AUTHOR S NOTE
The story of Queen Boadicea is one of great love and great
ffag~d3/i fik single blaze of colour in the intermingled tapestry of
Ancient Britain and Ancient Romei Regrettably， historians
have been comparatively brief about ~it and only Tacitus and
Dio Cassius， scribes of Rome， give us more than an outline.
Even then they do not agree， for whereas Tacitus implies that
the Romans won a miraculously quick victory in the final
battle against the Iceni queen， Cassius tells us that the conflict
raged all day. In view of the strength of each army， the latter
is far the likelier.
By reason of the historians brevity， Boadicea comes down
to us as more of a legend than a fact， but in both legend and
fact she stands a rich and colourful figure of her time.
She was a woman of majesty and magnetism， a queen greatly
lo~;ed by her-people. On her behalf they rose to challenge the
~ghtof Rome. It was an entirely impulsive gesture that
~Jmrd~ned them with a task of Herculean proportions， for in
，weapons and armour they were vastly inferior to the enemy.
Yet they almost succeeded.
If， during Boadicea s campaign， the Britons gave cruel death
to many Romans and collaborators， this was something the
vanquished suffered in most wars of those times. Students of
history who deprecate the way in which Boadicea revenged
herself for wrongs done to her and her people do so with an
obsessive pro-Romanism common to many classical scholars，
forgetting that there was little any nation could teach Rome
about cruelty. There are those who write angrily or bitterly
about Boadicea s destruction of the temple of Claudius at
Camulodunum (Colchester)， but the modem parallel is Cassino.
There are also those who， studying the conduct of the
queen s campaign， have concluded that it was masterminded
a，.A
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