The Rebel King and the Proconsul

In the winter of 52 BC, Julius Caesar was in northern Italy, his legions were scattered across Gaul in their winter camps, and the snow lay deep on the mountains between them. That was the moment the Gauls chose.It began with the killing of Roman traders in a town on the Loire. Within weeks a young noble of the Arverni named Vercingetorix, whose own uncle had thrown him out of his town, had been hailed as king by his followers and given command of a war by peoples from the Seine to the ocean.He did not mean to beat the legions in battle. He meant to starve them. On his word the Gauls burned their own barns, their own farms and, in a single day, more than twenty of their own towns.The Rebel King and the Proconsul tells that year from both camps at once.On one side is Vercingetorix, who left no word of his own. He had the right plan and an army of allies who could overrule him. They did so twice. The first time cost him a city. The second cost him his cavalry in an afternoon and sent him up the hill of Alesia.On the other side is Caesar, in the seventh year of his command, cut off from his army, then from his grain, then from his oldest allies in Gaul. At Gergovia he was beaten under the walls and marched away. At Alesia he dug eleven miles of ditch, rampart and hidden iron around a hill, and then fourteen more facing outward, and waited between the two lines for all Gaul to come.This is narrative history written for readers, not specialists, and it is honest about its evidence. Almost everything known about the war comes from one book, and Caesar wrote it. Every speech Vercingetorix makes in it is Caesar’s composition. The book treats him as what he was, a witness with a great deal at stake, and sets the excavations at Alesia and Gergovia beside his account. Where he falls silent, it says so. An Author’s Note, a Note on Sources and chapter-by-chapter notes show what rests on the record and what the book has reconstructed.Inside:- The winter crossing of the Cevennes through six feet of snow- The plan of fire and hunger, and the city the Gauls could not bring themselves to burn- Gergovia: the one battle Caesar admits he lost, and how he tells it- The vote at Bibracte, where a commander had to be chosen twice- The siege lines at Alesia, in Caesar’s text and in the ground- The people of the town, put out of their own gates and refused by both armies- The last day, when the fight came down to one unfinished corner of the Roman works- The surrender, in four ancient versions, the shortest by the man who was sitting there- Six years as a prisoner, and how little anyone wrote down about themVercingetorix has been a patriot, a martyr and a statue. This book goes back to what the sources hold, and to what they leave out.Book 2 of Enemies of Rome. Each book stands alone.