So is Vercingetorix King Arthur?

It's no doubt a big stretch to suggest Vercingetorix - or a descendant - was old King Cole, or the eventual genesis for Arthur of Camelot. But as I've previously covered, there are some surprising coincidences between real Romano-Gallic history, Gallic religious beliefs and Arthurian myth. Still, if circumstances allowed a stateless Arvernian 'royal' family to exist in Britain...then what were they?

First of all, lets start with Vercingetorix. He wasn't born a king. He was appointed the King of Gaul by a federation of Gallic states during early 52BC. Before that he'd been an Arvernian aristocrat. Now the Arverni had been functioning as a senate-run Republic for several decades prior to that and no longer had a royal family - and Vercingetorix makes no claim to royal blood. In other words, he was a lot like Napoleon...the king you have when you don't really have a king. The King of Gaul was a brand new title, with no hereditary tradition, and functional only as long as the Nation of Gaul existed - which was for less than a year. After that it was an empty title. Sure, someone could claim it, but the state of Gaul didn't exist - open grounds for Juvenal to joke or for 'Old King Cole' to be a merry old soul and little else. What's more, thousands of disaffected Gauls did move to 'free' Britain after the Gallic wars, so there's a good chance some stray Arvernian did pick up the title and throw it around a bit. It might have got some free dinners, but not much else...remember British tribal states already had their kings, and while they might have tolerated an Arvernian exile, they wouldn't have been giving up any of their powers to him. 

But could this have been Vercingetorix himself? It is improbable, but it can't be entirely ruled out. And this is where Julius Caesar himself offers some fuel to the conspiracy. As I've mentioned before, Vercingetorix was a title, not a name. It actually means "King of/over Warriors"...and since the Arverni didn't have any kings in 78BC when he was born, it is very unlikely his father and mother were so prescient of mind to name him as such. So why doesn't Julius Caesar mention the Arvernian's real name? It was either a very well kept secret that Caesar never learnt...or more likely (as someone who made a habit of learning everything they could of their enemies) Caesar had reason enough to protect the king's identity. Don't forget Julius Caesar wanted the Arvernians on his side after the war, and we know he gave them very generous terms of surrender. Executing the Arvernian 'King of Gaul' while most of the former Gallic legions were mopping up from the Civil War in Greece, North Africa and Spain might have been more trouble than Caesar really needed in 45BC...let alone giving the Arverni a reason to join the Pompey's side during the war. A huge stretch, yes, but remember, Caesar didn't execute any of his Civil War protagonists either. It may have been worth his while for a stateless King of Gaul to exist on the fringes of the world...just as the British did with Napoleon 1800-years later. Juvenal's quip about 'Arviragus' - the Arvernian - sits well with this, just as a British satirist may have humoured his audience with 'the Emperor of St Helena'.

Vercingetorix - Arviragus or King Arthur?

And imagine how things might have played out for Vercingetorix's or Napoleon's kids if they'd had any. A 'Bonny Prince Charlie' character trading off his ancestor's title could have easily been the basis of 'Old King Cole/Gaul' - written at a time when Rome had controlled Britain for fifty years. By then even the British kings were dis-empowered or dead - so, which ever king this story was about was one with nothing else to do but enjoy himself, and perhaps...just perhaps he really was the King of Gaul, some half-kept state secret that everyone knew about with a wink and a nudge, but only a single line from Juvenal preserves the story for us today.

Is this the end of the discussion? Probably not.   

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Was King Arthur a Gaul - the Vercingetorix connection

So there we go then, we've got Roman satirist Juvenal - the Seinfeld or Connolly of his age - writing about an Arvernian king living in Ancient Britain. Most likely his point was meant to be a matter of farce or absurdity, a fact that may have been lost on Geoffrey of Monmouth - who possibly sourced the name 'Arviragus' from Juvenal's poem. But why did Juvenal joke about an Arvenian king living in Britain? And could such a king be related to someone as real as Vercingetorix?

This is where we come up against the limitations of what we can be sure is reasonably accurate 'recorded' history. We lose track of Vercingetorix after his surrender in early October 52BC. As the declared leader of a conquered state he would have been transported to Rome, probably via ship out of Narbo (modern day Narbonne) during November and then afforded a private villa beyond Rome's city boundary - where he would have been allowed a privileged but imprisoned life - all standard practice for death-row heads of state. After Caesar's Gallic Triumph in 45BC the King of Gaul would have then been taken to the Mamertine prison for execution. But in truth, we don't really know. We don't know if Vercingetorix was shipped to Rome, we don't know if he enjoyed house-arrest in a luxurious villa, and the few ancient historians who mention his execution do so centuries after the event. Chances were he was...but that's by no means definitive.

What we do know is Julius Caesar gave immediate clemency to all Arvernian and Aeduan soldiers and aristocrats at the end of hostilities. These two states made up a large proportion of the Gallic army's heavy infantry and cavalry - and Caesar impresses on his readers he wanted to return to good terms with these two powerful tribal states who had very much proven their mettle against him. And in describing his generous terms for their surrender, he does not mention the imprisonment of Vercingetorix. So, yes, there's a chance Vercingetorix was allowed to flee to neutral Britain rather than face the music in Rome. And if he didn't, there's a good chance a hitherto unreported relative did. Remember, we don't know Vercingetorix's real name and we don't know if he had brothers or children.

So this raises two possibilities...an unlikely one that Vercingetorix lived out a life of exile in Britain...eventually becoming some age old joke - a King of Gaul who had no Gaul to rule - or a dauphin existing in his father's name, achieving the same notoriety. And this infamy is something we have evidence for. Juvenal's joke about Arviragus is exhibit A. But here's exhibit B...and one most of us have heard. It is, what researchers like to say, that wonderful second independent source.

Old King Cole was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he;
He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl
And he called for his fiddlers three.
Every fiddler he had a fiddle,
And a very fine fiddle had he;
Oh there's none so rare, as can compare
With King Cole and his fiddlers three

The origins of this Romano-British poem date to the same time as Juvenal...and guess what the Welsh name 'Cole' (or Coel - say Coil) phonetically resembles and may have once meant? Try saying Gaul instead of Cole and I think you'll see where I'm coming from. Hmmm...I think there might be even more to this story.

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Was King Arthur a Gaul?

There's one thing we know about King Arthur - he was English, right? Okay, maybe he was Welsh...and then there's a chance he was Romano-Briton fighting against the Saxon invasion. Or perhaps he was a native Briton who fought against the Roman invasion. Frankly, no one can really nail him down, because he's a mythical construct handed down through the ages. He might be one man, he might be a thousand. And by the time the 12th-century French writer Chretien de Troyes added the romantic elements of Lancelot and the Holy Grail to the tale, the traditional origins of the story were at least seven hundred years old...or perhaps even much older. How much older? Well, when Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his King Arthur story in 1136, the king was a native Briton who fended off the Roman invasions of the Emperor Claudius in 43AD...and his name was Arviragus. Now one handy thing about Arviragus, unlike the traditional King Arthur, his name actually comes to us through Roman sources...Juvenal refers to him in a satirical poem - "you will capture some king or Arviragus will fall from his British Chariot-pole" - which also dates the name to the late 1st-century AD. Of course this doesn't prove Arviragus existed, but it does mean Juvenal had heard the name.

And it's this name...Arvi-ragus. This is where I'm going to have a crack at myth busting. But first a little about my research. I've spent the last decade piecing together the Gallic Wars, particularly the year 52BC, when the Celtics from central Gaul finally got their act together and became a single nation for all of 11-months. The leading tribal state in this short-lived federation was the Arverni, led by a 26-old who would become the King of Gaul - Vercingetorix (not his real name by the way, but a title bestowed upon him). And this is where a little bit of geography comes in. Avalon is in France. During the time of Vercingetorix it was called Aballo, and to its south was a city called Cavillonum (now Chalon-s-Saone) which has some phonetic context with Camelot...by now you might be seeing where I'm heading. Should I add by this time the Gauls had been throwing swords into lakes and rivers for the previous 1000-years and worshipped such water goddesses as Boann. Hmmmmm...I feel a wild theory coming on.

And here it is...Arvi-ragus. Arvi is Latin shorthand for Arverni or Arvernian. So Arviragus was the 'Arvernian' or the 'Arvernian King'. And if there was one Arvernian king Juvenal was joking about, it could be Vercingetorix. But why would Juvenal be suggesting an Arvernian King was living in Britain? Well, that's going to be tomorrow's post...

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Building Bridges

There's a new bridge being built over a river estuary a few blocks from where I live. It's only half a dozen spans across, and will never feature on Discovery Channel as one of the world's greatest structures. Yet with all our modern machinery it has taken over two years to prepare the site and more than eight months to get five spans in place. Maybe that's fast these days. What I do know is that its construction pace doesn't measure up to many of the great structures from the 19th and early 20th-century, and certainly not to the 1st-century BC. The first bridge to ever cross the River Rhine was built in 55BC by Julius Caesar's Gallic army in just 10 days. Situated near modern Coblenz - where the river is around 400 metres across and is noted for strong currents - the legions harvested a forest of timber, built pile drivers and drove a two lane highway across that mighty river in less than a fortnight. It was an incredible feat. But it was repeated by the Roman Army again and again over the next few centuries. Most of the great infrastructure projects found across the provinces - the paved roads, the aqueducts, even Hadrian's wall - they were all constructed by professional soldiers. Sure, their intentions weren't necessarily altruistic. A paved road meant an army on the march could cross a province in a matter of days, and a regulated water supply meant armies could be quartered without fear of exhausting local wells. But they didn't shirk on quality for the sake of speed - considering some of their bridges in Spain and France are now carrying 18-wheeler semi-trailers - they engineered their structures to last. Now if only they were building the bridge near me...it would last 2000 years and I would have been using it eighteen months ago.

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Lots of sugar, lots of cavities

Of course, one thing the Greeks and Romans found after the arrival of sugar cane was the arrival of lots of cavities. Roman cemeteries can often reveal those who could afford sugary desserts - the middle class and wealthy with bad teeth - and those who couldn't...I guess that was one good thing about being poor. But like everything in the Roman economy, treating tooth decay was a matter of supply and demand - once there was a demand for dentistry, along came the medical solutions. Just like today, Romans frequently used tooth powders and tooth pastes - these gritty chalks were usually applied with the fingers rather than brushes and often contained flavourings to freshen the breath - that's right, that minty freshness began a long time before Colgate. For those who found the tooth powders coming up short, urine was actually suggested as a mouth wash - yeah, I know, but at the time boiled urine was a common whitening agent so it shouldn't be a surprise - still, so much for the minty freshness on that one.

A 20th-century copy of Roman bridgework from the Science Museum London 

However once things got bad - as if rinsing with pee wasn't - Romans could visit their barbers for a tooth polish or tooth pulling, deadened with local anaesthetics made from cloves or chrysanthemum roots - the latter could also soften the gums to make extraction easier...overzealous application would mean more than one tooth fell out. Fortunately for those who'd lost their winning smile at the barber, they could then have customised bridges and crowns made for them. Gold dental bridges had actually been invented by the Etruscans by 500BC, but the Romans took dental prostheses to a whole new level, using artificial teeth made from ivory, bone and boxwood, not to mention recycling their own choppers or the occasional dog or pig tooth - no doubt depending on the customer's budget. Rows of false teeth were more or less permanently wired into the mouth with gold filaments, and remain a common find in Roman graves. In fact by 450BC, the Romans had enshrined in law that a citizen could be buried with the their permanently wired teeth - although any removable gold bridgework was to be recovered for recycling.

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That spoon full of sugar

I'm sure most of us have sampled those syrup soaked and sugary desserts from the Middle East, Turkey and Greece - the famous baklava, halva and galaktoboureko, not to mention the widespread favourite - fairy floss. Believe it or not, these sugary treats date back to the Roman era and even further - and the Roman sweet tooth was just as sugary as ours. Now you might expect all of the ancients' sugary goodness came from honey...but that's not entirely true. The fact is, crystallised sugar and syrups have been around for at least five thousand years and was common enough in the Roman world. The tall grass we call sugar cane was first cultivated around 6000BC in Papua New Guinea. By 3000BC there is evidence that cane cultivation had spread to the Indus Valley civilisation in India - where the first signs of sugar crystal manufacturing can be found. Fast forward to the Classical era and the Persians, then Alexander the Great discovered Indian sugar - the honey made without bees - and introduced sugar and sugar syrup into the Mediterranean basin. During the Roman era, the Mediterranean countries were warmer than present (by at least one degree centigrade), and after Alexander the Great sent sugar cane to Greece for cultivation, the crop soon spread to Italy and Spain where cane farming continued through the Roman era and into the Middle Ages. It was only the gradual cooling of the Northern Hemisphere after the 12th-century that saw cane cultivation collapse in Europe and sugar become the expensive luxury that it was by the time of the Renaissance...which of course leads into sugar cane's modern history now firmly focused in the Tropics and Subtropics.

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Is there another doctor in the house

Even though most modern medical practices have developed in historic isolation to that of the classical era, it appears that the final outcome generally needs the same strategy. The Greeks and Romans were putting badly broken limbs into traction two thousand years before modern medicine returned to the same method for restoring fractured bones to their proper length. Likewise putting broken limbs into casts - made from bandages soaked in egg whites rather than plaster - dates back to the Egyptians at least 5000-years ago. But bones are bones, right? What about actual surgery? Well, we know that Roman law required at least one surgical procedure to be procured on a regular basis. Since the early 6th-Century BC, the Lex Regia (the Regal Law) required any pregnant woman who died prior to birth to have her unborn child removed. This on many occasions would have produced a successful delivery. However while it is accepted that this is the origin for the Caesarian Birth, the presumed outcome for Roman mothers was pretty negative...but remember, until this last century, childbirth was still one of the main causes of death for women. 

So this is the big question - were Roman surgeons capable of replicating modern Caesarian births where both mother and child are expected to have survive? The first successful modern Caesarian birth did not occur until 1881, however the conditions in which it occurred were little different to those that would have presented themselves two thousand years earlier - that is, it occurred in a private residence, it was completed with minimal anaesthetic and with only the most basic wound and instrument sterilisation. What's more, two years before this historic birth, Ugandan villagers were observed completing successful Caesarian sections in even more basic conditions. So, all in all, there doesn't seem a lot standing in the way of ancient surgeons being able to do the same. Remember, with a fairly regular attendance to pregnant women who had died for any number of reasons, a Roman surgeon would have been familiar with the abdominal region, including where they should make incisions and what they would encounter beneath.

A Roman era 'dialator'

But just to add a little twist of evidence to the story, we may have an example of a successful Caesarian birth right under our noses...the namesake. The story goes that the Caesarian birth is named after Julius Caesar - Pliny actually attributes the name to an earlier much less famous ancestor 'who was cut from the womb', and the question of Julius Caesar being born in such a manner is usually dismissed since his mother, Aurelia, lived to old age. Of course this could be a classic case of ignoring the trees for the forest. Perhaps her survival to old age should not be used as a denial of the legend but proof of it. Face it, Roman women would have been just as keen to live as anyone today, so I am pretty sure that one way or another surgeons of the era would have been very interested in the rewards - particularly the financial ones - if they could keep mothers alive too. After all, they were certainly equipped with tools and fundamental standards to do so...so maybe they did.     

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