The Economist December 18th 2021 Holiday specials 25
without fear of being surprised by the Gauls”. From the
second camp, Caesar launched his main attack.
On a sunny October Sunday, your correspondent
climbed the same mountain path, stopping first to buy
bread and goat’s cheese—rations any legionary would
have recognised. As in Caesar’s day the slope is steep
and rutted. Loose stones trip the unwary. Round every
corner is a bush in which an archer might lurk. Even
without armour, the hike was arduous. Under a hail of
javelins it would presumably have been worse.
After an hour,dripping sweat and feeling that he
had earned his monthly bag of salt, your correspon
dent reached the foot of the battlements. There he was
greeted not by blooddrenched Gaulish warriors, but
by a French family with two small children having a
picnic. They were there partly for the splendid view,
they said, and partly to learn about history. The chil
drendebated which Asterix book was the best: “Asterix
the Legionary” or “Asterix and Cleopatra”?
On top is the Museum of Gergovia, which opened in2019. Visitors wander around the plateau, where help
ful signs explain who camped where and who slaugh
tered whom. Inside are exhibits describing what mod
ern archaeology has added to Caesar’s account.
The ditch connecting the two Roman camps is as
Caesar described. Excavations in the 1990s found parts
of it. In crosssection, the older soil is paler; the soil
that filled it over subsequent centuries forms a dark
triangle. Numerous artefacts have been unearthed:
cracked helmets, short stabbing swords and huge ar
rows fired from a “scorpion”, a Roman siege crossbow.
In his own account of the battle, Caesar is an inge
nious tactician. He has muleherders don helmets and
pretend to be cavalry, to distract the Gauls’ attention.
He moves soldiers quietly through his ditch to sur
prise them. He loses largely because of bad luck. Some
of his men fail to hear a trumpet ordering them to fall
back at a crucial moment. Others mistake their allies,
from another Gaulish tribe, for Vercingetorix’s men.
Caesar clearly downplays the scale of his defeat. He
claims to have lost 700 soldiers, including 46 centuri
ons. Since he fielded somewhere between 20,000 and
45,000 men and suffered a rout, this seems unlikely,
notes Frédéric Nancel, the head of the museum. Caesar
Incidentally, Romans were sniffy about the Gaulish
habit of drinking wine neat, instead of mixing it with
water like civilised people. Arriving in Lutetia (“a town
of the Parisii [tribe], situated on an island in the [River]
Seine”), your correspondent checked to see if this bar
baric custom persists. Happily, it does.
the swiss roll
The war began with a migration crisis. Nationalists to
day often describe an influx of migrants as an “inva
sion”. This one really was. The Helvetii, a tribe from
what is now Switzerland, “felt that their territory was
unduly small”.They burned their own villages so they
could not retreat, packed three months’ supply of flour
and rolled their wagons into Transalpine Gaul, a Ro
man province in what is now the south of France.
Caesar saw his chance. Or, as he put it, “He saw that
it would be very dangerous to the Province to have a
warlike people, hostile to Rome, established close to
its rich cornlands.” (Caesar always referred to himself
in the third person.) He crossed the Alps, thrashed the
Helvetii at the battle of Bibracte and deported the sur
vivors—110,000 of the 368,000 original migrants.
Over the next nine years, he conquered Gaul, an
area that covers most of modern France and stretches
as far east as the Rhine. He also fought the Germans
and briefly invaded Britain. He was a superb strategist,
methodical in securing supplies, and a deft forger of
alliances. Yet he did not always win. The Economistvis
ited the site of his most famous defeat.
It was at Gergovia in 52bc. Vercingetorix, a young
chief of the Arverni, had roused several Gaulish tribes
to join a revolt. His victory has been celebrated in
French art and literature, on Gauloises cigarette pack
ets and by the indomitable Gauls in the Asterix books.
Looking up at his hilltop fortress, one can see why
Vercingetorix won. It is, as Caesar puts it, “situated on
a high mountain and difficult of access on every side”.
Gaulish warriors “occupied all the mountain heights
within view and presented a terrifying appearance”.
Caesar set up two camps: a big one on flat ground,
and a smaller one on a hill below the Gaulish fortress.
His men dug a long, deep trench to connect the two
camps, so that legionaries could “pass to and fro...
Roman wine...
was so popular
with other
Gauls that an
amphora of
it might be
bartered for
a slave