Pod Insights Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! | Greek Mythology & the Ancient Mediterranean Ancient History Fangirl's Boudicca 1: the Seeds of Rebellion About this episode Liv's off to the UK and realized she's never covered Boudicca! Presenting episode 1 of Ancient History Fangirl's 2021 series on Britain's warrior queen. The story of Boudicca’s revolt is as epic as you can get. It’s got murder and pillage, Romans behaving badly, cities on fire, and a layer of destruction that was scorched into the earth. But it's also the story of a people on a precipice of great change.
Who was Boudicca? Who was this iron-age warrior queen who stood up to the Romans—and whose name was so revered and feared that stories of her are still being spun almost 2,000 years later? In this episode, we’re going to find out. Here's a Spotify playlist featuring all of AHFG's episodes on Boudicca and Roman Britain https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0cXDg1A0m2A4olvbTRVexZ?si=97SPGO5GRgKKOPD15_kiCg.
Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby
CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.
Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.
Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand).
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Transcript 13,758 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Liv Albert? Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.
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0:59 Speaker 01 No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.
1:02 Speaker 02 No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you.
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1:08 Speaker 03 Get Verizon FiOS because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.
1:13 Speaker 04 At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet, like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
2:10 Liv Albert? Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby! Except really, it's not. It's an episode of Ancient History Fangirl, but I am the other host, Liv, here to explain what's happening. Now, you all know I love to share episodes of Ancient History Fangirl because it's interesting, and also Jen and Jenny are my really good friends, and they do great work, and I would like to shove their work into your faces, because that's just the type of friend that I am. But, but, today's episode is a little specific. I am traveling to the UK right now. I'm going to London for the first time, which is pretty fun. I'm doing a bunch of events and things there, as well as just honestly, visiting a bunch of museums that hold all of the stolen artifacts
2:55 Liv Albert? that I have never seen in Greece. Let's not be subtle about it. And because of that, obviously, also, you know, I'm dealing with this whole collective founding, which, if you can believe it, along with writing a children's book of the Odyssey, it's just taking up like, a lot of my time. And so, I was figuring out, you know, what kind of episodes I can give you guys, and it occurred to me, as I prepared to head off to London for the first time, that I've never talked to you about Boudicca.
3:26 Liv Albert? And I, well, I don't have the research capabilities right now to talk to you about Boudicca on my own, and thus, I have gone to my great friends Jen and Jenny of Ancient History Fangirl, because, guess what? They've talked about Boudicca. And so, this episode today is episode one of their 2021 series on Boudicca. And spoilers, Boudicca, I mean, I don't even know quite enough to say with too much confidence, but I do know that she was a warrior queen of the Britons during Rome. She basically stood up to Rome. She was a lady who said "fuck you" to Rome.
4:10 Liv Albert? So here's her story and Jen was amazing enough to put a bunch of episodes of their series on Boudicca generally and then Roman Britain overall because what a perfect way to get you guys listening to some ancient Roman Britain, but specifically Boudicca. So there's a playlist, a Spotify playlist linked in the episode description where you can listen to the rest of their series on Boudicca and more on Roman Britain if you are so inclined. This is Rome. Women don't get to inherit things.
4:56 Speaker 05 Your husband is a good man and while there might be more white in his mustache than black, he is still your tribe's bravest warrior. He is 10 years your senior, but he values your words. Your husband cares for you. He is a kind man, the kind of man you can build a life with. So it sticks in your throat that you cannot agree with him on this thing, this big thing that he is asking of you, of all the Iceni, his people. You sat with him as the Romans offered their terms for peace. Throw down all your swords, they said, and they will let your tribe alone. They will allow you to live under your own customs and they will raise your husband to kingship. The Romans spoke as if your husband ruled
5:41 Speaker 05 at their pleasure, as if he gained all his authority from them and not from the will of the Iceni. They are commanding your people to disarm, to throw away their weapons, their ancestral swords and spears and shields. You know why. Neighboring tribes have been fractious. Rebellions have broken out like rashes all over the land. Wales is still on fire. The Romans do not trust even their staunchest allies now, not even your tribe, who allied itself with them at the beginning. The other tribes hated your people for the choice they made, but the Romans were too strong. It seemed the only way. At the time. But now you are questioning everything.
6:24 Speaker 05 You sat quietly by your husband's side, clenching and unclenching your fists as the Romans made their demands. And your husband listened politely, inclined his head, and didn't take out his sword and smash in the lying skulls of the invaders. When the Romans are gone, he asks for the room to be cleared so you two may speak in private. You start in immediately. Has he forgotten the siege at Stonia Camp? You demand. The men, women, and children who were butchered by the Romans. You will never forget the sight of that small boy's head cleaved in by a Roman sword. You watch as his face falls in upon itself, like a cliff sliding into the heaving sea.
7:05 Speaker 05 When he looks at you with his dark, kind eyes, all you feel is his weakness. And you do not know how you can bear to stand by his side, raise his children, and rule with him for another moment. Wife, he says, we must do this thing. And I know that you would counsel me against it, but there is no other way. I will not see our people in chains. I will not watch as these terrible men lay their hands upon my wife and children and haul them away before me as I stand helpless. I see no other way. I will not watch as our people are destroyed. What are warriors without swords, you demand? What are we without the ability to defend ourselves? We are their captives. We are their subjects, he answers.
7:50 Speaker 05 And we get to rule ourselves. We get to keep our lands. He reaches out to uncurl your clenched hands. What good are lands when we don't have the means to protect them, you ask? What happens when these Romans change their mind and want our land or our people for themselves? Your husband takes your hands in his. My wife, they have asked us to throw away our swords and we shall. But we are metalworkers and warriors. When the Romans turn their eyes west or south or north, when they believe they have subdued us, we will forge new weapons, stronger weapons. Because the god Camulus will not let this slight to us go unanswered. He is slow to answer. But he sees all. You smile, your spirits lifting.
8:34 Speaker 05 Perhaps he has not been so quick to sell your people's dignity after all. The king keeps his sword, you say. Tell the Romans that it is a matter of ceremony. The pompous Romans will understand that. Then, we will give them their show of disarming, but we will tell our people that the swords they are giving up aren't for the Romans. They are a sacrifice for Camulus, for Androstae, for Apona, who have seen these injustices and will guide our hands to victory when the time comes. Yes, your husband says, his hands hold yours, warm and strong. And now you are as one, when the time comes. I'm Jen McMenamy.
9:13 Speaker 06 And I'm Jenny Williamson, and this is Ancient History Fangirl.
9:17 Speaker 05 Jenny, we're here, we're finally here.
9:20 Speaker 06 I cannot believe we've actually made it to this episode. We've been talking about it for years.
9:24 Speaker 05 Three years.
9:25 Speaker 06 Yes, it was like one of the earliest episodes we wanted to do.
9:29 Speaker 05 I have literally been waiting to tell this story since we launched the podcast. And as I'm sure everyone listening has figured out by now, I really love a good revolution. I love digging into the story of people who either peaceably worked for change or took up arms to overthrow their oppressors. Ancient history is rife with these stories of revolution. And the story of Boudicca's revolt is just about as epic as you can get. There's Romans behaving badly because it's Romans. They're almost always behaving badly. We're gonna talk about sexual assault and rape in this episode. So this is your warning towards the end of the episode. There's also murder and flames. And there is a layer of destruction that was literally scorched
10:12 Speaker 05 into the archaeological record of London and Colchester. That layer is called the Boudicca layer.
10:18 Speaker 06 I love that so much.
10:20 Speaker 05 Me too. So I didn't know a lot about Boudicca until I visited the UK for the first time as an exchange student. My then boyfriend and now husband, geez, it's such a long time ago, we were babies. He was the first one to introduce me to this story of Boudicca. And I think he saw some strange kinship between broke student Jen with her Wild curly untamed ginger hair, my gross paint splatter jeans, my purple Doc Martens and my army surplus bag that was literally covered in a million patches. And an ancient Iron Age warrior queen. But let's be honest, I have no idea what the comparison is there because I just look like a broke ass student.
10:59 Speaker 06 It must have been the hair.
11:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, I did not look like any kind of Celtic or I see new royalty, but I guess that's what love does to you.
11:07 Speaker 06 Love goggles, possibly beer goggles.
11:09 Speaker 05 Absolutely. But it was this moment, all those years ago, that my boyfriend with his love beer goggles sat me down in a pub. And over a few pints, he began to spin the tale of Boudicca. And that Jenny is the moment when my obsession started.
11:25 Speaker 06 Who was this Iron Age warrior queen who stood up to the Romans? Whose name was so revered and feared that stories of her were still spun almost 2,000 years later? We had to know more. We were hooked. I mean, mainly Jen was hooked, but I was hooked too. I love this story.
11:42 Speaker 05 This is one of those stories that we fought to tell. Jenny and I, at the beginning of every season, sit down and carve out the season. And there are always stories that both of us kind of want to tell. And because we're friends and because you gotta divide the work evenly, you know, we can't always tell the stories we want to. But this, this was the Boudicca burn layer hill I was gonna die on.
12:03 Speaker 06 I mean, I wanted to tell the story of Anglesey and the Druid's Last Stand and Jen really wanted to do Boudicca. And I think the cool thing about it is that these two stories actually happen around the same time. So we kind of made Boudicca the capstone because we've been, we've been laying the burn layer, I suppose you could say, for the entire season. And now we finally, I mean, we've talked about Anglesey, we've talked about the Druid's Last Stand. We've talked about how the Romans conquered England, what the situation was like. There's a lot about the history that we've just laid down, you know, as a foundation for this. We've talked about Celtic women in mythology. We've talked about ancient female Druids and the Morrigan and the possible roots of genocide of female power holders in Celtic culture
12:46 Speaker 06 that may be echoing down the years in those myths, which I think is really Interesting. And now we're finally getting to one of those extremely powerful women that we get to talk about. And I'm really excited about that. Like, she kind of combines everything that we've done elsewhere in this arc. So I think it's really important that we're telling her story and that we're telling it here.
13:03 Speaker 05 I think without knowing what was going on in Engelsie and how dire everything is at this particular moment in the, you know, occupation of Roman Britain, you don't understand exactly what this revolution meant in the same way.
13:18 Speaker 06 So when we discuss spending a season in Roman Britain, we knew exactly what story Jen wanted to cover, as we said. Boudicca, the legendary queen of the Iceni. But the story of Boudicca and her people is the story of a world on a precipice of great change. Because Boudicca's is the story of one of the biggest revolts and possibly the final revolt in southern England against Roman rule. But let's start with the most intriguing question of all. Who was Boudicca?
13:47 Speaker 05 Well, this is not an easy question to answer because we don't actually know a lot about Boudicca. Even her name is open to debate. And all the archaeological evidence that we find about Boudicca just leaves us with more questions. More things we desperately want to know about the warrior queen who almost convinced Nero to abandon the Roman provinces in Britain, according to the ancient Roman sources. So let's start with what we do know. It's very likely that there was a real Boudicca. But like Spartacus or Vercingetorix or Carthacus or Alaric of the Visigoths, Boudicca probably wasn't her real name. Boudicca essentially comes from a Celtic word for victory.
14:29 Speaker 05 Her name means victory or Victoria or Victorian in Latin. And while it's possible this was her actual name, it's more likely this was an honorific given to Boudicca by her people and then passed along to the Romans who chronicled her story.
14:46 Speaker 06 Boudicca was probably born around 30 AD, although we don't know this for sure. All we know for sure is that she died in 61 AD at the Battle of Watling Street, and that would have made her 31 when she died, if we're going with that birthdate. She would have likely been a teenager when Claudius's Roman military campaign began in 43 AD, and a young teenager, she would have been like 13. She would have seen the foreigners come to her land after hearing the stories of Julius Caesar's ill-fated campaign about 100 years before. She would have looked at these foreigners and their weapons of war, and maybe she would have felt a sense of unease. What if this time, the Romans decided to stay, rather than, as Julius Caesar did, packing up and leaving? What if this time, they couldn't be bought off with a tribute? What would that mean for her people?
15:31 Speaker 06 In her late teens, Boudicca may have seen what happened to the tribes who rebelled against Rome. She would have watched as Carataucus united the tribes when the Romans attacked his ancestral seat in Camulodunum, which is near Mater De Colchester, and waged a war that ravaged across southeastern England. A war that Carataucus's followers wound up losing. Their lands taken, their families sold into slavery. The people who rose up against Rome wound up the worst for wear, and that is an understatement.
15:59 Speaker 05 Boudicca's tribe, the Iceni, didn't fight with Carataucus. Instead, they were one of 11 who allied with Rome and paid tribute to Claudius's generals.
16:09 Speaker 06 That was a thing that they did 100 years ago, too, when Julius Caesar came to Britain.
16:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, they were one of the original six.
16:16 Speaker 06 Yeah, and that time, Julius Caesar took their tribute and was like, "Yep, I rule now", and then he left, and no one ever saw him again. So I could imagine that they were thinking, "Maybe we can just pay them off again." Like, it's not a bad strategy. Like, we'll just say it, we don't have to start a war, we'll just give them some money and hostages, and they'll go away and never come back. Sucks for the hostages, but just give them people we don't like.
16:35 Speaker 05 We're only three pages in, and it's gone real dark.
16:40 Speaker 06 Right. I'm sorry, whose podcast do you think this is? Are you new here?
16:45 Speaker 05 So, a teenager at the time, when Caratacas rebelled, Boudicca couldn't have known that the peace they bought with their allegiance to Rome would be as fragile as a dragonfly's wing. But this peace was preferable to the violence that the tribes who sided with Caratacas faced. It was a peace that let the Iceni live a life, keep their customs, and trade with the Romans. And, for the most part, continue on the way they always had. We don't know much about Boudicca's early life. It's possible she had druidic training, or was a priestess of Androsthe, the Iceni goddess of victory. All of this is based on tales we have from Tacitus, writing about fifteen to thirty years in the future, or Cassius Dio. He's a source who loves to explode the salacious details,
17:30 Speaker 05 and he was writing about a hundred years in the future. And we're gonna tell you these details in the next episode, so don't be like, "Where are these details?" They're coming.
17:38 Speaker 06 Things that made the ancient Romans think that maybe Boudicca had druidic training, is what you're saying?
17:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, or why she might have been a priestess to Androsthe. We will actually see that in the next episode, because that's where we're gonna pull those quotes from, or those examples from. But you have to remember, these are both Roman sources, and they both had axes to grind. Both against a female ruler, and against the ruling class of Rome. But, as always, they're what we have to go by.
18:05 Speaker 06 Neither Tacitus nor Dio mentions the words "druidic training" or "priestess." Instead, they imply Boudicca's knowledge by her actions. Actions which could have been misinterpreted by the Roman chroniclers, or deliberately manipulated to make Boudicca seem like something she wasn't, to horrify a Roman audience who would have picked up what they were putting down. Druids were scary. Druids were especially scary during this time period. Druids were these strange people who practiced human sacrifices, according to the ancient Romans, and who had spent the last few years making a lot of trouble on the British front, and on the Gallic front before that. All of this would have been known to the average Roman. They would have been hearing these scary tales about Druids for over a hundred years. It's in the commentaries. Julius Caesar was writing...
18:50 Speaker 06 Lurid paragraphs about the wicker man and druidic sacrifice in the commentaries that he was sending back from Gaul to be read in public squares all over Rome. So people had this image of the Druids as very scary people. These Roman chroniclers knew that giving Boudicca even the slightest hint of otherworldly power, it was basically othering her. It would present her as, to a Roman reader, as not the average woman who sat at your side and bore your children and ran your household. It presented her as an aberration, a wolf in a woman's dress. And this distinction is important because to imply that Boudicca, a mere woman, could lead an uprising that would nearly cost the Romans the British province, would be to accept that women were truly men's equal and maybe even people who could,
19:33 Speaker 06 if the situation was right, snap and spark a revolution that would end in fire and blood. Dudes didn't want to hear that women had this capability because it's like, well, I have a woman in my house. What's she gonna do to me?
19:45 Speaker 05 Exactly. They didn't want to think that, oh my goodness, all women could be pushed to the point where they could be revolutionaries. They could just overthrow the yoke of this oppression that's been on them. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. She has to be something else. She can't be a woman. It just can't be that.
20:00 Speaker 06 Those dudes probably were doing things that their wives would want to burn their house down over and like lay down a Boudicca burn layer.
20:08 Speaker 05 There's a lot of fragile dick energy here. And yes, we salute queens. They have coined that term.
20:12 Speaker 06 I think we owe them some money now.
20:14 Speaker 05 We just owe them a pint the next time we see them.
20:16 Speaker 06 We'll buy them a drink next time we're in the same town. I would love to do that.
20:19 Speaker 05 So let's, let's continue in the othering of Boudicca.
20:22 Speaker 06 We were busy othering Boudicca. Let's continue.
20:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, let's continue. It's fine. What did Boudicca look like? Even this is open to debate. According to Cassius Dio, quote, "In stature she was very tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh. A great mass of the tiniest hair fell to her hips. Around her neck was a large golden necklace, and she wore a tunic of diverse covellers, over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch. This was her invariable attire." So let's break this down. Cassius Dyer tells us that Boeotia was a giant of a woman.
21:04 Speaker 06 Just massive.
21:05 Speaker 05 So massive, so tall. She was Brienne of Tarth, okay?
21:08 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah, absolutely.
21:10 Speaker 05 She was terrifying with her waist-length flaming red hair, and she wore a tunic of diverse colors. She would have been wearing a tribal tunic, most likely of like a plaid or like a tartan pattern, because we know that that is something that we see in ancient Gallic and Celtic cultures.
21:26 Speaker 06 The Gauls are described as wearing what we would recognize as plaid in Roman times, which is really interesting. So that's kind of what I pick up of that.
21:34 Speaker 05 That's what I'm picking up as well. And Jenny, I just, I can't leave out the most important detail. The bling, the large gold necklace she wore. Most likely, this necklace was a torque.
21:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, a torque was a symbol of power in Celtic culture.
21:49 Speaker 05 It was, and these neck torques were very rarely worn by women. They were largely ceremonial, as they were pretty heavy to wear, and they were almost always worn by men, distinguished warriors. Sometimes warriors went into battle only wearing their torques, or nobility, or kings. Wearing a torque would make Boeotia stand out as a female leader, who was so fierce that she wore a necklace traditionally worn by men, by warriors or kings. She was formidable in every sense of the word, including her fashion sense.
22:21 Speaker 06 Yeah, and so like a torque is a, it's not really like a necklace the way I picture a necklace. I mean, I guess it's a kind of necklace, but like, it's more like a round tube, like a really thick neck ring, sometimes very elaborately decorated, with a gap in one side so that you can fit it around your neck, or sometimes they make them for like your arm or your wrist, too. And I imagine that this torque was a symbol of her rulership. She might have taken it off her husband's corpse. That's my thought.
22:46 Speaker 05 Totally. That is, that's what I'm picking up from what the Romans are laying down. She is wearing the king's torque. She is the ruler. They're looking at her wearing a warrior's torque going like, what am I seeing here?
22:57 Speaker 06 Very hardcore.
22:58 Speaker 05 Love it.
22:59 Speaker 06 Archaeology doesn't tell us that the Iron Age Britons were particularly tall, and there is no evidence that the ancient language spoken by the Isini would have been harsh to the ear. Although, I don't know, like, in terms of, you know, what ancient Beratonic sounds like. What did it sound like? I don't know.
23:16 Speaker 05 I did not feel the need to go down a rabbit hole to research this.
23:19 Speaker 06 So, why does this description matter so much? This description of this towering woman with this harsh voice and this flaming red hair and this massive torque, they're othering her. It serves to make her into this, you know, giant, massive boogie woman who had a harsh voice, who wore the necklace of a warrior king so she was, you know, stepping outside of her appropriate gender role, according to the Romans, whose hair was long and wild. In short, she was a terrifying figure.
23:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, that was hair that was not styled like a noble Roman woman's would be.
23:51 Speaker 06 Right. It was wild and streaming down her back as she rode her chariot into war.
23:56 Speaker 05 Woohoo!
23:58 Speaker 06 In short, she was a terrifying barbarian, not a woman. Certainly not a woman like a proper Roman wife or mother. I mean, that's the comparison. And she's not, you know, the only woman from outside of the Roman culture that gets very othered in Roman writing. Another one is Cleopatra, but they're really treated differently. Boudicca isn't described as beautiful and cultured. Well, I mean, Cleopatra wasn't really described by contemporary sources as beautiful either.
24:22 Speaker 05 Well, she was described as alluring, you know? There was something charismatic, you know?
24:27 Speaker 06 Yeah. I would say like educated and cultured, like Cleopatra, who was another feared and revered queen who took up arms against Rome. In fact, Boudicca is, she's like the anti-Cleopatra. She's the complete polar opposite.
24:40 Speaker 05 Yes.
24:41 Speaker 06 She's rough and tumble. She can beat you in an arm wrestling match. She might be a queen, but she's not a queen like Cleopatra. She is a warrior queen.
24:49 Speaker 05 And here's another fascinating link between Boudicca and Cleopatra. They both, according to some contemporary sources and artwork, had red hair.
24:57 Speaker 06 And that's really interesting. Sometimes Cleopatra was depicted in ancient artwork as having red hair.
25:02 Speaker 05 Yes, which, I mean, I don't believe she had red hair, but you know, I just, I want to talk about this for a minute because the red hair is kind of an interesting othering thing that we've seen several times in the ancient sources. We know that Boudicca is usually depicted as being a redhead, you know, wild ginger like me, but we don't actually know that her hair was red. It could just as easily have been brown or strawberry blonde or blonde or black. Because here's the thing about redheads in antiquity, particularly in ancient Rome. Describing people as having red hair was a way to other them, to set them apart and make them the enemy. We saw this with the Thracians, and it's possible we're seeing it here too.
25:46 Speaker 06 We also saw it in vampire myths.
25:48 Speaker 05 We did. In particular, redheads in ancient Greece were believed to be vampires when they die because they had red hair. That was, that was literally all there was to it.
25:57 Speaker 06 Yeah, like redheads were believed to be these supernatural, soulless beings. And I think that that carried into ancient Rome. And there's all this baggage around that, which we break down in, in our, I think our first vampires episode, which is way back, but it's a good one.
26:11 Speaker 05 So while I, while I don't think that Cleopatra actually had red hair, like, let's be honest here. I mean, it's possible, but I really don't think it. I really do hope that Boudicca had red hair. But it's just as likely that she wasn't a ginger and that this hair color was given to her to make her more fierce and more unlike the Romans. Because red hair in Rome was rare and it would have taken lots of dye or a good wig maker to achieve. So the idea of natural red hair was something pretty unnatural to most Romans.
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27:30 Liv Albert? and I have my go-to woven leather bag. I seriously use it everywhere. That's why it's with me here. It's beautiful and it's practical and it's from Quince. And I actually have a parcel to pick up when I, when I get back home, which has some goodies in there. I got this pair of corduroy high-rise pants. I'm really excited to try those out as soon as I get home. And everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% Less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you can give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. So, give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive
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29:10 Speaker 06 So, to recap, Boudicca was possibly an unusually tall, possibly redheaded teenager when Claudius first came to England. She was from a high-born family, that's pretty well-known, and she no doubt heard all the news about the southern tribes rebelling under Caratacus, their devastating loss, and Caratacus having to flee to Wales to continue the fight. Her own tribe, meanwhile, the Iceni, made peace and paid tribute to the Romans. So, who were the Iceni? The Iceni lived in the east of England, where modern-day Norfolk is located. They lived in an area that was mostly lowlands, and their primary exports were their exquisite metalwork and horses. They must have been very secure in their tribal lands, because
29:53 Speaker 06 archaeology tells us that they didn't have many hillforts. I mean, possibly because they lacked hills, because it's kind of hard to have a hillfort without a hill to put it on, and that their strongholds were potentially shared with their tribal Neighbors and allies, the Trinovantes.
30:08 Speaker 05 However, because of the destruction to this area, even the fact that they don't have like vitrified hillforts, or any hillforts, is hard to say for sure. This area was razed to the ground during the Roman occupation. And the only evidence we have of any kind of gathering of both the Iceni and the Trinovantes is this massive sort of, it's a cache, but not a cache the way you're thinking, like, it's this massive amount of brooches that have been excavated in the area, dating from around the time of Boudicca's rebellion. Historians believe that the place where the brooches were excavated may have been used as a gathering place for the tribes, maybe as Boudicca staged one of her first battles.
30:47 Speaker 06 Were these all brooches that were excavated like in one place, like on a hill that seemed to be a gathering place?
30:53 Speaker 05 So I was reading a modern historian who was talking about this. And what they were saying was they weren't buried in the ground, like when we find like the sacrificed brooches or things like that.
31:02 Speaker 06 Yeah, that was my other question is like, if you have like a cache of brooches, I'm kind of picturing either someone has buried a sack of brooches, which is like their wealth and they intend to, you know, return for it later, or they maybe broke the brooches and they are burying them as a sacrifice. And that's not what's happening here, right?
31:20 Speaker 05 That's not what's happening here. What's happening here, they believe, is so many people were gathered together in what might have been a staging ground for a battle or like a big meeting hall, that they were jostled around and that brooches actually just fell off and were sort of trampled into the ground. And later on were found over this wide area that they think would have been an ancient hall. So they don't think they were broken and put here. They think this was an ancient hall or gathering place. That because at a certain point in time, Boudicca's army may have had up to as many as 120,000 people in it. You would have had so many people jostling together that they just lost some of their brooches. And brooches are found so commonly in archaeology, more than other things, because they were actually pretty easy to lose.
32:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's really interesting. And I'm thinking about like the way that the clothes were back then. Like, I mean, I guess they could sew, because I know they found needles that like come from, you know, even the Paleolithic. I'm sure people knew how to sew, but I think that the way- That clothes were constructed was like really simply and a lot of clothing. This is true of the Romans and I think it's true of Celtic cultures with their, you know, really big cloaks. A lot of the time, your clothing is like a big piece of cloth that you arrange over yourself and then hold in place somehow. In the Celtic cultures, this would have been a big drapy cloak that was held in place with a brooch, or maybe it would have been a tunic that would have been held up at the shoulders with a brooch, like a big ornate pin. So it was, you know, a way to hold your clothes together back before there were buttons and zippers and things like that.
32:46 Speaker 05 That's why they find so many brooches and earrings. Think about earrings, they fall off a lot, too.
32:50 Speaker 06 I can attest to that.
32:51 Speaker 05 But yeah, so that's what they think happened here.
32:54 Speaker 06 People who wear brooches today, and sometimes it's like more decorative, like it's just kind of pinned to your shirt as an accent, as opposed to as, you know, a tool to hold your clothes together.
33:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, the way modern fashion tends to incorporate brooches is on your cardigan or on your coat or stuff like that. But at this point in time, the function of a brooch would be to hold your clothes or your cloak or your whatever, to hold it to you so you didn't wind up naked.
33:20 Speaker 06 You're right. So there's a lot of people in this army who are all of a sudden winding up naked because their brooches fell off in this meeting. And this is why they fought naked with only their torque. I figure it solved an ancient mystery.
33:31 Speaker 05 Exactly. We've solved it. That's what they think. And you would imagine if brooches were this important, then they probably would have had other means to hold the clothing together. I imagine needles and stuff like that. Anyway, let's get back to our story now that we've broken down the brooches. The Iceni sided with the Romans quickly after Claudius's invasion began, and they did well out of their partnership. It's hard to know why they sided with the Romans so quickly, whether the Romans made them an offer, a bribe, promises of many ornate busts of Julius Caesar.
34:02 Speaker 06 How many busts? Exactly six?
34:05 Speaker 05 Exactly six. Whatever was promised, it was an offer they couldn't refuse. Or maybe the Iceni had seen enough of Roman might to understand that fighting them would be a losing battle. We don't know what persuaded the Iceni to become a client kingdom of the Romans. I suspect a fairly hefty gift or bribe from Claudius would have done the trick. But we do know that for many years, they paid their tributes, traded with Romans, and ruled their lands with a Roman-approved tribal leader.
34:35 Speaker 06 I mean, I suspect that they thought that if they just kind of gave lip service to the Romans, they'd go away, which is what happened 100 years ago. But who knows? We don't have that documented. So the Iceni were also horse lords. They were expert horse breeders and horse tamers. They would have worshipped the horse goddess Ipona, her name literally means horse. And they were expert metalworkers, as we've talked about. We know this from archaeological discoveries of astounding metalwork found in Iceni territory. The Snedegymtorq, which is one of the most famous and ornate Celtic torques ever found, was found in Iceni territory and dates to around the time of Boudicca's rebellion. And I kind of want to do a mini-soat about that and maybe some other really cool metalwork finds
35:20 Speaker 06 in Iceni territory. What do you think, Jen?
35:22 Speaker 05 I'm down for it.
35:23 Speaker 06 The Iceni recycled the gold they used from earlier items, but they must have imported silver, as it wasn't naturally occurring. They didn't have silver mines. They also didn't have gold mines. They didn't have mines, is what I'm picking up, right? Maybe they had tin mines?
35:37 Speaker 05 They had tin and copper, definitely. I don't know about gold, but I know that they didn't have silver. So the idea that they were making things out of silver, particularly coins, means that they had to be trading with people outside of their tribe.
35:50 Speaker 06 So anyway, what this suggests is that the Iceni were on the British trade routes, which means that they were not isolated from the outside world. And that's important because one kind of more modern narrative about the Iceni is that the Romans left them alone because they were kind of out in a backwater and nobody cared about them and they kind of just lived in the woods. And that's not the case.
36:08 Speaker 05 That's not the case at all. They were a part of what was going on. They saw what was going on in the world around them and to their tribes around them. They weren't just off on their own, doing their own thing.
36:18 Speaker 06 So the Iceni made their own coins? This is from pre-Roman times, right? Or did they start making coins after the Romans came?
36:25 Speaker 05 I believe there are some from pre-Roman times, but what we see is during Roman times, we actually see writing on the coins, which we can sort of identify as probably being Latin. What we see at this particular point in time is that the Iceni were minting coins during the time of Boudicca's revolt and just before, that we can actually... Actually read and we can read them as having characters like that say I C E N meaning Iceni. So this was probably in Latin, I would imagine. So that the Romans they were trading with could also read who they were. And that might have been a more common tongue.
37:01 Speaker 06 They didn't write things down. I mean, that's the whole thing about being Celtic and Druidism. So I think it would have been Latin letters, you know, this was a Romanization thing.
37:08 Speaker 05 Exactly. I'll put in the show notes, the different examples of the coins that we've found. But there is very famously one that says I C E N. There's no I. It's got a horse on it. Sometimes on the back it even said, who made the coin? There's one that's got like, made by this person. And there's definitely a spelling error in their name.
37:23 Speaker 06 That's cool.
37:24 Speaker 05 It is really, really cool and fascinating, but it does show that these coins that were being minted now really had a Roman influence. They were trading these coins that had their tribal signifiers that had their tribal culture on them with the Romans. And they were including things like their tribal name on it. So that the Romans or whoever else this coin was passed on to could see that the Iceni were a tribe and there were people who traded with the Romans.
37:51 Speaker 06 I mean, what's cool about the coins with writing on them is that this is some of the first writing ever found in Britain. And it's not Roman writing, it's Celtic writing using Roman script. So the Iceni stayed a Roman allied tribe for roughly 17 years. And for most of that time, they didn't cause the Romans much trouble. But there was one time before Boudicca's rebellion that they did cause trouble. That the Iceni told the Romans they could fuck right the fuck off.
38:17 Speaker 05 They did. Iceni had been living under Roman rule for about four years. It had been an uneasy time, but mostly a peaceful one for the Iceni. I mean, we talked about this when we rehearsed it. Essentially, it was kind of like a quarantine where you can see all the awful things going on in the world outside of you. And you're kind of like, if I stay in my bubble and I stay in my lane, things should be okay, right?
38:39 Speaker 06 Don't look to the right, don't look to the left, just look ahead and keep walking and don't make any trouble. And we'll be fine, we'll be just fine.
38:47 Speaker 05 Yeah. And this worked for a while, but then the Romans installed a new governor of the British province, Publius Austrius Scapula.
38:58 Speaker 06 Oh, I remember Scapula.
39:00 Speaker 05 Oh, I remember Scapula too.
39:01 Speaker 06 How could you forget?
39:03 Speaker 05 You can't. Scapula was the second governor of the British province and he was not taking any shit from anyone.
39:11 Speaker 06 He was a hard ass.
39:12 Speaker 05 He was a hard ass. He'd seen enough uprisings. He knew how fragile the Roman hold was on his province, and he decided that all the allied Celtic tribes in the province needed to throw down their weapons and submit to Roman rule.
39:26 Speaker 06 Even though they already had submitted to Roman rule because they were allies, he wanted them to go just this one step farther.
39:32 Speaker 05 The Iceni were not okay with this. They were happy to work with Rome. I mean, I don't know if they were happy, but they were willing to. They gave them tributes and traded with them, but they were proud Celtic warriors. They were metalworkers. They were not about to throw down their swords and just obey these outsiders. So the Iceni rose up and rebelled against Scapula. The battle went down at a hillfort, most likely Stony A Camp near Cambridge. Whose hillfort was this? We don't know because we've just spent some time saying that the Iceni didn't really have hills or hillforts.
40:07 Speaker 06 Right, so this might have been like a Trinovanti's fort, like an allied neighbor's fort?
40:12 Speaker 05 That's what I think. They don't mention the other sort of allied people fighting with them, but I can assume, and I think you can assume, that if this was happening to the Iceni, it was happening to everyone else and they were all pissed off about it at the same time.
40:24 Speaker 06 They just called up the Trinovantes and they're like, hey, can we have the keys to your hillfort for like a weekend?
40:29 Speaker 05 They were like, fuck yeah, and we'll tell you why in a little bit. So, yeah, maybe one of the neighboring tribes let them borrow their hillfort for the weekend because they also didn't agree with a no weapons ban. The ancient sources don't tell us which one if this is the case. Anyway, after a hard fought battle, Scapula stormed the fort and managed to put down the revolt. The archaeological evidence of what happened is really gruesome. Jenny, do you remember that? I can't remember exactly what happened.
40:56 Speaker 06 Well, this is just the Wikipedia page about Stony A Camp, which was a hillfort, I guess adjacent to Iceni territory. I forget exactly where it was, but they found skeletons in the hillfort with sword marks on them dating from around this time. Including the skull of a child that had been cleaved in two with like a bladed weapon, like an axe or a sword, I think.
41:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, which is horrifying. Once this revolt was put down, the Iceni must have had something the Romans really wanted to trade because they were allowed to remain independent as long as they gave up their weapons. And we know that wasn't the case for other tribes, you know?
41:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, the fact that the Romans didn't just enslave everybody right then is, I don't know what it tells us, but it tells us something.
41:39 Speaker 05 It tells us there was something there that the Romans valued or wanted from the Iceni that we don't know. And the Roman sources don't tell us what that thing is either because potentially it might be something that put them in a negative light. They might have, they might have had good grazing land. They might have been where the Romans were planting things to feed everyone.
41:58 Speaker 06 They could have done that without the Iceni there, though. You know, they could have taken the grazing land and the agricultural land. Like, we don't really know what's going on. So the Iceni this time ruled over and decided that they would do what the Romans told them and disarm themselves and get rid of their weapons. Their old king had either fallen in battle, or he was deposed by the Romans and a new king was crowned, a new Roman-approved, Roman-allied king who was gonna play ball. And that was, how do I say this? Prostetagus.
42:28 Speaker 05 Pursut- Pursutagus.
42:30 Speaker 06 Prostetagus.
42:32 Speaker 05 Pursutagus.
42:33 Speaker 06 Prostegosaurus.
42:35 Speaker 05 Oh, boy.
42:35 Speaker 06 Prostegosaurus was, he was a dinosaur, kind of an old-fashioned guy.
42:40 Speaker 05 He was pro-Roman.
42:42 Speaker 06 The thing about Prostegosaurus is he was okay with throwing away his sword because he still had that very spiky tail.
42:48 Speaker 05 He did. He had a really spiky tail. He had those like spiked ridges all along his back. He was Prostegosaurus. It's fine.
42:56 Speaker 06 Were those ridges just for defense? Or, you know, did they have like blood vessels? Were they kind of an erogenous zone? We don't know.
43:02 Speaker 05 We don't know, and we are not going to be writing weird dinosaur Iron Age king erotica on this podcast, Jenny Williamson.
43:10 Speaker 06 I bet Boudicaneu.
43:11 Speaker 05 Oh, we know Boudicaneu.
43:13 Speaker 06 But she's not telling us, so we're just gonna speculate filthily.
43:16 Speaker 05 I mean, I don't think I can stop you, so.
43:19 Speaker 06 Prostegasaurus and his wife, Boudicca, ruled together over the Iceni for 13 years, and those were prosperous years for their tribe. Everything was fine. It was fine. Just don't step out of line and it's fine. Until it wasn't. Prostegasaurus fell ill and died in 60 AD. We don't know much more about his death, except that the ancient sources seem to say that it was natural. He was a pragmatic king, and he wanted his kingdom to be secure once he passed away. He and Boudicca hadn't had any sons, but they did have daughters. I mean, he was, you know, Prostegasaurus was, he was a pragmatic king. He was salt of the earth.
43:58 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, as salt of the earth as a noble dinosaur can be, but sure.
44:02 Speaker 06 That's right. He was a noble dinosaur king, salt of the earth, gives you the shirt off his back.
44:08 Speaker 05 Great giant golden torque that he goes naked into battle with.
44:13 Speaker 06 I mean, look, he doesn't need a lot of clothing in battle anyway, because he has natural occurring armor.
44:19 Speaker 05 Oh, Presuticus, I'm so sorry this is happening to your memory.
44:23 Speaker 06 I bet he'd love it.
44:24 Speaker 05 Probably.
44:25 Speaker 06 What I'm trying to say is that Prostegasaurus and Boudicca didn't have any sons, but they did have daughters. And this wasn't that major of a concern for Prostegasaurus or his people. He was happy for his kingdom to pass on to his daughters to rule once they came of age. And we don't, I mean, I think that what we basically know about women in Celtic law, what I know anyway, comes from Brahan law, which I believe is Irish and from about 1,000 years or so in the future. So it's a little bit iffy, but the picture we get is that women did have a lot more status in this culture than women did in ancient Greece and Rome, including, you know, their ability to own and inherit property. And also, dinosaurs aren't sexist. So he had absolutely no problem with his kingdom going to his daughters.
45:08 Speaker 05 I'm really glad to hear that dinosaurs aren't sexist. That really, that warms the cockles of my cold, dead heart.
45:17 Speaker 06 What is a cockle?
45:18 Speaker 05 I'm gonna giggle it. Oh, okay, so this expression uses the corruption of the Latin name for the heart ventricles. So the coccylicordis would mean ventricles. And so when you say it warms the cockles, you're literally saying it warms the ventricles of my heart.
45:34 Speaker 06 Interesting. I didn't know that.
45:37 Speaker 06 So, I'm trying to talk about this will. So, Prostegsaurus had a will drawn up which stated that half of his kingdom would be left to the emperor and the other half to his daughters once they came of age. And this was a very strategic, wily move. It was a Roman move. A move that spoke of a dinosaur man who had submitted to the rule and laws of his Roman occupiers and who wanted to make sure that they were not gonna find any way to screw him over here. They were gonna be appeased. He was trying to appease the Romans and ensure that there was something left of his kingdom to pass on. I don't know exactly what was going on here with Prostegsaurus, like if he had Roman citizenship at this time, because what we do know about Britons who attained Roman
46:22 Speaker 06 citizenship is that a lot of the time, it would have been somebody like him who was a ruler of a tribe that the Romans wanted to keep loyal at this point in history. And if you had citizenship, you were allowed to pass things down to your heirs, but if you didn't, you were not.
46:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, the assumption I got in the research was certainly that historians seem to think that he believed he had Roman citizenship. Now, whether or not he did or didn't, or whether or not Nero decided not to honor things that Claudius gave people 13 years ago, we'll never know exactly. But the belief is that he made this will in particular to make sure that his lands would pass to his daughters.
47:00 Speaker 06 Right, so theoretically, this should have been ironclad and honored, but who the fuck knows? Prostegsaurus was a king, after all.
47:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, his words should have been law in his own kingdom.
47:11 Speaker 06 You would think that, but there's one major problem here. Prostegsaurus began his reign during the rule of Claudius, but he died during the rule of Nero.
47:21 Speaker 05 So essentially, his major problem is a Nero-shaped, ginger-neck-bearded problem.
47:27 Speaker 06 Nero neckbeard enters the story.
47:30 Speaker 05 Yup, it's time to talk about our favorite neckbearded emperor. So Nero was living it up in Rome. He just had his mother, Agrippina the Younger, executed. He divorced his wife Octavia, and he's living his best life with his mistress-turned-wife, Sabine. With his mom, dad, and his, you know, royal stepsister-wife out of the picture, there were now no checks on Nero's power. Nobody was reining him in. And things in Rome were gonna get really, really wild, according to the ancient sources.
48:03 Speaker 06 Things were about to get extremely out of hand.
48:06 Speaker 05 Shit was gonna go down.
48:09 Speaker 06 That's right.
48:10 Speaker 05 So Nero's advisors, including the statesman, author, and now financier, yeah, somehow he managed to become Nero's master of coin. And yes, I know that's not a real job, but it's effectively, that's what it was. Fuck you Seneca was getting a bit exhausted with all the fighting going on in Britain. Because while things had been quiet and relatively peaceful in the Iceni Kingdom for the 13 years of Prostegy Saurus's reign, this wasn't the case in other areas of Roman Britain. In fact, the vast majority of Rome's military might in Britain was currently engaged to subdue the Druid uprising in a place called Mona, or Anglesy. And we did a whole episode on this.
48:53 Speaker 05 It's called "Anglesy: The Druid's Last Stand." In case you missed it, here's a basic recap. While the Iceni were living a relatively prosperous life as Roman allies, those who refused to submit to Roman rule had fled to Wales, which quickly became a center for Celtic resistance. The island of Anglesy, off the coast of northwest Wales, was both a refuge for displaced people fleeing Roman violence and a major center of power for the Druids. Protected by deadly straits called "swellys", between the island and the mainland, the Druids supported and egged on the resistance fighters.
49:30 Speaker 06 Around the time of Prostegosaurus's death, the bulk of the Roman forces, the seasoned soldiers, the people who really knew what they were doing, were off in Wales fighting the Druids. They were led by the governor at the time, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus. Scapula, the governor who had made the Iceni give up their swords, had died eight years ago, and there had been a number of governors since then. This is a job with high turnover. The governors of Britain keep dying. Why? I have no idea. To understand why it's important what's going on in Anglesy right now, you have to understand a little bit about the geography of the UK. So Norfolk, where the Iceni were based, is in the southeast of England, about 100 miles northeast of London. And Mona, or Anglesy, is an island off the northwest coast of Wales.
50:13 Speaker 06 So the bulk of the Roman forces were concentrated on the other side of the British Isles, both north-southwise and east-westwise. They were about 300 miles away. This meant that the Romans running the show in the Iceni territory were doing it without the support of their seasoned soldiers, who were all the way over on the other end of the island fighting the Druids. It was like a skeleton crew in Iceni territory right now. And that was a problem for the Romans, because while they were busy in Mona, there was unrest brewing in the southeast.
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51:29 Speaker 05 The Trinavantes, the neighboring tribe of the Iceni, were furious with Rome. The Romans had seized Camulodunin, whose name meant the stronghold of Camulus. Camulus was a Celtic god of war and was sacred to the Trinavantes. And Jenny, you found some stuff about Camulus that I thought was fascinating, so I'm gonna let you talk about it.
51:49 Speaker 06 Yeah, so Camulus was the Celtic god of war. And the thing about Celtic gods, especially Celtic gods that date from the Roman era, is that we know so little about them, especially gods that come from places that the Romans conquered, like Gaul and Britain.
52:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, because they did a really good job when they came in of sort of erasing the local gods and combining them with their gods. So we see this at Bath. A really good example is like that is like temple to Minerva Solus, like Minerva and the sun. But really, Solus is not related to Minerva at all. They've just tried to put the two of them together so that people are going there and worshiping their god.
52:25 Speaker 06 It was like a tool of colonization. And with Camulus, what happened was he got rolled into the god Mars, and a lot of his unique qualities kind of just got erased by the identity of Mars as the years went on. So we don't know that much about Camulus, but we do know a few things. So one of the things about Camulus that sets him apart from Mars is that he was apparently very slow to anger. He doesn't get mad easily, but when his fuse blows, it blows. There were other things about Camulus that it might be interesting to know. Depictions of him often show him wearing ram's horns on his head, and he had an unbreakable sword made of iron. So Camulus was heavily associated with iron.
53:07 Speaker 06 He was believed to guide people to rich iron ore deposits so that they could make swords that would help them defend themselves from their enemies. And it was said that Camulus would search the earth over for the finest iron possible so that he could create the strongest warriors in the world to defend their territory. So he was all about defending what's yours, Camulus. He was a defensive war god and not a colonizing war god. You know what I mean?
53:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, which is... Super fascinating.
53:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, and it's also said that magnetic iron, pieces of magnetic iron were believed to be channeling camulus. Celtic people, you know, in Britain during this time, might carry pieces of magnetic iron as a form of protection and to bring a little piece of camulus's defensive power with them. So, that's a little bit that we know about camulus. But the big thing about camulus is that he's very slow to anger. But when he does get angry, watch out.
54:03 Speaker 05 He's a fucking volcano, kids. So, Camulodunum was originally the ancestral home of the Trinovantes. At some point, it was taken over by the Catavilanii, Caritacus's people. It might have been taken over several times because this area probably had a significance to lots of different tribes who worshiped camulus.
54:21 Speaker 06 If you look at the Roman accounts of what happened when Claudius originally started his invasion of Britain, there's all this conflict there and apparently the Catavilanii were attacking other people and taking over their territory. And this might have been one of the things that happened then, but we don't really know. It's not that clear.
54:39 Speaker 05 It's not that clear because, you know, the Romans didn't really understand the tribal boundaries.
54:44 Speaker 06 Right, and maybe the Trinovantes were allies of the Catavilanii and just lent them the keys to their Iron Age hillfort. We don't know.
54:51 Speaker 05 Anyway, but then the Catavilanii got defeated by the Romans in the forties, driving Caritacus out. The Romans seized this area to create a colonia for retired Roman soldiers. And this is really fascinating. The name of this colony is essentially like the Colonia Victrianus Claudius, which is like the colony of the victory of Claudius.
55:16 Speaker 06 Yeah, and this was like a retirement town for Roman soldiers.
55:19 Speaker 05 For Roman soldiers. And Roman soldiers, these Roman soldiers who could be retiring there might have served on the British front. They could have served on the Gallic front. They could have served anywhere. Like, where you got your retirement, when you retired, wasn't necessarily based on where you served or where you had lived the bulk of your life. So, this colony had grown in importance until it turned into the capital city of Roman Britain. It was a major center for trade, giving access to vital rivers to bring goods into the UK and out of it.
55:47 Speaker 06 Meanwhile, here's how the Roman veterans treated the Trinovantes who already lived in the city. And this is a quote from Tacitus's Annals. Quote, "For these new settlers in the colony of Camulodunum, drove people out of their houses, ejected them from their farms, called them captives and slaves, and the lawlessness of the veterans was encouraged by the soldiers who lived a similar life and hoped for similar license." I'm assuming these other soldiers here were currently employed in the Roman army and were supposed to keep order, but were clearly not doing that. "A temple also erected to the divine Claudius was ever before their eyes, a citadel, as it seemed, of perpetual tyranny. Men chosen as priests had to squander their whole fortunes under the pretense of a religious ceremonial." So, the Roman veterans newly settled in Camulodunum
56:33 Speaker 06 did not treat the Trinovantes well, according to this quote. They drove them out of their homes, took them into slavery, and were encouraged in their violence by local Roman soldiers who were supposed to keep the peace, but who were not keeping the peace. To make matters even worse, I'm going to talk about this temple here. The Romans built a temple to the deified Claudius, their oppressor, in Camulodunum, that the Trinovantes had to look at every day, probably built over a temple of Camulus.
56:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was built over a temple of Camulus. And now you've got the frickin' temple of the deified Claudius. He's not a god, he's just a dude who came in and oppressed them and took their lands. No, no!
57:13 Speaker 06 Yeah, and I want to talk about the thing about the priests, because here's what I'm picking up from this. It's a little bit unclear, but the picture that I'm getting about this is that the Romans forced the highest-ranking Trinovantes to work as priests at this temple and/or to donate all their material goods to it under the pretense of some kind of a religious ceremony. And this was a way to wipe out their power base, basically. The Trinovantes, understandably, harbored a deep and burning rage against the Romans. They were a powder keg, just waiting for the fuse to go off. And this had been going on for years. Like Camulus, they were slow to anger, but when they angered, watch out.
57:52 Speaker 05 Boudicca's husband died in 60 AD. At the time, a procurator called Decianus, Decianus, Decianus.
57:59 Speaker 06 Decianus.
58:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, now all I can see is anus.
58:02 Speaker 06 Decianus Catus. Is that Latin for cat anus or what?
58:07 Speaker 05 I don't like him very much. And as we'll see in episode two, he kind of is a cat anus, although that's unfair to cat anuses.
58:13 Speaker 06 I feel like it's a little bit of an insult to cats, but it does look like cat anus to me.
58:18 Speaker 05 Let's get back to the tenth cat anus, who I am now just gonna call Catus, Decianus Catus.
58:24 Speaker 06 Tenth of his name.
58:25 Speaker 05 Anyway, Decianus Catus was in charge of collecting the taxes and levies against the allied British tribes. He probably wanted to make a name for himself, or at least cement his worth to Nero as someone who could get things done. You know Nero was a very, um, fair weather, moody guy. You want to be the guy who's given him the money for what he wants.
58:48 Speaker 06 He's very spendy.
58:49 Speaker 05 So Decianus, so Decianus.
58:54 Speaker 05 So Catanus!
58:55 Speaker 06 We can't hold it in.
58:57 Speaker 05 Anyway, so he decided it was time to call in all the loans that the British tribes owed to Rome. And according to Cassius Dio, quote, "An excuse for the war was found in the confiscation of the sums of money that Claudius had given the foremost Britons. For these sums, as Decianus Catus, the procurator of the island, maintained, were to be paid back. This was one reason for the uprising. Another, Seneca, bucky Seneca, in the hope of receiving a good rate of interest, had lent the islanders forty million sesterces that they did not want, and had afterwards called in this loan all at once, and had resorted to severe measures in exacting it."
59:39 Speaker 06 What is happening here with this loan?
59:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, let's unpack this a little bit. According to Dio, the Catanus decided to call in all the loans on the allied Celtic tribes. And these loans, some dating back to Claudius, might have been seen by the tribes as gifts and not loans. Possibly, they were even given at the time as bribes to get the tribes on side with Rome at the beginning of the invasion, or to Maintain good relations at some point after. We don't really have any idea.
1:00:09 Speaker 06 Yeah, and then there's this possibility that Seneca had loaned the money that they didn't want, and then immediately called it back, which would make it different than the Claudius loan gifts or whatever bribes.
1:00:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, we don't know exactly what's happening here because I don't think Dio knows exactly what's happening because he's writing about 100 years in the future. And this is obviously something that has been muddled. And at this point in time, both Claudius and Seneca's reputations have taken some smackings.
1:00:39 Speaker 06 I think that probably the most plausible explanation here is that at the beginning of the Roman invasion, Claudius paid some of these tribes off to get them on side. That's possibly what was happening. And now Seneca was saying, alright, it's time for you guys to pay back that loan that these tribes thought was a gift and not a loan.
1:00:58 Speaker 05 But at some point in time, Seneca, according to Dio, gave up 40 million sister-she's. We don't know what he gave this enforced loan for. If it was bribes, if it was trying to get like the Iceni onto like a Roman currency, and that's where maybe some of that silver came from, we don't know.
1:01:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, so it's possible that this uprising was a result of cultural confusion over this money. I mean, Jen and I are confused, so it wouldn't surprise me if the Iceni were confused. It's also possible that, fuck you, Seneca, who was now a high-ranking official in Nero's court and also a grade A asshole, was starting to see the way the wind was blowing and wanted the money that he'd lent paid back because Nero was a fan of the high life and he was starting to drain the treasury. He was starting to gild all the nipples of everybody in the Praetorian Guard, and that was expensive. The British Isles were a great place to exact some much-needed resources from, whether those resources were taxes, slaves, wood and metal, and other natural resources, or conscripts for Rome's armies.
1:01:58 Speaker 06 Whatever the actual reasons for this whole debt situation, we do not know. It's possible that the procurator Decianus Catus, tenth of his name, was the one who went tribe to tribe, exacting these quote-unquote loans. It's his rapacious
1:02:14 Speaker 06 That ancient writers blame for sparking the rebellion in the first place. Tacitus in his treatment of Boudicca is much more matter of fact than Dio. He doesn't dwell on salacious details. Instead, he tends to stick to the narrative, and I get the feeling that his account is more trustworthy because he's pulling this information from his father-in-law Agricola, who actually was in Roman Britain during this time. So Agricola would have been a low-ranking officer who was just starting out. Eventually, he would go on to be the architect of subjugation of the entire island of Britain. But at this time, he was just starting out. He would have been possibly a young aide to Paulinus, who was the general handling the Druidic Rebellion in Engelsian,
1:02:56 Speaker 06 who would be the general to respond to the Boudicca Rebellion as well. So he may have been an eyewitness to this stuff. But what's really interesting here is that while Cassius Dio loves the big, gory story and all the salacious details, he gives us a very prosaic reason for the Iceni uprising. He's the one who tells us about this debt and tells us that this is the reason why Boudicca rebelled. Tacitus is the one who gives us the more violent origin story of Boudicca.
1:03:21 Speaker 05 So according to Tacitus, the Romans rolled into Iceni territory, probably looking to collect on this giant loan that the Iceni hadn't wanted in the first place and maybe didn't even realize was a loan at all. We don't know exactly what was said, but it's likely that, one, Boudicca, whose husband had just died, did not have the money to pay back this loan. And, two, the Romans were not pleased that old Pastasaurus.
1:03:50 Speaker 06 Pastasaurus?
1:03:52 Speaker 05 What did we call him?
1:03:53 Speaker 06 I called him Prostagosaurus.
1:03:55 Speaker 05 Prostagosaurus.
1:03:56 Speaker 06 Well, he's like stuck with Pastasaurus now. That's fine. That sounds delicious.
1:04:02 Speaker 05 They weren't pleased that old Pastasaurus had left half of his tribal lands to his daughters and the other half to Nero.
1:04:09 Speaker 06 They wanted it all.
1:04:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, they wanted it all. So Decianus Catus told Boudicca and the Iceni that Pastasaurus might have been their king, but that he ruled at the pleasure of Rome. And he had no right. To leave a will, everything he owned, including his people, his wife and children, were property and subjects of Rome. Also, this is Rome, so women don't inherit shit. Like, don't start getting wild ideas, ladies.
1:04:38 Speaker 06 Even if you are a citizen and you have rights to leave things to your descendants, you can't leave things to women. This is Rome. Women don't get to inherit things. Forget it.
1:04:49 Speaker 05 Absolutely. We are gonna talk about what happened to Boudicca and her daughters, and we're gonna talk about rape. If that is something that you're not comfortable hearing about, we will see you in the next episode. Just know something really bad happened. Okay? From here on out, that's what we're talking about. So, to prove that the Romans were the bosses here, they started to debase and humiliate the nobles. We don't know exactly what that means, but we can guess. They enslaved them and they stripped Boudicca, the queen of the Iceni, and flogged her while her daughters were carried off by soldiers and raped or potentially gang raped.
1:05:24 Speaker 06 That's awful.
1:05:26 Speaker 05 It's awful. And we know that daughters were young. We know that they were not of marriage age, and that's why when they were given the land to rule, their mother was to rule at their side as their regent.
1:05:37 Speaker 06 I would guess they were probably young teenagers at the oldest, because marriageable age in the ancient world was not that old.
1:05:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. So, we're talking really about children here, which is awful. So, according to Tacitus, this is exactly what happened. Quote, "King Pasasaurus, celebrated for his long prosperity, had named the emperor his heir, together with his two daughters, an act of deference which he thought would place his kingdom and household beyond the risk of injury. The result was contrary, so much so that his kingdom was pillaged by centurions, his household by slaves, as though they had been prizes of war. At the beginning, his wife Boudicca was subjected to the lash and his daughters violated. All the chief men of the Iceni were stripped of their family estates, and the relatives of the king were treated as slaves."
1:06:30 Speaker 06 So, what happened to Boudicca and her daughters is the literal use of rape as a weapon. Of war. Boudicca was stripped and flogged before her people to debase and humiliate not just her, but her whole tribe. She must have objected when the Romans arrived and told her that she was no longer queen, that her lands were no longer hers, that her people would be sold into slavery to pay back a loan, that she didn't even realize that she had to pay back, probably. My assumption is that she probably mouthed off. She probably did not take this lying down.
1:06:59 Speaker 05 No, I imagine that she was like, uh, excuse me, what now? What's this?
1:07:03 Speaker 06 Right.
1:07:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, like, we're still mourning the death of our king. We're just getting ourselves sorted. We're not gonna deal with this nonsense that you've brought to us. And I can imagine that the Romans at this particular point in time were like, uh, excuse me? We do not take orders from you. You have no right to even do anything or rule because you're just a woman. And the person who's in charge here is Rome until we find a seizable region, and it won't be you.
1:07:28 Speaker 06 Yeah, and so they decided to educate her on her place in the Roman world that she was now inhabiting. So that education would have involved her being stripped, possibly naked, in front of everybody in her tribe and flogged. And flogging in this context, it does not mean beaten. It means scourging, which we have talked about before. We go into detail about scourging in our episode on the First Servile War, the one about Eunus, Eunus and the mermaid goddess. And the fact that she was scourged is interesting because scourging was not something you were supposed to live through. It was pretty much always used as a precursor to crucifixion in the Roman world. It's something they really did if they wanted to make an example of you.
1:08:12 Speaker 06 It involved using a type of whip, like a catanine tails, with multiple strips of leather that had small pieces of like, sharp things like bone or nails or something in it. And that's a whip that's intended to rip flesh from bone. And we have ancient world sources that talk about what this was like, that was basically just like breaking your body open. Like, you're not supposed to live through it. It's possible that the Romans might have been planning to crucify Boudicca next to really make an example of her.
1:08:38 Speaker 05 I have heard this story many times, and it wasn't until I was in this research that I really started to think, that is probably What they wanted to do because they had no time for a tribe to rebel in the east of the country. When everyone was all fighting in the west, they just needed to put this shit down and move on to the next thing.
1:08:56 Speaker 06 Yeah, they needed to come down on them really hard so that this would not turn into a giant conflagration. And also, like, all their more experienced soldiers weren't there. So these are probably, like, not the most experienced guys. So they were probably, like, just bringing the hammer down because they didn't know any other way to handle this.
1:09:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, the person in charge had an agenda and the people he had with him were not as experienced. And I think what you're gonna see happening is things really get out of control real quick.
1:09:22 Speaker 06 They are bringing their A game here. This isn't the cream of the crop, Roman soldiers handling this right now. So another clue that the Romans had planned not just rape and scourging, but execution, was the rape of Boudicca's daughters. So the ancient Romans didn't believe in killing virgins. And what that meant in practice is that sometimes young women, if they were imprisoned and scheduled for execution, and this happened a couple of times that I've seen in different parts of Roman history, they would be raped in jail before being executed, which is really fucking horrible. So taking Boudicca's daughters off and raping them might have meant that the Romans wanted to execute both Boudicca and her daughters. But before they could do this, because of their beliefs,
1:10:03 Speaker 06 they had to rape the young virgin princesses of the Iceni tribe because they didn't kill virgins, which is fucking awful.
1:10:10 Speaker 05 They were young virgins. They were princesses. They should have been protected. No one has the right to rape anyone ever. This is awful. And the Iceni people were fucking furious. So we don't know exactly what happened next. What would have stopped the Romans from carrying out their plan of potentially crucifying Boudicca, if that was even their plan?
1:10:33 Speaker 06 And another thing that makes me think it might have been their plan was the fact that she lived through this scourging. They might have just been getting started when they were stopped.
1:10:40 Speaker 05 I totally, totally agree. And like I said, as I was reading, I was like, wow, I never put those pieces together, but it makes a lot of sense. So this insult to the queen of the Iceni and her daughters could not be born.
1:10:55 Speaker 05 Honor was at stake for the whole tribe. And it's probable that the tribe rose up right there and drove the Romans out before they were able to either crucify Boudicca or slaughter their princesses. And that would have been quite an achievement because the Iceni people would have been fighting the Romans without swords. Because remember, the Romans had forced them to disarm 13 years earlier. This is assuming that they did disarm and didn't keep some swords somewhere.
1:11:23 Speaker 06 I suspect that number one, they probably had some swords hidden under mattresses and things.
1:11:27 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm, absolutely. Or made new ones, as we suggested in our cold, open.
1:11:31 Speaker 06 Right, exactly. But also, fighting off the Romans without weapons would have been quite the achievement in itself. It's also really remarkable, or without as many weapons as they normally would have had.
1:11:41 Speaker 05 Absolutely. So, there's a lot we don't know about the immediate aftermath of the Romans' vicious assault on Boudicca and her family. If she'd been scorched, she probably needed some serious time to heal. But we do know that Boudicca and her daughters and their tribe regrouped, and that Boudicca decided then and there that the Romans would know her fury. They would know the Iceni rage, it was coming their way.
1:12:06 Speaker 06 Much like Camulus, they were slow to anger.
1:12:08 Speaker 05 It took a while, but it's coming.
1:12:11 Speaker 06 That's right.
1:12:12 Speaker 05 Boudicca and her people were going to war, and they knew exactly who to recruit to their cause.
1:12:18 Speaker 06 So that's it for this week. Join us in two weeks for the next installment in the story of Boudicca. And in the meantime, come find us on social, at AncientHistFan on Twitter, or Ancient History Fangirl on Facebook and Instagram.
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1:12:46 Speaker 06 Inimitable livers.
1:12:48 Speaker 05 Inimitable livers.
1:12:50 Speaker 06 We actually launched this, and then we realized that it was spelled wrong in the design, so we had to relaunch. It was somebody on Twitter pointed it out, and neither of us had seen it. And we were just like, oh crap! And then we had to relaunch it. But now it's spelled correctly.
1:13:02 Speaker 05 This is what happens when you mispronounce the- Enough times that you start thinking the mispronunciation is the correct way to spell it.
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1:13:51 Speaker 06 So we have some Patreon members to thank, don't we, John?
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Previous Conversations: When Science Meets Storytelling, Storylife w/ Joel Christensen Next Liv Reads Statius: The Thebaid (Part 3) Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated