Arverni

The Arverni held the Auvergne highlands of central Gaul and had been the dominant power in the country before the Romans arrived. In the second century BC their king Luernius was famous enough for Greek writers to record him scattering gold from a chariot, and his son Bituitus fought Rome in 121 BC and lost, which cost the Arverni their hegemony and gave Rome its first province in southern Gaul. They kept their independence and their resentment. In 52 BC, while Caesar was south of the Alps, a young Arvernian noble named Vercingetorix - whose father had been killed by his own people for aiming at kingship - raised a revolt that for the first time united most of Gaul under one command. His strategy was deliberately unheroic: avoid battle, burn the countryside and the towns to deny the legions supply, and let logistics do the work. It nearly succeeded. He beat Caesar at Gergovia, the Arvernian hillfort, in the only clear defeat of the campaign. Then he allowed himself to be shut up in Alesia, where Caesar built a double ring of siegeworks facing inwards and outwards and held off a relieving army several times his own size. Vercingetorix surrendered to end the siege, was displayed in Caesar's triumph six years later and strangled afterwards. The Arverni kept their territory and lost everything else; Augustonemetum, now Clermont-Ferrand, replaced Gergovia. Vercingetorix is the first figure in French history to be treated as a national founder, though the statue at Alesia was put up by Napoleon III in 1865 and looks nothing like the coins. Gergovia's site was disputed for centuries. The Arvernian territory kept its name as the Auvergne, one of the few Gaulish peoples whose name survives as a region rather than a city.

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