Barstool History - Boudicca
On a dark, bleak, rain-sodden, autumnal morning somewhere just off the road that ran up the spine of Britain, a route you can still trace through the quiet countryside to this day, and that has been known since medieval times as Watling Street, a man sat on his horse and surveyed his troops.
Before him were a ragged bunch of part Legions, misfits and cobbled together units of men who were scared, terrified even. They were hungry, they were tired and they faced imminent destruction. There were 9,000 of them, maybe 10,000 with the auxiliary cavalry he had somehow scraped together.
He saw the fear in their eyes. He could smell it. But Gaius Suetonius Paulinus also saw Roman soldiers. He saw trained, well-armed, regulated fighting men. Men who, right at the moment, he would not have swapped for anyone else in the world.
They huddled in a small defile with a forest to their back and sharp rising ground on each side. Before them stretched a wide plain and on that plain, in the very far distance, a long thin trail of wagons had pulled up to watch the battle. Carts, camp fires, oxen, sheep, chickens, women, children and old people had drawn up to get a good view of what was about to happen.
And in between the wagon train and the Romans was an immense army. A teeming morass of seething, brutal, blue-faced people. They stretched across the plain as far as the eye could see. Thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands, maybe as much as a quarter of a million angry, very angry, people who were about to fight for one thing and one thing alone.
Revenge.
An ordinary man would have taken his men, turned, fled and hoped to escape to live another day. But Gaius Suetonius Paulinus was a Roman general and Roman generals are not ordinary men.
He drew his sword, flicked back the heavy woollen over cloak he wore to keep off the rain, revealed the bright purple trimmed cloak that befitted a man of his rank and rode to the front of his lines.
Suddenly, a dreadful wailing drifted across the plain and from the ranks of the terrifying barbarian horde came a line of wild-haired harpies. Writhing to ritualistic drumbeats, they began to call down hideous curses on the Roman ranks, their faces streaked with blood and clay and colored dye. They invoked every imaginable god, spirit and demon to wreak terrible destruction on the enemy.
Druids step forward, chanting and sacrificing small animals, pulling the steaming entrails from the bodies in the cold morning air to examine for omens. Smoke from torches and fires drift across the battlefield like ghosts, bucking and twisting into demonic shapes to horrify the cowering defenders.
The weather gods whip the branches of the forest back and forth and drive a sudden sleet into the terror-struck faces of the Romans. The clouds skip across the sky, showering sudden god-rays of light upon the favored Britons. A sound like a roaring ocean fills the air.
Some of the younger Romans begin to visibly shake in terror.
With a sudden swirl, the mist breaks and a single chariot charges from the barbarian ranks. At the reigns is a woman. She is short, but powerfully built, in her early 30s maybe, with long, matted, almost dreadlocked fire-red hair streaming behind her like a comet’s tail. In her free hand she holds four severed human heads. They have been dead for a while and they are bloated and decaying, their fly filled milky eyes staring blindly at nothing. But they are still recognizably Roman heads.
She hurls them in the direction of the Romans ranks, spits after them and screams curses at the enemy, her face contorted with rage. In a language none of the Romans can understand, she bellows her vitriol at them. She draws her short sword, raises it above her head, and in silence turns her chariot and rides it back into the mists.
Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni, warrior, rebel, vengeful force of nature, has just signed the death warrants of every last Roman in Britain.
Their fate is sealed.
Paulinus turns to his men. The younger ranks look stricken in terror and ready to break, their superstitions running wild.
He smiles and, in a voice loud enough to carry the ranks, he begins to talk.
”Look at them,” he says. “Look at this fucking rabble. “
They can’t. They dare not even look at the witch-led, demon inspired horror that awaits them.
”LOOK AT THEM”, he insists.
” It’s a bunch of fucking women, spell-sayers, blacksmiths and pig farmers. They carry pitchforks and they wear trousers. They have no discipline. They have no training. Most of them don’t even have fucking shoes. This should be easy.”
Not all the soldiers, faced with 250,000 enemy against them, are convinced.
” This is your fucking chance, boys. This is your opportunity to write your names in legend. Imagine the songs they’ll sing about us once we’ve dealt with this bunch of savages. All those other fucking legions who cower behind walls will hear of our deeds and are going to shit themselves silly once they realize that they missed their day. We have that day right here, right fucking now.”
The soldiers shift uneasily. They’re still not sure. They’re an awful lot of them…..
”I don’t see fear in your eyes, you bastards. I see glory. I see excitement. I see names being made, here in this shit field in this shit country. Today.
”These barbarians are no match for us, even if there are a hundred times our number. We are Romans, boys. We are trained. Remember that training. Let the fuckers come. Let them scream their old lady curses and come to us. Fell them with your shields. Finish them with your swords. Do not stop to plunder because at the end of this day, everything will be yours.”
Meanwhile, Boudicca has retreated to her own lines and is riding up and down the front line, exhorting her own ranks.
”I know what you’re thinking, friends.” she tells them “Even among our people it is unusual for a woman to lead you into battle. But I’m not here as a woman. I’m here as one of you. I am your vengeance. I bear the same marks of what these animals have done to us as do each of you. They have raped, stolen, beaten, and dishonored me, my family and each of you collectively and individually. They steal our land and our freedom. They take our memories and our songs and grind them into the dust. They burn and destroy and mock us. They call us savages. Us. All we ever wanted was to live in peace and to live free and that, my brothers and sisters, that is who you are fighting today.”
A quarter of a million people stay to bay for Roman blood.
”Fall on them. Tear them apart with your bare hands if you have to. Leave nobody alive. We have already destroyed most of them, and these are the last. Finish the job. I might be just a woman, but I am terror to these Roman bitches. We do not slaughter them for joy, as they do, we slaughter them for something greater. For our future.”
She turned to face the Romans and with one last bellow of defiance, the huge army charged the Roman ranks.
A volley of fire went up from the spinning chariot artillery of the British advanced line. The Romans returned with javelins, driving them away.
And then, like a colossal tsunami, the Britons fell upon the Roman front line. It groaned under the onslaught. Another wave of javelins went in. More Britons piled into the attack, wild eyed, screaming, leaping at the enemy. The Roman line twisted and buckled. The sheer weight of attack looked certain to win.
But the Romans had chosen the battlefield well. The short valley which they had chosen to defend offered protection on the flanks and narrowed the front line to a few hundred yards across. One more charge thundered into the line which strained again, to breaking point this time, and then held.
The Romans ducked behind the great length of their shields and began to hack at the legs of the Britons.
Suddenly, the rage of the Britons turned to concern. Before this, sheer weight of numbers and surprise had allowed them to scythe through the Roman ranks and tear them apart from within. But now, the lines were holding and they had a problem. The initial charges repelled, the Britons on the front lines were sitting ducks.
With superior weaponry and experience, the Romans began to slaughter the British front line. Concerned, the Britons turned and tried to retreat, ready to come again. If it took ten charges, then ten charges it would take. They would keep coming until the lines broke.
But now they had a problem. Behind the front line were tens of thousands of other Britons, all desperately trying to surge forward. The front lines, who had now turned their backs on the Romans, were stuck. And with a sudden dawn of horror, they knew it.
Panic shot through the British ranks like lightning. They surged back up the battlefield, into their own troops. The British were now stuck in a giant whirlpool of humanity in the middle of the field some trying to flee in terror of the Romans at their back, others trying to join the fray.
The Romans seized the moment, formed themselves into wedge formation and began to slaughter their way through the Britons.
Felling and then hacking, they began the brutal processing of the barbarian horde.
Wheeling and screaming in terror, the British began to rout. As one they turned and fled back across the battlefield, clawing at each other to get away. And as they reached the farthest end of the field, they came across a new obstacle. The long wagon train of supplies and families that they had brough along to revel in their victory now served only to stop their escape.
Nobody can be sure how long it took. Maybe only a couple of hours. But by the end, depending on who you believe, the Romans had slaughtered every man, every woman, every old person, child, goat, oxen, sheep and chicken and at least 80,000, maybe as many as 200,000 people lay dead. Only 400 of them were Roman.
If we believe the numbers of dead given, and more on that later, then it was possibly the single greatest loss of life in one day of any battle in human history. Even at the lower estimate of 70-80,000 Britons, that is four times then number who died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
All this, of course, depends on who you believe. And that’s where we hit a few problems.
This is the normal narrative we’ve all come to expect. A wronged widow raped by tyrannical soldiers, the hated, fascist oppressors of a downtrodden people who can take no more and are left with no other option but to fight back against the hated masters. What other reaction could any right-thinking person, even a barbarian, have when faced with such hideous tyranny? Who would not rise up against the jackboot of Roman bullying?
So they did. And a legend was born. Heroic rebels struggling against the mighty evil. Cowboys and Indians. Darth Vader against Luke Skywalker. The Spitfire versus the Luftwaffe. Plucky Allies against the Nazis. Bruce Lee versus a room full of ninjas. Rocky versus that Swedish bloke who was pretending to be a Russian. This story is as old as human history itself.
But how could we have ever known that this struggle against oppression was seeded so far back in the historical narrative? Who do we have to thank for telling us this tale of the fight against Roman savagery?
The Romans, of course.
This is a tale told by the bad guys in this story, not the good guys. The good guys had no written history at all, or at least not one that has survived. Apart from some evidence in the archaeological record that something happened in Britain at that time, all we have is the Roman account of what happened. And what you just read wasn’t even the Roman account of what happened. It was my account of what happened, based on their account of what happened. These are not the narratives of the Britons; they are my narratives of Roman narratives. All the dramatic license was mine and if you went along with it, and it matched your expectation of what you were going to read about Boudicca and the rebellion she lead, then all I was doing was giving you what you wanted to read.
And that’s all the Romans were doing, too.
But what gives here? Why would the bad guys in this story make themselves out to be so hideous? They have the opportunity to paint themselves however they like in this story. The Britons could be the bad guys and the Romans the oppressed minority suffering at the hand of the brutal locals. Why didn’t they?
To really find out what’s going on here, we have to go back right to the start and talk about how people became ‘Romans’. There are three ways to ‘Romanize’ someone. One, you can go round and poke them with something sharp until they turn Roman. Two, you threaten to poke them with something sharp until they turn Roman and three, you give them some money and build them a bathhouse or two.
Boudicca’s tribe, the Iceni, fell largely into the latter category. Following the Claudian invasion of 43AD, the Iceni had come to a voluntary peace with the Romans. All that went out of the window when, in 47, the then governor of Britain, Publius Ostorius Scapula, threatened to disarm them. At the time, Ostorius was busy in the south east of the country and the last thing he wanted was some potential troublemakers to his rear. So, without much evidence that the Iceni would be any problem at all, he tried to take away their potential to make trouble, which just provoked their potential to make trouble. A rebellion was put down by Ostorius in a short but fierce confrontation. The long-term winner of the truce negotiated in the aftermath was Prasutagus, Boudicca’s husband (or one of them), who found his new position as a ‘client king’ installed with Roman blessing to gain leverage over his people and the surrounding tribes. The deal struck was simple. The Iceni would behave, the Romans would leave them alone, a tribute would be paid by the British and Prasutagus would remain as ruler until his death. At that point, control would be handed over to the Romans and there would be no succession. This is a pretty standard deal around the empire. In many circumstances, it was simpler and cheaper to leave whoever was in charge alone as long as they were on your side.
Romanizing people was an expensive and bureaucratic process which required a lot of soldiers to not only keep the peace, but to build the infrastructure that came with it. If the incumbent was a competent man (and he was always a man), it was easier to leave him in place, give him the protection of Rome and receive a slice of whatever he made as profit. Sometimes it didn’t even require a tribute. Sometimes it was easier and simpler to pay him to behave instead.
Not all Romanization necessarily came at the end of something pointy. In Wales, the south of the country was largely Romanized. Roads were built to connect towns, villas sprung up along them and forts reminded any uppity locals or bandits who the boss was. Some tribes went willingly into this arrangement and some had to be persuaded into it.
The Demetae of West Wales seemed rather keen to adopt the Roman life and for them the town of Carmarthen gave them the taste of the finer things in Roman life - the forum and the amphitheatre, baths and mosaics. And it did so in a town very much on the frontier, built in the manner of a posh Roman town by the locals themselves, out of wood. The amphitheatre, which you can still visit to this day, is simply hacked from a natural bowl in a hillside. The locals building themselves their own vision of a Roman town and seemingly without much in the way of persuasion.
Their cousins to the east, the Silures, needed much, much more persuading. Their guerilla campaigns against the Romans kept them busy for decades. The great rebel leader Caratacus gnawed at the Roman leg bone like a particularly annoying dog, until they too, eventually, succumbed to the pointy things and bent the knee. From there on, they too became good little Roman boys and girls and in return for their compliance had the magnificent town of Venta Silurum built for them. The great stone walls of the town are still impressive as the modern town of Caerwent; caer for fort and went from venta. Within a few years, the locals were wearing togas and erecting fawning statues to the emperor.
In the north of Wales, however, it’s a different story with the locals either unwilling to become Roman or the Romans unwilling to poke them with pointy things long enough for them to comply. Romans are famously tenacious when it comes to defeating uppity locals, so the idea that they simply put up with a constant churn of rebels coming at them seems unlikely. But there are no towns, no villas and no ‘civilization’. There are roads, but they serve only to link the forts. It’s a landscape of occupation. The enormous military complex at Tomen-y-Mur was home to an unknown cavalry unit who appeared to spend most of their time building parade grounds and practice camps to give themselves something to do. The locals appear to have kept themselves to their camps and the Romans to theirs. After a while the cavalry unit even built themselves a tiny little amphitheatre off to one side of the complex, perhaps to have given themselves somewhere to watch plays and recitals of a bored evening on a bleak, wind-scraped, desolate Welsh hillside.
The empire was driven by money. The emperor wanted money, the Roman state wanted money and, if you were a client king like Prasutagus, you also wanted money, mostly so you could give it to the Romans who would then return the favour by lending you money. And where did you get the money so that you could give it to the Romans who would then lend it back? Why, the Romans, of course! So, you would borrow from the Romans and then issue coins with your face on them to show how much money you could borrow, and then live happily ever after until you dropped dead and then the Romans wanted their money back.
Which is what, in the year 60, Prasutagus went and did. He died.
Pleased with this turn of events, the Romans turned up and started measuring for new curtains and planning to move in, as agreed. And all the money lenders, or Seneca if you believe that piece of propaganda, followed along politely behind, coughing gently and pointing at contacts on scrolls that the locals Iceni couldn’t read, with numbers on them, and expecting these numbers to be turned into gold.
Boudicca had other ideas. She had waited a long time for Prasutagus to die and she wasn’t in the mood to let some Roman money lenders take it all from her. Instead, she rose up, called the tribes to her cause, got her own pointy things and said no.
But wait a minute. This is not how the story goes. There should be raped daughters and defiled corpses of the ancestors. There should be violent beatings and Roman slavery. Where did all that go?
Think back to the battlefield and those speeches. Stirring stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. But was that Boudicca? Were those her words? Did Paulinus really say that?
Of course not. Those are my words. Or, rather, those are my versions of the words of a man who’s name we’re not really entirely sure of, who was born somewhere or other in probably, but not definitely, 56AD and who was known as one of, if not the, greatest ancient historian of them all - Tacitus.
To try and understand why Tacitus, a Roman senator no less, a man who walked the very highest corridors of power in Rome, would be telling us a tale in which muddy faced barbarian farmers and most of his own people - Romans - are the evil bad guys, we have to take a look at the time in which he was writing.
The turn of the 2nd Century AD was a time of great moral navel-gazing in Rome. Senators of high ideals such as Tacitus are frustrated with what they see as the abandonment of the last vestiges of strait-laced Republican morality. Rome is a venal, slothful, immoral and insensitive place. Poetry, art and learning have been replaced with boorishness and crass violence. The streets are crowded, smelly, unsafe and dirty. The ideals that senators and educated gentlemen hold dearest have been eroded by succession after succession of uncouth and brutal emperors, unfit to hold the high Augustan office into which they are thrust.
The recent death of one of them, Domitian, in 96AD has released a champagne cork of pent-up frustration. Domitian and the senate were openly hostile towards each other. Senators complained loudly that one of the rights they saw as sacrosanct - the right to speak their minds freely - had been completely demolished by an emperor who saw plots around every corner, with some justification, and who countenanced no criticism as a result, either in public or private. He ruled by terror and encouraged spies. Whilst he lived, writers such as Martial practiced self-survival with Soviet-like sycophantic fawning. Although Domitian was a good administrator and the legions loved him, mostly because he paid them to, the writers of the time jumped at the opportunity to slate him once he was assassinated. The senate damned his memory.
Whilst Domitian was alive, one senator went as far as to openly complain that he was not allowed to speak his mind on the senate floor. A charge Domitian tried to refute by, incongruously, ordering him to commit suicide.
It is in this atmosphere that Tacitus begins to tell us the tale of Boudicca’s rebellion. It’s a tale of Bad Rome and Good Rome. The first is so fetid and evil, bloated, corrupt and lacking in moral fibre that even filthy barbarian oiks are better and more noble than they. These are the Romans who defile the graves of the Iceni ancestors and who rape Boudicca’s daughters and publicly flog her for her insolence.
On the other hand, Paulinus and his men represent the last vestiges of a decent Rome. Paulinus’ Romans ride to save the day and the honor of Roman Republican morality like John Wayne and the cavalry. Just in the nick of time.
Seconded to Paulinus’ unit was a young military officer by the name of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the future governor of Britian and, crucially, the future father-in-law of Tacitus himself, and about whom he was to write a biography, A hero in the family. And, importantly, an eye-witness to the defeat of Boudicca.
Men like Agricola would be the ones who, if anyone could, bring Rome back from the precipice of moral desolation.
This is the time in which Revelation, the great Biblical teeth-gnashing, portentous doom prophecy is written. Literally the end of the world. Rome, the Great Babylon, is falling and the angels of destruction are levelling the city and tossing her millstones into the sea and, rather annoyingly if you like a bit of a tune, silencing the trumpet players in her streets.
This is the fate of Rome unless men like Agricola can come to her rescue.
But there are two accounts of what happens in Britain. We have Tacitus’ account and we have that of the rather more prosaic argument about money. That second account is the work of Cassius Dio who was writing quite a bit later, in the 3rd Century. He is using the same sources as Tacitus, but without the eye-witness of Agricola and he is also using Tacitus himself as a direct source. But he writes without the same narrative arc, without the need to have Good Romans and Bad Romans. He just plumps for the Good Romans all along. In this metanarrative, the Iceni are deal-breakers going back on their word. They are dishonorable and perfidious. True, he does mention some of the same lurid details that Tacitus does about how the Romans treated them, but in this account, they are barbarians who broke their word and they are more deserving of their treatment. Tacitus, it must be noted, mentions nothing about money lenders at all. Dio leads with it.
In some other respects, Dio’s account is more exaggerated. The figure of 250,000 people comes from him. Tacitus, with Agricola reporting directly, estimates the number nearer 80,000. Surely Dio is overstating the number for dramatic effect? The whole population of Britain was maybe only 1-1.5 million, so the idea of a quarter of the entire population getting together to charge at some Romans in a field is surely fanciful?
In Tacitus’ account, all of them are slain. In Dio’s, a lot of them run away. Tacitus has Boudicca fleeing the field and drinking poison. In Dio, she disappears into legend, never seen again, ready to ride once more to the rescue of Britain like King Arthur.
What we know for sure is that something big happened. There’s no direct archaeological evidence for anyone called Boudicca, although there are coins attributed to Prasutagus. Both accounts have her army march on and destroy the Roman capital of Britain, Camulodunum, modern day Colchester. After ransacking the city, survivors holed up in the temple of the Divine Claudius for two days before the Iceni burnt it, and everyone inside, to a crisp. A bronze statue of the emperor is decapitated and thrown into the local river where it was discovered in 1907. The archaeology shows perfectly a layer of significant burning that contains accurate dating material. There’s no reason to doubt that, whatever the reason, the attack on Camulodunum took place.
Another future governor, Quintus Petillius Cerialis, on command of the 9th Hispania Legion, attempts to relieve the city, but they are slaughtered, probably by ambush, and Cerialis only just manages to escape with his life but all the infantry are massacred. Hearing this, the then governor, Catus Decianus, abandons the province, scuttling to Gaul as fast as he could. All looks increasingly lost.
The rebels descend on the unguarded city of Londinium where the political elite have fled with Decianus, leaving the ordinary citizens, Roman and British alike, at the mercy of the barbarians. The city is razed to the ground and the people slaughtered in brutal fashion. Again, the archaeology backs this story up.
It’s at this point that Paulinus first shows up. He’s been busy driving the mysterious shamanic elites of British tribal society, back to their island stronghold of Mona, modern day Anglesey, where he has prepared to cross the Menai Straits and attack. Tacitus tells us how he sent the infantry across on improvised flat-bottomed boats and the cavalry swimming alongside their horses:
On the shore stood the opposing army with its dense array of armed warriors, whilst between the ranks dashed women in black attire like the furies, with hair disheveled, waving brands. And all around the Druids, lifting up their hands to heaven and pouring forth dreadful incantations, scared the soldiers by their unfamiliar sight so that, as if their limbs were paralyzed, they stood motionless and exposed to wounds. Then, urged by their general’s appeals and mutual encouragements not to quail before a troop of frenzied women, they bore the standards onwards, smote down all resistance and wrapped the foe in the flames of his own brands.
(Tacitus, Annals of Imperial Rome, xiv.29)
Suddenly, Paulinus receives word of the rebellion and dashes back across the country, arriving just in time to see the huge barbarian army approach London. He has no choice but to abandon the city. He has neither the men to defend it, nor the city the walls to keep them out and so leaves it to its fate.
The rebels then turn on Verulamium, modern St. Albans, where the archaeology is more scant, but by now there is no reason to doubt events. The fate of the inhabitants is gruesome. They are impaled on spikes and have their breasts cut off and shoved into their mouths. 80,000 have been slain.
Paulinus is rallying every soldier he can muster. He has to do something. His own force of the 14th Gemina is joined by auxiliaries, seconded units, anyone he can find. Apart, that is, from the 2nd Augusta who, under Poenius Postumus, refused to come out of their legionary base at Exeter. On hearing of victory for Paulinus, Postumus takes his own life, but the reason for his refusal is uncertain. There’s nothing to suggest cowardice and his subsequent suicide speaks more of shame for a victory missed than of a refusal to follow orders. He was a seasoned campaigner and nothing in his record suggests he was scared. He might have received confusing or conflicting orders, or believed that he was being led into a trap by the Iceni who were trying to tempt him into another ambush. Or, of hearing of the defeat of Cerilias, he might have thought himself the last legion in Britian and was awaiting clearer orders from Rome. But he fell on his own sword all the same. If only for denying his men their share of glory.
Perhaps with their bloodlust sated, the rebels wandered a bit, looking for another target or perhaps a way home. Paulinus tracked them until he could dictate terms of the engagement.
And when his victory was secured, he did what all good, magnanimous Roman generals should do and went absolutely fucking berserk.
Decianus, who fucked off at the first sign of trouble, is lost to history, never heard of again. His replacement, Gaius Julius Alpinus Classicianus, arrives to find Paulinus on a rampage. Perhaps deciding that the best way of ensuring that the Britons never do it again is by ensuring that the Britons never do anything ever again, period, Paulinus has begun to revenge hack his way around the country, murdering and pillaging as he goes.
Afraid, with some justification, that this will just cause more trouble, Classicianus sends word to Nero who despatches his freedman, Polyclitus, to find out what in blazes is going on.
Paulinus is recalled to Rome on a trumped-up charge of losing some ships or something and is replaced by a calmer head, Publius Petronius Turpilianus.
Classicianus dies in London soon after and his magnificent tombstone is erected there by his wife. It is later used in the building of London’s medieval walls and then recovered to sit in splendour in the British Museum.
Paulinus returns to Rome with his reputation just about intact and was almost certainly rewarded with a triumph. A man of the same name - either him or a son - becomes consul in 66 for the second time. And in 69, the year of the four emperors and the chaos surrounding the death of Nero, he is a general under the short-lived emperor Otho. When he is captured by his rival Vitellius, escapes a horrible fate by claiming to have deliberately lost a battle in Vitellius’ favor. His eventual fate is unknown.
The mythology of Boudicca is widespread. She is Buddug to the Welsh. The treacherous lioness who butchered the governors to the 6th Century chronicler Gyldas. Polydore Vergil’s 16th Century Voadicia. Raphael Holinshed’s uniter of the people. Bondica and Boadicea. She is reincarnated in Queen Victoria. Immortalized in Thorneycroft’s weird, colossal statue ‘Boadicea and her Daughters’ on a charging chariot, complete with - why the hell not - scythes on her wheels like the Persians, standing a proud guard over the city she once burned to the ground and slaughtered the population of. Suffragettes carried Boadicea banners as the eternal feminine guarder of the hearth and avenger of wrongs.
And all of those viewpoints, all of those images exist only because one Roman senator was frustrated because he couldn’t say what he wanted, when he wanted, in the senate house.
That was never her. That was Tacitus we hear. That was his version of her. She is the Boudicca he invented and she is the one we have built into our own imaginations. The one we want to see. The underdog doing good. The righteous destroying the wrongdoers. The protector.
Somewhere in every society’s psyche sits a Boudicca. The symbol of everything we hold dear about ourselves, even if we have to invent something about ourselves to do so. She is the one who will protect us. She is the one who will save us. We are undefeatable against even the strongest enemies, even the Armada, even the Normans, even the Saxons and the Romans and the Nazis when we have Boudicca to lead us.
Who wants the Boudicca who didn’t pay her debts or stick to the deal she made? There’s no romance in that!
Every TV show, every film, book, play, musical or opera ever made about her has been channeled through the narrative voice of a man. Such is the fate of women in history. Their voices stolen by men.
It’s worth noting, incidentally, that in writing the biography of Agricola, some years earlier, Tacitus first addresses the matter of the rebellion in Britain. Which, without the same rhetorical narrative arc to follow, merely attributes events to ‘indolence’.