Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Nathan Ross]

Dates the harvesting season seems to be early August and were on the stalk... but they may have been from the previous year?

Yes, I would guess the dates were preserved and imported from (?) the Mediterranean.

The grapes might be a different matter - presumably they were fresh. I believe grapes were cultivated in Britain at some point, but perhaps not this early. Would they have been imported from Gaul or the Rhineland, perhaps? In which case it must have been during or after the grape harvest, which begins in August in some places I think and goes on through the autumn.

By the Spring of AD61 the territories of the Iceni and the Trinovantes were Roman Provinces run on the Roman Estate System and owned by Rome, not by the tribes, and the locals were tenants. Therefore the corn that was planted in the winter of AD60 actually belonged to Rome.

We don't know when Prasutagus died - we tend to assume it was only a month or two before the revolt, but it could have been several years beforehand and the grievance had gone on since then.

Either way, the Iceni kingdom was a client state while he still lived, and only became a province at some time afterwards. I don't know if the transition was as abrupt as you imply though. The paragraph in Annals that describes what happened (14.31) makes it sound like a more chaotic and haphazard process, and not an entirely legal one either - presumably driven by the 'rapacity' of the procurator Catus. But this could just be Tacitus bashing Roman imperialism again!

"his kingdom was plundered by centurions, his house by slaves, as if they were the spoils of war... the chief men of the Iceni, as if Rome had received the whole country as a gift, were stript of their ancestral possessions... reduced as they now were into the condition of a province, they flew to arms..."

'As if' (velut and quasi) suggests that this was not really the case (true enough!), but 'the condition of a province', or 'the form of a province' (quando in formam provinciae cesserant) might mean that they were not in legal reality a province at this point but Catus and his gang were treating them like one.

So I don't know if we would see a Roman estate system in operation on Iceni territory as early as 60 or 61, or official Roman ownership of Iceni land - whatever was happening seems (if we can believe Tacitus!) to have been local greed and appropriation at this stage, rather than imperial policy.