Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Renatus]

Hanny,

I will depart from the usual quotation and response method of dealing with your replies to me in your post #2041 and try to deal with them thematically.

The outbreak of the revolt is intimately connected with the timing of Suetonius' Anglesey campaign, as we are told that it coincided with the closing stages of that operation.  The actual fighting on Anglesey seems to have consisted of a single battle but preparations for it would have taken longer.  We have spoken of road-building to get to the Menai Straits but this need not mean the construction of metaled Roman roads, rather pioneers going ahead of the main column, identifying the easiest route and clearing it of obstacles.  The construction of barges for the crossing of the Straits would probably have taken some time, however.  Unfortunately, Tacitus does not give us precise dates.  If the campaigning season starts in spring and spring in the northern hemisphere is taken to run from mid-March to mid-June, we have some sort of indication.  It cannot start too early, if reliance is to be put upon there being grain in the fields to forage for, as Julian found to his cost.  Summer need not be ruled out, as early in the season there will be corn ripening in the fields.  Nevertheless, to get the maximum practical period for campaigning, late-spring would seem to be a sensible starting point and we can probably see Suetonius on Anglesey in mid- to late-summer, but not too late.

The missed planting season is a problem.  If the main planting season is in the autumn, it is virtually impossible to imagine that Boudica would have planned the revolt so far in advance as to neglect planting in the autumn of AD60.  On the other hand, if spring planting was supplementary to the main planting and was harvested at the same time, it is difficult to see how this would make such a difference to the availability of grain as to cause the famine that Tacitus reports.  Nathan has proposed that the revolt broke out after the harvest of AD61.  This is not impossible but one has to be careful.  Harvest was a longish process, involving reaping, threshing and winnowing.  In pre-mechanised 19th century England it lasted through August to mid-September.  This seems to be too late but, if one imagines the harvest in AD61 to be limited to reaping only, leaving the corn in stooks in the fields, it becomes more plausible.  The missed planting season would then be that of autumn that year, the rebels having gone to war before seed-time.  The fact that this caused a famine need not be a problem.  Tacitus is not specific as to the year of the famine and it need not be in the year of the revolt.  I have suggested that was actually in the winter of 62-3.  However, there is another possibility.  Suetonius' reprisals involved ravaging the tribes with fire and sword.  Incidentally or deliberately, this would very likely have involved the destruction of stored grain and, with depleted stocks and nothing coming through to replace them, the famine could have begun much earlier than winter 62.

What makes me slightly uncomfortable with Nathan's timing, if I have understood it correctly, is that it leaves little time in the rest of 61 for the events described by Tacitus - the revolt and its defeat, the arrival of reinforcements, Suetonius' reprisals, Classicianus' realisation that these were going too far and reporting to Rome, Polyclitus' journey to Britain, investigation and report, and eventually Suetonius' loss of ships and replacement by Petronius Turpilianus.  Of course, some of this can be pushed into 62 but not too much for reasons that I will come to.

If, to gain more time for these events, one brings the outbreak of the revolt forward to sometime after the time for spring planting and assumes that it was this that was missed, as I have said, that should not have caused a famine.  I therefore wonder if what Tacitus may have had in mind, although he does not say it in terms, is that it was the harvest that was also missed and that the crops planted in autumn 60 rotted in the fields, either because the revolt went on too long for them to be harvested or, because of the losses sustained in the battle and the disruption caused by Suetonius' campaign of reprisals, there was not the manpower or opportunity to harvest them.

You have suggested, if I have it right, that the revolt was not necessarily settled by one battle and that resistance persisted and continued into a second or even, possibly, a third year.  I cannot agree with this.  First, all our sources are adamant that there was only the one battle.  Dio says that those who escaped were prepared to continue the fight but, after the death of Boudica, realised that the cause was lost and gave up.  Tacitus says that they remained at large because they were afraid of retribution at the hands of Suetonius.  Neither says that there was any further fighting.  However, the major reason for believing that the events described by Tacitus could not have persisted beyond the early part of 62 is what he says about the replacement of Suetonius by Petronius Turpilianus.  He says that, after the loss of the ships, Suetonius was ordered to hand his army over to Turpilianus 'as if the war continued' (tamquam durante bello).  He goes on to say that Turpilianus did nothing to provoke the enemy and they did nothing to trouble him and the same continued under his successor, Trebellius Maximus.  In short, the rebellion was completely over by the time Turpilianus succeeded Suetonius.

The question then is when the changeover took place.  The rebellion started during the consular year of Caesennius Paetus and Petronius Turpilianus (AD61) but Turpilianus had stepped down as consul by the time he took over from Suetonius (qui iam consulatu abierat).  The key word here is 'iam '.  This has a variety of meanings - 'already', 'just', 'recently', 'by this time', etc. - but all imply that the event was comparatively recent.  Turpilianus had handed his consulate over to a suffect consul in mid-61, so I would say that he must have taken over from Suetonius a maximum of six months later.  Carroll gets round this by suggesting that he was appointed as Suetonius' successor in 61 but did not actually go to the province until 62.  Suetonius would have been obliged to remain in Britain until Turpilianus arrived to replace him.  The result of this is that Turpilianus' effective governorship is most likely to have begun in early 62 at the latest and, as we know, he was back in Rome to take up the post of curator aquarum in 63.  The upshot of all this is that all the evidence points to the rebellion beginning and ending in 61, although Suetonius' reprisals could have continued a short way into 62.