Hardly had Gaius Julius Caesar 53 BC Chr. Gaul subjugated, then it rose again against him. Under the leadership of the Arverni Prince Vercingetorix, the Gauls did everything in their power to get rid of their occupiers.
In front of the city walls of Alesia there was a decisive field battle in which the Celtic associations commanded by Vercingetorix and other princes were defeated despite their numerical superiority. The city, located in what is now Burgundy, was remembered as a mythical place where Gaul’s independence was finally lost. In fact, the united tribes continued the fight for a long time after this defeat and the capture of Vercingetorix, but the battle of Alesia was nevertheless a turning point.
In this conflict, Caesar proved to be a strong-nerved, decisive and brutal general. In his work “De Bello Gallico”, the essential and strongly subjectively colored source about the events, he describes the war in detail and with a sure sense of the dramaturgy. One of his tricks: he portrays his Gallic opponents as extremely threatening opponents in order – by ultimately defeating them – to look particularly good himself.
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