Vercingetorix: what is really known about him

A people, a father, a name: Caesar grants his origins little more. Vercingetorix is an Arvernian (the Auvergne of today) and the son of Celtillus, “whose father had held the supremacy of entire Gaul, and had been put to death by his fellow citizens, for this reason, because he aimed at sovereign power”. No date of birth, no childhood, no physical description. The “c. 80 BC” of the textbooks is a modern estimate, and the moderns do not agree: a dictionary of Gallo-Roman civilisation writes born about 72. No ancient text gives a year.

The only object of his own time that carries his name is a coin: a gold stater found at Pionsat, in the Puy-de-Dôme, and kept at the Musée d’Archéologie nationale. The die was badly centred, so only NGETORIXS can be read on it; a bronze example supplies the beginning, VERCI. Fewer than thirty pieces in his name are known, all struck during the Gallic War. And the head in profile is not a portrait: the Grand Palais RMN’s notice calls it more conventional than realistic and sees in it rather a god, perhaps Apollo. Nobody knows what he looked like.

His name is not a first name, it is a programme. The same notice translates it: in the Gaulish language, Vercingetorix means the very great king of warriors. With an oddity Caesar lets pass without remark: he already bore that name before the Arverni gave him the title of king.

The winter of 53-52 opens with a massacre: the Carnutes cut the throats of the Roman traders settled at Cenabum, the Gallic town that sleeps under present-day Orléans. Among the Arverni, a young nobleman gathers his dependants. His uncle Gobanitio and the other chiefs expel him from Gergovia. He comes back with, in Caesar’s English translation, “a levy of the needy and desperate”, drives out in turn those who had driven him out, and is saluted king.

The title comes from the Arverni; the other peoples confer the command on him. What changes everything is Bibracte: after Gergovia, where Caesar broke his teeth, a council of all Gaul is summoned and, in Caesar’s words, “all to a man approve of Vercingetorix as their general”. All, except those not there: the Remi and the Lingones, loyal to Rome, and the Treviri, too far off and pressed by the Germans. The Gallic unity of 52 has holes in it.

One contemporary witness, and he is the enemy. Book VII of the Gallic War is written by Caesar, for Rome, in a text where the hero is called Caesar.

The portrait he draws is not that of a fool, even so. At the end Caesar lends him a speech: he had undertaken the war not for his own needs but for the general freedom; and since he must yield to fortune, he offers himself to his own people, to atone to the Romans by his death or be surrendered alive. Then the surrender, in one line: “They surrender Vercingetorix, and lay down their arms.”

The others write at second hand. Strabo dispatches the matter in a line: under the walls of Alesia the Gallic leader was taken prisoner, which ended the war. Plutarch, a century and a half later, adds the decked horse and the circuit of the tribunal. Cassius Dio, two and a half centuries later, tells the surrender in his turn, and he is the only one to speak of the death.

He did not throw his arms down from horseback. In Caesar the scene takes one line, without a mount and without flourish. The magnificently harnessed horse, the circuit around the tribunal, the silence at the Roman general’s feet: that is Plutarch, a hundred and fifty years later. And Lionel Royer’s painting of 1899 does not even follow Plutarch: the musée Crozatier, which holds it, recognises Cassius Dio in it and, above all, an illustration from the Histoire de la France populaire whose composition Royer took over.

Nor did he have the face he is given. With no ancient likeness, it was the nineteenth century that made him one: Aimé Millet’s statue in 1865, Royer’s painting in 1899. The musée Crozatier puts it plainly: the Gauls were no more moustachioed than we are. And he never unified Gaul: three peoples were missing at Bibracte, and the assembly that raised the relief army refused the general levy he wanted, demanding a quota of men from each people instead. His authority among his own also rested on terror: Caesar says so, and a victor has an interest in painting the enemy as a tyrant.

After Alesia he vanishes from the texts for six years. He turns up in 46 BC, in Rome, where Caesar celebrates four triumphs four days apart. Cassius Dio describes a crowd moved by Arsinoë of Egypt in chains, who was in the end released; “but others, including Vercingetorix, were put to death”. On the manner, nothing; and Dio writes more than two centuries after.

Then a very long forgetting, and an emperor: it was Napoleon III who, in the nineteenth century, brought Vercingetorix back into honour. In 1863 he commissioned a statue from Aimé Millet, raised in 1865 west of Mont Auxois: 6.60 metres of hammered and riveted sheet copper, on a 7-metre base designed by Viollet-le-Duc. The art historian Hélène Jagot has noted the paradox: this official monument was never inaugurated, and the public saw in it a defeated man rather than a hero.

That is where the moustache, the long hair and the schoolroom myth of Gallic ancestors come from. The place where it was all decided has a history of its own, as disputed as his: it is told in the Alesia dossier.