Siege of Uxellodunum

51 BCE: a siege aimed at water

Uxellodunum held ample grain and could not easily be stormed, so in 51 BCE the Romans made its water supply the target rather than its food or its walls.

Gaius Caninius Rebilus, pursuing the rebels with two legions, destroyed an attempted resupply operation and completed a circumvallation; Gaius Fabius then joined the siege. Caesar arrived and blocked the defenders' dangerous descent to the encircling river with archers, slingers and artillery, leaving them a single spring below the walls.

A sixty-foot ramp to command a spring

Roman engineers raised a ramp 60 Roman feet high, topped with a ten-story tower, to dominate the approaches to that spring, while miners intercepted and diverted its underground veins.

The defenders rolled barrels packed with pitch, tallow and dry wood down the slope as burning weapons against the siege works. When the spring suddenly dried, they surrendered.

Hands, not executions

Caesar ordered the hands cut off everyone who had borne arms, and left them alive precisely so the punishment would stay visible.

Drapes, the Senonian leader captured when Caninius attacked the rebels' supply base, was not executed either: Aulus Hirtius — Caesar's officer, and the author of the Book VIII account rather than Caesar himself — says he deliberately refused food and died.

This was the last major fortified holdout described in the Gallic War, though not the final recorded clash; Hirtius goes on to report fighting involving Labienus and Commius.