Elodie Harper

Oh, it's an absolute delight to be with you again.

Thanks so much for having me on.

She is.

And there are so many different ways of approaching her story.

And over the centuries in Britain, people have done that in multiple ways.

The reason we think of her as red-haired is because Elizabeth I used her as propaganda, another warrior queen, and projected her own physical attributes onto this ancient warrior queen.

In fact,

The only Roman source, which is hundreds of years after the fact, said she was blonde.

I mean, who knows?

She could have been a brunette, but this is all part of the storytelling.

And then the Victorians who erected that incredible statue designed it that faces the Houses of Parliament, Boudicca and her daughters.

She was a very strange figure for them because

They identified as an imperial power, Britain then, very much with the Romans.

And yet Boudicca was a rebel.

So her legacy in that time period was quite complex.

And then I would say now...

One of the reasons I was so drawn to her story is with recent archaeological discoveries, we're finding out that powerful warrior women were much more common in this time period than perhaps was thought.

And rather than being a kind of mythical outlier, Boudicca represents a different cultural phenomenon to that of ancient Greece and Rome.

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, it's, I think, one of the most fascinating lines in