The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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Position of the Insurgents at Alesia
Thus the junction of the two divisions of the army was happily
accomplished. The insurgents meanwhile had consulted as to the farthe
conduct of the war at Bibracte (Autun) the capital of the Haeduil
the soul of these consultations was again Vercingetorix,
to whom the nation was enthusiastically attached after the victory
of Gergovia. Particular interests were not, it is true,
even now silent; the Haedui still in this death-struggle of the nation
asserted their claims to the hegemony, and made a proposal
in the national assembly to substitute a leader of their own
for Vercingetorix. But the national representatives had not merely
declined this and confirmed Vercingetorix in the supreme command,
but had also adopted his plan of war without alteration. It was
substantially the same as that on which he had operated at Avaricum
and at Gergovia. As the base of the new position there was
selected the strong city of the Mandubii, Alesia (Alise Sainte
Reine near Semur in the department Cote d'Or)(49) and another
entrenched camp was constructed under its walls. Immense stores
were here accumulated, and the army was ordered thither
from Gergovia, having its cavalry raised by resolution of the national
assembly to 15,000 horse. Caesar with the whole strength
of his army after it was reunited at Agedincum took the direction
of Besancon, with the view of now approaching the alarmed province
and protecting it from an invasion, for in fact bands of insurgents
had already shown themselves in the territory of the Helvii
on the south slope of the Cevennes. Alesia lay almost on his way;
the cavalry of the Celts, the only arm with which Vercingetorix
chose to operate, attacked him on the route, but to the surprise
of all was worsted by the new German squadrons of Caesar
and the Roman infantry drawn up in support of them.
Caesar in Front of Alesia
Siege of Alesia
Vercingetorix hastened the more to shut himself up in Alesia;
and if Caesar was not disposed altogether to renounce the offensive,
no course was left to him but for the third time in this campaign
to proceed by way of attack with a far weaker force against an army
encamped under a well-garrisoned and well-provisioned fortress
and supplied with immense masses of cavalry. But, while the Celts
had hitherto been opposed by only a part of the Roman legions,
the whole forces of Caesar were united in the lines round Alesia,
and Vercingetorix did not succeed, as he had succeeded at Avaricum
and Gergovia, in placing his infantry under the protection of the walls
of the fortress and keeping his external communications open
for his own benefit by his cavalry, while he interrupted those
of the enemy. The Celtic cavalry, already discouraged by that defeat
inflicted on them by their lightly esteemed opponents, was beaten
by Caesar's German horse in every encounter. The line
of circumvallation of the besiegers extending about nine miles
invested the whole town, including the camp attached to it.
Vercingetorix had been prepared for a struggle under the walls,
but not for being besieged in Alesia; in that point of view
the accumulated stores, considerable as they were, were yet
far from sufficient for his army--which was said to amount to 80,000
infantry and 15,000 cavalry--and for the numerous inhabitants
of the town. Vercingetorix could not but perceive that his plan
of warfare had on this occasion turned to his own destruction,
and that he was lost unless the whole nation hastened up to the rescue
of its blockaded general. The existing provisions were still,
when the Roman circumvallation was closed, sufficient for a month
and perhaps something more; at the last moment, when there was still
free passage at least for horsemen, Vercingetorix dismissed
his whole cavalry, and sent at the same time to the heads
of the nation instructions to call out all their forces and lead them
to the relief of Alesia. He himself, resolved to bear in person
the responsibility for the plan of war which he had projected
and which had miscarried, remained in the fortress, to share in good
or evil the fate of his followers. But Caesar made up his mind
at once to besiege and to be besieged. He prepared his line
of circumvallation for defence also on its outer side, and furnished
himself with provisions for a longer period. The days passed;
they had no longer a boll of grain in the fortress, and they
were obliged to drive out the unhappy inhabitants of the town
to perish miserably between the entrenchments of the Celts
and of the Romans, pitilessly rejected by both.
Attempt at Relief
Conflicts before Alesia
At the last hour there appeared behind Caesar's lines
the interminable array of the Celto-Belgic relieving array, said
to amount to 250,000 infantry and 8000 cavalry, from the Channel
to the Cevennes the insurgent cantons had strained every nerve
to rescue the flower of their patriots and the general of their
choice--the Bellovaci alone had answered that they were doubtless
disposed to fight against the Romans, but not beyond their own bounds.
The first assault, which the besieged of Alesia and the relieving
troops without made on the Roman double line, was repulsed;
but, when after a day's rest it was repeated, the Celts
succeeded--at a spot where the line of circumvallation ran over
the slope of a hill and could be assailed from the height above--
in filling up the trenches and hurling the defenders down
from the rampart. Then Labienus, sent thither by Caesar, collected
the nearest cohorts and threw himself with four legions on the foe.
Under the eyes of the general, who himself appeared at the most
dangerous moment, the assailants were driven back in a desperate
hand-to-hand conflict, and the squadrons of cavalry that came
with Caesar taking the fugitives in rear completed the defeat.
Alesia Capitulates
It was more than a great victory; the fate of Alesia, and indeed
of the Celtic nation, was thereby irrevocably decided. The Celtic
army, utterly disheartened, dispersed at once from the battle-field
and went home. Vercingetorix might perhaps have even now taken
to flight, or at least have saved himself by the last means open
to a free man; he did not do so, but declared in a council of war that,
since he had not succeeded in breaking off the alien yoke,
he was ready to give himself up as a victim and to avert as far as
possible destruction from the nation by bringing it on his own
head. This was done. The Celtic officers delivered their general--
the solemn choice of the whole nation--over to the energy of their
country for such punishment as might be thought fit. Mounted
on his steed and in full armour the king of the Arverni appeared
before the Roman proconsul and rode round his tribunal;
then he surrendered his horse and arms, and sat down in silence
on the steps at Caesar's feet (702).
Vercingetorix Executed
Five years afterwards he was led in triumph through the streets
of the Italian capital, and, while his conqueror was offering solemn
thanks to the gods on the summit of the Capitol, Vercingetorix
was beheaded at its foot as guilty of high treason against the Roman
nation. As after a day of gloom the sun may perhaps break through
the clouds at its setting, so destiny may bestow on nations
in their decline yet a last great man. Thus Hannibal stands
at the close of the Phoenician history, and Vercingetorix
at the close of the Celtic. They were not able to save the nations
to which they belonged from a foreign yoke, but they spared them
the last remaining disgrace--an inglorious fall. Vercingetorix,
just like the Carthaginian, was obliged to contend not merely
against the public foe, but also and above all against that anti-national
opposition of wounded egotists and startled cowards, which regularly
accompanies a degenerate civilization; for him too a place
in history is secured, not by his battles and sieges,
but by the fact that he was able to furnish in his own person
a centre and rallying-point to a nation distracted and ruined
by the rivalry of individual interests. And yet there can hardly
be a more marked contrast than between the sober townsman
of the Phoenician mercantile city, whose plans were directed towards
one great object with unchanging energy throughout fifty years,
and the bold prince of the Celtic land, whose mighty deeds and high-
minded self-sacrifice fall within the compass of one brief summer.
The whole ancient world presents no more genuine knight, whether
as regards his essential character or his outward appearance.
But man ought not to be a mere knight, and least of all the statesman.
It was the knight, not the hero, who disdained to escape from Alesia,
when for the nation more depended on him than on a hundred thousand
ordinary brave men. It was the knight, not the hero, who gave
himself up as a sacrifice, when the only thing gained
by that sacrifice was that the nation publicly dishonoured itself
and with equal cowardice and absurdity employed its last breath
in proclaiming that its great historical death-struggle was a crime
against its oppressor. How very different was the conduct
of Hannibal in similar positions! It is impossible to part
from the noble king of the Arverni without a feeling of historical
and human sympathy; but it is a significant trait of the Celtic nation,
that its greatest man was after all merely a knight.
The Last Conflicts
With the Bituriges and Carnutes
The fall of Alesia and the capitulation of the army enclosed
in it were fearful blows for the Celtic insurrection; but blows
quite as heavy had befallen the nation and yet the conflict
had been renewed. The loss of Vercingetorix, however, was irreparable.
With him unity had come to the nation; with him it seemed also
to have departed. We do not find that the insurgents made any attempt
to continue their joint defence and to appoint another generalissimo;
the league of patriots fell to pieces of itself, and every clan
was left to fight or come to terms with the Romans as it pleased.
Naturally the desire after rest everywhere prevailed.
Caesar too had an interest in bringing the war quickly to an end.
Of the ten years of his governorship seven had elapsed, and the last
was called in question by his political opponents in the capital;
he could only reckon with some degree of certainty on two more summers,
and, while his interest as well as his honour required
that he should hand over the newly-acquired regions to his successor
in a condition of tolerable peace and tranquillity, there was
in truth but scanty time to bring about such a state of things.
To exercise mercy was in this case still more a necessity
for the victor than for the vanquished; and he might thank his stars
that the internal dissensions and the easy temperament of the Celts
met him in this respect half way. Where--as in the two most eminent
cantons of central Gaul, those of the Haedui and Arverni--there
existed a strong party well disposed to Rome, the cantons obtained
immediately after the fall of Alesia a complete restoration
of their former relations with Rome, and even their captives, 20,000
in number, were released without ransom, while those of the other
clans passed into the hard bondage of the victorious legionaries.
The greater portion of the Gallic districts submitted like the Haedui
and Arverni to their fate, and allowed their inevitable
punishment to be inflicted without farther resistance.
But not a few clung in foolish frivolity or sullen despair
to the lost cause, till the Roman troops of execution appeared
within their borders. Such expeditions were in the winter of 702-703
undertaken against the Bituriges and the Carnutes.
With the Bellovaci
More serious resistance was offered by the Bellovaci,
who in the previous year had kept aloof from the relief of Alesia;
they seem to have wished to show that their absence on that decisive day
at least did not proceed from want of courage or of love for freedom.
The Atrebates, Ambiani, Caletes, and other Belgic cantons took part
in this struggle; the brave king of the Atrebates Commius,
whose accession to the insurrection the Romans had least of all forgiven,
and against whom recently Labienus had even directed an atrocious
attempt at assassination, brought to the Bellovaci 500 German
horse, whose value the campaign of the previous year had shown.
The resolute and talented Bellovacian Correus, to whom the chief
conduct of the war had fallen, waged warfare as Vercingetorix
had waged it, and with no small success. Although Caesar had gradually
brought up the greater part of his army, he could neither bring
the infantry of the Bellovaci to a battle, nor even prevent it
from taking up other positions which afforded better protection
against his augmented forces; while the Roman horse, especially
the Celtic contingents, suffered most severe losses in various combats
at the hands of the enemy's cavalry, especially of the German cavalry
of Commius. But after Correus had met his death in a skirmish
with the Roman foragers, the resistance here too was broken;
the victor proposed tolerable conditions, to which the Bellovaci
along with their confederates submitted. The Treveri were reduced
to obedience by Labienus, and incidentally the territory
of the outlawed Eburones was once more traversed and laid waste.
Thus the last resistance of the Belgic confederacy was broken.
On the Loire
The maritime cantons still made an attempt to defend themselves
against the Roman domination in concert with their neighbours
on the Loire. Insurgent bands from the Andian, Carnutic, and other
surrounding cantons assembled on the lower Loire and besieged
in Lemonum (Poitiers) the prince of the Pictones who was friendly
to the Romans. But here too a considerable Roman force soon appeared
against them; the insurgents abandoned the siege, and retreated
with the view of placing the Loire between themselves and the enemy,
but were overtaken on the march and defeated; whereupon
the Carnutes and the other revolted cantons, including even
the maritime ones, sent in their submission.
And in Uxellodunum
The resistance was at an end; save that an isolated leader of free
bands still here and there upheld the national banner. The bold
Drappes and the brave comrade in arms of Vercingetorix Lucterius,
after the breaking up of the army united on the Loire, gathered
together the most resolute men, and with these threw themselves
into the strong mountain-town of Uxellodunum on the Lot,(50)
which amidst severe and fatal conflicts they succeeded in sufficiently
provisioning. In spite of the loss of their leaders, of whom
Drappes had been taken prisoner, and Lucterius had been cut off
from the town, the garrison resisted to the uttermost; it was not
till Caesar appeared in person, and under his orders the spring
from which the besieged derived their water was diverted by means
of subterranean drains, that the fortress, the last stronghold
of the Celtic nation, fell. To distinguish the last champions
of the cause of freedom, Caesar ordered that the whole garrison should
have their hands cut off and should then be dismissed, each one
to his home. Caesar, who felt it all-important to put an end at least
to open resistance throughout Gaul, allowed king Commius, who still
held out in the region of Arras and maintained desultory warfare
with the Roman troops there down to the winter of 703-704, to make
his peace, and even acquiesced when the irritated and justly
distrustful man haughtily refused to appear in person in the Roman
camp. It is very probable that Caesar in a similar way allowed
himself to be satisfied with a merely nominal submission, perhaps
even with a de facto armistice, in the less accessible districts
of the north-west and north-east of Gaul.(51)
Gaul Subdued
Thus was Gaul--or, in other words, the land west of the Rhine
and north of the Pyrenees--rendered subject after only eight years
of conflict (696-703) to the Romans. Hardly a year after the full
pacification of the land, at the beginning of 705, the Roman troops
had to be withdrawn over the Alps in consequence of the civil war,
which had now at length broken out in Italy, and there remained
nothing but at the most some weak divisions of recruits in Gaul.
Nevertheless the Celts did not again rise against the foreign yoke;
and, while in all the old provinces of the empire there was
fighting against Caesar, the newly-acquired country alone remained
continuously obedient to its conqueror. Even the Germans
did not during those decisive years repeat their attempts to conquer
new settlements on the left bank of the Rhine. As little did
there occur in Gaul any national insurrection or German invasion
during the crises that followed, although these offered the most
favourable opportunities. If disturbances broke out anywhere,
such as the rising of the Bellovaci against the Romans in 708,
these movements were so isolated and so unconnected with
the complications in Italy, that they were suppressed without material
difficulty by the Roman governors. Certainly this state of peace
was most probably, just as was the peace of Spain for centuries,
purchased by provisionally allowing the regions that were most
remote and most strongly pervaded by national feeling--Brittany,
the districts on the Scheldt, the region of the Pyrenees--
to withdraw themselves de facto in a more or less definite manner
from the Roman allegiance. Nevertheless the building of Caesar--
however scanty the time which he found for it amidst other
and at the moment still more urgent labours, however unfinished
and but provisionally rounded off he may have left it--in substance
stood the test of this fiery trial, as respected both the repelling
of the Germans and the subjugation of the Celts.
Organization
Roman Taxation
As to administration in chief, the territories newly acquired
by the governor of Narbonese Gaul remained for the time being united
with the province of Narbo; it was not till Caesar gave up
this office (710) that two new governorships--Gaul proper
and Belgica--were formed out of the territory which he conquered.
That the individual cantons lost their political independence,
was implied in the very nature of conquest. They became throughout
tributary to the Roman community. Their system of tribute however was,
of course, not that by means of which the nobles and financial
aristocracy turned Asia to profitable account; but, as was
the case in Spain, a tribute fixed once for all was imposed on each
individual community, and the levying of it was left to itself.
In this way forty million sesterces (400,000 pounds) flowed annually
from Gaul into the chests of the Roman government; which, no doubt,
undertook in return the cost of defending the frontier of the
Rhine. Moreover, the masses of gold accumulated in the temples
of the gods and the treasuries of the grandees found their way,
as a matter of course, to Rome; when Caesar offered his Gallic gold
throughout the Roman empire and brought such masses of it at once
into the money market that gold as compared with silver fell about
25 per cent, we may guess what sums Gaul lost through the war.
Indulgences towards Existing Arrangements
The former cantonal constitutions with their hereditary kings,
or their presiding feudal-oligarchies, continued in the main
to subsist after the conquest, and even the system of clientship,
which made certain cantons dependent on others more powerful,
was not abolished, although no doubt with the loss of political
independence its edge was taken off. The sole object of Caesar
was, while making use of the existing dynastic, feudalist,
and hegemonic divisions, to arrange matters in the interest of Rome,
and to bring everywhere into power the men favourably disposed
to the foreign rule. Caesar spared no pains to form a Roman party
in Gaul; extensive rewards in money and specially in confiscated
estates were bestowed on his adherents, and places in the common
council and the first offices of state in their cantons
were procured for them by Caesar's influence. Those cantons
in which a sufficiently strong and trustworthy Roman party existed,
such as those of the Remi, the Lingones, the Haedui, were favoured
by the bestowal of a freer communal constitution--the right
of alliance, as it was called--and by preferences in the regulation
of the matter of hegemony. The national worship and its priests
seem to have been spared by Caesar from the outset as far as possible;
no trace is found in his case of measures such as were adopted
in later times by the Roman rulers against the Druidical system,
and with this is probably connected the fact that his Gallic wars,
so far as we see, do not at all bear the character of religious
warfare after the fashion which formed so prominent a feature
of the Britannic wars subsequently.
Introduction of the Romanizing of the Country
While Caesar thus showed to the conquered nation every allowable
consideration and spared their national, political, and religious
institutions as far as was at all compatible with their subjection
to Rome, he did so, not as renouncing the fundamental idea of his
conquest, the Romanization of Gaul, but with a view to realize it
in the most indulgent way. He did not content himself with letting
the same circumstances, which had already in great part Romanized
the south province, produce their effect likewise in the north;
but, like a genuine statesman, he sought to stimulate the natural
course of development and, moreover, to shorten as far as possible
the always painful period of transition. To say nothing
of the admission of a number of Celts of rank into Roman citizenship
and even of several perhaps into the Roman senate, it was probably
Caesar who introduced, although with certain restrictions,
the Latin instead of the native tongue as the official language
within the several cantons in Gaul, and who introduced the Roman
instead of the national monetary system on the footing of reserving
the coinage of gold and of denarii to the Roman authorities, while
the smaller money was to be coined by the several cantons, but only
for circulation within the cantonal bounds, and this too in accordance
with the Roman standard. We may smile at the Latin jargon,
which the dwellers by the Loire and the Seine henceforth employed
in accordance with orders;(52) but these barbarisms were pregnant
with a greater future than the correct Latin of the capital.
Perhaps too, if the cantonal constitution in Gaul afterwards appears
more closely approximated to the Italian urban constitution,
and the chief places of the canton as well as the common councils
attain a more marked prominence in it than was probably the case
in the original Celtic organization, the change may be referred
to Caesar. No one probably felt more than the political heir
of Gaius Gracchus and of Marius, how desirable in a military
as well as in a political point of view it would have been to establish
a series of Transalpine colonies as bases of support for the new rule
and starting-points of the new civilization. If nevertheless
he confined himself to the settlement of his Celtic or German horsemen
in Noviodunum(53) and to that of the Boii in the canton
of the Haedui (54)--which latter settlement already rendered quite
the services of a Roman colony in the war with Vercingetorix(55)--
the reason was merely that his farther plans did not permit him
to put the plough instead of the sword into the hands of his legions.
What he did in later years for the old Roman province
in this respect, will be explained in its own place; it is probable
that the want of time alone prevented him from extending
the same system to the regions which he had recently subdued.
The Catastrophe of the Celtic Nation
Traits Common to the Celts and Irish
All was over with the Celtic nation. Its political dissolution
had been completed by Caesar; its national dissolution was begun
and in course of regular progress. This was no accidental destruction,
such as destiny sometimes prepares even for peoples capable
of development, but a self-incurred and in some measure historically
necessary catastrophe. The very course of the last war proves this,
whether we view it as a whole or in detail. When the establishment
of the foreign rule was in contemplation, only single districts--
mostly, moreover, German or half-German--offered energetic
resistance. When the foreign rule was actually established,
the attempts to shake it off were either undertaken altogether
without judgment, or they were to an undue extent the work
of certain prominent nobles, and were therefore immediately
and entirely brought to an end with the death or capture of an
Indutiomarus, Camulogenus, Vercingetorix, or Correus. The sieges
and guerilla warfare, in which elsewhere the whole moral depth
of national struggles displays itself, were throughout this Celtic
struggle of a peculiarly pitiable character. Every page of Celtic
history confirms the severe saying of one of the few Romans who had
the judgment not to despise the so-called barbarians--that the Celts
boldly challenge danger while future, but lose their courage
before its presence. In the mighty vortex of the world's history,
which inexorably crushes all peoples that are not as hard
and as flexible as steel, such a nation could not permanently maintain
itself; with reason the Celts of the continent suffered the same
fate at the hands of the Romans, as their kinsmen in Ireland suffer
down to our own day at the hands of the Saxons--the fate
of becoming merged as a leaven of future development in a politically
superior nationality. On the eve of parting from this remarkable
nation we may be allowed to call attention to the fact,
that in the accounts of the ancients as to the Celts on the Loire
and Seine we find almost every one of the characteristic traits
which we are accustomed to recognize as marking the Irish.
Every feature reappears: the laziness in the culture of the fields;
the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation--we may recall
that sword of Caesar hung up in the sacred grove of the Arverni
after the victory of Gergovia, which its alleged former owner viewed
with a smile at the consecrated spot and ordered the sacred property
to be carefully spared; the language full of comparisons and hyperboles,
of allusions and quaint turns; the droll humour--an excellent
example of which was the rule, that if any one interrupted a person
speaking in public, a substantial and very visible hole should be
cut, as a measure of police, in the coat of the disturber
of the peace; the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds
of past ages, and the most decided gifts of rhetoric and poetry;
the curiosity--no trader was allowed to pass, before he had told
in the open street what he knew, or did not know, in the shape of news--
and the extravagant credulity which acted on such accounts,
for which reason in the better regulated cantons travellers
were prohibited on pain of severe punishment from communicating
unauthenticated reports to others than the public magistrates;
the childlike piety, which sees in the priest a father and asks
for his counsel in all things; the unsurpassed fervour of national
feeling, and the closeness with which those who are fellow-countrymen
cling together almost like one family in opposition to strangers;
the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance-leader
that presents himself and to form bands, but at the same time
the utter incapacity to preserve a self-reliant courage equally remote
from presumption and from pusillanimity, to perceive the right time
for waiting and for striking a blow, to attain or even barely
to tolerate any organization, any sort of fixed military or political
discipline. It is, and remains, at all times and all places
the same indolent and poetical, irresolute and fervid, inquisitive,
credulous, amiable, clever, but--in a political point of view--
thoroughly useless nation; and therefore its fate has been always
and everywhere the same.