On October 3, 52 BC, by the traditional reckoning, the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix surrendered to Julius Caesar, ending the Siege of Alesia and with it the last great revolt against Rome in the Gallic Wars. Caesar held him prisoner for six years, paraded him through Rome in triumph, and had him executed. Nearly two millennia later, French painter Lionel Royer imagined the moment in this 1899 canvas, now in the Musée Crozatier in Le Puy-en-Velay. It is more theater than history: the Percheron horse, the rectangular shields, and the legionaries’ segmented armor all postdate or misplace the scene, but it captured how 19th-century France came to see Vercingetorix as a national hero. From Wikimedia Commons, public domain.