Since the Roman state reserved this penalty almost entirely for political rebels and runaway slaves, the so-called thieves probably fell into the former category. In fact, it is quite likely that they were Zealots, members of an underground anti-imperialist movement which wanted to kick out the Romans and replace them with a purified Jewish state run by a priestly caste. The Zealots were to stage an insurrection some decades after Jesus’s death, with catastrophic results. They are memorably satirised as a kind of first-century Socialist Workers Party in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

The point of crucifixion wasn’t so much the pain, even though we derive the word “excruciating” from the practice. It was rather to proclaim the helplessness of those who struck against Roman sovereignty, hence discouraging others from doing the same. Their mutilated bodies were turned into advertisements for the power of Rome, pinned up in public humiliation on the edge of the city. Even so, Jesus himself got off fairly lightly.

I once made the mistake of pointing this out in a talk on BBC radio, and was the recipient of a shedload of outraged letters from Evangelical Christians who promised to pray for my soul while deeply doubting that I was in possession of one. But it’s true: Jesus seems to have been on the cross for only six hours, whereas there were other victims who thrashed around for days. It could be that the scourging they gave him helped to speed him on his way. If you are about to be crucified, lose as much blood as you can.

If the so-called thieves were revolutionaries, was Jesus one as well? It’s possible that the gospel-writers edited out some politically explosive stuff in order to cosy up to the authorities. Christians at the time were being savagely persecuted, and for them to portray their leader as a prototype for Lenin would scarcely have appealed to those in power. It’s true that a lot of what Jesus said might have sounded to a casual bystander like good Zealot stuff. He certainly would have had Zealots in his entourage. Judas Iscariot may have been one of them. Perhaps he sold his master out because he had expected him to lead the Jewish people against the occupying forces and was bitterly disenchanted when he didn’t. Jesus’s right-hand man Peter carried a sword, an odd thing for a Galilean fisherman to do.

On the other hand, Jesus supported paying taxes to Caesar, which the Zealots didn’t. He also called down some frightful curses on the heads of the Pharisees, who were more or less the Zealots’ theological wing, perhaps in order to put some daylight between the militants and himself.

The Pharisees, incidentally, have had a particularly bad press. They were admired by most Jews for their piety and good works, but are vilified in the New Testament as legalists and hypocrites. Some modern Christians think that Judaism is about the external and collective, while Christianity is about the inward and individual. Jews are devotees of Law, while Christians are disciples of Love. The gospel-writers, who were of course Jews themselves, wouldn’t have believed any such theological nonsense, and neither would Jesus himself. But the seeds of Christian anti-Semitism can already be detected in the smearing of the Pharisees.

Jesus tries to overturn what might be called the Satanic image of God. This is the idea of God as Patriarch, Big Daddy, Judge and Superego, with whom you have to bargain your way to heaven by being exceptionally righteous and respectable. On this theory, if you’re going to have a God at all, you might as well have a big nasty bastard of one who will relieve you of your guilt by clobbering you at regular intervals — not some gentle, Guardian-reading deity who lets us murder his own child without even a struggle. Jesus’s God, by contrast, is not a judge but a counsel for the defence. You can’t make graven images of this God because the only image of him is flesh and blood.

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The real Big Daddy was not the Jewish Yahweh but the imperial state, of which the local representative at the time was Pontius Pilate. The Roman governor is presented in the gospels as a vacillating, well-meaning, rather spineless liberal with a metaphysical turn of mind (“What is truth?” he inquires of Jesus), the kind of man you could imagine doing moderately well in the BBC. Being a decent sort of chap, he doesn’t want to come down too hard on this enigmatic young holy man, one of a whole pack of hairy prophets, freaks, hippies and charlatans thronging the streets of Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. The place must have looked a bit like Woodstock. In the end, however, Pilate can’t resist the pleas of the Jewish rabble and reluctantly packs Jesus off to his death.

None of this is likely to be true. For one thing, Jesus was wildly popular with the common people, who would never have called for his crucifixion. Like a modern rock star, he actually has to hide from his adoring fans. For another thing, Pilate was by no means the decent chap the gospels make him out to be. We happen to know from other sources that he was a ruthless despot who murdered prisoners, executed at the drop of a hat, and already stood accused of bribery, cruelty and illegal execution when Jesus appeared before him. He would never have got past his first interview at the BBC. In fact, he was finally dismissed from the imperial service for dishonourable conduct, and you had to be spectacularly dishonourable to be kicked out by the Romans. He would certainly have condemned Jesus, not to speak of his own grandmother, without a qualm, and without needing to believe that he was guilty.

Seeking once more to keep the ruling powers sweet, the gospel-writers tried to shift the blame for Jesus’s death from Pilate himself to the Jewish people. But why was he killed in the first place? It’s true that his life-style might have been offensive to the Jewish Establishment. He was homeless, vagrant, without property, celibate, a scourge of the rich and powerful, a champion of the dispossessed, remarkably laid-back about sex, averse to material goods and hostile to the family (almost every reference to the family in the New Testament is resoundingly negative). He also laid claim to an extraordinary authority, surprisingly for someone from a rural backwater like Galilee.

None of this would have got him into rabbinical school, but none of it would have got him topped either. He doesn’t directly claim to be Son of God, and even if he had it wouldn’t necessarily have landed him in trouble. All Jews were sons and daughters of God. He doesn’t claim to be the Messiah either. Instead, in carnivalesque spirit, he sends up the whole notion of kingship by riding into the capital on the back of a donkey. Besides, Messiahs don’t get themselves crucified. The very idea of a crucified Messiah would have struck the Jews of the time as a moral obscenity. In any case, the Romans wouldn’t have given a toss about the theological squabbles of their colonial underlings. They didn’t get out the hammer and nails for that.

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They might well have done so, however, had they thought that the Jesus movement was seditious. And the people most likely to have sown that suspicion in their minds were the Jewish priestly caste or Sanhedrin. Maybe the priests didn’t believe that Jesus was a would-be insurrectionist, but it might have been convenient for them to pretend that they did. The political atmosphere in the capital at Passover would have been extremely tense, and Jesus could have provided the spark that sent the place up in flames. The Sanhedrin knew that any such uprising would bring the full force of Roman power down on the backs of their hapless people, and would have been properly fearful on their behalf. They were out to prevent a disaster, and Jesus was to be the scapegoat. So it may be that Jesus was sent to his death as a political agitator without either the Jewish or Roman leaders believing that he was — or in the case of the Romans, really caring.

The first person to discover that Jesus’s tomb is empty was Mary Magdalen, which means that the news of his resurrection was broken to the world by what used to be known as a fallen woman. She was in the company of other women, all of whom testified that Jesus had risen from the dead. This must have proved an embarrassment for the early Christians — not because Mary was of dubious moral character, but because the testimony of a woman was regarded as worthless. What the Christian community viewed as the most momentous event in human history rested on notoriously unreliable witnesses. Just for this reason, however, the women would seem to be vindicated. If the gospel-writers could have passed over this awkward episode, they might well have done so; but the fact that they don’t suggests that it was so widely believed that it would have been odd to leave it out.

Jesus warns his followers that if they speak out for justice and friendship as he did, then they, too, will be done away with by the state. There are plenty of latter-day Zealots who have learnt this lesson the hard way. The message of the gospels is that if you love in a certain way, you are likely to be killed. There’s your pie in the sky for you. But as long as we see love mostly as an erotic and Romantic affair, rather than a matter of, say, toppling dictators, this needn’t disturb us unduly. One of the biggest mistakes of the modern era is to see love only as interpersonal. The authors of the New Testament can’t be accused of that, whatever their other shortcomings.

Readers in the 1970s, when Aldiss was writing Billion Year Spree, his history of science fiction, might have thought of Survivors, Terry Nation’s TV series that killed most of the British population with plague — but which, by its second series, was as much a paean to self-sufficiency as The Good Life. Readers in the 2020s may think of other stories: the post-apocalyptic Fox sitcom The Last Man on Earth, or Raised by Wolves — Ridley Scott’s new TV series about an android couple bringing up humanity’s last survivors. There’s even, I think, an echo of Aldiss’s idea in the discussions we’re having — on Zoom calls between friends and at the World Economic Forum — about whether a better world might emerge after the Covid-19 crisis has passed.

The name of Margot Bennett does not appear in Billion Year Spree. It doesn’t appear in many places. She is a scandalously forgotten writer. Even her murder mysteries, for which she received a Golden Dagger Award, have fallen out of print. Only the second-hand section will now yield her blue-spined Pelican, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, or The Furious Masters — a creepy story about an alien spaceship and its influence on an English village. You’ll have to search hard, too, for the book I think is her masterpiece, a novel of 1954 set in a post-catastrophic England that is anything but cosy: The Long Way Back. It is a scaldingly witty corrective to two ills that seem as present today as they did in the 1950s: British self-importance and British self-pity.

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In Bennett’s future, mainland Europe has sunk beneath the waves. The British Isles remain, but the Savoy is gone, there are no cars to be requisitioned and the tins of pineapple chunks and luncheon meat ran out long ago. The plants have turned carnivorous. (Thankfully they can’t move.) Monstrous canine mutants, the sabre-toothed descendants of household pets, stalk the forests. Britons live in caves and on potatoes. They worship a god that is a personification of fear. “We fear,” goes their litany, spoken by a four-foot tall tribesman named Brown. “We fear illness, death, fire, dogs, fever, madness, desolation.”

This is not a story about the conquest of that fear. The Britons we encounter are not the protagonists of the story. We don’t see this country through their eyes. Bennett’s heroes are members of a survey team despatched from the continental superpower of Africa. Grame, a restless technician, and Valya, a tough soldier, have come to “investigate primitive Britain,” an obscure and hazardous backwater whose inhabitants they view with horror, pity and contempt. “Savages,” breathes Valya, when she encounters her first tribal Englishmen. “And speaking in a dialect of our own language. It’s a miracle.”

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The Long Way Back reverses the conventions of imperial literature that we associate with Kipling or Edgar Rice Burroughs. Its African explorers speculate about mining British coal and shipping it back home. They worry about the health of the natives. (“If only we could educate the mothers to feed their children properly,” Valya declares, wondering if calcium supplements would help thicken their fragile skulls.)

For Bennett’s original readers — still two years away from the Suez Crisis that triggered Britain’s period of decolonisation – such humour must have seemed astonishing. In the age of Brexit and BLM, it plays differently — demonstrating that, over six decades later, the tensions and contradictions within Britain’s post-imperial identity have yet to be resolved; that the process of decolonisation remains incomplete.

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The real greatness of the Bennett’s novel, though, lies in a quality it shares with the book it most resembles. In Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad takes his narrator, Marlow, from the Thames to the Congo, reminding us that London was once considered “one of the dark places of the earth”. Conrad also questions the imperial paradigm of light and darkness. Not enough for many readers: Chinua Achebe considered it “a totally deplorable book” by “a bloody racist”. His novel does, however, suggest that the colonial impulse is a form of moral malaise, and in Bennett’s technocratic future Africa — a single political entity — this malaise is taking hold.

It’s a warning that all such projects are unsustainable. Not much, perhaps, to console anybody toiling behind barbed wire in Xinjang province, but one that might encourage members of post-imperial societies like ours to look back on the past with more humility.

And here Bennett has a warning for those whose politics are shaped by anxiety about the status of their nation. The British expedition of The Long Way Back is a stunt to restore morale; to make Africa great again. Valya diagnoses the problem: “Soldiers desert from the army… miners don’t want to go down into the earth; mothers hide their children to avoid the grading machine; people walk past the news boards without reading them; and political meetings can’t be held without a conscripted audience.”

Grame is an embodiment of that dissatisfaction and disengagement. He wants to quit his job in IT and study cosmic rays instead, but the reply to his request, issued by an administrative computer, comes as a series of questions: “Have you an adequate tobacco-room? … Have you an adequate sex-cubicle?”

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Frustrated by this treatment, he volunteers for the expedition. A lecture on British history is part of the training — a peculiar, garbled, dream-like account of the nation he is preparing to explore. The Romans ruled Britain. Russia was a colony of the Romans. The Romans were led by Napoleon. In Britain, people kept dogs, played ball games and idolised a figure called Crom Well. The lecture is not given by a single authority, but is picked up like a song, which must be acquired and then passed on to new arrivals. With each repetition, the speech becomes more weird and incoherent. “It ensures the continuity of tradition,” Grame is told.

A similar historical tangle seems to have entered conversations about Britain today. Except these are not happening across a gulf of time and space, they’re in the mouths of ministers and campaigners. They are not as weird as Donald Trump’s historical monologues — in which Frederick Douglass walks the modern world, Canada burned down the White House, and American forces took control of the airports during the War of Independence – but they are a puzzling mess of memories and impulses. Magna Carta. VE Day. Sunlit uplands. Project fear. The Luftwaffe. “The greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200.” Those peculiar exhalations on British national superiority that sometimes emerge from the education secretary. All primary sources for future historians to piece together, in the hope of finding a picture that looks like something. Unless, of course, they’re engaged in other, more urgent projects.

This is the uncosiest thought in The Long Way Back. Margot Bennett’s Britons eat potatoes and fight among themselves. And nobody cares what they think.

Yet then something miraculous happened. Spreading from east to west across the Mediterranean, travelling along the great network of roads and shipping lanes that constituted the arteries of the Roman Empire, news began to spread that this man whose mortal remains supposedly lay entombed in the grave had been seen alive. Most people, of course, scoffed at such reports — but there were some, small communities of believers, who did not. These, even as the decades passed, kept the faith: the conviction that their saviour would come again, that he would reign, in the words of a widely circulated prophecy, as “the king of Jerusalem”, that he would bring to groaning humanity a universal peace.

In the event, Nero did not come again. Despite the various imposters who appeared in the wake of his death in AD 68, and the fact that, centuries later, there were cities in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire that still honoured his memory, his fate was to be commemorated, not as a saviour, but as a monster. And so, in numerous ways, he was. His readiness to have members of his own family — mother, brother, wife — put to death ensured that when he himself died the dynasty of the Caesars perished with him.

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His sex games were notorious. He was darkly rumoured to have set fire to Rome. By the time that Suetonius, half a century after his death, came to write his biography, the details of his life could be structured almost entirely as a catalogue of deviancies and crimes. “Insolence, an uninhibited sexual appetite, dissipation, greed, cruelty: these were the vices which, to begin with — because he gave expression to them only secretly and incrementally — might well have been chalked up as the excesses of youth, had it not been manifest to everyone even at the time that they were failings, not of age, but of character.”

Nero’s rule had become one protracted blasphemy against the customs of the Roman state. These, hallowed by the centuries, enabled the people of a city that had conquered most of the known world to feel a sense of communion still with the mos maiorum: the customs of their distant ancestors. To no class of society was this more important than the Senate, which still, despite the collapse of Rome’s venerable republican order and its replacement by the autocracy of the Caesars, cherished its time-honoured role as the guardians of tradition.

Augustus, the founder of the Caesars’ monarchy, had succeeded in securing it, paradoxically, by veiling the brute reality of his power. Other emperors too had made an effort to parade their respect for constitutional and moral proprieties. Nero, however, had found the pretensions of the Senate tedious. Over the course of his reign, his boredom with them had metastasised. Increasingly, he had sought to break free from the prescriptions of what he saw as a crabbed and superseded order by creating his own reality. The Senate, wounded and demoralised by a rising swell of executions, had appeared powerless to resist him. In the end, only a series of military uprisings across the empire had been sufficient to topple Nero, and back him into taking his own life. The hatred for him shown by writers such as Suetonius reflected the hatred of an elite that had found all its priorities, all its values, all its assumptions enduring sustained attack.

But the desperation on the part of many to believe that Nero was not truly dead, and that he would come again, reflected the fact that not everybody had loathed him. The readiness of people to put their faith in him as a supernatural saviour derived from the very aspects of his reign that had so offended the political elites. When Nero took to the stage, playing on the lyre or acting the parts of ancient heroes, he had been trampling on everything that Roman traditionalists held sacred. Those who made a show of their bodies before the public gaze, draping themselves in exotic costumes and speaking other people’s lines, were regarded by upstanding citizens as little better than whores.

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But across the Greek world, and even in Rome itself, there were many who had found themselves enraptured by Nero’s command of fantasy and spectacle. To rule as a Caesar was to play a part. Sometimes, when Nero took to the stage, his mask had been painted to look like the hero he was playing, sometimes to look like himself. No one had been able to mistake the point that was being made. The events of Nero’s life, its many trials and tribulations, were as worthy a subject of drama as anything conjured up by the ancient tragedians. This was why, far from attempting to veil the murder of his mother, he had drawn attention to it as publicly as he possibly could by playing a famous matricide from Greek mythology. Nero had enabled his public to believe that heroes once again were treading the earth.

And not just heroes. As a literally colossal memorial to his reign, Nero had left behind in Rome a statue of that golden charioteer of the heavens, the Sun. There had been, though, in the contours of the god’s original face, more than a suggestion of a second famous charioteer. The Colossus, as the bronze had come to be known, “was designed to resemble the Emperor”. In other ways too, Nero had sought to offer to mortals the spectacle of a god become man. In the rumoured overthrow of his predecessor as emperor; in his rapes; in his mastery of metamorphosis, making humans into beasts and men into women, he had adopted the character not just of the Sun but of Zeus himself, the lord of the gods.

If many among the people loved him, then this was in part because Nero had offered them the chance to share in his conflation of the heavenly with the earthly. In the wake of the great fire that, in 64, had destroyed much of Rome, he had planted a park in the very centre of the city. The sprawling lawns, lakes and forests that surrounded what he termed his ‘Golden House’ had offered to the masses a feel of fresh breezes, a break from the monotony of smoke and brick, a hint of the pavilions of the immortals on Mount Olympus.

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Senators, of course, had hated it. The loss of Rome’s familiar sights to countryside had borne witness precisely to what they had always found most disorienting about Nero: his ability to dissolve the boundaries of everything that they had previously taken for granted. So it was that they had accused him of starting the fire deliberately, as a way of clearing a space for his building plans; and so it was that Nero, looking to shift the blame, had fixed on convenient scapegoats. These culprits, even by Nero’s own taboo-busting standards, embodied everything that decent citizens had always most dreaded about moral upheaval: the adherents of a sinister cult whose motivation was nothing less than, in the words of a Roman historian, “their hatred for the norms of human society”.

‘Christians’, these deviants were called, after their founder, ‘Christus’, a criminal who had been crucified in Judaea some decades before, under a previous Caesar. Nero, ever fond of a spectacle, had displayed a vengefulness worthy of the Olympian gods. Some of the condemned, dressed in animal skins, had been torn to pieces by dogs. Others, lashed to crosses, had been smeared in pitch and used as torches to illumine the night. Nero, riding in his chariot, had mingled with the gawping crowds. Suetonius would include his persecution of the Christians in the list — a very short one — of the positives of his reign.

Among those put to death, so later tradition would record, was a man who in time would come to be viewed as the very keeper of the doors of heaven. In 1601, in a church that had originally been built on the site of the tomb where Nero’s two nurses and his first great love had buried him, a painting was installed that paid homage, not to the notorious Caesar, but to the outcast origins of the city’s Christian order.

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The artist, a young man from Milan by the name of Caravaggio, had been commissioned to portray a crucifixion: not of Christ himself, but of his leading disciple. Peter, a fisherman who, according to the Gospels, had abandoned his boat and nets to follow Jesus, was said to have become the bishop of the very first Christians of Rome. Since his execution in the wake of the great fire, more than 200 men had held the bishopric: an office which brought with it a claim to primacy over the entire Church, and the honorary title of ‘Pappas’ or ‘Father’ — ‘Pope’.

Over the course of the 15 centuries and more that had followed Peter’s death, the authority of the popes had waxed and waned; but nevertheless, even though much diminished from its heyday, it remained in the lifetime of Caravaggio a formidable thing. The artist, however, knew better than to celebrate its pomp, its splendour, its wealth. The earthly greatness of the Papacy was turned — literally — on its head.

Peter, the story went, had demanded to be crucified upside down, so as not to share in the fate of his Lord; and Caravaggio, choosing as his theme the very moment when the heavy cross was levered upwards, portrayed the first pope as he had authentically been — as a peasant. No ancient artist would have thought to honour a Caesar by representing him as Caravaggio portrayed Peter: tortured, humiliated, stripped almost bare. And yet, in the city of Nero, it was a man broken to such a fate who was honoured as the keeper of “the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

The utter strangeness of Easter does not lie in the notion that a mortal might become divine. As Nero well knew, the border between the heavenly and the earthly had always been viewed as permeable. Divinity in the Roman world, however, was understood to be for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and Caesars. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself; to have a person stabbed in the womb, or gelded and made to live forever as a member of the opposite sex, or smeared in pitch and set to serve as a human torch.

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That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. Nero, charging the Christians with arson and hatred of humanity, seems not to have undertaken any detailed interrogation of their beliefs — but doubtless, had he done so, he would have been revolted and bewildered.

Radically though Nero had sought to demonstrate to the world that the divine might be interfused with the human, the Christians he had tortured to death believed in something infinitely more radical. There was but the one God, and His Son, by becoming mortal and dying the death of a slave, had redeemed all of humanity. Not as an emperor but as a victim he had come. The message was novel beyond the wildest dreams even of a Nero; and was destined to endure long after all his works, and the works of the Caesars, had crumbled into dust.

This Sunday, when billons of people around the globe celebrate the triumph over death of a man laid in a tomb in a garden, the triumph they celebrate will not be that of an emperor. “For God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

The Iron Age queen Boudica looms large in myth. She is revered as an awesome figure of female rage, a military leader raising an army against the occupying power of the Roman Empire, an avenger of men’s sexual violence and patriarchal entitlement, a bringer of justice fuelled by pain and anger, a native subject who refused to be ruled by a foreign invader. She is a symbol of resistance against colonialism and slavery.

At the time of Boudica’s rebellion, Britannia had been occupied by the Romans for less than 20 years. King Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni tribe, had acquiesced to Roman rule after the previous Emperor Claudius’s invasion in AD43 and a failed local rebellion four years later. Prasutagus accepted and adopted Roman ways and gave the Empire duties, loans, tithes and taxes from his people – including fees the Iceni had to pay to bury their own dead.

Then, in AD 60, Prasutagus died and left only half his estate to the new emperor, the notoriously cruel Nero, giving the other half to his daughters. In retaliation, the Romans plundered the household of his widow Queen Boudica’s household; she was flogged, her relatives enslaved and her daughters gang-raped. She and her tribe erupted in rebellion, and the Romans soon found themselves facing a general uprising.

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Yet there is scant evidence that Boudica definitely existed, as I discovered when I was commissioned by a publisher to write a fictionalisation of her rebellion. I grew up on Manda Scott’s thrilling series of novels and on the television series starring Alex Kingston as the red-haired heroine. But looking at the actual (meagre) evidence presented by historians such as Richard Hingley, Christina Unwin, Marguerite Johnson, Nic Fields and Vanessa Collingridge opened my eyes.

There is almost no contemporaneous evidence from 60-61AD, the time of Boudica’s rebellion, identifying her as the revolutionary leader. The story of the Iceni tribe can be pieced together from some archaeological evidence, including fragments submerged in the molten matter produced by the scalding, decimating heat of the rebels’ fires in the Roman towns of Camulodunum (Colchester), Verulamium (St Albans) and Londinium (at that time a small, emergent outpost). There then followed a final battle against the Romans, led by general Suetonius Paulinus, but the exact location of this remains a mystery.

We don’t even know if Boudica — which simply means “Victory” — was her given name or a symbolic epithet, although there were certainly other Iron Age women leaders, such as Cartimandua of the northern Brigantes. The mythologising accounts we have of Boudica come from two later classical commentators, Tacitus (whose father-in-law had been an imperial governor in Britain) and Cassius Dio.

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It is these men — stalwarts of the Roman Empire themselves — who contributed unwittingly to the powerful image we have of her today, although they were written with quite the opposite intention. Boudica’s muscular frame, weaponry, mane of reddish-gold hair, glinting jewellery, flowing clothes and rousing speeches, delivered standing on her war chariot, are their inventions. These classical men tried to depict Boudica as an unnatural and uncouth barbarian she-devil but actually made her impressive to later readers, although their accounts were not rediscovered until the Renaissance humanist period.

Boudica’s achievement had been to unite a number of tribes, assembling a great horde of fighters that included the neighbouring Trinovantes, considered the most powerful in Britain. Together, they poured down through Camulodunum, Verulamium and Londinium, sacking and burning as they went. Some of the classical accounts of their massacres — such as those of women mutilated and impaled lengthways on stakes — are outlandish and cannot be proven either way. But there is no doubt about the level of physical destruction. The fires were thought to have reached 1,000 degrees centigrade. And Boudica’s army was so fierce that the Roman administrator, Catus Decianus, fled rather than face her.

The three towns Boudica’s army struck had symbolic power as imperial administrative centres, settlements for former Roman soldiers built on co-opted lands, as well as Romanised natives who had adopted the dress and habits of their colonisers. Although they might have been enjoyed by retired soldiers, they were not actively defended by the military, with the exception of a small retinue of troops slaughtered inside Claudius’s temple in Camulodunum.

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Although there are no contemporary verifications, the practicalities of moving an army of hundreds of thousands of fighters – and their families — across such distances suggests that Boudica’s campaign lasted several months, rather than weeks. By now, Emperor Nero would have known about it, and Suetonius Paulinus was under pressure to act against the barbarian upstarts.

Suetonius had been in Wales and now travelled to meet Boudica’s forces, with the full might of the Roman army behind him. The Romans were practiced technical fighters, excellent at strategy, calm, well-horsed and well-armoured, with expertly-built weaponry including arrows and spears, daggers and swords, as well as rounded full-body shields. Despite being outnumbered by Boudica’s fighters, they were simply a better war machine. They took up a position uphill of Boudica’s army, which was now squashed between the Romans and their own carts, laden with plunder, possessions and relatives.

That Boudica killed herself with poison cannot be verified, although it once again corroborates the myth of this warrior queen preferring death to ignominy and dishonour. The Romans took their revenge, seizing the rebel tribes’ valuable horses and plunder, torching the settlements and slaying the Iceni and those who had fought with them. They re-militarised the occupation, building and populating forts across their territory.

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By Bidisha

In the decades to come, the Romans would continue to bed in their occupation, and it wasn’t until nearly 400 years later that the land was finally rid of the empire and the colonisers left. Boudica’s rebellion in the early days was singular in its ferocity. It is its gendered aspect, I believe, which compels and fascinates many women who identify with her raw rage — as I do. The uprising failed, but it was indicative of the fact that the Romans’ presence in Britannia was never really easy, no matter how many towns they developed (among them Gloucester, Bath and York). They failed to take Caledonia — Scotland — and had to keep constant military vigilance against the tribes – tribes just like those that Boudica led.

Boudica occupies a unique place in the tale of early Britain: she is the native warrior who fought back against foreign invaders, the once obedient vassal who decided death was better than more dishonour, the anti-imperial, anti-slavery activist who got radical the moment things got personal. Of course the idolisation of Boudica, especially strong in the Victorian era, has usually glossed over Britain’s global infamy as slavers and colonisers running an empire that dwarfed Rome in size.

She has also been interpreted as a testament to a wronged woman’s zeal and a symbolic warning that a formerly compliant wife and mother is capable of any feat in defence of her family. The implication is that this is a nation that cannot be subjugated, co-opted or annexed by occupying forces and would never submit to the humiliation and violation of imperialism; that this island may be small, but has the guts to defend itself against anyone who dares to subdue it.

Suggested reading

Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

Boudica’s war gave the Roman empire a hard jolt and served — I have no doubt — as an inspiration to the countless other tribes, settlements and occupied people that resistance, protest and fighting back were righteous and valuable. Without her, Britannia would be seen as just more territory to be easily conquered by the Roman war machine. Yet after her rebellion, Britannia was seen as a troublesome outpost of the Roman empire, one which required constant vigilance due to repeated acts of rebellion.

It cemented a national image that is both double-edged and enduring: the Brits as hard-drinking, easy-fighting hooligans, self-righteous, proud, eccentric, patriotic and defiant. That can be interpreted in any number of ways. Indeed Boudica has since the Victorian period been taken up very strongly by Britons of all politican and cultural persuasions: by suffragettes, abolitionists, imperialists, freedom fighters, feminists, pagans and others. Because so little is truly known about her, she has retained her mystique and stands as a universal and timeless symbol of the wronged woman lost to history.

It is this obscurity and mystery that drive people to endlessly rediscover her. She inspires me as a woman who refused to take abuse, internalise her anger or accept the perpetrations and humiliations of those in power. Her anger was her expression and her fuel. She required that she and her daughters be revenged and their rapists punished. Thousands of years later, I want the same thing.