AUTHOR S NOTE<br > The story of Queen Boadicea is one of great love and great<br > ffag~d3/i fik single blaze of colour in the intermingled tapestry of<br > Ancient Britain and Ancient Romei Regrettably， historians<br > have been comparatively brief about ~it and only Tacitus and<br > Dio Cassius， scribes of Rome， give us more than an outline.<br > Even then they do not agree， for whereas Tacitus implies that<br > the Romans won a miraculously quick victory in the final<br > battle against the Iceni queen， Cassius tells us that the conflict<br > raged all day. In view of the strength of each army， the latter<br > is far the likelier.<br > By reason of the historians brevity， Boadicea comes down<br > to us as more of a legend than a fact， but in both legend and<br > fact she stands a rich and colourful figure of her time.<br > She was a woman of majesty and magnetism， a queen greatly<br > lo~;ed by her-people. On her behalf they rose to challenge the<br > ~ghtof Rome. It was an entirely impulsive gesture that<br >~Jmrd~ned them with a task of Herculean proportions， for in<br > ，weapons and armour they were vastly inferior to the enemy.<br > Yet they almost succeeded.<br > If， during Boadicea s campaign， the Britons gave cruel death<br > to many Romans and collaborators， this was something the<br > vanquished suffered in most wars of those times. Students of<br > history who deprecate the way in which Boadicea revenged<br > herself for wrongs done to her and her people do so with an<br > obsessive pro-Romanism common to many classical scholars，<br > forgetting that there was little any nation could teach Rome<br > about cruelty. There are those who write angrily or bitterly<br > about Boadicea s destruction of the temple of Claudius at<br > Camulodunum (Colchester)， but the modem parallel is Cassino.<br > There are also those who， studying the conduct of the<br > queen s campaign， have concluded that it was masterminded<br > a，.A<br >