Boudicca: Myths vs Reality

Boudicca, the warrior queen of the Iceni tribe, has become a symbol of resistance and British defiance. But what do we really know about her, and her bloody revolt against Roman rule? Dr Shushma Malik from the University of Cambridge joins us to untangle this mystery and explore the lasting legacy of this enigmatic ruler. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Tim Arstall. Join Dan and the team for the first-ever LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/. You can now find Dan Snow's History Hit on YouTube! Watch episodes every Friday (including this one) here https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:29Dan Snow?

  Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. An entire province of the Empire, almost torn from the mighty grasp of Rome. A legion destroyed, the eagles humiliated, Roman towns wiped off the map, Roman settlers massacred. Roman historians tell us the name of the rebel leader, the woman responsible for this destruction, a British queen, Boudicca. One historian, Tacitus, even recounts rousing speeches that she gave to her furious followers. But there is a nagging problem with all of this. How much can we trust these few sources that have survived? Was Boudicca real?

• 2:14Dan Snow?

  What really happened in that great uprising in Roman Britain in the first century AD? To talk about what we know and what we can only guess at, how far we can trust these Roman sources, I've gone to the brilliant Dr Shushma Malik. She's a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. She's the author of The Nero Antichrist. She has got answers, or at least she's going to tell me one of the best questions to ask. This is Dan Snow's History Hit and we're talking all about the great Boudiccan uprising. Enjoy.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  T minus 10.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till they're dispersed from black unity.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

• 3:12Dan Snow?

  Shushma, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Hi Dan, lovely to be here.

• 3:15Dan Snow?

  This is one of the big moments of British history, isn't it? Tell me, what is the state of Britain in 60 AD before this revolt breaks out? Where are we?

• 3:25Speaker 04

  So Britain has been part of the Roman Empire, sort of more formally, I suppose, since about 43 AD. So that's Claudius. So we've got the formal annexation of Britain in that stage. But actually, Britain has had relationships, trading relationships, all sorts of things with Rome before that. So we know Julius Caesar, of course, crossed the channel and went over. But also since sort of Augustus, there's been continuing relationships between Britain and Rome. So this isn't sort of entirely an unknown territory or an unknown place, certainly not. And you get in Britain, in terms of sort of its organisation itself, there are different regions, so different places, and there are different people in ruling those places. So kings in charge of kingdoms, I suppose. And a lot of that stays in place under Claudius.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  And that's where we get to in around 60 AD, when one of the kings in East Anglia dies.

• 4:14Dan Snow?

  So even though we like painting the map red in our neat little modern way, Actually, the Roman conquest often just meant arriving in an area, meeting the local king or the local elite and going, can we do business? We'll leave you in charge as long as you pay us some tax and sort of pay homage to us. And so it would have felt for locals not necessarily like a big sort of jackbooted conquest.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  I think that's right, but what's interesting about particularly the story of Boudicca is that what we have in that area is veteran colonies. So one of the things that the Romans did was settle veterans in land of the Iceni, so in East Anglia. So there is a bit more of, you can see the difference that that's made, in particular because these veterans, one of our sources say that's one of the reasons for the war, because they were behaving very badly or the revolt. We also see sort of, you know, some architectural differences, that kind of thing. So we've got a temple to Claudius at this point as well. So there are changes, but it's not necessarily that you kind of get an overhauling of the political system, for example.

• 5:14Dan Snow?

  So the Romans arrive in East Anglia at some stage in the 40s AD.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:18Dan Snow?

  Might have been a bit of a battle, might have been bloody, or does the local king immediately go, okay, fine, you guys are like pretty tough opposition, I'm going to sort of submit to you if I can stay in power in my little area?

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you have battles. Normally, you would imagine battles when the Romans and the indigenous people, whoever they might be, come into contact. So normally a bit closer to the coast.

• 5:37Dan Snow?

  Right.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  But then, once the fighting carries on, I guess it's difficult because there's not necessarily one answer to that for different places, but you would imagine perhaps a bit of submission, depending on how far you're through the war and what you imagine. But also, I think there is a clear violence to this as well.

• 5:54Dan Snow?

  Okay, so it might be what you get in sort of other empires, you might get a local king resists Romans, give him the chop and put his little brother on the throne or something like that.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, you sometimes get those sorts of things. I mean, you can see examples of that in Egypt. It's a similar time period, this is Julius Caesar as well. And the way that they were sort of intervening in politics in Egypt. So Julius Caesar starts to play the diplomat between Cleopatra and her brother, but then also gets involved in much more difficult ways. And then also, when you get Antony and Cleopatra and her sister arguing our sin away, Antony is very involved in the death of Cleopatra's sister. So there's intervention there as well. And certainly, you know, it's one of the things that the Romans used as a sort of model of imperialism.

• 6:35Dan Snow?

  By 60 AD, you've got a sort of patchwork quill, you've got the Romans advancing across Britain, you've got some local... Kings that are still sort of have a bit of autonomy but basically are obeying the Roman command and they're pushing into Cornwall, Wales, even up into the north of what is now the north of England as well. So they're expanding Roman rule in Britain.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, so of course this is a process and it sort of takes time and eventually there are going to be Romans stationed at particularly strategic parts of Britain as we go into the later first century. And of course then we get sort of Hadrian's Wall and those sorts of areas. Settlements tend to be more in border places rather than necessarily spread throughout the entirety of the island or, you know, in other places as well. So the Romans were quite strategic about where they stationed legions and where they had military presence versus other types of presence like colonies and other ways of integrating.

• 7:26Dan Snow?

  So these are colonies of veterans troops who promise like, well done, you've served the Roman army very loyally, here's some free land and even though you might be from Croatia, you're going to get some land in Essex and there'll be a little colony and a little town and a bit of Romanness and temples and things and then farms for veterans all around there.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So that kind of settlement we see in various parts of the Roman Empire. And certainly, one of the things that Augustus was grappling with, if we sort of go back to the earlier Judeo-Claudian period, was making sure that veterans had good land to be settled on so that they felt like they were getting their due recompense for all of the wars and all of the, you know, particularly if we think we're coming out of a period of civil war as well for Augustus, all of those sorts of loyalties were properly paid and properly rewarded.

• 8:13Dan Snow?

  Soldiers have fought for the land. In their heads, they want to see some benefit, I suppose.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  Well, yes. And that's an interesting point because historically, when we think about the way that the Roman Empire sort of understood itself and how Rome understood the purpose of empire, I suppose, was that that land was part of the res publica. So res publica is where we get the word republic from, but it means sort of the people's thing. So the land that's in the empire that's commonly shared by the Roman people. But actually, you know, what we kind of see as we get later on in the Republic and then into the Imperial period is the reality that a lot of this land is not being shared equally. And in particular, it's very important, once we get the professionalisation of the army in the late Republican period as well, for payment to be much more formalised.

• 9:01Dan Snow?

  Okay, so we then get a situation in sixty. Two Roman historians tell us about this.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so in terms of what happens in Britain in sixteen sixty-one, we've got one historian called Cassius Dio, who's writing in the late second, early third century. He's a Roman senator, but he himself is from Bithynia, so modern day Turkey, but he's quite integrated into Roman politics. He's a consul as well as part of his career. And the other source we have is Tacitus. And generally speaking, people sometimes think Tacitus is more reliable because he's a bit closer to the time. He's late first, early second century A.D., but also because his father-in-law was actually in Britain, probably not in the time of the Boudiccan revolt, but a little bit later, so Agricola.

• 9:45Dan Snow?

  Who would go on to become a great general.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  Exactly, precisely.

• 9:48Dan Snow?

  And would have served alongside people who would have served in that period in Britain.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, quite possibly, exactly, and would have had a much closer connection. So we get actually an account of Boudicca and the Boudiccan revolt in two of Tacitus's works. So the Agricola, which he wrote earlier, which was a sort of biography of his father-in-law, and then his later work, which is the Annals, which is his history of essentially the juliocladian period from Tiberius to Nero, where he sort of revisits these themes and gives us a bit more narrative as well.

• 10:18Dan Snow?

  Okay, so what do they say happens?

• 10:21Speaker 04

  So, depends who you ask. I focus on the Annals and Cassius Dio as the two different versions. So according to Tacitus, there in the Annals, it's about the death of Prasutagus, so that's the husband of Boudicca.

• 10:36Dan Snow?

  He's a sort of local king in what's now Norfolk.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, precisely, yeah, yeah, in Norfolk and East Anglia. And when he dies, he leaves half of his kingdom to Rome, which, you know, makes sense as someone who was probably allied, an allied king to Rome, to Nero specifically. And he leaves the other half to his family, so to Boudicca and their daughters. But the Romans, the veterans, these settled veterans, decide that actually the fact that half of it was left to Nero means that they can take advantage of this. And according to Tacitus, they start to sort of attack the house and also assault Boudicca's daughters, Boudicca and Boudicca's daughters. So it's a much more sort of personalised tale. One of the things that Boudicca uses when she's sort of talking to the troops and thinking

• 11:19Speaker 04

  about the reasons why they should go and revolt against the Romans is this sort of personal, really quite horrific, violent acts against against her and her family. And that emblematises, I suppose, the idea of what these Romans are doing to these women as well. And it is, you know, partly the fact that these are women. So that's one story. The other story from Cassius Dio is much less personal. It's not personal at all, really, in fact. He talks about the fact that the certain Romans, including one of Nero's closest advisers, Seneca, has made these, you know, huge loans that no one asked for to the Britons and is now recalling those loans. And also that taxation is very high, that there are all of these different financial problems and economic

• 12:02Speaker 04

  problems. And taxation in particular is seen as a big driver for him as the cause of the revolt. So that's a very different way of thinking about it and understanding it. And when he has Boudicca sort of address her troops, it's about the Romans and the fact that they are not worthy to be ruling over the Britons. The Britons have, you know, far more masculinity, Boudicca included, than these sort of Romans who are very decadent.

• 12:27Dan Snow?

  Their spreadsheets.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:28Dan Snow?

  And their interest rates.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Well, exactly. And their bread, actually. Bread is one of the things that she talks about. Bread, wine and oil. That's the symbolism of decadence, whereas, you know, they can find their bread in any root that they find in the soil. So it's a really interesting difference, I think, between the two sources and how they want to understand these problems. For Cassius Dio, it's much more about this kind of idea that the barbarism, if we want to use that word, of the West and how they have kept up these old characteristics versus the decadence of Nero's Rome. Whereas for Tacitus, it's sort of personalised much more. And I think also has more to do with Boudicca's role as a wife and a mother as well.

• 13:08Dan Snow?

  But we sort of know what happens next, and partly because of the archaeology, which I'd like to ask you about. But Boudicca appears to have rallied her tribe and perhaps others, and marched on this nest of Roman veterans, particularly Camulodunum, Nomon and Colchester. Which we think was totally destroyed.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So again, our sources give us numbers, but we have to be very wary when they do give us numbers because most of the time they're sort of exaggerating or rounding up quite significantly. So Cassius Dio says about 80,000 Romans, so these are Romans living in Britain and allies to the Romans living in Britain were killed while there was this sort of destruction of these cities that Boudicca did before she was stopped by the Romans. So there was clearly quite a lot of a huge impact on the southeast of England in terms of what she did. And again, the archaeology sort of bears that out as well. But Boudicca too, and the army, what they're also taking advantage of is the fact that the sort of governor, the person who was in charge in Britain at this stage, was off in Anglesey.

• 14:08Dan Snow?

  Yes, suspiciously good timing.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, not suspicious, like strategic timing.

• 14:14Dan Snow?

  Yes, very strategic, sorry, yeah. Suspicious in that it seems that perhaps it could have been coordinated because the Romans are off in Anglesey.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And this is another thing of why we have a bit of a problem dating exactly when this happened because our sources talk about it as probably being 61. But then actually what happens means that it takes place in a longer time period. So it probably started in 16 to 61, we're not quite sure. But it wasn't a very, very quick sort of succession of things. There seems to have been a campaign that's taken a while.

• 14:43Dan Snow?

  So we think Boudicca marched on, modern London, modern St Albans, the three that's often talked about. And you mentioned the archaeology. It seems if you dig down in any of those settlements today, you hit a Boudicca destruction horizon.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely. So there is, yeah, like you say, a burn layer in the stratigraphy that indicates, you know, something clearly happened there in the mid first century. The interesting thing about that then is that we call this the Boudiccan revolt. And clearly there was a revolt in Britain and we have these two historical sources who, you know, name her in various ways of different spellings, but it's clearly the same person. That talk about this being led by this woman who was the wife of the king who died. But actually, we have very little evidence of Boudicca. We have a lot of evidence for the revolt archaeologically, but we have very, very little evidence for Boudicca herself, mainly just these histories. So the bit that's famous about all of this is often her.

• 15:36Speaker 04

  And, and, and that makes for some very, very interesting kind of views of history and views of women and views of leadership. But in evidential terms, the Boudiccan revolt is a little bit more difficult.

• 15:47Dan Snow?

  Eventually, this army, we think according to the sources, they march up Watling Street, the modern A5. The Roman governor is sort of somewhere in the Midlands with his legions. There's a huge battle, we don't exactly know where.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:57Dan Snow?

  Lots of people can tell us in the comments where they think it is. It's a lively topic of discussion. I've looked for a few myself. And there's this massive battle that the British appear to lose.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so this is the battle that our sources are very interested in. Suddenly, the action becomes very vivid. We get these speeches, we get pairs of speeches. So Boudicca giving a speech and then Suetonius Polinus on the, the Roman side giving a speech, whipping up their troops and giving everyone a reason to go into battle. But it is catastrophic for the Britons. They'd been going along, they hadn't faced much resistance. You know, the burning of all of these cities was one thing, but when they actually came face to face with the Roman army, even though they had more people, it was a fairly brutal outcome. And Boudicca herself, you know, in our sources, is there giving the speeches. But also, we get very different accounts of her death between our two sources as well. So Tacitus says that they were defeated.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  She did what she would do, which is take her own life and she poisoned herself. Whereas Cassius Dio is actually a bit more optimistic, I suppose, in that he says, actually, yes, this was a great defeat, it was catastrophic, but there were still, you know, a core group of people who were willing to kind of start again and bring the battle again. But then Boudicca got ill and she died of her illness. And that then was the deciding moment where they accepted their defeat. If Boudicca hadn't got ill, he's sort of insinuating, who knows whether they could have carried on. But her death through illness rather than her own act was the decisive bit.

• 17:27Dan Snow?

  And did this shake Rome? I mean, Britain was right on the edge of the world. It was quite expensive to maintain. It wasn't super abundant in resource. I mean, it's useful, but there was a kind of cost benefit analysis, wasn't there?

• 17:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:40Dan Snow?

  Do you think this? Risked prizing the province from Rome's grip? Or would they always have come back? They couldn't take the humiliation of abandoning it?

• 17:47Speaker 04

  I mean, it's not presented as something, in our sources at least, that seems to have worried anyone in Rome, if that makes sense. I was rereading Cassius Dio this morning, and it's sort of, you know, it's quite striking that you get this account of Nero's juvenalia, which is the games he instigates to celebrate his own coming of age, kind of thing, where he shaves off his first beard. And so you've got that account, and it's all about Nero and, you know, his decadence and the fact that he doesn't understand, kind of, you know, what the protocol is of hierarchies and games and all sorts of things. Then we go to Britain, and Cassius Dio sort of gives Boudicca this great speech where he says the Romans are all effeminate. Look at Nero. And he feminises Nero's name, so Domitia Nero instead of Domitius Nero.

• 18:31Speaker 04

  So he's making this really clear point that the Britons are sort of the archetype of masculinity, and all of these Romans are the archetype of femininity. And even Boudicca, as a woman, is more masculine than this feminised Nero. And so it's all playing into what we've been talking about before in Cassius Dio. And then, after we get the account of her death, he then goes on to what Nero's doing with his wives, so Octavia, and the fact that he wants to divorce the women that he's married to. So all of this is sort of wrapped up in this story of Nero's goings on in Rome, particularly in relation to these questions of gender, and, you know, masculinity and femininity and so forth.

• 19:11Dan Snow?

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• 22:44Dan Snow?

  Before we get into what you really think who Boudicca might have been or if she existed, just remind me, which is so fascinating. Queen Elizabeth I, for example, had never heard of Boudicca. Like, we lost Boudicca and she was rediscovered. Tell me about that.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true. So, Boudicca has a fascinating reception history in that she seems to go in and out of fashion. So, well, she disappears, like you say, for a bit and then comes back again. We've got these sort of ancient accounts and then there's sort of some early medieval period accounts. But like you say, she disappears a bit from our literary records.

• 23:14Dan Snow?

  Because we have lost that Book of Tacitus and Cassius Dio, for example.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, Tacitus in particular, he gets lost and found again quite significantly at different points. It's difficult when you do have a manuscript tradition that you're playing with that means bits are better known and worse known at different points. Cassius Dio is writing in Greek. So there's also a question then of what sources people are using and what they're reading. Certainly in the Byzantine Empire, you know, we'd get a very different story. But in the West, there's a different sort of language tradition as well. So, we do get lots of these stories, very different takes on them. I mean, for a long time before Tacitus' books on Nero were rediscovered, Tiberius was the ultimate tyrant, right? That's as bad as you can get. Like, look what he does. And then Nero comes back again and you get all of the popular response to that.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  And similarly with Boudicca, you get different periods where she works. And even when she does come back, how she's operating within political culture and popular culture and how people want to identify her and who they want to identify her with. It's quite problematic and quite a complex picture.

• 24:16Dan Snow?

  Yeah, because she comes back in the early modern period. Everyone's like, hang on, are we celebrating this person who rebels against the mighty empire now that the Brits have conquered a mighty empire? Or we?

• 24:24Speaker 04

  Well, exactly. I mean, who is she? She's a British queen on the one hand, so we've got some good parallels there.

• 24:29Dan Snow?

  But we also really like the Romans.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  But we also like the Romans, but then we don't like Nero. So she works also very well because she is of the Neronian period. So there's this nice kind of, well Nero is a Roman who's not really Roman because he's a bit too, you know, eastern. He actually aligns in tropes of slander. Exactly, precisely, which aligns quite well with what the British are doing in empire as well. And then you've got Boudicca, who is, you know, the strong British queen. But on the other hand, she rebels against an empire, which is very difficult to get away from. So particularly the mid 19th century, there's a lot of contestation about what to do with Boudicca. On the one hand, she can symbolise the Indian uprising of 1857. On the other hand, Albert wants to make her a sort of ancestor of Queen Victoria.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  So how you negotiate those things is quite difficult.

• 25:19Dan Snow?

  And now she is squarely in the lively publishing tradition of Girlboss. Like, I cannot walk around my house without stumbling across some of my daughter's books or playing cards or top trumps or whatever, featuring kind of Boudicca wrecking shop.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Well, maybe that's how we should, we should do it. I think that sounds like a good place to settle.

• 25:39Dan Snow?

  But we also do have to deal with the fact that, like, according to Tasters, like monstrous, monstrous crimes that perpetrated under.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 25:46Dan Snow?

  Against the civilian population.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  Mass slaughter, according to some of our sources.

• 25:50Dan Snow?

  Difficult. Okay, so I was this many years old before I realised that brilliant academics like you are actually like, well, maybe Boudicca didn't really kind of exist in the way that, you know, these Romans. I mean, that's blown my mind. Is there now a question mark about whether Boudicca was actually a thing?

• 26:03Speaker 04

  Clearly the revolt happened and clearly there would have been a leader. I think what there's a difficulty with is sort of disentangling the reception history of Boudicca from what we actually know of the times. So I think most historians now would say, look, clearly there was, you know, some sort of figure here that was leading the revolt, someone, perhaps Boudicca was an honorific title. But actually, a lot of the imagination around her, so like you say, in the books, there'll be a very particular image of this woman. And the fact that she was a queen as well, I mean, our sources don't use the word queen about her, but it's become really important that she's a sort of ancestress queen specifically of Britain. Really what historians mean when they try to do that is that the Boudicca of Tacitus

• 26:46Speaker 04

  and Cassius Dio is not necessarily something we should think of as, you know, pure historical representation. Unfortunately, you know, if we were to look at someone like Agrippina or someone like Messalina, we've got the literary tradition, we've got what Tacitus says, we've got what Suetonius and Cassius Dio say, and we tend to take that with a bit of a pinch of salt because they're thinking about very particular things when they're talking about them. But we've got inscriptions, we've got statues, we've got coins, right? We've got all of this other material evidence that, yeah, needs a lot of interpretation as well, but can give us a bit of a different way of thinking about the role of these women in Roman society, right? With Boudicca, we don't have that. We don't have that material layer to draw on as well. We're stuck with the literature and that makes it quite difficult.

• 27:29Dan Snow?

  Before you're coming on, I got to thinking, is there also something about women as rebels to Roman rule in a way that you do see it in other traditions, other parts of history? But there's something about, you know, we've got Boudicca, we've got Cleopatra, who's an ambiguous figure in terms of rebellion against Roman rule, but certainly a sort of powerful woman who challenges nature parts of Roman rule. We've got Cartimandua, this northern chieftain in Britain who does another rebellion as well. And then is it Zenobia and Palmyra?

• 27:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:54Dan Snow?

  So is that just luck and whatever? Or is our Roman historians, is there almost a trope, a tradition of saying, look, when things are bad in the Roman Empire, even women are able to, is there something going on there?

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, it's a really good question. I think there are probably a few different answers. I think on the one hand, we should stop thinking that women don't rule in antiquity because clearly they do. By which I don't mean to say that there were lines of succession, but things happen where... Husbands die, sons are very young, you know, that's the case with Zenobia. Certainly Cleopatra co-ruling with her brothers. That sort of mechanism obviously can exist and has existed. And we think of it perhaps as an anomaly, but whether we should think of it as an anomaly is, I think, a different question. And I think also our sources are interested in that because in Rome, you know, women holding this kind of power is really difficult. Going from the Republic into the Imperial period for people to understand.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  So in the Republic, we've had the senatorial class and yes, there are a sort of women around that and involved in conversations. We've got women that we hear about, like Brutus's mother, Civilia, and others who clearly are quite important political. I'm going to say players, but in political conversations in and of their own right, because of who they are, but obviously because of who their male relatives are. But in the Imperial period, we see that like emphasised in the Imperial family even more. Suddenly you've got, you know, all of these women who can be the wife of an emperor, the mother of an emperor, the, you know, the sister of an emperor and all sorts of things. So in Rome, they're still kind of dealing with that, even in the late second century CE, still dealing with those kinds of ideas.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  And then when these women elsewhere are coming up, it's perhaps unsurprising that they want to talk about them. So someone like Cleopatra, someone like Zenobia, someone like Boudicca. And they think about them as women because they're women, but also because this is a sort of paradigm of leadership that perhaps is there. But also can be part of military activity in a rebellion as well.

• 29:57Dan Snow?

  And there is a later rebellion in Britain as well, isn't there?

• 30:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is later in the time of Agricola, when Tacitus's father-in-law is in Britain. And again, we get these great speeches and these great accounts of what's happening. And also the Romans are sort of pushing their territory further north at this point as well.

• 30:14Dan Snow?

  And that provokes a potentially female-led rebellion as well, or a sort of resistance anyway. So Boudicca's meant different things, different people. She's been received in so many different ways.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  I mean, it's fascinating about historical figures, I think, full stop. There are lots of different ways of taking historical figures and using them in the bounds of kind of, you know, other, other political cultures to say particular things. But because Boudicca is who she is, and because of the relationship between sort of rebellion and empire, and the fact that she's there when Nero is there, makes her, you know, doubly, triply complicated, I think, because there isn't this kind of straightforward story like you get with Cleopatra of the seductress and, you know, Julius Caesar and, and Mark Antony, these great generals who are enslaved to her kind of charm or whatever, we want to say about that. But Boudicca is completely different. The sort of dynamics there, because Nero is the one

• 31:04Speaker 04

  who's sort of always weak, not weak because it's anything to do with her, but just a weak emperor. And she sort of, you know, in our sources, particularly in Cassius Dio, is making these points about embodying kind of the traditional sort of British value of hard work and being able to be militarily successful because you don't rely on decadent luxuries because you're very close to the earth and the ground and the place where you live and those sorts of things. So later on, when Britain is the empire and you get expansion and colonies in India and various things, and then uprisings against Britain as an empire, it can become very complicated. But, but actually, even before that, we see Boudicca in domestic political culture, away from empire, actually. So one of the interesting

• 31:48Speaker 04

  things, I think, of actually about the way that Boudicca comes into political culture of the early 19th century is via Queen Caroline.

• 31:56Dan Snow?

  A daughter force wife.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 31:58Dan Snow?

  And he has the heir of Nero button, doesn't he?

• 32:00Speaker 04

  He does. According to, according to the radical press, he does.

• 32:03Dan Snow?

  Yeah, but you're right. Sort of dissolute, has an artistic bent.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 32:07Dan Snow?

  Not, not, not rugged, simple, manly, virile, sort of kind of king.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  Terrible to women.

• 32:13Dan Snow?

  Terrible to his mother and women, yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  Exactly. And countless mistresses as well.

• 32:17Dan Snow?

  Yeah. How interesting. So Queen Caroline as Boudicca.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  One of the really interesting years for Queen Caroline is 1820, when she's actually put on trial through the House of Lords for, ironically, and this was sort of seen as that, I think, by some anyway, for adultery. Despite the fact George the Fourth was, you know, clearly doing this, which is why it couldn't go to trial through the courts, it had to go through the House of Lords. She is represented in, we see in some caricatures, so in the press, as a sort of Boudicca figure. So one of the ways, you know, is that she is against George the Fourth and his decadence, she's symbolising a kind of old British value, the values of being a queen. Because what they wanted to do, the outcome of this trial, would be to strip her of the title of queen, to take away her queenship. So she is fighting to keep that, or her lawyers are fighting to keep that.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  And she herself, she writes to the House of Lords as well. But it's interesting that that sort of in the press, that's how, or in the radical press, that's how she's represented. Whereas on the other side, Rome still comes into the picture, but she's Messalina instead. So she is like the ultimate kind of, you know, adulterous woman, again.

• 33:22Dan Snow?

  Pulling strings.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Precisely, yeah, yeah.

• 33:24Dan Snow?

  Trying to rule throughout, yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah. But someone who cannot control their sexual appetite, that's the thing about Messalina, that's sort of probably the most famous and was very well known in that period as well, is a sort of anecdote about her, that she essentially, you know, our sources say prostituted herself. And that was the argument that the anti radicals were trying to make about Queen Caroline, at the same time as another faction were trying to figure her as Boudicca. And yeah, so it's really interesting how you get this sort of backwards and forwards with this woman who is being so variously kind of pulled around these different ancient representations. But Boudicca is there as this figure, so this is before Victoria, of course, but it's this figure of kind of old British values of queenship and victory, and here she's having a victory over sort of the lords.

• 34:09Dan Snow?

  Just another brilliant example of how we reach into the past and tell stories and histories because they satisfy some purpose that we have in the present.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And because these figures, you know, have become, they instantly say something, you can instantly sum up something. If you say Nero, Vidal, Wyron burns, you know what that means. If you say this person is a Messalina type, you know what that means. This, this woman, this queen is like Boudicca, you know what that means.

• 34:33Dan Snow?

  Girlboss.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's a very quick way to fundamentally sort of capture the essence of something because these stories are so well known.

• 34:41Dan Snow?

  And yet, there may only be a shred of truth within them.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Well, and maybe truth isn't the point.

• 34:46Dan Snow?

  Oh brilliant. Well, listen, thank you very much, Shushma, for coming on and talking it all about Boudicca and even discussing whether or not she did in fact exist, which has blown my mind. I love this story. I've been to sites across Britain connected with it and looked at all the archaeology as well. So you can actually check that out on History Hit, whether it's podcasts like The Ancients or my feed, on our YouTube channel and on our subscription channel as well. We've got lots and lots of Boudicca and indeed Roman content. See you next time.

• 35:16Dan Snow?

  Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube and you can see me, you can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground there. See you next time, folks.

• 36:01Speaker 01

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• 36:52Dan Snow?

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