Julius Caesar Possessed a Secret Weapon That Had Nothing To Do With Fighting
And it became a Roman staple for centuries
In September of 52BCE, a force of 80,000 Gallic warriors was fortified at the fortress of Alesia. They were holding out against an advance by Julius Caesar and the Roman army, hoping to pin them in a siege while a large relief force arrived. If the besieged Gauls could tie up the Romans in a prolonged siege, they could buy time for the reinforcements to arrive and pin Caesar between a rock and a hard place.
It was a good plan, in theory. The only problem was, Caesar had already anticipated this response by the Gauls and had made plans of his own to counteract this action.
Caesar had a plan to crush the Gallic resistance once and for all by wiping out their strongest fort at Alesia. It would require hard fighting, but it also revolved around Caesar’s ultimate secrete weapon: construction.
The walls at Alesia
To both pressure the besieged and protect against the incoming relief force, Caesar built two sets of walls around the fort. The first wall was the inner wall designed to bottle up the defenders and allow the Romans to attack the fortress from the safety of their positions.
