What was life like for Vercingetorix, the Gaulish chieftain who opposed the Romans, while he was imprisoned for nearly six years following his capture by Cesar?

by KwesiStyle

Vercingetorix was, as far as I know, the only Gaul to successfully embolden and unify enough of the Gaulish clans to potentially liberate them from the Roman Empire. In the end however, after some stirring success, his revolt was defeated by Cesar. Upon his surrender he was imprisoned for SIX YEARS in the Roman dungeon known as the Tullianum. What was Tullianum like, and what must it have been like for Vercingetorix during his time there? Did he ever see the daylight? Was he completely alone? Did he go insane? What was it like being publicly displayed in Cesar’s triumph? How did he die? Can we know any of this?

Edit: a couple typos

Libertat

Dio Cassius (Historia, XL, 41) accounts is particularily interesting in describing Caesar's consideration of the war chief after his submission.

All were silent, and Vercingetorix, without a word, fell on his knee, joining hands, beg Caesar. Others, remembering his past deeds and moved seeing his current fate, were moved by compassion. But Caesar required against him these same memories who were to be his salvation, arguing how much more revolting were his misdeeds. And because of this, he had pity no more and threw him in chains.

It's indeed quite possible Vercingetorix had served under Caesar during the first part of the Gallic Wars, as many Gaulish peoples and factions did, before he turned against him in -53. As an ancient ally and auxiliary, and maybe having been fairly close to Caesar due to his high birth, changing sides would have been seen harshly and coldly by the general who had executed leaders as Acco for similar reasons.

We don't know much of the fate of Vercingetorix after Alesia : he simply disappear from Cesarian sources and reappears only in -46, when he's executed along other captives.

Having Vercingetorix under his firm control, he didn't excecute him both "safekeeping" him for his eventual triumph, but also to make a political point on Gauls, probably putting him on display as he wintered in Bibracte the chief city of the Aedui (whose behavior at Alesia was somewhat debatable, in terms of political and strategic loyalty) but also the place Vercingetorix was elected as commander-in-chief of the Gaulish coalition.

It's as well possible that Caesar questioned hostages, including Vercingetorix, into making his commentaries for the past year events in Gaul, with details on the Gaulish plans and objectives being taken from them : arguably, it could be the sign that if not living comfortably both physically and mentally, these captives weren't treated with an utter contempt either during the winter.

A change of heart might have arisen due to the Gaulish revolt of -51, which gathered many people out of Vercingetorix's coalition along with some of his lieutnants (namely Commios) inspired all the same by the gutuater (maybe a religious function of prime sacrificer, henceforth an important druid) of the Carnutes. This revolt was very harshly quelled and his leaders publically executed after having been tortured : if Vercingetorix was still imprisoned in Gaul at this point (either at Bibracte or Cabillonum), this might have heralded of a future treatment.

As Caesar returned to Italy, he was probably part of Caesar's baggage of hostages, captives, plunder and supplies he acquired during the Gallic Wars; or kept by the general's supporters in Italy in a first time then in a guarded jail set outside the pomerium : indeed, the Tullianum wasn't a place for long-held prisonners but rather a symbolical place for captives to be publically exhibited during a triumphal parade and later (altough not systematically) executed within.

Still, such a captivity might have taken a lot out of the still young Arvern noble (who might have been in his thirties). Even if the Gaulish coinage with his name is probably displaying Apollonic tropes rather than his likeness,the Roman coinage, even if Roman artistic tropes certainly factor there (in representing the archetypal Barbarian prey to divine panic), is frightening in how realistic it represents the consequences of long imprisonment both in psychological effets (intense stress, maybe with psychotic effects) and physiological (emaciation, malnutrition) and both (maybe hyperthroidism due to both.

This disheveled, sickly, aged before his time representation might be associated with the prospect of an ingominous and inglorious death (in a Gaulish perspective) after a traumatic defeat (the Gaulish casualties in Alesia in particular and in Gaul in general having been really important), a traumatic captivity and with a planned humiliating triumphal display.

The parade itself was a fastuous display of Caesarian triumph, an immense parade with long files of animals and men preceeding chariots (ironically, these might have been borrowed from old Gaulish display traditions) richly adorned and made of specific woods depending on which victory they celebrated (citrus for Gaul, acacia for Egypt) and covered with tortue's scales and ivory plaques. The triumph over Gaul was celebrated in June, being the "first and most important" of all, Caesar on a chariot, Vercingetorix on another, probably chained to a totemic representation of a Gaulish warrior with himself possibly being "attributed" with a sign recalling the crown who he was. Along with statues, representation, legionary parade, musicians, etc. Vercingetorix was but a part of the spectacle celebrating his defeat and fate, being put on an humilating display to better serve Caesar, especially that, of all the defeated adversaries of the imperator, he was still the only one still alive (or that he could have his hand on, as he never could capture Ambiorix) the other people put on display being child (as the child king Juba).

We don't know how he acted or reacted during the parade, altough there's no mention of him loosing face as it happened with Jugurtha in a same situation during the triumph of Marius. Let's say it must not have been a particularily enchanting experience for a man that suffered captivity for years.

After the public, fastuous display of victory, he was sent in the Tullianum, little more than a glorified cistern where he was strangled, maybe out of a twisted compassion and sense of importance for the former eader : indeed, prisoners were often left to die of starvation in this place and only women and high-ranking prisoners were mercy-killed.

Even there, the death of Vercingetorix wasn't necessarily bound to happen : Dio Cassius himself highlights that "all captives, but Vercingetorix as well, were put to death". Indeed, not all captives were executed, and as Bituitos (king of the Arverns, who then had some sort of hegemony over Gaul) was graced by Domitius or Juba by Caesar; Vercingetorix could have been, if he wasn't the only avaible expiatory and prestigious victim in Caesar's triumph : altough Caesar made publicity of his "clementia", it simply did not play a role there, something Vercingetorix might have been aware since his capture as hinted by Dio Cassius's testimony.

  • The Roman Triumph ; Mary Beard; Harvard University Press; 2007)
  • Vercingétorix; Jean-Louis Brunaux; Gallimard 2018
  • Vercingétorix, chef de guerre; Alain Deyber; Lemme Edit; 2016
UndercoverClassicist

Firstly, we don't have any primary sources written by residents of the Tullianum, for fairly obvious reasons - primarily that 'prison' in the Roman sense did not a mean a place where you hung around for long. The Roman jurist Ulpian, for instance, writes that some governors are 'in the habit' of condemning men to be held in prison or in shackles as a judicial sentence, but that this is 'forbidden', because prisons are 'for detaining men, not for punishing them'[1]. In other words, a prison was a place where you were kept waiting for something - either a trial or an execution. Now of course Ulpian's testimony admits (and here we should be careful to note that he was writing around AD 220, under a much more interventionist, bureaucratic and far-reaching state than Caesar had access to) that some governors break the rules, but at least the theory suggested that there shouldn't be a large prison population at any given time.

It's more difficult to find hard evidence about what prisons themselves were like. It was certainly normal for prisoners to be chained up (indeed, the parallel Greek word to the Latin carcer literally means 'a place of chains'), which was otherwise the mark of a slave. [2] When we get other details in the primary sources, we need to be cautious - for example, the Roman aristocrat Seneca describes a particularly long, dark and generally unpleasant tunnel (the still-visitable Crypta Neapolitana near Naples) metaphorically as a carcer [3], and Plutarch tells of Aemilius Paullus doing a 'favour' for his defeated enemy Perseus by having him moved from the carcer to 'a cleaner and kinder place' [4]. These tell us what the Romans thought prisons were like, but don't come from a position of first-hand knowledge. The one source nearer to the coal-face comes several centuries later, when the newly Christian emperor Constantine announced changes to how prisons would operate:

A man who is produced in court should not be put in iron chains that cleave to the bone, but only in looser chains, so that there should be no torture and yet custody should remain secure. When incarcerated he must not suffer the darkness of an inner prison, but he must be kept in good health by the enjoyment of light, and when night doubles the necessity for his guard, he shall be taken back into the vestibules of the prison ... when day returns, he shall forthwith be led out into the common light of day, so that he shall not perish from the torments of prison. [5]

There are a few grains of salt to be taken here - firstly, that any imperial decree is primarily about showing an emperor's character and priorities - Constantine's 'crackdown' on over-harsh prison masters need not imply that the empire was rife with them, any more than Augustus' 1st-century crackdown on female adultery implied that all of Rome's wives were unfaithful. Even more than most emperors, Constantine had a vested interest in appearing to be a man of mercy and common humanity. However, there are some interesting points to tease out from between Constantine's propaganda and self-promotion. Firstly, he takes for granted that at least most parts of a prison will be dark - and we may therefore supply cold, dirty and generally unserviced - and that simply staying in one without particular attention from the guards would be likely to kill many prisoners. Indeed, the end of king Perseus' story, according to some whom Plutarch heard it from, was that the soldiers sent to guard him in the 'cleaner and kinder' place took enough of a dislike to him that they kept him constantly awake until he dropped dead. If it could happen to a king, even in the broad daylight of semi-public house arrest, spontaneous and fatal cruelty could certainly happen to anyone else in the darkness of the Tullanium.

In the end, Vercingetorix died - he was taken out of the Tullanium for Caesar's triumphal procession and executed - almost certainly by strangulation.[6] It bears noting, however, that he was rather unlucky in this respect - it was by no means guaranteed that the defeated prisoners in a triumph would be executed. The Palmyran queen Zenobia, for instance, ended her life in a comfortable villa near Tibur; in one memorable but unusual case, Ventidius Bassus, whose city of Picenum had rebelled against Rome, was displayed as a child prisoner in one triumph only to become a Roman general and celebrate his own triumph in 38 BC. As Mary Beard points out, 'the economy of violence and power is extremely complex, and it operated in Rome, as elsewhere, by fantasy, report, threat and denial as much as it did by the sword or the noose itself' [7]. In other words, the key thing for the victorious general was to show that you could have kings and emperors killed with a word - actually doing it wasn't necessary and, because it would rob you of the chance to show the clementia (mercy to the defeated) that befits a great Roman, might not always have been the best idea.

Sources

[1] Ulpian's writings are preserved in the later Digest of Justinian (48.19.9).

[2] The late Fergus Millar (originally 1984), 'Condemnation to Hard Labour' in Rome, the Greek World and the East, Vol. 2, p130.

[3] In his Letter 57 to Lucilius.

[4] In his Life of Aemulius

[5] Preserved in the much later Theodosian Code at 9.3.1. Indeed, one of the major problems of Roman law is that it was only durably codified at very irregular intervals - so we are usually forced to trust the later collators to have accurately and thoroughly represented earlier documents.

[6] Our main source, Dio, records simply that he was 'put to death' - strangulation was overwhelmingly the normal way for this to happen, particularly within the city of Rome (Donald Kyle, 2004, Spectacles of Death in the Roman World, p217), and we may safely infer that the method was sufficiently unremarkable that either Dio's source didn't mention it or Dio (never knowingly underverbose) found it ordinary enough to avoid commenting.

[7] This and much of what follows comes from her excellent 2007 book The Roman Triumph, specifically chapter 4, 'Captives on Parade'.