Elodie Harper

Tacitus in his Agricola is when he says that the ancient Britons don't distinguish between the sexes when choosing commanders.

And he says that in reference to Boudicca and her rebellion.

And it's a throwaway line, but the significance of that in this time period is really immense.

I mean, it is impossible to imagine a Roman emperor or a Roman legate commanding legions in

armies and being a woman.

Just unthinkable.

And yet in ancient Britain, this was really common.

We don't just have Tacitus' word for it.

We're aware that there was Cartimandua, the queen of the north of the Brigantes, the original Sansa Stark, although she was a collaborator with Rome unlike Boudicca.

But we have other female rulers recorded.

And we also have the archaeology

Last year, the Diotreges tribe, who were in the west of the UK, were found to practice matriloquy.

So their whole societies, it's not just that random rulers might be a woman, but their whole societies were based upon the idea that power was vested in the female line, which is such a different way of living to what was happening in ancient Rome at that point.

Yes, absolutely.

And this was another thing that drew me to the story is it wasn't just a political rebellion.

This is really a family drama, what happened and deeply personal in the relationships between all the people involved.

So the statue too is very interesting in the sense that it looks like Boudicca is about to attack the whole Houses of Parliament.

So she's a British heroine yet seems to be about to launch war on her own.

But that's weirdly apt for what happened in the rebellion because there had aspects of it that were close to civil war in the sense that there weren't kind of neat lines between colonizer and colonized.

There would by this point have been a degree of intermarriage, a degree of cultural exchange between people.