Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Nathan Ross]

What can possibly be pushed into 62 is Turpilianus' arrival in the province... Suetonius was ordered to hand his army over to Turpilianus who had resigned his consulship (qui iam consulatu abierat).

It seems that governors usually arrived in their provinces in the summer of their first year of office. Perhaps Turpilianus's appointment was a last-minute decision, taken in late spring rather than the previous year as per normal?

In such a case, might Tacitus simply be telling us that it was by now in fact the following year, and Turpilianus was no longer Consul?

Are there other references to Ordinary Consuls 'resigning' or 'laying down' their consulships and going on to do different things that same year?

Polyclitus arriving to conduct his investigation during a second year... would mean that... the revolt must have broken out in AD60, thus reviving the old notion that Tacitus had made a mistake with his dates. 

Yes, I've began once more to incline towards this particular heresy!

All the more galling as I'd spent so long arguing against the '60/61' dating, and Tacitus is unusually specific with AD61. But sadly it does make a lot more sense of the chronology if the revolt was in late summer-autumn 60, and Turpilianus took over in summer 61.

Does it have to be a mistake on T's part, though? In Agricola there's no mention of the date (or of Prasutagus, or the treatment of Boudica - it seems it took a while for these details to emerge!); could it be that Tacitus, researching the story fifty years later in whatever official source he was using, found all the events of the British revolt listed under AD61, which was the year that Classicianus's full report on Paulinus's military activities arrived and the emperor took the decision to replace the governor? Tacitus might have considered that officially speaking the whole thing happened that year, even if he knew that in fact most of it had happened the previous autumn.

A bit too tortuous, or a possibility? We would have to look at some other examples of Tacitean chronology to work out how plausible this might be.

The product of a full harvest would surely have been too great for the rebels to take with them and, accordingly, they could have harvested only so much of the crop as they could have loaded on to their wagons. 

I tend to think that an agricultural people would never break off a harvest and leave standing crops in the fields. But they had to move fairly promptly; if they waited until the full harvest season was done, the campaign season would be over too, and Paulinus and his legions would be looming over the horizon once more...

A poor and brief harvest is more likely than a deliberately abbreviated one, I think, and makes more sense of the note about seizing Roman supplies.

...failure to sow in the spring would mean that there was nothing to harvest in the latter part of the year, after the defeated rebels had returned to their homelands, and this, coupled with the failure to harvest the crop from the previous year, would have led to the famine referred to by Tacitus.

The problem is that both winter and summer crops were harvested at around the same time - August/September. So if the spring planting was missed, the autumn-planted crop could still be harvested, and famine averted. Tacitus is specific that the famine was caused by missed sowing, not missed harvesting.

If the harvest was bad, and the rebels were away for the sowing season that followed but meanwhile lost what little they had harvested after taking it with them on their failed campaign, they would have had little to sustain them over the winter, nothing to sow the following spring and nothing to harvest the following summer either. Famine would have set in quickly.

I still think this is the only scenario that would create a famine as a direct (or indirect?) result of a missed sowing season.