Nero by Anthony Everitt & Roddy Ashworth

Author:Anthony Everitt & Roddy Ashworth [Everitt, Anthony & Ashworth, Roddy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

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Boudica, meanwhile, had been crowned as the queen of the Iceni in the kingdom’s capital at Venta Icenorum (Market of the Iceni—today’s Caistor St. Edmund). A proud and intelligent woman, she may have thought this kind of demand was not Catus’s to make—it would be action that only the governor could oversee, and (perhaps rightly) she guessed Paulinus would never dream of instigating a large tribal standoff so close to Britannia’s capital. Some suggest she may even have sent an appeal to Paulinus, but if she did, it either never arrived, was ignored by one of his staff, or was disregarded by him.

She was wrong about Catus’s position as deputy. Catus’s relationship to Paulinus was more complex. It was the procurator’s duty to report back to Rome if he thought the governor was in error, especially over financial matters. He probably thought of himself as more of an official backstop, should the governor misbehave. Besides which, with the governor absent fighting a campaign, there was no doubt he was indeed in charge of the province.

Boudica defied his order and refused to hand over any of her treasures, lands, or citizens to Rome. She saw the throne as hers and the Iceni people as her subjects. Importantly, so did they.

But Catus was determined: She would pay up, and pay up fast. There was a chance that merchants and their vigilante militias would call in yet more of the Iceni’s riches.

Boudica refused again, probably not fully understanding the power, determination, and greed of the procurator. Catus had a significant number of Paulinus’s guards at his disposal—perhaps even as many as four or five centuries (that is, between four hundred and five hundred men, plus an equal number of auxiliaries, making eight hundred to one thousand men) barracked at a fort near Londinium.

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