The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  Even ignoring the loss of income and labour, these quasi-military operations were often counter-productive. Tactical genocide had at least two serious drawbacks. First, as Caesar had observed when the Helvetian migrants left their homeland, large parts of the country were left defenceless against potentially less tractable enemies from across the Rhine, though the danger could be mitigated in the short term by the destruction of buildings and crops. Second, what remained of society in the zones of annihilation was catastrophically destabilized. As the war went on, far beyond the months when Caesar had first reported that ‘all of Gaul was pacified’, the Celtic armies took on a different appearance. For the remainder of the war, the legions would be harried by bands of ‘desperadoes’, ‘robbers’ and ‘runaway slaves’. In the lands of the Unelli (the Cotentin Peninsula), ‘a great multitude of wreckers and thieves came together from all parts of Gaul, called away from their farming and daily chores by the hope of plunder and a passion for war’.

  It was something of a miracle that the greatest military coalition of Celtic tribes in history emerged from this disaster zone that stretched from the Ocean to the Rhine.

  One day at the end of the winter of 53–52 BC, the sun rose at Cenabum (Orléans), and the Roman merchants who had been living in the town since before the war were massacred. The Gaulish message system transmitted the news to the Massif Central and the plateau of Gergovia. There, in the chief oppidum of the Arverni, ‘a young man of the highest ability and authority’ called Vercingetorix (‘Great Warrior King’) put the next stage of the plan into action.

  Ambassadors were sent throughout the western half of Gaul, from the Parisii to the Ruteni and along the Atlantic seaboard. Their mission was to assemble a pan-Gallic army. Cowards and appeasers were to be tortured and burned to death; less serious offenders would have both ears cut off or one eye gouged out. There seems to have been little need of such encouragements: almost all the tribes of Independent Gaul declared their support for Vercingetorix – even the Aedui, who until then had remained loyal to Rome. When Caesar learned of the rebellion, he returned from Italy, placed the province in a state of emergency, and marched his soldiers over the snowy Cévennes. This time, when he reached the Loire and the heart of Gaul, he would be confronting a nation determined to recover its freedom.

  As far as one can tell from Caesar’s account, Vercingetorix was a ruthless and effective general. His father, Celtillus, had been elected supreme leader of the Gauls. But Celtillus had tried to turn the republic into an absolute monarchy and had been executed by the state. Vercingetorix was suspected of harbouring the same design, but the political institutions of the Gauls were remarkably flexible. (Caesar twice refers to their propensity for taking a vote as ‘fickleness’ and ‘eagerness for political change’.) In Britain, Cassivellaunus, who had tyrannized his neighbours the Trinovantes, had been asked to organize resistance to the Romans. Now, the son of an executed dictator was entrusted with the salvation of Gaul. Even after several defeats and his destruction of twenty Biturigan oppida in a vain attempt to starve the Roman army, Vercingetorix was hailed as ‘the finest of leaders’.

  At Gergovia, the young Arvernian general seems to have won a great victory against the Romans. A century later, Plutarch reported that the Arverni ‘still show visitors a small sword hanging in a temple, which they say was taken from Caesar’. According to Caesar himself, Roman discipline broke down at Gergovia: ‘The soldiers thought that they knew more about victory and its means than their commander-in-chief.’ (In the Commentaries, successes are attributed to a singular ‘Caesar’, whereas setbacks are usually described with a generalized plural.) With the province of Gallia Transalpina already trembling at the thought of a barbarian horde less than three days’ march to the north, Caesar would not have wanted to inform the Senate that disaster had stared him in the face at Gergovia, but so many soldiers, merchants and slaves were arriving in Italy with tales of the war in Gaul that he was forced to make concessions to the truth. ‘Having achieved what he intended [at Gergovia], Caesar ordered the retreat to be sounded . . .’ He admitted to the loss of forty-six centurions and ‘somewhat fewer than seven hundred soldiers’.

  If the war had ended at Gergovia, Vercingetorix might have become the leader of a unified Gaul. A nation would have existed on the north-western frontiers of the Roman empire in which the benefits of Roman civilization were enjoyed without the humiliation of military defeat. At Alesia, a gigantic bronze statue commissioned by Napoleon III shows Vercingetorix as a moustachioed Viking. This is not the barbarian general who spent the last five years of his life in prison on the Capitoline Hill before being paraded in Caesar’s triumph and then strangled in his cell. This is the military genius who told his army that ‘not even the whole earth could withstand the union of Gaul’. Since almost fifty tribes with proud traditions of belligerence elected him as leader and followed him to the end, he deserves his place in history as the first French national hero. The problem is that having defeated Caesar at Gergovia, this Napoleon of the Iron Age now did something so ‘unusual and extraordinary’ that, as Montaigne and countless other disappointed patriots have pointed out, ‘it appears to defy military custom and logic’.

  Gergovia lies on the solar path that joins the burial place of the Delphic treasure to the mother-city of the Celts (Alesia). One hundred Roman miles from Gergovia, on the same solar trajectory, stands the Aeduan capital of Bibracte. This is where Vercingetorix next appeared, at a general council of all the tribes. He was again proclaimed commander-in-chief ‘by popular vote’. From Bibracte, following the same line, he marched to the north-north-east. At the same time, Caesar was skirting the edge of the Lingones’ territory and heading for the lands of the Sequani in the hope of finding a safe route south to the province.

  Caesar’s itinerary was the ancient ‘tin route’ along the upper Seine: it would have taken him past the hilltop ruins of a yellow palace where the Lady of Vix had lived over four centuries before. A few hours’ march from Alesia, he met the Gaulish army. Following the line from Gergovia and Bibracte, Vercingetorix would have intercepted Caesar near the Celtic settlement of Bellenod. The river mentioned by Caesar in his account of the battle would be the infant Seine, and the hill that the Gauls defended the place once called ‘les Châtelots’, which indicates a fortified enclosure.

  The German cavalry recruited by Caesar charged up the hill and routed the Gauls. Several important prisoners were taken, including the man whom the Druids had elected chief magistrate of the Aedui. It was then that Vercingetorix seemed to relinquish command to a higher authority. He retreated to Alesia and immured himself and all his army inside the oppidum. On that elliptical hill at the heart of Heraklean Gaul, an army of eighty thousand settled in and waited for the attack. ‘Why’, asked Montaigne, ‘did the leader of all the Gauls decide to shut himself up in Alesia? A man who commands a whole nation must never back himself into a corner unless he has no other fortress to defend.’

  The Gaulish army, according to Caesar, occupied ‘the part of the hill that looks towards the rising sun’. A sanctuary has been found there, near a healing spring, dedicated to a Celtic equivalent of Apollo. The Romans immediately began to surround the hill with turreted ramparts, fields of pits and sharpened stakes, trenches twenty feet deep and a moat filled with water diverted from the river Ozerain. Caesar was as busy as a spider when it feels the first twitch of the fly. His lovingly detailed description of the siege works translates his glee at Vercingetorix’s blunder. Before the oppidum was completely encircled, Vercingetorix ordered a levy of all the tribes: ‘12,000 each from the Sequani, Senones, Bituriges, Santones, Ruteni and Carnutes; 8000 each from the Pictones, Turoni, Parisii and Helvetii’, etc. The total number of soldiers requisitioned was 282,000.43

  About three weeks later, the pan-Gallic relief force assembled in the lands of the Aedui. Since Celtic armies marched and fought in tribal regiments, the horde would have been an ethnographic map of Gaul. Some were dressed
in chainmail (a Celtic invention), others in leather cuirasses. All of them carried brightly painted shields and cloaks fastened at the shoulder with a brooch. Their cloaks and trousers were striped, with checks of many different colours. Some of the warriors wore iron helmets crested with wings or a solar wheel. Those from the poorer regions wore sheepskin skull-caps and stuffed woollen bonnets. Their hair was blanched and stiffened with lime-water so that it looked like the mane of a horse. Others were clean-shaven and had feathered, wreath-like hairstyles. They might almost have passed as Romans.

  A census was taken (this was the source that Caesar would use when he wrote up his account): 258,000 soldiers had answered the call. Accordingly, the Roman fortifications formed two lines of defence – one facing the oppidum, the other facing the plain from where the relief army would arrive.

  By entombing his warriors in the sacred town of Herakles and Celtine, and by summoning a quarter of a million soldiers to the same place, Vercingetorix or the Druid augurs had presented Caesar with a general’s dream – the chance to inflict total defeat on the combined forces of the enemy. The siege began in late August or early September and lasted long enough for the jaws of famine to tighten on the eighty thousand. The population density of the beleaguered oppidum would have been four times that of modern Paris. After about thirty days, the civilian population was evacuated, but their exit was blocked by the Romans and they died of starvation under the eyes of the besieged. When the relief army arrived, it was massacred by the legions within sight of the ramparts.

  Inside the mother-city, another council was convened: it was decided that Vercingetorix should surrender. He donned his finest armour and trotted out of Alesia – according to Plutarch – on a beautifully caparisoned horse. He rode in a circle around Caesar, dismounted, dropped his armour on the ground, and sat at the conqueror’s feet. The survivors were divided up among the Roman soldiers. In place of booty, each man received a slave, and since, by that stage of the war, the legions were labouring under the weight of plundered treasure, even a half-starved porter was a boon.

  The Alesia that can be seen today on the hill above the village of Alise-Sainte-Reine is the Roman town that replaced the oppidum. The oldest part is the temple to Ucuetis, a god of metalworkers. Its stone footings, next to the table d’orientation, trace the ground-plan of an earlier temple. The museum of Alesia is unaware of the fact, but unlike the other buildings, the Celtic temple is oriented by its major axis on the solstice line from Châteaumeillant. There are few other signs of Druidic calculations – the army that faced the rising sun, two sorties launched by the Gauls when the sun was highest in the sky, and Vercingetorix’s final circumambulation of Caesar. These are the only hints that Alesia had once been the focal point of a solar sanctuary as large as Gaul itself.

  At Alesia, the Gaulish cause was lost. But there was to be one other ‘last stand’. Throughout that winter and the following spring (51 BC), the legions were busy stamping out the fires of rebellion that still burned in other parts of Gaul. In early summer, a Gaulish army was defeated at the siege of Lemonum (Poitiers), which lies on the same latitude as Châteaumeillant. Vercingetorix’s most trusted general – a leader of the Cadurci tribe named Lucterius – escaped from Lemonum and joined forces with a leader of the Senones called Drappes. They assembled a ragged army of two thousand warriors. Lucterius was already known to Caesar as ‘a man of the utmost audacity’, but the Cadurcan’s plan was more than audacious, it was suicidal. Abandoning the ruins of central Gaul to the Romans, Lucterius and Drappes would march south to attack the Roman province.

  The direct route from Lemonum to Narbo, the capital of the province, led through the lands of the Cadurci, where Lucterius had his power-base. He and his army passed the Duranius (the Dordogne) and struck out across the region of limestone plateaux where the rivers run through deep gorges. Here, where the warmth of the south begins to prevail over the moist winds of the Atlantic, Lucterius was in his home territory. Word reached him that two Roman legions had set off in pursuit. He realized, says Hirtius, that ‘to enter the province with an army in the rear would mean certain destruction’. But the region later called the Quercy (from ‘Cadurci’) was the natural habitat of fugitives. Long before the Celts, a primitive race had lurked in the tortuous caverns that led to the lower world. In the valleys of the Lot, the Aveyron and the Viaur, the crags that jut out of the woodland at river-bends look like citadels, and the citadels look like crags.

  Lucterius chose what appeared to be an impregnable oppidum. Its name was Uxellodunum, from uxellos (‘high’) and dunum (‘hill fort’). Before the war, Uxellodunum had been a protectorate of his tribe. It was a natural fortress: a river almost surrounded it, ‘very steep and rugged cliffs defended it on all sides’, and on the narrow strip of land that connected the oppidum to the outside world, ‘the waters of a copious well burst forth’. Its only obvious weakness was a large area of high ground facing the oppidum from which anyone trying to enter or leave could be seen.

  Despite the meticulous topographic description by Hirtius, no one knows where the last major battle of the Gallic War was fought. ‘Uxellodunum’ was a common Celtic place name, and several oppida in the same region may have shared it,44 but since the final resting-place of Independent Gaul is a matter of national historical importance, the French Ministry of Culture, in 2001, following the lead of Napoleon III, declared the plateau of the Puy d’Issolud in the Lot département to be ‘the official site’ of Uxellodunum. Six hundred and thirty-four arrow-heads, sixty-nine catapult darts and other Roman weaponry prove that a battle took place there in the mid-first century BC. Unfortunately, not a single detail of Hirtius’s description corresponds to anything at Puy d’Issolud, and a war of words still rages between the three towns that claim to have been Uxellodunum.

  Three kilometres to the east of the Gaulish meridian, on the borders of the Cadurci and the Ruteni, there is a place that no one has ever suspected of being Uxellodunum. It matches Hirtius’s description exactly. The village is now called Pampelonne. The steep-sided promontory on its eastern edge, in a tight bend of the river Viaur, bears the old name of the town, Thuriès. A hamlet, first recorded in 1275, once clung to the cliffs; its last remnants disappeared when the hydroelectric dam was built in the 1920s, but the impressive ruins of a medieval castle still bear witness to its strategic importance.

  Thuriès castle stood on the Iron Age route that connected Aquitania to the lands of the Arverni. It was the stoutest fortress in the region; its lords grew rich on tolls exacted at the river crossing – which is why, one day in the 1360s, a small band of Gascon mercenaries led by the Bastard of Mauléon, wearing handkerchiefs on their heads and talking in high-pitched voices, gathered at ‘the magnificent spring’ on the edge of Thuriès. After filling their pitchers at the fountain, the six ‘women’ strolled into town, then summoned their companions with a horn-blast from the ramparts – ‘and that’, as the Bastard explained to the chronicler Jean Froissart, ‘is how I captured the town and castle of Thurie [sic], which have brought me more profit and revenue every year . . . than I could ever make from selling the castle and all its dependencies.’

  Some places are predestined to be battle-sites. Many centuries before Thuriès fell to the Bastard of Mauléon and his band of bogus women, the last Gaulish army, following the direct route from Lemonum to Narbo, would have come to what is now the Puy d’Issolud, the ‘official’ Uxellodunum. Near the bridge over the Dordogne, a battle was fought with arrows and catapults. Continuing along the same direct line to Narbo, the survivors would then have reached the Thuriès oppidum above the river Viaur. Knowing, as Hirtius says, that it would have been madness ‘to enter the province with an army in the rear’, the fugitives decided to make a stand.

  Thuriès, which Hirtius may have conflated with the other uxellodunum or ‘high hill fort’ on the route, does in fact lie on or close to the borders of Gallia Transalpina. It also lies on the borders of the Cadurci and the Ruteni, which
is what Hirtius’s description implies. Thuriès was a frontier town with a major river crossing on the long-distance route to Aquitania. This might explain why Caesar decided to leave central Gaul to help out at the siege of Uxellodunum: ‘He reflected that, though he had conquered part of Aquitania through [his lieutenant] Publius Crassus, he had never been there in person.’ The oppidum lay conveniently on the route to Aquitania, which is where Caesar, after supervising the siege, would decide ‘to spend the latter part of the summer’.

  51. The route to Uxellodunum

  The dotted line represents the ancient route from the Auvergne to Aquitania.

  The key to Uxellodunum was the ‘copious well’ below the oppidum walls. The Romans eventually succeeded in drawing off its water by ‘cutting the veins of the spring’ with mineshafts. The inhabitants of Uxellodunum surrendered, but not because they were dying of thirst. A prisoner explained the logic of their decision to Caesar: ‘They attributed the drying-up of the well, not to the devices of men, but to the will of the gods.’ To the Romans, this was a mark of primitive superstition, but the Celts were at least as advanced as the Romans in mining techniques, and the digging of mineshafts can hardly have passed unnoticed. From the Celtic point of view, the Romans were acting as agents of a higher authority. The course of the siege – and of the entire war – had been governed all along by the upper world.