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- [00:02]
A
We British are used to women commanders in war. I am descended from mighty men. But now I am not fighting for my kingdom and my wealth. I am fighting as an ordinary person for my lost freedom, my bruised body and my outraged daughters. Nowadays, Roman rapacity does not even speak bear our bodies, old people are killed, virgins raped. But the gods will grant us the vengeance we deserve.
- [00:36]
B
That was part of a rousing speech given by Queen Boudicca rousing her troops up to battle against the romans in about 60 CE. She's not only the first first woman in the British historical record, she's one of the first named people we know about at all on these islands. Everything we know about her comes from the Romans, but she's pretty kickass. She's the woman who, 20 years or so after the Romans had conquered these islands, or sort of conquered them, she almost defeats them. Go completely. She almost wipes them off the face of Britain. Well, perhaps that would only have been in the short term, and maybe it wasn't quite as simple as that, but it's a wonderfully good story.
- [01:32]
A
Yeah. She is the original rebel, the original woman warrior, the avenging mother, maybe terrorist. She's hero, she's villain, all rolled into one. And a deliciously complicated figure who sort of haunted British history for centuries. She's been compared to Elizabeth I, to Queen Victoria, and memorably Margaret Thatcher, and a huge bronze of her and her daughters in her chariot with blades kind of attached to the wheels, ahistorically, thus it be said, gallops towards the British Houses of Parliament. But she's never, ever been a simple or straightforward figure, which is why Instant Classics absolutely loves her.
- [02:18]
B
In fact, we love her so much, or to be more accurate, we love thinking about her so much that this is part one of our two part Boudicca miniseries where we're going to tell her story and think about what this rebel queen, who was in many ways actually invented by Roman writers, what she really means, and what effect she has on the way the British think about themselves. This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.
- [02:58]
A
And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us.
- [03:08]
B
Now this Boudicca, the woman who defied an empire. Sorry, it sounds a bit cheesy, but true. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.
- [03:34]
A
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- [03:41]
C
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- [03:42]
A
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- [03:46]
C
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- [03:59]
A
Oh, we've got to do cheesy once, once in a while, Mary, particularly with a story as good as this. Yes, okay, but what is that story? What is that story? Where are we? We're in Roman Britain, aren't we? First century ce.
- [04:13]
B
Yeah. Our story proper is going to start in the 60s CE and it's a story, a Roman story written by Romans. And in particular, our kind of big writer here is going to be Tacitus, the great Roman historian who has given us two accounts actually of how Boudicca nearly put page to Roman control in Britain. He certainly had never met Boudicca. He'd never witnessed the events that he describes. But he did know a bit about the province, even though he'd probably never been there, because his father in law had actually been governor of that distant, exotic world on the far north western corner of the empire. Now, his father in law, Agricola, hadn't met Boudicca either. He came later than Boudicca. But Tacitus writes about this and writes about these terrifying events for the Romans in two places in his biography of his father in law called Agricola, but also in his big history of the early empire called the Annals.
- [05:32]
A
So at this point, Britain has been, so say, under Roman rule for about 20 years because Claudius finally managed to conquer Britain in 43 CE. And when I say conquer, I mean they claim they conquered it. But I think we could probably more safely say that the southeast of Britain had been successfully conquered. And also we have to say that it was after a few false starts because like 100 years prior, Julius Caesar had tried to do it a couple of times in 55 BCE and 54 BCE and failed to do it and wrote about it and rather brilliantly blamed the weather, right? There was a storm, you know, like really terrible excuse. The dog ate his homework on that occasion. And Caligula had a bit of a go at it in about 40 CE. So we get this idea there's a place that's not in mainland Europe. It's this weird and exotic patch of islands off the coast of Gaul. At the same time, you know, that's how the Romans figure it. But at the same time, actually the archaeological record tells us that there was actually A huge amount of contact between Roman Gaul and, you know, barbarian Britain in the sense that there was trade, you know, rich people in the southeast of England of Britain were importing olive oil and there was. There was sort of traffic between these two land masses.
- [07:06]
B
It's Claudius who is the real key here, because you've got this country as yet not quite part of the Roman Empire, that got quite a lot of contacts. And it's crucially the Romans say it's across the ocean. Now we think that Britain is actually crossed the English Channel, but for the Romans it was on the other side of this great sea. So it was a wonderful opportunity for a spectacular conquest, if you could make it. And Claudius comes to the throne. He's old, he's a bit doddery. He comes to power after the assassination of the emperor Caligula. And one thing Claudius needs is a glamorous, in Roman terms, spectacular, in Roman terms, victory. And so his sights are on this exotic land across the ocean and he doesn't do very much of the conquering. He himself, he has a fairly efficient general, brutally bloodily efficient general called Aulus Plautius. But Claudius turns up in Britain to celebrate his victory in 43 in real imperial style. Basically. Once Aulus Plautius has finished the job, it's said that he comes to Britain with a load of elephants, really to impress the natives. Now, actually, I find it very hard to imagine that you could get many elephants on a boat going across the channel in 43, but that is the story and there is a sense that Claudius appearance, kind of putting the Roman flag, if Romans don't have flags, but metaphorically putting the Roman flag in British soil starts a new era in British history. We've got Camilla Dunham. That's what we call Colchester. Camilla Dunham is established as the capital of the province. There's a temple built to Claudius. A big, big kind of public buildings, at least in Romano British terms, are put up and it's the main town. Meanwhile, London, or Londinium, although not formally a very important place, Londinium becomes a kind of business, commercial centre and the province is sort of set to go. Except that turns out to be a massive simplification.
- [09:50]
A
I think it's fair to say the Romans don't tell us in any kind of granular detail about the. The British people living in Britain. And we don't know about those British people living in Britain from them. I mean, they weren't a literate society, so it wasn't as if they were writing their own kind of well informed accounts what was going on. We have an archaeological record. But nevertheless, from that archaeological record and from what the Romans tell us in their histories, it seems pretty clear that Britain was inhabited by a bunch of different communities or peoples who are sort of fairly conveniently wrapped up into sort of tribes by the Romans. And it wasn't a unified. It wasn't a unified set of British people. That's the crucial thing. Like a lot of these people were enemies of each other. Some of them were actually friendly to Rome, some of them weren't. And some of them were. And you get the sense that there are sort of alliances of convenience are made. There's a certain amount of my enemy's enemy is my friend. There was in any case, a lot of contact between Britain and Roman Gaul. This is a complicated situation. And this is where the Iceni, so Boudicca's community or people, or as the Romans have it, tribe, the Iceni, come in. And this was a set of people. And we do know that they really exist. I mean, there are coins that they minted themselves that, you know, have been discovered. Beautiful, actually. Beautiful with images of horses on them. This was a people based in Southeast England, in East Anglia, and they were friendly to Rome, basically, weren't they, Mary?
- [11:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think the point here, I mean, you're hitting the nail on the head really, because this isn't a unified community. The romans, and most 99% of our evidence comes from Rome. The Romans are trying to kind of put some structural order on this. And in a way that they decide that this is all divided into tribes. Now, quite how far the actual Brits thought they were divided into tribes or where they thought the boundaries between tribal lands fell, I think is very hard to know. But there clearly are different groupings of people with some kind of political organization. And as you say, some of them are going in with the Romans and some of them aren't. And what seems to be pretty clear is that the Iceni tribe were governed, and I'm using very Roman terms here, all the time, governed by their king, a guy, according to Tacitus, called Prasutagus, and he was Boudicca's husband and he's what the Romans would have called a friendly king. That was their title. When the Romans are conquering, they often. This isn't just in Britain, they often need to do deals with local big guys. And Presbyterchus is a local big guy in Britain who does a deal with the Romans. Now, part of the problem about Roman rule in that slightly messy hand to mouth way is that these relationships are pretty unstable. And they're often unstable because the guy you're doing the deal with, if you're a Roman guy's dying in Prasi Tagus dies. And what he does, according to Tacitus though, this sounds a very kind of Roman view of things. He bequeaths his kingdom equally to the Roman emperor Nero and to his own daughters. Now, in Tacitus view, the idea is that he's trying to protect his kingdom and if he kind of brings in Nero together with his own kids, that will somehow let the arrangement that he's been having with the Romans continue. Now it sounds weird and as I said, I think it's a very Roman view. I've got no idea whether Prasutagus would have understood what a will or a bequest was, but that's how Tacitus sees it. And there are other examples in Roman history of people who bequeath their kingdom in some way to the Romans. Here we've got a kind of shared kingdom. A power sharing agreement appears to be what's in mind, but it doesn't go at all as Prasutaichus had hoped it would.
- [14:58]
A
Really, really not. So after Prasutagus dies, what Tacitus tell us is that the Roman military just kind of come in, they seize all the Iceni property, and this is the really horrific bit, they take the daughters of Prasatagus and Boudicca and they flog them and rape them. So this is a kind of horrific story, at least told by Tacitus. I mean, who knows what really happened?
- [15:27]
B
For me, I think that whatever the correctness of the details, it is a wonderful glimpse of the kind of messiness, the improvisations that go along with Roman conquest. You know, Roman conquest in most cases isn't armies coming, destroying the whole of the native culture and setting up Roman ness in the province. It's about bargains and deals and they're always liable to fail. And in this case they fail spectacularly.
- [16:04]
A
And like you say, it's a reminder of how messy this process is. I mean, Britain by, you know, brackets, Britain is not properly conquered yet. There's tons of Britain that's going to be conquered in the coming years. But this is, you know, this is a very partial situation and a very, a very fragile situation, it turns out, for Rome, because at this moment, most of the legions stationed in Britain are actually off in Anglesey. Anglesey is an island off the coast of North Wales. It's a really, really Long way from either Colchester or whatever bit of Suffolk or Norfolk the Iceni were from. It takes a heck of a long time to get from Anglesey to California. Colchester in 2025. I mean, heaven knows how long it would have taken even for the Romans who were busily building incredible roads. So the Roman forces are often Anglesey, tackling, according to Tacitus, a Druid stronghold. A detail which I love.
- [17:06]
B
The Druids are the kind of quintessence in the Roman imagination or barbarian religion, aren't they?
- [17:14]
A
Yeah, they're exotic, they're strange, they're terrifying, they have peculiar rituals and weirdly, they sort of need an entire Roman army to deal with them. And this is Boudicca's chance. Boudicca responds both to this appalling situation that's been visited on her own people and to this remarkable fact that all the Roman troops are at the opposite end of the country. She, she responds by taking her opportunity by gathering her army together and marching on the Roman capital Camalodunum.
- [17:52]
B
We need to take a break because things hot up after very soon.
- [18:04]
D
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- [18:31]
B
Look Charlotte, I think what we need to put in place here before we look at Boudiccas campaign is quite what kind of figure she would have been for the Romans. Now we've said that Tacitus can't really have had any direct knowledge, indirect knowledge, perhaps a bit of what Boudicca was like, but she fits so closely into a terrifying Roman stereotype, terrifying for the Romans, which is that she is a frenzied, out of control female leader. And I think that's absolute classic that Rome's enemies can often be portrayed as women out of control. Now the obvious case of that from a little bit earlier is Queen Cleopatra, who challenges the forces of the person who's going to be the Emperor Augustus. But here we've got a absolutely stereotypical but incredibly vivid image of a woman in power. It's a woman in power that's the problem. And you see that sense of anxiety about that in both of Tacitus accounts of the rebellion. You see it perhaps even more clearly in a later account we have. And there's only basically 3.2in Tacitus and one in this other guy, the Roman writer Cassius Dio, writing at the end of the second, early third century. And he really goes over the top on the idea of a woman in power, a woman leading an army. And all those pictures that you see in popular representations of Boudicca now, her flowing auburn locks, et cetera, her kind of glaring eyes, that comes from Cassius Dio writing very much the same terms, but a bit later than Tacitus.
- [20:52]
A
Exactly. And someone who couldn't possibly have known what she looked like, let it be said. But what I kind of. I love about. Even though we know that the Romans were effectively inventing this figure in many, many ways, what I still love about it is that even though she is this frenzied and terrifying hate figure, she's also weirdly attractive. And I think that when you mentioned Cleopatra, it reminded me there's a poem about Cleopatra by the Roman poet Horace, and it kind of swivels from loathing of this foreign queen, Cleopatra, into a sort of sympathy and a sort of attraction. And I think you can see that happening in the way Boudicca is described by these Roman writers as well. When I read that speech earlier at the very beginning of the podcast, you know, that's an impressive speech to an extent. I think Tacitus is asking us to empathise with her point of view that he's invented effectively. And also Cassius, you know, the Cassius Dio. It's kind of incredibly fanciful how he describes Boudicca, and he gives her an even longer and even more elaborate set of things to say. But he is also figuring Boudicca as both exotic and terrifying, but also as representing some virtues, I think. Would you agree, Mary?
- [22:26]
B
No, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that in some ways, this might seem a bit of a downer on the story of Boudicca. I think that these Romans are telling this story of this rebellion, really, as a story of Rome, and it's about Roman fears, but it's Roman fears projected onto this frightening female figure. And as you say, what is really important, both in the accounts of Tacitus and the accounts of diocese, is that they can imagine and give voice to the complaints and the objections of the conquered people to Roman power. I mean, we often think of Romans as, you know, pretty unimaginative types who just go out there and smash people and they don't think about what the effect of their conquest is. Well, what you see in all the accounts of Boudicca is, is that the Romans are saying from the other side, our conquest looks exploitative, cruel and brutal. And I think that self awareness is, I think really important. It doesn't justify what they do. We don't actually know if what has to said happened in the dishonouring of Boudicca and her daughters ever happened. And nobody else, apart from Tacitus's other account in the Agricola Cassius Dio doesn't mention the rape. We don't know what happened on the ground here, but we can see that the Romans know what the basic rule is, which is that in the provinces Romans can behave extremely badly, cruelly in a way that you have, you know, saying partly let's look at ourselves as Romans. Let's hear these people, let's look at them now. They're also frightened of this woman and want her put down and those two go hand in hand.
- [24:40]
A
But I think there's also a kind of sense that all these things are happening a really long way away from Rome with these primitive and barbarian people. And yet the sort of distance from Rome, the distance from the sort of temptations, the wealth, the decadence of Rome gives these Roman generals almost like a sort of semi noble enemies to fight. There's that going on too. It's actually really, it's surprisingly multi layered and surprisingly interesting. But, but I fear that we are deflecting from the story. We are building up hopefully, well, some kind of appetite for what happens next because we left you before the AD break with Boudicca about to march on the provincial capital of Britain. What happens next? Well, certainly it's pretty scary if you're in Camaladuna because there are lots of horrific portents of disaster already. This is before the army gets there. The statue of victory in Camilla Dunham spontaneously falls over. In the theater people hear these kind of supernatural wailings and shriekings and in the Thames estuary it kind of turns all bloody and people see images in the water of the whole Roman province overthrown by barbarians. So. So it's not looking good. It's not looking good if you're a Roman in Camalodunum waiting for this army to descend on you.
- [26:19]
B
Boudicca's troops do come along, the loyal Romans. And there's not very many of them there because most of the Roman forces are away. They lock themselves in the temple that had been put up to the Emperor Claudius, who has now become a God, died and become a God. The Romans asked for a bit of help. They asked for help to be sent from London, but they only get a couple of hundred troops. Basically, Boudicca's forces, I see any tribe, they burned down Camillogenum and it appears that they burned down the locked temple with the people inside it. And it is very grim. Then a legion does show up, but Boudicca defeats them too, and actually puts swords through the infantry. And the general, Petilius Carielis is his
- [27:20]
A
name, runs away and my God, this is a really cataclysmic. This is a cataclysmic defeat. She's burnt down the provincial capital of a Roman province.
- [27:34]
B
I have to say we know that happened because even though, you know, we've been saying that some of these details are probably not true, they're probably Roman imagination. What is clear in the archaeology of Colchester, there is a great whacking layer of burning which marks what Boudicca did to the city. So whatever the background, whatever the details, one thing is pretty certain, that somebody probably called Boudicca burnt the city of camalodunum down in 60 or 61. Not sure of the date.
- [28:12]
A
So this is Boudicca triumphant and she is turning her attention to London. Boudicca is about to march with her army, her victorious army on London. Join us again next time to find out what happens. As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions, and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media. Nstantclassicspod. Die.
- [28:55]
E
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [29:01]
F
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
- [29:07]
E
Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world, yet he started life in a muddy provincial a
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F
rebel son who hated his father, survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions From Empire.
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E
The Goal Hangar World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
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F
And I'm William DuranPaul.
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E
In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
- [29:39]
F
We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution. A time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
- [30:00]
E
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