When we did the first part of the Boudicca Way (sic - there are various spellings!) recently I meant to take along my historical notes from when we did part 2 of the walk last November to regale people with when we had our lunch stop. But I failed to print the right page. Grr.
Then this week there was this article in The Times ...
Opening for the defence, Thomas Grant QC, said “this brave woman” had been the victim of “scurrilous Roman propaganda” and had been resisting an illegitimate occupier. “I am confident that a British jury will do justice to a Briton,” he said. “What have the Romans ever done for us?” Apart, he conceded, from the aqueduct.
He said that after she made a “mild protest”, the Romans had acted so violently towards her that her revolt was “the only conceivable response”.
Boudica was finally defeated at the Battle of Watling Street by the Roman governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus. She is said to have committed suicide by poisoning herself, though was looking in good health in the dock, if not quite how Cassius Dio described her: “In stature very tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce and her voice was harsh.”
The moot trial was presided over by Lord Justice Stephens, a Supreme Court judge, who told Boudica that she was at liberty to reclaim her spear from security and retire to her plinth by Westminster Bridge “without any stain on your character and remain as a national symbol of an inspirational hero”.
This was the sixth trial of a classical figure at the Supreme Court to raise awareness of and funds for the education charity Classics for All. Previous trials featured Socrates, Brutus, Antigone and Gaius Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily, while in 2019 the jury rejected a petition by an Athenian to divorce his wife, Lysistrata, for unreasonable conduct. They decided she had the right to end war between her city and Sparta by encouraging women to withhold sex from their husbands, as described by the playwright Aristophanes in 411BC.
Classics for All was founded in 2010 to reverse the decline in the teaching of the ancient world and its languages in state schools. It has since worked with almost 100,000 pupils in 1,000 schools, half of them primaries, training more than 3,300 staff to teach a classical subject alongside their own specialism. Last year, 102 pupils who had been supported by Classics for All were accepted to read classics at university. More than 40 per cent of the schools involved in the scheme have higher than average numbers of pupils on free school meals.
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