Vercingetorix and some 80,000 warriors took refuge in the nearby oppidum of Alesia in the territory of the Mandubii. It was a disastrous tactical error. Caesar arrived the next day and immediately began to surround Alesia with two lines of ramparts, the inner one to prevent the inhabitants escaping, the outer to prevent any reinforcements or supplies getting in. Each rampart was about 14 miles (22 kilometres) in length and was protected with watchtowers, ditches, chevaux de /rises and lilia (lilies), the Roman equivalent of a minefield - foot-deep pits containing a sharpened and fire-hardened wooden stake. Roman legionaries actually spent far more time digging than they ever did fighting. Vercingetorix had supplies for only one
Month and the Gauls made a desperate effort to break the siege. Though the Gallic council refused Vercingetorix’s demand for a universal call-up of all warriors, forty-four different tribes from all parts of Gaul raised between them a relief army said to number nearly a quarter of a million men. It was a hugely impressive achievement, yet there were still a few tribes, the powerful Remi and the Lingones among them, who stood aloof, and it took weeks to gather such a large force.
By the time the relief army arrived at Alesia, the situation of the inhabitants was getting desperate. Vercingetorix tried to make his supplies last longer by sending out the women and children but Caesar refused to allow them through his lines. Three times the Gallic relief army tried to break through Caesar’s defences and three times it was driven off after desperate fighting with heavy casualties on both sides. After its third assault, the relief army, its morale shattered, broke up and dispersed. Seeing that all hope was gone, Vercingetorix decided to surrender to spare his people further suffering. The Aeduans and Arverni among the captives were sent home - Caesar wanted to rebuild good relations with these powerful tribes as quickly as possible - but the rest were sent to the slave markets. Vercingetorix himself was imprisoned in Rome to be executed six years later when Caesar belatedly celebrated his triumph. It is hard not to feel sympathy for Vercingetorix: Gaul was thoroughly pacified by that time and his death served no purpose beyond providing a cruel entertainment for the Roman masses. Heroic figure though he was, it must be said that Vercingetorix’s leadership was nothing short of a disaster for the Gauls. By concentrating so much of the armed strength of Gaul at Alesia, he simply gave Caesar a convenient opportunity to fight it on his own terms and destroy it. Had the Gallic council agreed to a universal call-up, the losses would only have been the heavier.
The fall of Alesia did not end the war, quite. Caesar’s lenient treatment of the Arverni and Aedui worked: both tribes returned to their allegiance to Rome and their neighbours, the Bituriges, soon followed, but it took another year of campaigning before the last embers of Gallic resistance were extinguished. The Gauls decided to return to a strategy of opportunistic rebellions by individual tribes in order to keep Caesar hurrying from one end of Gaul to the other. But the casualties of the previous year and the enormous economic damage of Vercingetorix’s scorched earth policy had sapped the will to resist. Caesar was occasionally brutal - when Uxellodunum (Puy d’lssou), the last major centre of Gallic resistance, fell, all those who had taken part in its defence had their hands cut off - but he was more often conciliatory, winning over the tribal elites with gifts and flattery and by not imposing new burdens on the exhausted Gauls. Caesar left Gaul pacified, so much so that when Rome collapsed into civil war in 49 Bc there were no new uprisings. The price paid by Gaul for its resistance was high. Of its population of around seven million, perhaps a million had died and as many again were delivered to the slave markets.
Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was probably not inevitable - it is clear that he greatly underestimated the fighting spirit of the Gauls, and after his failure
At Gergovia he was staring defeat in the face - but from the beginning he held important advantages. No Gallic leader came close to matching Caesar’s qualities as a general, particularly his ability to seize the initiative in the most unpromising circumstances. Though the Gauls usually had the advantage of numbers and certainly did not lack courage, unlike the Roman legionaries most fought without armour and lacked both training and discipline. Man for man the Roman legionaries consistently outfought the Gauls. The Gauls could win battles when they employed ambush and deception but in set-piece battles they were at a hopeless disadvantage. This Roman battlefield superiority need not have been the decisive factor it was, had the Gauls not given Caesar so many opportunities to exercise it. Even the huge armies Vercingetorix was able to raise were doomed. Raw courage and sheer weight of numbers have rarely been able to prevail on the battlefield in the face of technological or organisational superiority (and the Romans had both) unless the enemy commanders have been incompetent or foolhardy. The larger the army the Gauls brought to the battlefield, the harder it was to control once battle had been joined and the greater the casualties. Instead of following Vercingetorix, had the Gauls chosen to follow the example of Ambiorix, who dispersed his forces and survived, their resistance might easily have been prolonged beyond Caesar’s term of office (which expired in 50). Many Romans viewed Caesar’s rise with apprehension and would have been glad to see him defeated in Gaul, as others were to see his political ally Crassus defeated (and killed) in his vain attempt to conquer Parthia in 53. There is no evidence that the Romans had contemplated the conquest of Gaul before Caesar arrived on the scene, and whoever was chosen to succeed him might well have lacked the ability and determination to continue a war which had no end in sight, even if civil war had not broken out.
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