Battle of Gergovia.  Gergovia is a oppidum.  So an oppidum is a fortified urban settlement that show up all around Gaul during this period.  And the oppidum of Gergovia is the capital of the  Arverni.  So we're back into south central France in the Massif Central.  The closest city to it is probably Clermont-Ferrand.  

Gergovia, Julius Caesar, again, tries to besiege, get set up and entrench and besiege the city.  But Vercingetorix, it's a victory for the Gauls and it's a pretty horrific defeat for the Romans.  But it is not necessarily a victory for the Gauls because they are good at warfare.  

OK, did they just get lucky?  

Julius Caesar, there appears to have been some kind of a miscommunication between him and two of his legions.  So Julius Caesar decides that he's going to launch an attack on Gergovia  and specifically on Vercingetorix's camps outside the walls of the city.  And the way that he does this is he sends a decoy legion to the western side of the city  and draws all of Vercingetorix's forces that direction because Vercingetorix thinks, OK, great.  This is where we're going to have our primary engagement.  This is where we need to get set up.  While they are getting distracted, Caesar moves in with his primary forces, easily takes the camp.  And according to Caesar, the plan was that the legions would then immediately withdraw,  that they would not push on to the city, that the goal was destroy the camp, regroup the siege.  Apparently two of his legions didn't get the memo and they push on and assault the city wall,  which very quickly alerts Vercingetorix to this.  And Vercingetorix, of course, rushes back and they sort of have the Roman legions pinned up against the wall.  And it just devolves into chaos.  The only thing Julius Caesar can try and do right now is get everyone retreating in some kind of an orderly fashion.  It's almost like a comedy of errors because he has an auxiliary force from the Aedui that come up from the eastern flank.  But the Roman legions are all really freaked out because everything's going to chaos.  And so they actually think that this auxiliary Gallic army is an enemy army.  And then they start attacking their own forces and it's just a disaster.  So it's really only a victory for the Gauls because of some incompetence from the Romans.  It's not a victory because of any particular military greatness on the part of Vercingetorix.  

At this point, I think it's a good time to ask, who is our main historical source for this war?  

It's got to be Julius Caesar.  I mean, he wrote, I mean, the man wrote one of the, I mean, he wrote an incredibly detailed history of the Gallic Wars.  It's called The Gallic War or De Bello Gallico by Julius Caesar.  And as I mentioned before, it's in the third person, which is kind of funny because you're supposed to read it and think it's somewhat impartial.  Well, OK, there's lots of debates over how you're supposed to read it.  He's very clearly gassing himself up.  There's a lot of stuff in there where he claims that the Romans built, you know, perfect continuous 10 mile walls at Alesia.  And archaeologically speaking, that's just not true.  So there's a lot of inconsistencies in Julius Caesar's account, but he is the best, the best account we have.  

So if he's writing his own account of this war, this battle seems like an utter PR nightmare for someone who's trying to impress everyone back at Rome.  How does he describe this complete snafu?  

He very much does not take responsibility for it.  

Shocker.  

He very much frames it as the legions didn't hear the order.  And that was shame on them because if they had paid attention to directions, everything would have been fine.  And after the defeat, there's a section where he basically has a stern talking to with the legions that disobeyed orders because they didn't know the orders.  So he sort of papers over it that way.  

King of spin.  Why am I not surprised?  So after that battle, what happens then?  

He loses a fair number of men with this retreat.  And more or less, he's at a point where he's he's just gone from a successful siege at Avaricum in May to the Battle of Gergovia that happens in July.  His men are demoralized.  He's got some low numbers in place and he still really needs to resupply.  And so he actually starts to sort of withdraw to the south of France because that is the region that's most friendly to him.  Maybe he's trying to get back to Italy so that he can sort of rest and regroup.  He does take a little bit of a break after Gergovia.  He regroups at a place called Agadincum.  Agadincum is the ancient name for the modern city of Sens, which is S-E-N-S.  Can really see how they went from Agadincum to Sens.  Makes a lot of linguistic sense.  So he retreats to Agadincum and rests up a little bit and then begins the sort of strategic return to the south of France in around September of 52.  While he's doing that, Vercingetorix starts harassing his marching columns and trying to attack and delay  because Caesar claims that Vercingetorix knew that if the Romans were allowed to get back to full supplies, then they'd be unstoppable, et cetera, et cetera.  

So Vercingetorix starts deploying his cavalry against this marching column because the Gauls are sort of known for their cavalry and their horses.  But unfortunately, Caesar has acquired some skilled cavalry of his own through the Germans,  and the German cavalry actually rout Vercingetorix's forces and basically scatter all of his, all the Gallic cavalry  and causes Vercingetorix to engage in this hasty retreat.  And Caesar says, aha, I've got them retreating now and starts chasing them.  He's the king of seizing opportunities when they show up.  So Vercingetorix starts retreating.  Caesar says, all right, let's follow him.  And he in turn starts harassing Vercingetorix's marching columns.  And he successfully picks off several thousand of Vercingetorix's rear troops while Vercingetorix sort of flees to Alesia.  And part of the strategic retreat to Alesia, there's some thought that Vercingetorix was hoping that he could lure Caesar to Alesia and then encircle him with relief forces.  But he didn't have those relief forces in place yet.  And so if that was his strategy, he hadn't thought through the practicalities of the timing of that before he did so.  And they basically transition immediately from this sort of skirmishy guerrilla warfare type battle to the siege of Alesia in September 52.  

I mean, you've said the Gauls, they know what happens when a siege goes wrong.  So this seems like a bit of a risky move.  

It is a very risky move.  It's not, in my opinion, a particularly smart choice on the side of Vercingetorix.  And again, I think he had this hope that he could sort of envelop the Romans.  And if he had those forces already prepared to do that, you know, if his strategic retreat was luring Caesar's forces in and then in Vercingetorix knew he had these auxiliary forces prepared to immediately deploy and catch Caesar, then it would have been brilliant, probably.  But he didn't have those forces ready.  And what ends up happening is Alesia is located in eastern, central eastern France.  The closest city is called Alice Saint-Ren and it's in Burgundy, France.  So if you're familiar with Dijon, Dijon mustard, Dijon is the city that Dijon mustard is made.  And that's the closest big city.  And Alesia is one of these sort of oppidums on top of a hill.  It's fortified pretty quickly.  They retreat into the city.  They set themselves up for a siege.  He does try.  Vercingetorix sends out messengers very quickly to try and get external forces to come and catch the Romans.  But it's too late.  By the time he's gotten that in place, Caesar is already pretty entrenched and is setting up for a siege.  And the Gauls just can't break a siege like that.  

So from a mental image, help us paint the picture, what does a fortified oppidum look like?  I'm guessing it's not like Carcassonne with massive walls and towers made out of masonry and stone?  

They were pretty impressive though.  So the most oppida had huge fortified walls.  They wouldn't be cut masonry per se.  But they're often these sort of rubble earthwork walls with beams strategically laid out through them to help with solidity.  Caesar's actually a really big fan of the Murus Gallicus.  The Gallic wall is what he calls it.  And he talks about it a lot because he's sort of impressed with the engineering required.  So you can make a pretty tall, pretty thick wall, but it's not, I mean, they don't have cannons, right?  So they don't necessarily need something that can withstand gunfire or explosions.  They would have these walls that would surround the entire town.  The town would usually be on top of a hill because it's very defensible.  And by hill, I mean, you know, like a mountain probably is a better term to use here.  These are the low-lying sort of foothills of the major mountain regions.  So they're not the peaks of the Alps, but these are not insignificant raised locations.  

So if someone's going to besiege you, you can really make them work hard for it. 

 Many of them have, you know, some kind of water source that is managed from within the walls.  So water is always the biggest issue when you have a siege or when you're thinking about any urban settlement.  And so many of them have these internal water sources.  You know, if I say urban settlement, we tend to think really dense population.  These are actually really spread out.  So you'll have sort of loci of houses or buildings put in different places around the mountaintop,  but they're not all densely connected typically.  They're much more spread out as opposed to a Roman urban settlement, which is very compact.  Yeah, they're pretty amazing. You can go see them today.  I've been to Alesia before, and the site itself is not, I mean, there's no active siege happening,  so it's not terribly exciting.  But it's cool if you like recreated siege works because they rebuilt versions of Caesar's siege works there.  Yeah, it's really cool.  

How awesome. So Caesar is besieging Alesia.  How long is he besieging the oppidum?  

So he starts in September 52, and everything's wrapped up by November.  

Okay, that's still quite a long time though.  You've got a lot of people to feed inside.  You've got, I'm guessing, women, children, the elderly, all to look after.  What kind of preparations do you have to make for a siege like that if you want to be able to stick out? 

 I mean, if you want to be able to withstand for longer than any, I mean, he sort of,  Caesar has Vercingetorix talk about how he really only has one month worth of supplies for this entire city,  and he knows that they're not going to break the siege in a month.  So you would need immense amounts of grain, of water, all kinds of resources stockpiled,  and Alesia is just not prepared like that.  There's no, it has not been set up for this kind of entrenched siege that it ends up experiencing,  and it causes a lot of issues for Vercingetorix.  

So I'm guessing he's running the risk of starvation for a lot of people, illnesses.  So the longer you stay in, the weaker you become.  How does he manage that?  

As you mentioned, as you stay in, you get weaker,  and one of the reasons you get weaker is not just because of food resources,  but it's also because of morale, and one of the easiest ways to win a war in any period  is to break the morale of your alternate group.  And we know from, again, from Caesar, so heavy grain of salt,  the Gauls are not happy with how the siege is going,  and they are trying to decide whether they want to give up the siege or stay entrenched,  and one of the Gallic leaders actually proposes cannibalism and says,  you know, we should stay fighting against Vercingetorix,  and we shouldn't send any of the citizens out because we need to,  you know, we're making grandstand, and we'll just kill and eat the elderly.  It's essentially what he says.  And the Gauls kind of go, you know,  there's always going to be someone that's a little too excited about cannibalism,  and they're kind of like, maybe not as our immediate next choice,  and they kind of are like, all right, you know, if we have to do cannibalism, we will,  but like, let's not jump to killing and eating people yet.  

Let's not make that plan A.  

And they decide instead what they will do is they will collect all of the non-combatants,  so the civilian populations, the elderly, the women, the children,  and decide that instead of keeping them within the city to feed them,  they will send them out.  And according to Cassius Dio, Vercingetorix thought that by doing this  that Caesar would let them through because they're non-combatants.  And Caesar doesn't do that.  Caesar posts his legions on his double wall that he has erected around the city  and refuses to let these refugees leave.  Cassius Dio says because Caesar wanted to, essentially he's thinking, great,  Vercingetorix will have to take these people back,  and that will continue to deplete his resources.  And Caesar doesn't actually say what happened.  Caesar says, you know, I said no, and that's it.  He doesn't talk about where these people go or what happens to them.  He just sort of moves on, and we get it instead from Cassius Dio  that Vercingetorix also refuses to let these people back inside the city.  And so tens of thousands of non-combatants die on the plane  between Caesar's siege works and the city.  

In Caesar's writing, is he the kind of person who shies away from writing  and I massacred them because who wouldn't?  Or is he skipping this because it's not going to look good for him  if people find out that he essentially killed women, children, the elderly, disabled?  

I don't know why he skips over it because with the battle at Avaricum  he does talk about how his men slaughtered 41,000 people.  

Maybe it's just repetition then?  Why do you need to say after every siege if it's implied after the first one?  

It is a different scenario because in this instance the civilians beg.  And in Caesar he talks about their begging to be essentially taken as slaves,  to be taken into Caesar's camp and taken as slaves and fed.  And it would reflect differently on him, I think,  for it to be elderly women, children, begging for assistance and him denying.  But he says he denies it.  I don't know why he doesn't talk about the fact that these people starved horribly to death  in between two places that could have fed them.  

I mean the psychological trauma, I can't even begin to imagine what those people must have been thinking.  

And I mean starving to death is not a quick experience.  

No, and incredibly painful.  This is why, and I'm going to go on a little bit of a rant here,  this is why Julius Caesar is such an asshole.  He is.  Sorry for swearing.  He is.  He's terrible.  And it drives me nuts when you get these people hero worshipping him because he's awful.  

Yeah.  

Oh my god.  And again, I would say who on earth would watch tens of thousands of people starve to death,  but we've been watching that for a couple of years now,  so we know that it's not exactly out of the realms of possibility, but even so.  

So much of the watching people starving to death nowadays is through X or through Blue Sky or through internet news sources.  This is like, you have to imagine the Roman legions that have been stationed guarding these fortified,  like the siege work fortified walls, watching people, children starve within 500 feet of you on a daily basis.  Like I just, I can't imagine what the morale for the Roman legions is at this point.  I can't imagine the morale of the Gauls within the city at this point.  And Caesar doesn't really talk about any of that.  

I mean, I really want there to be just one legionary who's saying this is disgusting and immoral and terrible and we should stop it.  I'm guessing that he wouldn't write it into his book, even if there was.  Okay, so the siege has been going on.  The civilians are slowly starving to death.  What happens next?  

The relief forces that Vercingetorix did finally, did send for, finally show up.  And in November, after the eviction of the civilians happens in October,  and in November, Vercingetorix's forces, they're getting desperate.  I mean, they're out of supplies.  They need to do something.  And they start pinpointing weak spots in the Roman siege works, which we haven't actually talked about at all.  So actually, this might be a good point for me to explain what is happening,  because one of the most famous things about Alesia is the double wall fortification.  

Oh, yeah, circumvallation.  That's a word that I was confused about the first time I saw it in print.  

And there's also contravallation.  We're going to get real crazy with it here.  So essentially, this is a military maneuver that's called encirclement.  So encirclement is any time you encircle a force with the force of an attacker.  So it's not always in a siege context.  Encirclement talks about this phenomenon more broadly,  whereas sieges are essentially stationary encirclement.  So instead of it being a movable force that's been surrounded,  it is a permanent settlement that has been surrounded.  And essentially, this is an extremely powerful position for the encircular  and a very dangerous position for the person that's been encircled.  So some of the sort of brilliance of his approach to the siege at Alesia  is he essentially builds something like 25 miles of fortified walls  in a month or so around the city of Alesia.  So if you think about it like a circle, you've got Alesia in the center.  And Julius Caesar, as part of the siege, is thinking,  I need to prevent this internal node from having access with anything else around it.  And what he does is builds a wall, more or less.  He claims that he built a continuous 10-mile wall.  Archaeological evidence does not bear that out.  It was not a continuous 10-mile wall.  But he builds a sufficiently long enough wall  that it essentially cuts off the city from any external sources.  So Alesia has been cut off from external communication,  external resupply, relief, anything.  They have no idea what's happening outside of Caesar's walls.  And these walls are not cut stone mortar walls.  They are predominantly earthwork.  So they take all of this dirt that they have excavated from trenches.  So there's multiple layers of fortifications in place.  There's first a really wide, deep trench, about 20 feet wide,  eight or nine feet deep trench that goes around the limits of the city.  And we found this archaeologically, which is actually really cool.  You can see it in the archaeological excavation.  So there's this trench, deep, wide trench.  Then several hundred feet back from that,  there are two ditches that are also sort of deep and wide.  They're not intended to inherently stop anything,  but they are to slow them down,  especially because one is filled with water.  Then behind that, they take all that excavated earth  and they build this earthwork wall,  which is a combined height of about 12 feet.  So there's this probably six, seven foot tall earth and work wall  and then a palisade on top, bringing it up to 12 feet total.  And interspersed on this wall are towers, places where,  lookout locations, etc.  And in addition to all of these ditches and trenches  and the palisade wall,  he constructs this complex series of traps.  He builds a ditch similar, I mean, so many ditches,  big fans of ditches, the Romans.  And he builds another ditch that he fills with sharpened sticks  that have been, I mean, sticks, I say, the branches,  long, thick pieces of wood that have been sharpened  and they're sort of lashed together.  And if you happen to fall into this trench, you will be impaled.  And this one doesn't seem to have been sort of covered up by anything.  It's just a trench with a bunch of big sharp sticks in it.  So it slows you down, but it's not necessarily a trap.  But he does also make sharp stick trap pits  that are covered with debris and sort of leaf clutter  and whatever else is around sticks,  so that if you step on it, you will fall into a trap  and you will be impaled.  He says they're thigh-sized tree trunks, essentially.  I don't know what a Roman thigh was like, but you know.  

I don't know why I'm wincing like this is a visual medium,  but my goodness, I am wincing.  

It's a thick tree trunk that has been sharpened.  So if you fall on that and it hits you in the abdomen like you're a goner.  And he also makes these sort of,  I don't really know how to describe them.  They're essentially sort of a wooden stick  with iron hooks that stick up out of it.  And you bury the stick slightly in the ground,  so it's just iron hooks sticking up.  And if it's in leaf litter, you can't see the hooks.  So it's kind of like caltrops.  And all of this is this complex secret series of traps  designed to essentially make it impossible  for Vercingetorix's forces to attack him from the city of Alesia.  And then he does that all.  Actually, I'm not sure about the traps.  I think the traps are mostly on the city side.  But he does this again, facing outward.  So the contravelation, the circumvelation,  is the one facing the city of Alesia.  The contravelation is the wall and fortification system  facing outwards from the city that is protecting the siege works  from any relief efforts.  So even though, if we think back to, I don't know, 20 minutes ago,  Vercingetorix sent out messengers requesting aid  and for other forces to come and relieve the siege at Alesia.  But it takes so long for all of this to come together  that Caesar has had time to build two fortification walls,  one of which is going to repel any attempt at the relief  getting access to the legions,  and the other which prevents the army at Alesia  from mounting any kind of attack against the Romans.  This is when, in November, Vercingetorix starts to, you know,  he's left all these people for dead on the pit,  the pit trap-ridden plane.  That's the other thing, is all of those people starve to death  surrounded by pit traps.  It's not funny, so I feel terrible for laughing.  

I mean, it's one of those things if you don't laugh,  you'll cry thinking about it, right?  

Yeah, yeah.  

This is why I think there's not been a movie  about this battle, because it would be too depressing.  

There's some operas written about this.  

They don't mind being depressing.  

The opera, right.  I mean, as soon as I said it, I was like, oh, operas.  

There's like one happy opera that I can think about.  This is perfect material for an opera.  

So in November, essentially, Vercingetorix realizes  they have to try something.  So they're trying to find weak spots in Caesar's setup.  And they do, you know, they sort of, they find one,  but because of how well-planned Caesar's setup is,  he has legions stationed at the weak spots, right?  So even if they are physically weaker  than other parts of his double wall,  they are reinforced with manpower.  And this is also manpower  that isn't beleaguered from a siege, right?  It becomes really clear to the Gauls  that they can't break out of this.  And when the relief forces finally show up,  they basically take one look at the siege works  and go, mm-mm.  We can't, we can't help you with this one.  And then they leave.  So we think, I mean, the Battle of Alesia  has this sort of connotation  of this really epic showdown.  And it's really just this really horrifying  siege of attrition.  And eventually the Gauls in the city  realize they can't do this, and they surrender.  

Yeah, I would.  

Yeah, yeah.  I mean, there was no other option.  Okay, that's not fair.  There's always other options  because they could have cannibalized each other.  They could have, you know,  arranged a mass death by suicide, et cetera.  But all of those are not winning.  Except for maybe that one guy  that really wanted to do cannibalism.  That would be a win for him.  But, right.  

I've heard so many stories  about the Romans winning a battle,  and we see historians write  that surrendering is a worse fate  than mass suicide.  Why do they surrender?  Do they just not know what's going to happen?  Do they forget what happened at Avaricum?  

Well, so apparently, according to Caesar,  they don't slaughter everyone.  I mean, maybe that's because all the noncombatants  have died already.  So they're not brutally killed.  There is mass enslavement.  And it's possible that for the Gauls,  in this scenario,  that enslavement wasn't worse than death.  There's just, there's no way  to really know what was going on.  The other thing is people,  you get weird when you're hungry.  There's this very famous image  of Vercingetorix riding a horse  into Julius Caesar's camp  and laying down his weapons  and gets sort of valorized  in later historians  and then becomes this visual motif  in the 19th century.  And according to Caesar,  what actually happens is that  Vercingetorix offers to the Gauls in the city,  he says, we've got to surrender,  but I give you the choice  whether you want me to live  and give myself up to Caesar  or if you want to execute me.  

What do they choose?  

They choose to give him up, apparently.  Caesar doesn't talk about it any more than that,  but Vercingetorix surrenders  on behalf of the forces at Alesia.  He presumably did go and surrender to Caesar  and he is taken into custody  and brought back to Rome.  And he is kept in jail for six years  while Caesar goes off  and deals with his other military conquests  and issues and Parthia and et cetera.  Then Caesar in 46 BCE celebrates  this sort of four-fold triumph  and Vercingetorix is marched as a captive  in this triumph and then he is executed.  

So there's an element of humiliation.  It's not surrender and execution  in front of his people.  It's execution in front of Romans  in a foreign city.  

The thing about his execution  is it's actually completely unknown  how he was executed, where he was executed and when  in terms of vis-a-vis the triumph, right?  We know he gets taken to Rome.  We know he's marched in the triumph  and we know he's executed at some point.  But the implication from Cassius Dio  who talks about this is that  he's executed after the triumph at some point.  So it could be during the triumph.  I mean, there's sort of that,  a hesitancy among some scholars to say  that people were executed during mid-triumph  because it feels a little bit too much  like human sacrifice.  I think the Romans are nastier  than we want to give them credit for, right?  And like they may not have thought  of it as human sacrifice,  but you know, potato potato.  Which is all to say I don't know that it happened  like the way it does in HBO's Rome  where Vercingetorix is sort of  dramatically choked to death.  Yeah.  In the middle of the triumph  in front of all of the crowd.  I actually show that scene to my students  when we learn about the triumph.  Not because it's accurate per se about him,  but because it's this incredible moment  of the social and cultural power of a triumph.  And one of the things that they get right  with that, in my opinion, is,  you know, we have to think about Vercingetorix  when he's marched in this triumph.  He's been in prison for six years.  I can't imagine that the Romans  are treating him well.  And so the Vercingetorix that gets marched  in HBO's Rome is already half dead.  He's haggard. He's filthy.  His clothes don't fit.  He seems sort of barely conscious,  which is maybe a blessing for him  in this scenario and in this fictional world.  But you have to imagine that that six years  in prison in Rome would have been,  I mean, horrifying psychologically in many ways  and presumably was also  a horrific physical experience.  

It just makes me happy to know  that Caesar followed him two years later.  Anyway, if there's no one left hating Caesar,  it's because I'm dead.  So we've seen the end of Vercingetorix,  but is this the end of the Gallic War?  

No.  Vercingetorix is kind of only on the stage  for maybe a year, and he's not even  at the last final stand of the Gauls.  There's another battle  that happens in 51 BCE,  the Siege of Uxellodunum.  So Uxellodunum is the closest city  in the modern France is Weyck.  So again, we're back south central France  in that Massif Central area.  And Caesar's forces besiege this settlement,  Uxellodunum, near Weyck.  And this is the last major military operation  of the Gallic Wars, 51 BCE.  Caesar is successful.  And after that point, he's basically,  everything's basically been done.  

And does Gaul end up becoming part  of the Roman Empire at this point?  

It does. It does.  They continue to have a fair amount  of resistance until around 70 CE.  And they're not actually formally,  Gaul isn't formally made into provinces  until 27 BCE.  So Julius Caesar, as you alluded to,  gets murdered, assassinated in 44,  and there's a whole bunch of jockeying for power,  and then his adopted nephew comes onto the scene,  the scrappy Octavian, who's also horrible,  takes over, gets the fun name Augustus.  And as part of that taking over  and really making the empire capital E,  he reorganizes the provinces in 27.  And that is actually when Gaul  is made officially a province.  It takes that long because of internal issues  with the Romans for them to actually get around  to the bureaucratic side of it.  

Plutarch suggests that the Gallic Wars  killed one million Gauls and enslaved one million more.  Can we trust this number,  or does it seem a little bit high maybe?  

I in general don't trust numbers from Plutarch.  I think it is probably exaggerated.  I don't think it's excessively exaggerated.  So for example, at Alesia,  we have a relatively decent idea  of the numbers that happened.  So on the Roman side of it,  we've got something like 10 or 11 legions,  so about 35,000 to 40,000 legionnaires,  and then of course sort of external auxiliary,  infantry, cavalry, et cetera.  So the Roman force is probably around 60 to 75,000 total.  Caesar claims that in the city of Alesia,  there are 800 besieged people.  He's unclear about whether that is entirely citizens  or if that is just the military force.  I think he's intending the military force here though.  I don't think he's counting the civilians at this point.  And then in addition to that,  he claims that there were 250,000 infantry relief  that show up, the relief that show up,  and then see the siege works and go, bye.  And then Plutarch takes this and he's like,  oh, there were actually, you know,  470,000 combined forces at Alesia  between the entrenched besieged forces  and the relief forces.  So I, which is all to say,  I don't trust Plutarch's numbers at all,  but Caesar's numbers for the number of people in Alesia  are actually probably not that far off.  It was probably somewhere between 50 to 80,000  of besieged forces.  And then the relief forces were probably  about half as much as he said it was.  Which is all to say,  I know that was just like a lot of numbers,  which doesn't necessarily mean that Plutarch is untrustworthy,  but, and I have no good way of estimating  how many people died,  but if we take the settlement at Avaricum  way back when, where there,  I realize I did my math horrifically wrong.  I kept saying that he killed 41,200 people,  but there were only 40,000,  Caesar says there were 40,000 people at Avaricum  and 800 escaped.  So 39,200 people died,  which is so much less than 41,000 obviously.  This is why my PhD is not in math.  So if we say like Avaricum,  this really horrific defeat for the Gauls,  39,000 people died.  And that's at the end of the war.  I mean, we are, I think,  easily dealing in the hundreds of thousands of casualties  and certainly 100%, hundreds of thousands of enslavements.  

Can we assume that Julius Caesar  significantly reduced the population of Gaul  far more than the Roman army was affected,  casualty-wise, in the Gallic Wars?  

Yes, especially because of the enslavement.  

Sure.  

Right, so even if, let's say,  there were relatively similar casualties  between the two forces,  because so many Gauls were enslaved after the fact  and then therefore physically removed from Gaul,  yes, absolutely,  it would have horrifically affected the population.  

Now, this is usually the part of the episode  where I ask, what are the sources?  But we've talked about this a little bit already.  Julius Caesar is writing his own memoirs about the war  in third person because, of course, he is pretentious.  I hate him so much.  And we've mentioned Cassius Dio writing a lot later.  Is he using Julius Caesar as a source,  or is he saying,  I've got these sources from other places  that's not just him?  

No, he's probably primarily relying on Caesar.  He does add some sort of extra little flavor.  So, Cassius Dio is the one that says  that Vercingetorix knew Caesar beforehand,  so was friendly with him,  whereas Caesar doesn't say that.  So, unclear whether that's invention,  if Cassius Dio has access to another source.  We're just never going to know.   Most of Cassius Dio's and Plutarch's narratives  follow Caesar closely enough  that I'm pretty confident in saying  that they're mostly working from Caesar.  

We've talked about Vercingetorix.  He doesn't win a lot.  He wins one because some Romans had too much earwax  and couldn't hear the right instructions.  Let's talk about Vercingetorix, his reception,  because we kind of touched on it a little bit earlier.  We mentioned it.  He is a hero for certain people in France.  Let's talk about that.  Who loves him and why?  

The most interesting thing I think about  the reception of Vercingetorix  is that he kind of gets forgotten until the 1700s.  No one really cares about him until the French Revolution  because what happens is the French Revolution  is discussed by revolutionaries  as a fundamentally racial-based revolution  because they think that the ruling monarchs of France  are descended from Clovis,  who's a medieval Frankish-Germanic king,  whereas they see themselves  as being racially descended from the Gauls instead.  They use this, and they're all white.  Not everyone is white in France,  but the prominent people of the revolution are white.  But they see themselves as racially different  from the ruling elite in France at this time.  They use Vercingetorix and the Gauls  as a unifying force for the revolution  and the conception of what the revolution is  vis-à-vis the Frankish monarch elites.  That's when he gets interesting for all the French.  It's not any time before that,  and it's all very much tied in with this  meeting a sense of unified identity versus the monarchy,  which the French Revolution happens.  This is not a podcast about modern history,  so we're not going to get into it,  but he ends up being essentially adopted by Napoleon.  

The French Revolution happens,  and then it fails, and then they get an emperor.  Napoleon is Napoleon and is very full of himself,  and he very much takes on this  idea that we need to learn more about the Gauls,  because that's our true racial identity.  

Okay, so he's not being seen as a loser.  He's being seen as a tragic hero?  

You know, it's interesting.  God, it's so weird, because he does lose,  and they are very sort of on board with him losing,  because they think, okay, yes, he was so brave,  and he tried so hard,  and that is our national Gallic spirit.  But also, it was great that he lost,  because the Romans civilized us.  

Okay, that's another set of red flags that we're just going to...  

Yes, yeah.  Because the French have this weird,  they're totally fine with that internal dissonance of,  yes, we love verse and generics,  but also we love Gallo-Roman stuff,  and we incorporate, especially Napoleon,  incorporated so much Roman,  Greco-Roman, neoclassical architecture.  They were very willing to have these two  seemingly diametrically opposed truths be together,  where, yes, verse and generics is this incredible  form of Gallic resistance and Gallic identity,  but also it's fine that he did get beaten,  because then we were civilized.  And it then becomes, of course, justification for colonization,  because then the French can tell themselves,  well, it's fine that we're going out  and we're killing and horrifically occupying all these countries,  because even if they have these beautiful,  unique national identities of their own,  we still have to conquer them with civilization,  and they'll thank us for that.  I think that in general the French idea  that he's this sort of national hero  is probably benign for the vast majority of people in France,  but he has, he and specifically this idea of the Celts  and like a Celtic race or the Gallic race,  Celt is a, it's a little bit confusing terminology,  and I don't want to get into it all,  but the Gallic race, this idea of there being  this racially pure Gallic strain,  has absolutely been co-opted by French nationalists.  And there, for example, in the late 90s,  there was a French president gave a speech at Biberact,  which is this incredible archaeological site,  South Central France, Gallic oppidum,  and at the same time as he was giving this speech,  there was a French nationalist rally  with people holding signs saying Gaul for Gauls.  So there is absolutely, I think,  a more insidious side to the use of Vercingetorix  by these ethno-nationalist factions within France.  

So whether or not we think he is a loser  that got lucky one time or a tragic hero,  was his defeat and was Gaul becoming a province of Rome?  Was that inevitable?  Was anyone ever going to be able to prevent that happening?  

You know, only a Sith deals in absolutes,  but I mean, you know, something could have happened  that they, you know, got really good  at burning things down or something.  But I think the way that Gallic,  you know, they weren't a unified people.  They had sort of briefly been unified under Vercingetorix.  And even under Vercingetorix,  there was incredible amounts of infighting.  No one really agrees on anything.  They can't handle these siege works.  They have no clue how to handle them,  and they don't have an opportunity to learn how to handle them.  So I think the moment that the Romans set sight on Gaul,  it was extremely unlikely  that the Gauls would successfully hold their own.  

So we shouldn't judge him too harshly?  Apart from the whole, you know,  letting all of our non-combatants starve bit,  I'm judging him harshly for that.  The rest of it.  

Right.  I mean, I kind of, you know, I'm in my early 30s now,  and I think about if I was in a situation  where I was trying to unite a bunch of people  and lead a resistance in a war that I was so clearly losing,  would I have been able to do any better?  And the answer is probably not.  I would probably be dead already at this point.  But I admire him for trying.  And I think you can find heroic things about that.  There's all the very interesting thread of reception  that's very post-colonial,  is the use of Vercingetorix  as this tragic resistance hero instead.  So he has been used in some reception pieces  that reimagine black resistance efforts in Africa  through the lens of Vercingetorix.  And so I think there are these compelling ways  of taking his story  and making them something meaningful for modern people.  And so, yeah, I think we can't judge him too harshly.  He was also, you know,  evicted all those women and children and left them to die.  I mean, yeah, that sucks.  

But, yeah, I think all of us,  even those of us who live in empires  or what once was an empire,  we can always empathize with that underdog who did try.  So, yeah, we're not going to judge him too harshly.  That's the final verdict.  What I want to know,  is he the inspiration for Asterix and Obelix?  

Absolutely!  

Yay!  So the idea is that Asterix and Obelix,  the sort of promise of it is that  Caesar has successfully conquered all of Gaul  except this one little town in Brittany,  so along the northwestern coast.  And that this town has a magic potion  that grants people super strength.  And so Asterix basically,  I think in the narrative of the comic book,  essentially inherits the resistance from Vercingetorix.  Leads Julius Caesar on his, like,  merry romp comedy of errors.  And somehow Asterix goes to Egypt  and meets Cleopatra and all of this stuff.  And so, yes.  And Asterix, that Rix again,  that ending is very clearly a reference  to Vercingetorix and also other leaders  from the Gallic resistance,  like Dumnorix, who we didn't talk about today.  But is the sort of Vercingetorix of the Aedui.  

It's kind of an awesome part of his legacy  that he's beloved by school kids everywhere  in the form of Asterix and Obelix.  I loved those cartoons and the comics are awesome.  Okay, so one final question.  If we're going to take away one thing  about Vercingetorix, this conversation,  what's the one big piece of impact  that you hope everyone remembers  and takes away from this?  

Hmm, that's a good question.  I think that the most important thing  about learning about Vercingetorix  is that contrary to popular belief,  he was only active in the Gallic Wars  for a few months in 52.  I think part of the sort of way  that he's been received and made  into this great hero, we like to flatten it  and make him the face of all of the Gallic Wars  and certainly this main enemy of Caesar.  And the reality is that that's just not true.  I mean, he was a major enemy of Caesar,  but he was not the primary,  I guess for while they were unified,  he was the primary enemy of the Gauls versus Caesar.  But the Gauls were so disunified for so many years  that his impact on the war is not as widespread  as we tend to think it is, I think.  

I think this has been a fascinating conversation,  mainly because there's been so many surprises  and so many, again, laughing because otherwise I'd cry,  so many human elements that we've managed to cram in here  that make it, you know,  just to remind everyone at home that war was not an adventure.  

Right.  

For anybody apart from Caesar himself, apparently.  

Yeah, no, it would have been bleak and cold and wet  and muddy and nasty  for the vast, vast majority of the experience, so.  

That's where we're going to finish the show  because how could we not end it that way?  Thank you so much for coming onto the show  and explaining everything we need to know about Vercingetorix.  So, yes, thank you. Thank you, Zoe! That was amazing.  I'm sure everyone enjoyed it as much as I definitely did.  We'll have to get you back in the future for another episode!  

I would love that. This was such a pleasure.  I'm so grateful for the opportunity, so thank you.