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Updated: June 23, 2025
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.
At the time when the history is taken up in the following narrative by Napoleon III, the great rebellion, B.C. 52, had sustained a heavy blow in the surrender of Alesia, and the capture of the heroic chief and leader of the insurrection, Vercingetorix, whom Caesar exhibited in his triumph at Rome, B.C. 46, and then caused to be put to death.
For the choice men of Gaul, picked out of each nation, and well armed, came to relieve Alesia, to the number of three hundred thousand; nor were there in the town less than one hundred and seventy thousand.
Suppose that the army of Cæsar had been exterminated at Alesia; suppose that Rome, discouraged, had abandoned its Gallic enterprise as it had done with Persia, after the disaster of Crassus and the failure of Antony; or suppose that Gaul had been a poor province, sterile and unpopulous, like many a Danube district; Rome could not have held out long as the seat of imperial government, just as to-day the capital of the Russian Empire could not maintain itself at Vladivostok or Harbin.
LXXV. Whilst those things are carried on at Alesia, the Gauls, having convened a council of their chief nobility, determine that all who could bear arms should not be called out, which was the opinion of Vercingetorix, but that a fixed number should be levied from each state; lest, when so great a multitude assembled together, they could neither govern nor distinguish their men, nor have the means of supplying them with corn.
Edmund Fitzalan was premier Earl as Earl of Surrey, which title he acquired by his marriage with Alesia, sister and heir of John de Warrenne, last Earl of Surrey of the original male line. Probably owing to the great mortality among the nobles caused by the French war, a man who survived fifty was regarded as very old in the reign of Edward the Third.
On the site of Alesia stands a monument erected by the French to the memory of the brave Gallic hero. The defeat of Vercingetorix ended the resistance of the Gauls, and not many years afterward their country was added to the long list of Roman provinces. CAESAR IN GERMANY. Caesar crossed the Rhine into Germany on a bridge which his engineers built in ten days.
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 Gauls had fruitlessly struggled for eight years against Cæsar; and the gallant Vercingetorix, who in the last year of the war had roused all his countrymen to insurrection, who had cut off Roman detachments, and brought Cæsar himself to the extreme of peril at Alesia he, too, had finally succumbed, had been led captive in Cæsar's triumph, and had then been butchered in cold blood in a Roman dungeon.
This was the year in which Cæsar was so nearly conquered by the Gauls at Gergovia, and in which Vercingetorix, having shut himself up in Alesia, was overcome at last by the cruel strategy of the Romans.
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