Luciana Pellegrino

In 52 BC, Julius Caesar trapped the Gallic leader Vercingetorix and his army inside a hilltop fortress called Alesia, in what is now eastern France. Caesar didn't try to storm it. He decided to starve them out. So his legionaries built a wall around the entire hill. Caesar wrote that the inner ring of siege works ran about 11 Roman miles. Then word came that a huge Gallic relief army was on its way. So Caesar had his men build a second wall, facing outward, around the first one. About 14 Roman miles. The Romans were now sitting in a ring between two walls, with an army trapped inside and another army coming from outside. In front of the walls, they laid traps. Trenches, some filled with water. Rows of sharpened branches. Pits with pointed stakes hidden under brush, which the soldiers nicknamed "lilies." And blocks of wood with iron hooks sticking up, buried just under the ground. The relief army arrived and attacked. Vercingetorix attacked from the inside at the same time. The fighting was desperate, and at one point it nearly broke the Roman line. Caesar threw in his last reserves and personally led the counterattack. The Gauls broke. The next day Vercingetorix surrendered. He was kept prisoner for about six years, paraded through Rome in Caesar's triumph, and then executed. For almost 2,000 years, all of this rested on one source: Caesar himself. And historians argued over whether he exaggerated, and even where Alesia actually was. Then in the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III, who was writing a biography of Caesar, ordered excavations at a hill near the village of Alise-Sainte-Reine. They found the ditches. They found weapons and Roman and Gallic coins. Later digs in the 1990s mapped the siege lines in far more detail, and they lined up closely with what Caesar described. Napoleon III also put up a giant statue of Vercingetorix on the hill. People have long said the face looks a lot like Napoleon III himself. Caesar's version of events was written to make Caesar look good. At Alesia, the dirt backs him up.