Elodie Harper

There's no getting away from their tyranny if you want to be free.

You have to fight for it.

I think she says in Tacitus has her say something like, it's better to be dead than to be enslaved.

And the historic Boudicca has believed, well, Tacitus says she took her own life after defeat, which again fits very much into the ancient world.

mentality and again in terms of my own book was something i wanted to challenge that selena does not make that choice to take her own life would be quite a short book otherwise i wanted to explore what it might mean to survive after the rebellion and to deal with the aftermath and the compromise and yeah all the issues that that would throw up

And I have to say, I found it quite convenient to go down that path as well.

But if we were to look at it as journalists, and my other hat on, I used to be a journalist for many years working for ITV.

Yeah, it's very convenient, isn't it?

It was all this guy.

And I think it's fair enough to imagine that perhaps Paulinas over in Wales is

for purely selfish reasons, probably would not have wanted to be causing a lot of trouble on a second front.

So perhaps he wasn't involved, but it's entirely possible that back in Rome, if Nero was aware of the will, maybe he was like, well, this is an outrage.

No, I don't want it.

I mean, we can't know.

There was quite a fair amount of devolution in terms of provinces at this time and decisions that people took.

But equally, as you say,

Having one bad apple is a better story for Rome, isn't it, than the idea that the whole structure of command in Britain was rotten and oppressive at this time.

Desianus did flee to Gaul afterwards, which does look a little bit guilty.

This is all part of the joy and the frustration of dealing with very ancient sources is

Not only have we got the passage of time and the patchiness of the records, there's also Tacitus and Cassius Dio or any of the chroniclers, they have their own propaganda, their own axes to grind.