Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/150

 Celtic city, amid which have grown the secular pines, displays on its surface, on the banks of the Lison, and on the neighbouring plateau of Amançay, so large a collection of tombs (more than twenty thousand have been counted), that only an awful slaughter, like that which decided the fate of Gaul, can explain their presence in such numbers. All the graves which the Archælogical Society of Besançon has carefully explored since 1858, contain the skeletons of Gaulish warriors (the Romans burned their dead) in variable numbers, who had been buried with their horses, and sometimes even with their chariots, of which no more remain than the iron-work.

M. Castan, who has examined many of them, gives the following account of the contents of one of these resting-places. Above two skeletons (surrounding them were

sides abrupt, between the rivers Ope and Operain, rendered an attack impossible. Vercingetorix, after making several furious but unsuccessful sallies, called all the Gauls to arms, and in a short time 250,000 men appeared before the place, Cæsar had, in the mean time, completed his line of circumvallation, protecting himself against any attack from without by a breast-work, a ditch with palisadoes, and several rows of pit-falls, to keep off the dauntless cavalry. These defences enabled him to repel the desperate attack of 330,000 Gauls against the 60,000 Romans attacked in front and rear. The Gauls were unable to force his lines at any point, and Vercingetorix, reduced to extremity by hunger, was compelled to surrender, without having carried into execution his design of murdering all the people in the town who were unfit for battle. But the whole tribe of the Mandubii, which had been expelled from the city by the Gauls, and were not allowed by the Romans to pass into the open country, died of famine between the two camps.

It must not be forgotten that some time afterwards it attained a flourishing condition, but was finally destroyed in 864, by the Normans.