The Annals

"We have two writers who write about Boudica. One is Tacitus who was living in the late first century. The other was a later writer called Cassius Dio. Tacitus was around within decades of Boudica’s uprising and we have good reason to believe that he would have had good information about it. People in Rome would have been both fascinated and deeply disturbed by what had happened. He tells us that Prasutagus, Boudica’s husband, who was the king of the people called the Iceni—who lived in what is now East Anglia—was dying, and he made a will. He tried to make his kingdom jointly over to his two daughters and to the emperor, Nero. So half of his territory would have remained in the hands of his family and half gone to Rome. In Roman terms, Prasutagus should have just given up his kingdom, because the Romans deemed the Iceni to be a ‘friendly people’. When such a ruler died, a territory that had been ruled by a friendly ruler was just incorporated into the Empire. That was an agreement that was probably made in AD 43 when Emperor Claudius came to Britain. So Prasutagus was probably trying to retain territory and some extra rights for his two daughters. He didn’t try to leave the territory to his partner Boudica. “Tacitus…takes quite a positive view of Boudica” But the Roman administration at the time, according to Tacitus, responded badly. Rather than using diplomacy, they decide to take the territory over in a dictatorial manner. Tacitus drives the story in a very moral direction, but takes quite a positive view of Boudica. He says she was seriously provoked by the Roman administration. For instance, he says that the household was ransacked by slaves and soldiers and the senior people in her community were treated very badly, too. Tacitus is making a very critical point about Rome under the unpopular Emperor Nero, who was long dead by the time he wrote his account and had been condemned. The elite in Rome viewed Nero as a very bad emperor, which made it very easy for Tacitus to be critical of him. Boudica is produced as this domineering female rebel who leads what is almost a justifiable rebellion against Rome. I think we can probably trust all that, although we have to be a bit careful with the stories we get. Cassius Dio is writing over a century later. Dio is passing on information he has derived from the writings of other authors that haven’t survived. Tacitus was writing closer to the events, but many people in Rome would have known what had happened in Britain 30 years before. Tacitus was maybe writing for effect, like a modern newspaper. It’s a different concept if people know about what had happened and perhaps Tacitus did not need to be entirely literal. He may have played around with the information to make his account of Nero more critical. The Victorians used to say the Romans ‘outraged’ Boudica’s beautiful daughters. We believe the Latin word Tacitus uses means ‘raped’. That’s what makes me a bit suspicious of whether that version of the story is actually literally true. Classical society was very class conscious and you did not carry out outrages against the daughters of a friendly king, even when he died."

"This is the best work of history ever written – that’s a big claim. Oh yes, just take the murder of Nero’s mother. There is no better story than Nero’s attempts to murder his mother with whom he is finally very pissed off! Nero the mad boy emperor decides that he is going to get rid of mum by a rather clever collapsible boat. He has her to dinner, waves her fondly farewell. The boat collapses. Sadly for Nero, his mum, Agrippina, is a very strong swimmer and she makes it to the land and back home. And she’s clever, she knows boats don’t just collapse like that – it was a completely calm night, so she works out Nero was out to get her. She knows things are going to end badly. Nero can’t let her off, so he sends round the tough guys to murder her. Agrippina looks them in the eye and says, ‘Strike me in the belly with your sword.’ There are two things going on. One is: my son who came out of my belly is trying to murder me. But the other thing we know is that they were widely reputed to have had an incestuous relationship in the earlier days. So it’s not just Nero the son murdering his mother, but Nero the lover murdering his discarded mistress. And if you read Robert Graves’s I, Claudius , some of it comes directly from this. Yes but it’s not just that. What he does is seduce you with an extraordinary tale, but there is also a cynical, hard-hitting analysis of corruption. Reading Tacitus in Latin is like reading James Joyce . It’s language which is really at the margins of comprehensibility as well as being very exciting. But, actually, he wants to talk about the corruption of autocracy. It’s about one-man rule going bad."