What to Do When Rome is a Jerk

The last couple days, I've been seeing someone comment on my mom's Facebook posts, and this person's name was Iceni Boudicca.

I saw that name, and I was like, "No way that's her real name." I checked with my mom, and yeah. It was an online alias. Her real name is really pretty generic.

But, it got me all excited, because I vaguely remembered the story of Boudicca from a class I took like 6 or 7 years ago, and I remembered her as being... um... something like a powerful Celtic woman who like raised an army and chased Julius Caesar off the island of Briton or something like that because his men killed her sons or something like that. Errr... yeah. Something along those lines.

Basically, she was an awesome sauce Celtic mama-bear who took on the Romans and won. That was what I remembered.

And, after trying to tell my husband how awesome she was, I decided I'd probably better actually research this and see if I was even remotely close to right.

Well...

No.

I was way off.

I mean, she was an awesome sauce Celtic mama-bear who took on the Romans and made them cry to their mommies and stuff, but in the end the Romans stayed in Briton, and she may or may not have died. Also, Julius Caesar had nothing to do with it. This was roughly 100 years after he got assassinated. Also, far as I know, she didn't have any sons. She did, however, very most definitely have two daughters.

So, here's the corrected story of Boudicca, told from researching Wikipedia, Tacitus, and Cassius Dio. And let me tell you what, reading Tacitus and Cassius Dio, who were writing from a Roman perspective, totally makes the reader root for the Britons. Like... Rome was seriously a jerk.

So, in 43 AD, during the reign of Emperor Claudius, Rome paddled across the channel from Gaul (aka France) to Briton, declared that it had been a part of the Roman Empire since Julius Caesar had a couple skirmishes on the beach, and started picking on the locals, as Rome was wont to do.

As their military took over several cities, some tribes held up their hands and said, "No no no! Don't take us over! We're your allies!!!"

Because, let's face it. It's better to be an independent ally to Rome than to have your village burned and your women raped and be forcibly subjected to Rome.

Rome was fairly used to this, and, while they weren't really planning to leave anybody as an independent anything, they were willing to play nice. After all, it's easier to annex a province diplomatically than to waste soldiers in unnecessary battles.

So, the rules of this game went like this:

Sure! You're our ally! Great! This arrangement lasts as long as your king is alive, and then your king will bequeath his entire kingdom to Rome in his will. Yes, he has to. No, his heirs don't get a say, and are completely irrelevant.

According to Wikipedia, this not only happened in Briton, but was also how Galatia and Bithynia (wherever the heck that is... oh... Google says northern Turkey) became part of the Empire.

The king of the Iceni tribe, over by modern day Norfolk, was a guy named Prasutagus, and he was married to Boudicca. He was a mix of very smart and very not.

Smart: When Prasutagus got bullied into bequeathing his kingdom to Rome, he made an attempt to preserve his royal line and the independence of his people by specifying in his will that it was to be joint-rule between Rome and his wife and two daughters. According to Tacitus, the Britons made no gender distinction when it came to rule, and by their standards, Boudicca and her two daughters were legitimate heirs.

Not smart: Upon allying with Rome, he discovered this little thing called "borrowing money," and found he could live really, really comfortably with all kinds of wealth and conveniences. He could just ask for money and people would give it to him!

Moron.

Now, granted, one translation claims that the debts incurred by Prasutagus were actually the work of a guy named Seneca, who gave his people 40 million sesterces that they didn't even want in hopes of gaining a high rate of interest, but that translation is in dispute, and more likely than not, Prasutagus was just really unintelligent about borrowing money.

Anyway, as can be expected, when Prasutagus did, in fact, finally kick the bucket, there was trouble.

Decianus Catus.

This man, Decianus Catus, was the Procurator of Briton, aka the treasury officer. He declared that all debts were to be paid back, and the whole Iceni tribe was liable for it. He confiscated Prasutagus's lands and property, and enslaved his nobles.

And what about that will? You know, the one that gave joint-rule to Rome and Prasutagus's heirs? Well, it was completely ignored. Rather than rule with Boudicca and her two daughters, they had Boudicca flogged and then raped her daughters.

Like I said, Rome was a jerk. And yes, "jerk" doesn't even come close to covering it, but you get the picture.

So, what did Boudicca do about this?

Well, her husband left her the kingdom in his will. That made her queen of the Iceni, and she had a kingdom to defend, and defiled daughters to avenge. She went to the neighbors, particularly the Trinovantes (though others got in on it too), and made herself some allies.

According to Tacitus, they all got together and, I kid you not, "dwelt much among themselves on the miseries of subjection, compared their wrongs, and exaggerated them in the discussion."

Because forced conscription of their sons into the military, taxing a people that were doing just fine on their own before the Romans came, enslaving not only the nobility, but anyone who didn't readily submit, confiscating property, and raping their princesses (all of which was described by the very same Tacitus who wrote the above sentence), is totally just the whining of a bunch of people out to exaggerate and find an excuse to fight.

Yeah. Nice move there, Tacitus. You're a real genius of propaganda.

Anyway, the Trinovantes hadn't managed to be an independent tribe the way the Iceni had, and they were more than happy to accept Boudicca as their leader. Boudicca raised a massive army and marched on the city of Camulodunum (modern day Colchester). This place was the former Trinovantian capital, and had felt the wrath of the Romans to a particularly brutal degree. In addition to enslavement, the locals had been forced to build a temple to Emperor Claudius at their own expense. Hence, it was a rather symbolic location for the Britons, being one of the major sources of oppression.

Boudicca razed it to the ground. Archaeological records show that in 60 AD (the year the rebellion started), the city was methodically torn down.

A Roman general brought the Spanish 9th Legion to defend the city, and while he survived the battle, his legion did not. They got creamed, leaving only himself and some cavalry to run away.

And remember Decianus Catus, the guy who came in and took all their stuff?

Yeah. He ran away too. He up and ditched Briton all together, making a mad dash for the safety of Gaul/France, where even the ancient Romans totally mocked the cowardice of the French, something we are still doing to this day.

After whomping all over Camulodunum, Boudicca led her forces to Londinium (aka London). The governor of Briton, Suetonius, who had been campaigning over in Wales, rushed back to defend Londinium, then went, "Uhhhhhhh.... we are so getting murdered here," and took off running, leaving the Romans inside undefended.

And, I'm sure you can guess how that ended.

Yep. Another city leveled.

Next Boudicca hit Verulamium (modern St. Albans), and scored another major victory. By this point, she had gathered more and more of the people together in their revolt, and victory appeared to be unstoppable. And, according to the historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, Emperor Nero, at the very least, considered Britain lost to the Empire.

And Cassius Dio? He said my absolute favorite thing about this whole revolt:
"...a terrible disaster occurred in Britain. Two cities were sacked [funny, Cassius, but I counted three], eighty thousand of the Romans and of their allies perished, and the island was lost to Rome. Moreover, all this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame."

That's right, Romans. Wither in shame. You mess with a woman's daughters, she will raise an army of over 100,000 and burn you to the ground.

The Romans, however, eventually won out. Governor Suetonius rallied 10,000 Roman soldiers, which was still dramatically smaller than Boudicca's army, but better trained, and gathered them to what he considered to be the perfect battle ground. The tactics of the Roman legions worked best in open spaces, so Suetonius found a narrow plain - an open space for their legions, but that was still somewhat boxed in, preventing Boudicca from unleashing her full force all at once.

And Suetonius was right. It was the perfect battle ground, and according to the Roman account of their victory, they lost 400 men while the Britons lost 80,000.

And what happened to Boudicca? That's pretty unclear. In Tacitus's original account, he doesn't say anything about what happened to her, but attributes the end of the revolt to the rebels' "indolence." 20 years later, after a couple notable people had died by suicide (including Nero), he claimed she poisoned herself. But, Cassius Dio claimed she died of illness, contradicting Tacitus and indicating the latter didn't actually know how she died. The illness claim, however, is also in dispute, because Cassius seemed to be looking for a conclusion to her story, a way to excuse the lack of information, and also didn't actually know what had happened to her.

Personally, I'd like to think she survived, and then maybe moved with her daughters up to Scotland, where the Picts and Scots were as free as the Britons used to be. She obviously escaped capture by the Romans, or else they would have known what happened to her and gloated over it. But, they clearly didn't actually know, so that leaves the end of her story wide open.

I love an open ended story.