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ii.

Caesar and Vercingetorix

AUVERGNE—the people today bound it as “tout le Massif Central”—is a great plain raised above surrounding France. It reaches south toward the borderland of the ancient Languedoc region, and in its place names, pronunciations, and patronymics, continues to echo the hard, clicking style of Languedoc speech, as against the more elegant and fluid idiom of the old Langue d’Oïl of Paris and the northern provinces. Great hill systems, with woods, ravines, glens, wide meadows, keep a bucolic aspect, all set off by ranges of distant wooded mountains whose dominant peak is the noble cone of the extinct volcano Puy-de-Dôme, after which the political district is called.

Under so much open sky, settlements remain sparse and far apart. Their distance one from another seems matched in the people by a reserve perhaps imposed by a history of separation. To reach each other, as Caesar wrote, the early Gauls, when they had matters of note to communicate in that landscape, shouted over meadows and through districts, asking neighbors to continue the relay afar, across high green acres where voices could carry on long cries. Early Gallic settlements were rough stockades, in high ground for protection against raid and for periodic market gathering. Life came from the earth and even in spirit returned to it. Caesar saw the Gauls as the most “religious” of men. Rivers, woods, springs, and mountains, in their various mysteries of source and atmosphere, all had their gods. It would not be strange to see the isolated rise of the Puy-de-Dôme itself as a great altar, whether almost lost in summer haze or lighted by clear winter. To live, propitiate, propagate, and die, remote from the sophisticated Roman energies which stirred to the south toward the Mediterranean; to take the earth’s yield and defend the land when necessary—such tasks and impulses governed life in the ancient Averni of pre-Roman Gaul, and seemed eternal.

But in a half century before Christ the Roman drive across Europe under Caesar intruded its superb array into Auvergne. Independence was threatened. The Averni resisted, and found their leader in the son of their king. He was Vercingetorix, who, making a coherent force out of what Caesar dismissed as “rabble,” stalled the conqueror. The tribal prince reached to the spirit of his people, led them to heroic measures, such as burning their own rude stockade towns to deny the invader protection and stores, and defeated Caesar’s attempt to take Gergovia (Clermont) in 52 B.C. The defenders put the torch to more than twenty of their own towns in a single day in one district. Other states did much the same. “In every direction,” wrote Caesar, “fires were to be seen.”

In the end, Rome’s wits and resources were too great to withstand. Overwhelmed by a huge Roman reserve force of men and supplies, Vercingetorix acknowledged defeat. He sent for his chiefs to let them decide whether they should put him to death for his failure, or deliver him alive to Caesar. Since this was a matter for the conqueror to resolve, messengers were sent to him to ask him his will. Caesar received them enthroned before his camp, demanded their weapons and the delivery of Vercingetorix, whose style was equal to the event. Wearing gold-studded armor and riding his finest mount, he presently pulled up before Caesar and in silence threw down his arms and regalia and became a living trophy in captivity. Caesar took him everywhere for five years to display him in defeat, and then had him executed. Rome’s Gallic wars succeeded. To native pastoral paganism was added imperial pagan politics in that remote frontier, and it was not until after the Christian baptism of Rome by Constantine in 312 A.D. that the Gauls began to come under Rome’s new faith.