November 10, 2025 • 58 mins
Margaret talks with Io about the Iceni revolt of 61 AD that almost drove Rome out of Britain.
Sources:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4434717
https://ul.qucosa.de/api/qucosa%3A31804/attachment/ATT-0/
https://web.archive.org/web/20120612044230/http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba83/feat3.shtml
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/62*.html#2
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0078%3Abook%3D14%3Achapter%3D32
https://historyandarchaeologyonline.com/the-evidence-for-the-historical-boudica%ef%bf%bc%ef%bf%bc/
https://vridar.org/2018/05/07/doing-history-how-do-we-know-queen-boadicea-boudicca-existed/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25471937
http://simoneparrish.com/2016/07/how-i-woad-using-woad-for-body-painting/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to cool People who did cool stuff.
You're twice a week. I'm remembering to say twice a
week because it happens twice a week this podcast. You
are twice a week reminder that when bad things happen,
there's people willing to burn entire cities to the ground.
In response, I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this
week my guest is Io.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hi, Io, what's up. It's me the Two Timers Club.
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Io was actually the first ever guest on this podcast,
not the guest on episode one, but the first person
I ever recorded this podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Oh fuck, I was you were scared shitless, Magpie. It
was great.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, nobs was cooling.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
If you want to go back in here. It was
the episode about the Russian Nihilists. The script was like
two or three times longer than it needed to be exactly.
I think I just talked fast the whole time.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Great time, me too, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fun. I
had to play like I didn't already know about the
Russian Nihilists, but I did learn many important details that
have stuck with me. One they braid fuses into their hair.
Pretty ballin'.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Oh shit.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
I forgot about that, have gotten that going for my
own fashion sense, and I recommend everyone else due to
twenty twenty six is coming up.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Slay slay.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Also, the other voice that you're hearing is our producer,
Sophie Hi Sophie Hi Ragpie. Our audio engineer is Eva
Hi Eva Hi Eva. Our theme musical was written forced
by Unwoman and Io. This is why I picked you
as the guest. Have you ever thought about how fun
it would be to burn London to the ground as
(01:45):
some part of a big anti colonial revolt? Is this
something you've ever considered?
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Only every waking minute of my life. As I take
a sip from a little gag for Sophie and Margaret,
I didn't know that this was happening, but I am
drinking out of an Ira mug that I got in Belfast.
You can see the little beautiful provo right there. I
don't know if that's what this is about, but yeah,
fuck London, so save Paddington and Salty Earth.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
What I always figured, I have the theme music already
picked out. When all of the people come together and
burn London to the ground, they should be singing England
Belongs to Me by cockspar That's my theory, especially if
it's all the people from like you know, the places
that England is colonized.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Oh, I would love that. We're all screaming whose streets,
no streets? Tear up the concrete kit just dragging that
Winston Church Hill statue through the ground. Sorry, go on
with your eyes.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
So what if I were to tell you that this
happened once that, possibly without killing anyone, or possibly killing
seventy thousand people, an anti colonial army, possibly more than
half women, burned London to the ground.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
I think I know what the Yeah, let's go. What
if you told me that? Tell me it?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
And what if I told you that the woman who
did this is held up to this day as a
British hero.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
That would be quite peculiar. How did she get there? Margaret?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well, this week we are talking about Boudica, queen of
the ic nine, people who were either a tribe or
a state depending on which historia, and you're asking how
they feel about the Celts.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Oh fuck, I told you to give me a good one,
and you've outdone yourself. I'm so jozz. I was like, oh,
maybe we'll get like you know, Bill watersaying, oh, that'd
be fun. Yeah, what a treat you prepare for me, Margaret.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Also, I thought it'd be really funny to have you
on to talk about a British patriotic hero, because she
is absolutely a British patriotic hero in the modern sense.
But it's for burning London to the ground as part
of an anti colonial revolt, so you can't go wrong.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
It is going to tear me in so many directions.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Absolutely, we are going to talk about a revolt that
almost ended Roman colonization of Britain hundreds of years early,
a revolt that quite possibly really kind of as part
of a larger series of revolts, but this is sort
of the biggest one. It stopped the Romans from encroaching
on Scotland and Ireland because they were so busy dealing
(04:22):
with local revolts. It's a revolt that ultimately failed, but
it might have just convinced the Empire that the juice
was not worth the squeeze. And I'm going to go
pretty far out on a limb here, but I'm going
to say that it's possible, therefore, that the reason that
we have any remnants of Celtic culture and language in
Scotland and Ireland today is because of a few hundred
(04:46):
thousand best friends who set a shit ton of stuff
on fire and paid with their lives in the year
sixty one AD. This is a stretch because the Icni
Revolt was far from the only vault against Roman rule,
but it's kind of the biggest, and more importantly, it's
the one we're going to talk about this week. And also,
(05:08):
I'm going to reveal some gender shit at the very end,
not even in this episode, but the end of next episode.
But we'll get to that. That's my teaser. I'm going
to go even further out on a limb a little
bit later.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
You're adding a neo pronoun.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Finally, I used a neo pronoun in fiction for the
first time last week.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Oh how did it work out for you?
Speaker 2 (05:32):
It's in a story that you're in. It's the we
did I for anyone who's listening, joined us on a
path Finder adventure and I wrote a little prequel story
and I throw in a line that has he sheve
or zer. But I actually don't know what the pronouns
and the gendered language of the Celtic people were like,
but I do know that the story I'm talking about
(05:54):
happened two thousand years ago, and the Celts didn't really
do much for writing shit down, not for a couple
hundred years more so, and so our sources on this
revolt are, to say the least spotty. There's a short
version of the story written down by a Roman historian
named Tacitus, who was writing imperial propaganda, but was at
(06:15):
least alive during the events in question. His father was
much more heavily involved, and so he at least kind
of heard its second hand, right. And then there's a
slightly longer version written by another Well, I wrote Roman
into the script, but he was actually Greek, whose prejudices
are even more obvious, one hundred and fifty years after
(06:35):
the events. And his name was Cassius Dio. No relation
to the.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Rock Garden role.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, okay, no, yeah, well, actually there might be a relationship.
I haven't asked doo where Dio got their name.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Nobody can ask it any more. Rest in peace.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
We don't have Dio, Cassius or otherwise. We don't have
Cassius Dio's original writing on this revolt that came one
hundred and fifty years later. We have a rewrite by
a Christian monk writing a thousand years later. So these
like two thousand words or so that were written about
this revolt are the basis of like endless legends and
(07:17):
conceptions of the British people before colonization, and like history
is really funny. We actually don't know anything.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
It's all written by the worst people who are willing
to do usually the most heinous thing possible to get
what they wanted, which was to write a bunch of
books nerds. But you know, I really respect When I
was just in Ireland, I went into owen Gat Cave
and there's an old Irish written language pre Latin alphabet.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, Roman alphabet.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Okay, no, no, it's just like a line with diagonal
oh slashes across it. Yeah yeah, Ohm is above the
cave there, and I was just thinking, like that's so
cool that they were like, no, we're in oral culture.
Every once in a while will be like, oh, this
is where Queen Mayve was born or whatever. But like
that's ballin'. That's cool to not think of time in
(08:12):
that way and just like, oh, I need to be remembered,
like all these fucking narcissists needed to but ugh, Now
I listen to hardcore history, and I got to hear
this guy telling me Julius Caesar's take on stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
I want to hear from the Libraians. They get out
fucking hang, they could party.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
We're gonna hear from some Julius Caesar today.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
So always getting his fingers instead.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
We're stuck with it because the ore the people who
wrote things down, and the Irish ogum actually wasn't invented
until hundreds of years later either, right, which actually makes
Irish one of the earlier written languages in Europe. But
you're still talking about I don't have this in front
of me. You're still talking about like six hundred ish
or maybe four hundred ish AD. So we have the
Roman Apology, it's like the main stuff we have. It
(08:53):
turns out writing shit down the main way for people
two thousand years later to know about you, who could
have fucking guessed.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Can't word of your way through that far?
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Well, But it's funny as they probably could have managed.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
I mean, that's how we got the freakin' Odyssey.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
If Julius these are hadn't like showed up and killed
all of them, like ended the Druidic reign of gall
you know, because they actually had a pretty good like
you had to go for twenty years to be a
druid to learn this oral shit, and so they're probably
passing things down pretty well for hundreds or thousands of years.
And then that only works if no one comes and
kills you well before you can pass on your Jedi
(09:28):
information or whatever.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, when you get Julius on the scene.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, But even the Roman Apologia is a good story
because it kind of bluntly talks about how evil Rome
is because they didn't consider what they were doing evil, right,
They're like, well, of course, like the only thing we
could get out of that country is like ten and slaves,
(09:53):
you know.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah, they are subject to our morality when we're thinking
of them now. And also Rome specifically was a bunch
of catty bitches who would always be talking shit about
their fellow senators, their fellow whoever's.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, so some of the best shit talk I have
ever read, wildly transphobic and homophobic shit talk from Rome.
I'm going to get to in part two of this.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Oh, I can't wait to do a deep dive into
Roman transphobia.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
It's like new take on transphobia. New transphobia just dropped
two thousand years ago.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
They were really innovating.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Absolutely, so. I also think that learning these stories as
was presented by the Romans and then archaeologists trying to
figure out what we can't we I'm not a fucking archaeologist,
I'm a pop historian, but people trying to figure out
what they can has all this use, and I think
it gives an interesting perspective on the sort of original
colonization that seems to feed into so much later colonization.
(10:52):
I read one hot take that was basically just like, yeah,
the British loved being colonized and treated so badly that
they decided that that's what they are going to do
the rest of the world, which is never a pattern
that anyone has ever seen before.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Look, hurt people, hurt people.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Yeah, and so that's what we're talking about. But first
you all don't know whether I'm about to pitch to
ads or context. Context.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Oh okay, I thought we were going to go to
an ad from the East End.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
No. Wow, the two things I like, pitching to ads
and context.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Give me the context.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
I've been talking a lot about the Celts and a
bit about ancient Rome for the past couple weeks on
this show because I picked druids for Spooky Week because
I was looking around and I have some books on
druids stuff that I wanted to read because it was autumn,
and then I decided to write about them. And then
last week I talked about the Galley, the trans Priestesses
of Sibylly, a goddess of ancient Rome that ancient Rome
(11:50):
borrowed the goddess with permission oddly from Anatolia. And so
there's this whole cult of trans priestesses. And when I
say cult, it's in the Roman sense, where like literally
the priesthood of a god, not like wingnut weird cult,
although the Galley were also a wingnut weird cult and
they were really cool. The short version of Celtic Celtia,
(12:14):
just not what it's called, goes something like this. There
was a Celtic culture which was more like a loose
collection of cultures that shared some languages, and it was
most densely found along what you might call Atlantic Europe.
By the end of the Iron Age, like coming up
on where Bce becomes Ce, we're talking mostly about what's
(12:34):
now France, and Belgium and Britain and Ireland. There's druids
who are this sort of elite educated caste or class
in Celtic society, class or caste, depending on which historian
you read. Basically, they're the druids. They mediated conflicts, they
presided as judges. They spent nineteen or twenty years learning
(12:55):
an entirely oral system of knowledge that included just astounding
levels of astronomical mind. They were the wise philosophers by
most standards. They also may or may not have presided
over human sacrifice. They probably did, but the degree to
which they did is played up by Rome, who was
busy killing them all.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Everybody was getting up just something back then. I know,
nobody's nerve act.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Honestly, Like I wrote this whole essay about this recently.
One of the main things I'm obsessed with right now
is like how metal was the old world. I don't know,
right because like all the people being like, oh they
did all this human sacrifice, or people being like we
want to genocide them, and it's kind of like how
like modern islamophobias, like they throw gays off of rooftops
and I'm like, yeah, that's happened. But not as often
(13:43):
as people die over here, you know.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Not as often as they're getting shot with AK forty
seven's over here. Yeah, should think also, you know, if
life was ugly, brutish and short, sure, but I just
don't think it was. I think that they're like really
shooting above like what a party element must have been
back then? Who among us hasn't been at a fucking
rager and suddenly somebody's on the pire. What are you
(14:07):
gonna do? But the crops grew well that year, didn't
they They sure did. Yeah, and nobody liked that guy anyway.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, he was a cop from the mainland in the Wickerman.
It was all totally fine. Yeah, trying to reference Wickerman,
Sophi's favorite movie as often as possible.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I enjoyed that immensely.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
So Rome went through Gaul which is now France, and
just like killed the shit out of everyone. After writing
all this propaganda being like they're these horrible, skull obsessed
human sacrifice people, which minus the horrible is probably true.
They were absolutely skall obsessed. They were probably headhunters. There's
many sources that say they were. They were absolutely doing
(14:47):
all these things. So it was just kind of everyone
at the time. It is the style at the time.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Yeah, Danzig's still keeping it alive, and it's a style
that never goes out of fashion. Really.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, I read this one source this It was a
couple of weeks ago. I said Rome did a genocide
in Gaulm that some sources claim that they killed a
third of the people there and enslaved a third of
the people there. And I read this one source and
I don't have it linked in my show notes because
I thought it was a shit source and I wasn't
going to use it. But then now several weeks later,
(15:17):
I'm still thinking about it. Which is one guy saying, like, actually,
with a fedora on, it wasn't a genocide when Rome
killed and enslaved hundreds of thousands or millions of Galls,
the Celts in France, because they weren't killed four being Gaulls.
It's just that Rome wanted to kill them and take
their stuff and their land, and they just happened to
live where Rome wanted to be.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
It wasn't a genocide. It was more of a holocaust. Yeah,
words mean stuff like in the first year of Israel's
genocide in Gaza, all these people I'm like, Websters defines genocide.
I like, shut the fuck up, nerd, I'm gonna put
you in a toilet, a locker, idiot.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
And then also it was just like pretty soon you'd
be like, well Webster's defines Oh yeah, no, that's still
that's actually what's happening. That is the definition of what's happening.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Yeah, and like if this far back close enough, let's
we got to study this stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
So Rome killed a shit out of the Celts, especially
in Gaul. Then Julius Caesar tried to invade Britain in
fifty five BCE and he got his ass handed to
him by the Celts.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
So he went home, and do you know what he did.
He took advantage of the deals that we're offering to
you today. If you want to get together with an
empire and invade Britain, I can't see how you can
do it without whatever we advertise on this show. Wow,
(16:42):
thank you.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Soldier of Fortune magazine.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
I'm just gonna start a magazine called Invade Britain.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Looking for twenty to thirty stout men for my gallion.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Oh god, this is basically what Engels tried to argue
that the only thing the Irish could possibly ever be
good for communism Anyway, I live in the real world
and not just reading theory and history from hundreds of
years ago. Here's ads.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
And we're back, okay.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
So Julius Caesar, he goes home, he gets the shit together,
He reads Soldier of Fortune magazine, he reads Invading Britain magazine,
and he shows back up a year later with more
troops this time and maybe a war elephant, although that's conjecture.
One hundred years later, the Romans they're going to claim
to invade Britain with war elephants. Historians doubt it. But
(17:39):
I am so here for the elephants having invaded Britain,
even though they're the bad guys doing it. It's just
such an.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
As is post Hannibal, right.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
I don't know enough about Rome to tell you. I mean,
they had access to elephants, but I.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Mean Hannibal was the first to do it, and Julius
never had an original idea in his life.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
That seems probably true.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Anyone cares about Julius Caesar, send me an email at
Margaret Kiljoy at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
How do you know my email address? So Julius Caesar
shows back up this time, and he he gets kind
of into a stalemate. You'll read people being like he won,
You'll read people being like he lost, and you'll read
people being like it was a stalemate. I'm going with
that one. He declared one group of Britons to be
his subjects with a client king who owed him taxes
(18:28):
or whatever, and then fucked off, and you know, he
kind of cut his losses. He wasn't doing super well,
but he convinced a couple people to send him shit
every year. But there's a couple problems. One was that
Britain was poor as hell. There was like kind of
nothing there historically pre that they were part of, like
(18:50):
the tin trade. But the only thing it was good
for from Rome's point of view was providing slaves. Caesar
wrote about the peace people he was there to conquer.
Quote I promise you Caesar quotes. Don't worry here we are.
They do not regard it lawful to eat the hair
and the cock and the goose. They however, breed them
(19:13):
for amusement and pleasure. Most inland inhabitants do not sow corn.
Corn means wheat. It was just like a catch all
word for grain like cereals at the time. Well, I
mean actually was all written in Latin, but whatever, But
live on milk and flesh, and are clad with skins.
All the Britons indeed dye themselves with woed, which occasions
(19:35):
a bluish color, and thereby have a more terrible appearance
and fight. They wear their hair long and have every
part of their body shaved except their head and upper lip.
Ten and even twelve have wives common to them, and
particularly brothers among brothers, and parents among their children. But
(19:56):
if there be any issue by these wives, they are
reputed to be the children of those whom, respectively, each
was first espoused when a virgin. Okay, so that's like
kind of the most interesting part from my point of view,
because it's not how people do marriage these days.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
That's a lot like my friends.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Yeah, honestly, they use either brass or iron rings determined
as a certain weight as their money. Okay, that's the
end of my quote. And they also fought from chariot back,
which the Romans didn't do yet at this point. Like
at one point when he first showed up, four thousand
chariots show up and like fuck his shit up.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
He's immediately taking notes. Good for Colisseum.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah, Romans had been using chariots too. This put me
down a whole rabbit hole of the history of chariots. Fortunately,
there's maps that show the disbursement of chariots across the world.
But Romans were using them for getting around. Basically, they're
kind of like the limo of the time, the like
fancy wave to travel if you're fancy.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Were horses native to the English Isles at this time
or do they have to?
Speaker 2 (21:00):
They definitely had horses. I don't know when horses came
to England, but I know that pre Roman conquest coinage
from people including the Icinae have horses instead of like kings.
Instead of it being like here's our king, they're like
horses rule. We like horses.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
We got a horse instead of a king, like a
town that has a dog for a mayor that.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Oh, we're just on their coins. But oh okay, but no,
you know what we're going with your version because we
don't have any evidence otherwise because they didn't write anything down.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
That's right, historians prove me wrong.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Yeah soon enough. Honestly, like fighting from chariot back kind
of wasn't the way to do modern warfare, and so
after a while they moved to cavalry instead. A side
note about the Wod thing, because after I finished the script,
I fell down a long rabbit hole about wod. You know,
this is kind of like the most famous thing about
(21:50):
the Britons. They like paint themselves of blue spirals or
whatever and live in the woods.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
Yeah, love that.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
This is the thing that said the most about them.
Modern historians are very, very skeptical, but other people are
skeptical of the skepticism. Modern historians will say things like,
and I'm paraphrasing rudely, Wode makes bad body paint, and
it's also kind of toxic. It leaves burning and scarring
because it's an allergen. That sounds like an argument about
(22:17):
why they're probably not Wode painted. Because the main argument
in favor of the Wod thing is that the fact
that the picts literally means like the painted people. It's
an exonym. It's like what the Romans were calling them.
They're the people who live like a little bit kind
of like Lower Scotland area whatever. And Julius Caesar was like,
they paint themselves with WOD, although I think he actually
(22:38):
wrote glass and then like the specific word also means
this plant again. Whatever. Enter the SCA, the Society for
Creative Anachronism, who are like, we didn't fuck her out
with historians telling us you can't do this, We're just
gonna do it.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
I'm just out there doing woe for myself.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I really like how this happens a lot that people
just like recreate the things to see if they work. Like,
we know a lot about medieval combat because of people
being like, what actually works if you have a fucking
claym war, you know, and people just fucking around with it.
So the SCA folks were like, all right, we're going
to pan ourselves a woad and see what happens. There's
(23:19):
a whole recipe linked in the show notes of my sources.
One person talks about having painted hundreds of people with
the recipe that they use, and it's caused two minor
allergic reactions ever total. That's good average, yeah, honestly, And
it depends on how you make the paint whether or
not it's a good paint. This person uses whiskey because
the alcohol evaporates quickly and leaves the paint behind. Anyway,
(23:43):
that's my side quest about Wode. I love watching people
argue about whether or not like different people tattooed and
what body piercings and stuff they had.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
How fucked up these people wound up looking. I can't
I won't imagine them not painted in spirals and stuff.
And if you like, I mean going around seeing all
the dolmans, seeing all the standing stones, all the old carvings,
like spirals were so important out there, whatever you want
to act like they represented. It's not a far leap
(24:16):
to say that they would like put it all over
themselves as a protection barrier, just to look like really cunty,
just to make the Romans scared, just to show off
like I have the most spirals, Like makes sense to me.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Tomorrow I'm gonna go hit people with a sword, and
they're gonna hit me with a sword. I'm gonna fucking
like do it up and get into some weird shit
the night before, you know.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Yeah, And what a move to put a spiral right above,
Like okay, we know when you stab somebody right here,
they die, I'm put spiral and say, like go ahead
do it if you want to.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, totally, I.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Spelled it out for you motherfucker.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
More argument in favor of them painting themselves and or
tattooing themselves is that a lot of a coinage that
did get developed that was still Celtic and not Roman
would have people's faces on it, and they would have
usually on their like it be a face in profile
in the Roman style. You could see their like tattoos
or woe paintings on their faces.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
That seems pretty cut and dry.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Yeah, yeah, really honestly, the question to me is like
was it woed or was it some other pigment? And
was it tattoo or paint? Those are like the only
questions I have.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, how blue? Was this blue? We're talking here?
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah? Exactly because they also.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
I mean I know that like the word in Irish,
I think through Gaelic for like when you're referring to
like like black people is like the blue people. So like, right,
it could have been black paint or something.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Oh interesting. Yeah, I learned that because I did a
whole thing on the way that mummers and stuff would
decorate themselves to go do weird witchy shit, you know.
And I was talking about like, oh, people paint themselves black,
and then like I heard from a listener who turned
me on to the fact that like people with dark
skin were called blue skinned within Irish language instead of
(26:04):
black skinned, because black skinned meant a different thing anyway.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Yeah, to call someone black was too kind of they
didn't have a differentiation for like black nighttime other world
evils and they're like, oh, these people aren't evil, and
they've got kind of a blue about them. And there
was a lot of trade going on between the North
coast of Africa. There's a really interesting history between like
all the music that got traded back and forth, but
(26:32):
like more than years ago anyway, and.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Then it happens again in Appalachia.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
I surefucking does. Time is a flat circle.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, So anyway, Julius Caesar shows up, he comes, he saws,
he doesn't really conquer. He like makes an ally and
he's like, could you'd like send me some stuff every
year so I don't kick your ass, And the guy's like, yeah, whatever.
Britain demands some tribute and shit from the kings in Britain.
Occasionally some boot liquor kings we get run out and
(26:59):
fleet round home and there was some trade in shit
for about one hundred years. That's what we're looking at.
Then an emperor named Claudius in a d forty three
oversaw the actual conquest of Britain. He wasn't really a
military guy himself, but he showed up in person and
eleven British kings immediately surrendered without putting up a fight. Again,
(27:20):
according to the Roman accounts, there also was some fighting,
but eleven kings were like, ah, you're here, You're really powerful.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
Did he have a you know, a way about him?
There's just like, oh, fuck, Audi, this is here.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
I have like steadfastively refused to become one of those
like row we boos or whatever.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Yeah yeah, and like care about Rome.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
And so I don't know a ton about the different emperors,
but Claudius was specifically kind of seen as like a weakling.
And it's the reason he didn't get purged when all
of the other competitors were getting purged is because they're like, ah,
it's the way this guy's gonna end up in charge.
But he was actually really smart and a really good
administrator and did a lot of the building of roads
and shit that allowed colonial expansion and evil things. I'm
(28:02):
not trying to hold him up as a good guy.
I'm just gonna say he's a good administrator.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
No, yeah, he's a banality of evil type.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, and he also might have had elephants. Again, Romans
are like, yeah, he fucking brought elephants, and the fucking
Brits were like, holy shit, what the fuck is that?
Speaker 3 (28:17):
You gotta hate it.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
The historians were like, I don't know about that, but
I really want him to have shown up with elephants,
because then that makes him the hair drim, like the
Olifunts from Lord of the Rings, the evil invaders from
the East to the Southeast. And then it's not as
racist as it is in Tolkien's world.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Mm hmm. Yeah, it's just white people fighting white people here.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yeah, and even.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Though they have Ulafonts who never asked for it.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
By the way, no no one asks a war animal
whether it wants to do war. Yeah, this is why
I'm like not mad at cop dogs, Like whatever, it's
not their fault.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Don't make me choose. Just want to eat sugarcane and vibe.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
I know, so eleven kings to him, but this doesn't
mean that Rome had all of Britain, or even most
of Britain. But the Romans started trying to force agriculture,
and you know their conception of civilization on the barbarians
of Britain to get better tribute out of them. One
group of people, the Icni, which is spelled ice n
(29:19):
i Icni, and it could be pronounced in multiple ways,
we don't fucking know, but this is the main way
that people say. It's in the northeast of the lower
half of Britain. This is about as like north as
you could get decent agricultural land. But they also had
the Fenlands or the Fenlands or the Ventures. It wasn't
actually the Ventures. I'm just trying to make fun of
(29:39):
British names right now. There as they had a fucked
ton of wetlands. So Rome made the Icni drain their
own swamps and start planting corn, cereal grains, because the
Romans wanted all that land to be agricultural because they
wanted to go conquer Scotland, which was called Scotland yet
(30:01):
and Scotland you can't really grow as much shit, right, no,
and you need carbs if you want an army to
march north. All of this like hanging out eating flesh
and milk, pastoralist shit that's not gonna fucking work for
like evil standing armies. Okay. The reason it's interesting to
me is you have this like sort of modern like
carnivore right wing man whose like whole thing is like,
(30:24):
I'm a super manly army type and so I eat
a lot of meat or whatever. Armies like standing armies
in the expansion of civilization and Roman shit, it doesn't
come from hunting or pastoralism, but from agriculture.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
What they didn't have a lot of time to kill
or something to go hunt thousands and thousands of deer
and depopulate the woods. Yeah, and eat every single nasty
organ they can find.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, No, that was more what the Britons were doing.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
Yeah, when you get time to hang out, you gotta
put some grains in a bowl, get some rain water
on it. That's for you. Now go kill a guy.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, and as many of them as possible.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Yeah, you're fueled up.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
And so the ICNI they've got one of these boot
liquor kings, right, and that's why they're draining all the
swamps and shit. And his name is Presatagus, and it
is possible he's one of the original eleven Kings of
Men who accepted the rings of power from Sore and
became the Nascol. No wait, sorry, one of the original
kings who surrendered without a fight to Emperor Claudius. Thank you,
thank you, Sophie. It's also possible that the CNI revolted
(31:27):
in forty seven, and then after that revolt was put down,
this sky Presatagus was put in charge.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Side note, did you see that person on Blue Sky
that accused me of not reading Lord of the Rings
and not reading the book?
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (31:41):
How dare you? How fucking dare you? They accuse me
of being only a movie watcher?
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Yeah, you're a deep fake nerd, Sophie. You just want
a podcast network full of nerds, but you're a fake one.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Wow, that cut deep Bagpie.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Yeah, but it was sarcasm. I hope that one understands
in the.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Audience Magpie would never be mean to me.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
No, I would never doubt your nerd cred. That is
a thank you see strategy.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
Thank you whoever said that. Come go toe to with
me and Magpie and we'll have a cindar and off
we gonna Sophie will judge?
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Wait? Can I tell the audience about the how we met?
Talking about a tattoo idea.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Yeah, yeah, because we were the same person.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yeah. Io and I did not yet know each other
but had been basically producing the same merch for years.
Io wrote a comic No Gods and No Dungeon Masters,
while I was independently and unaware of the comic, producing
shirts that said No Gods, No Dungeon Masters.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
On separate sides of the country.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
And so that I meet Io, and I tried to
start to explain to Io how I have this plan
to get acab tattooed and elvish across my neck.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
Yeah, and I just fucking slammed dunk on you immediately
pull up my short shorts. It's already there in dwarf
in ruins.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Gorgeous anyway, gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yeah. I have a type for my.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Friends, beautiful friendship.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
We heart style and said, like you and me, Amigo's
for life. Yeah, speak friend and be fun. I wish
I could remember bella.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
What is it?
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Hell?
Speaker 2 (33:26):
I never remember? This is the problem that I was like,
I've also never read.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
That are you talking about? When they're like, speak friend
and enter.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Yeah, what is it mel.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
It's no, it's it's melon melone malone, which means friend.
So the I looked it up.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
We are Melon for life.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
It's pedro melon am no, which means speak friend and
enter hot.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
And then it's advertising.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
This is a good podcast.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
I don't even know what we're doing, but I'm loving it.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah, what are we talking about? Dragons?
Speaker 2 (34:05):
I think we're cinding into an ad break. I think
that's what we gotta do. Well, here's some ads unless
you have cooler zone media, in which case here's probably
the music. And we're back. So you have the bootlegquer
king Presitagis and he has a problem, and his problem
(34:26):
is that his wife is coole as shit. His wife
is so fucking cool.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Many such cases.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Her name is Boudica aka our hero for the week.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
Yay and the crowd goes wild.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yeah, and we can infer for a couple of reasons,
as she was anti Roman and pro Barbarian. She seemed
to be connected with the non conquered peoples of Britain.
It's possible that she was Irish. This is his conjecture
from a historian in the nineteen sixties. And I just
like want to believe it, but it's just because I
want to.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yeah, I want to believe it.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
It's true the like the tour from that region. We
don't have her torque, but we have like a torque
like those brass or gold rings that people would wear
around their necks. She probably wore one, and she's described
as wearing one, and there's like one from the region,
and the only other one that's similar is from Ireland anyway.
And she is described as like tall, masculine framed with
(35:20):
the most golden hair. It usually gets translated as tawny,
but it means most golden most literally, and this is
a word that could be either used to describe blonde
or red hair people who are obsessed with celts being
who they are. She's exclusively drawn with red hair.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
M M.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
Masculine framed, red haired woman. Picture me, dear audience as
a horny cartoon wolf with their tongue rolling across the
table and eyes bugging out of their head.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Yeah, the classic muscle marble who of Celtia. And unfortunately
every written description we have of her was written by
people later making shit up whole cloth or using descriptions
from people who knew her. You can infer that she
was a druid based on her position in society and
the spellcasting attributed to her, but honestly, we don't know.
(36:12):
And part of why it's like not really mentioned is
that the Romans couldn't wrap their head around the fact
that women were druids, even though they kept witnessing women
doing all of the things that druids do, and also specifically,
over and over again, the Romans kept having a problem
with the Celts, being like, they let women do whatever
they want.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Somebody stop them. They're kicking our asses. Our cooked kings
have too powerful of wives.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
That is what happened to old Prasitagus. Her name Bouticum
comes from the word for victory, which feels really on
the nose, considering that the Romans had a god named
Victoria Victory, but it was a common enough personal name
as well, and historians tend to assume she was an actual,
real person, and I'll get to the evidence of that later.
(37:01):
Presatagus was pro Roman, either because he believed in Rome ideologically,
or more likely he wanted power or he didn't want
to see his people killed by invaders. Because the pro
Roman kings when they accepted the ring of power from
sour On, they got more and more power because Rome
wanted fewer, stronger kings rather than like a million different
(37:22):
tribes and clans to deal with. Press Atagus was already
halfway a figurehead in his life because most of his
power was held by Rome. And one of the reasons
we know this is that there's no coinage with his
face on it. I read way too many articles talking
about this one time that people thought that they found
coins with his name face on it, but then later
(37:43):
they decided it was someone else.
Speaker 3 (37:44):
It was just some dog's ass. Why would they put
that on money.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Yeah, some other Honestly, it was probably his predecessor, so
our boot liquor. He writes out his will, and in
it he names his heirs as his two daughters and
also Emperor Nero, the Emperor of Rome. And it's the
fact that he left his wife out of this will,
out of being the heir, because like traditionally, power would
(38:10):
have gone to her, because you're allowed to be a queen,
like no questions asked. He writes her out of his will,
and historians presume that she was pro Rome and that
he didn't trust her to rule. And then he went
and died, and no one's conjectured that she killed him.
They're just like And then he died.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
And then he perished from causes and he left her
out of his will because she was just too bad ass.
I can't think of a joke. That's probably the reason, right.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
No, yeah, I mean that, like literally, the most likely
thing is that she was too pro independence, you know,
And he was like, that's not what I think is best,
So I'm leaving it to my kids and Nero. And
the leaving it to Nero thing was kind of a like,
it was just a boot licking thing. It was a like,
please don't kill us, doctor Rome. I don't know why
it's doctor now, but please don't kill us Roum.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Please Rome, MD, don't smash me with your big boot.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
And so two big important things happened at the same
time that led to this revolt. First of all, the
ICNI among other Britons, had been basically forced to take
massive loans from the Romans, presumably on very unfavorable terms,
and then those money lenders decided it was time to
call in the debt. Things were pretty unstable in Roman
(39:26):
Britain at this point. Nero was considering abandoning Britain entirely
because the generals there kept trying to like conquer West,
like out to Wales, and kept just losing because the
people in Britain were very fighty and poor, and it's
very hard to conquer fighty poor people.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yeah, when you're fighting people who had been farming mud
their whole life, who maybe.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Had dragons, Yeah, might had dragons.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
And were ready to just bifurcate you right there in
the milk.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Yeah, it's true. They had the big old claymores.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Yeah. I'd want to go back to sweet Italy myself.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Once I retire from everything else. I'm just going to
wing that out. Learn old Irish, not even modern Irish.
Just learn old Irish and start writing dark ages and
iron ages, romance novels. That's like my plan.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Carve them into slabs, leave them in caves.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
Oh fuck yeah, uh huh yeah exactly. So prass Attagis
he goes and dies, and he left his kingdom in
the hands of his daughters in Nero, and then Rome
was like, yeah, actually, we don't give a shit what
you said in your will, That like literally doesn't matter
to us. We're taking the whole thing. Fuck your family,
fuck all your like lesser nobles and all that shit.
(40:40):
We're just in charge because those who lick boots get
their teeth kicked in. The Romans had a habit they
would set up client kingdoms and then they would just
take the whole thing over anyhow. But let that be
a lesson tale as old as time. It honestly is.
This is a pattern that will repeat, it will echo.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
Yeah, if you're a coward, it does not pay off
for very long.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
No, God hates a coward, and in this case Rome
made it personal too. They show up, they steal the kingdom,
They whip Boudica and then rape or two totters no
and claim the whole kingdom. So at this point there's
kind of nothing left for the Icni to lose. And
this like feminist or at least rape revenged nature of
(41:25):
the revolt is pretty upfront in some of the tellings
of it. Basically, women were suffering even harder under Roman
rule than men were, I'm sure. The fact that Rome
was patriarchal, while the Celts, especially in Britain and Ireland,
according to one source, had much more quality between the genders.
So the entire nation of the Icni rose up, which
was one of the largest and most important tribes, not
(41:47):
as important as the Briganti, who I didn't write into
my script, who are immediately to the west. But it's
not just the Icni who rise up. All sorts of
ostensibly conquered people started revolting, most importantly the neighboring tribe
or nation, depending on which his story and you read
the Trinvantes. While the Trinavantes have a Celtic sounding name,
(42:08):
the Icna, his name is neither Celtic, nor Roman nor Germanic.
No one knows where that shit comes from. It's probably
just pre Celtic.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Britain, Yeah, left over from when the sea people's were
doing their Bronze age nonsense.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
And I love that shit.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
I love that shit. Yeah, we got all these tribes
who have a blurry gender line. We're just like they
fucking did what And words starts spreading around and this
is kind of like this seems to be like the
straw that breaks the camel's back of just like, We're
fucking done with these goddamn Italians coming over here telling
us how to do our mud farming. Yeah, bringing big
(42:45):
ulafhants to try and scare me. I'm not scared of
an ulafant.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah, I ain't scared of shit. I paint my body
blue and like go into trances.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
Probably I go into trances. I'm carrying thousand pounds stones
to put them on top of other stones. You don't
know what I'm capable of.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
And honestly, like it's interesting later I'll talk about this.
But there's like the noble savage take that like some
Greeks would have of the Celts. But then there's this
other one called the hard primitive, which is this assumption
that the like barbarian people are like just so much
less effeminate and like more like strong, and they just
(43:22):
eat dirt and they can do fucking anything less of.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
Nutrition and dirt. Yeah, anyway, I mean, the real thing
is to me, and I'm even less of a Papa historian,
but it's like when you're not going in on a
centralized authority with this like strict gender dynamics and you're
kind of letting everybody have a say and like just
spreading ideas around, pollinating that shit without attention to the
(43:47):
gender or you know, anything but a vague paganism type religion,
You're gonna get some weird, hearty, brave people, I know.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
And so it's like the problem I have with the
hard primitive thing is it's like trying to make it masculinist, right,
because it's like written by people who are like sad,
Rome is gone effeminate and weak, you know, And there
are gender roles within Celtic society, but they're much more variable. Yeah,
and also argued about today anyway. Okay, so the trade Avantes,
(44:19):
the other one of these other tribes or nations or
whatever the fuck, they have their own history going on
of how they related to Rome, and it's too tangly
to get into, but they had recently become second class
citizens in their own territory because Taylor's all this time
Romans had moved another Celtic group into their area and
we're like, nah, y'all like more important, Like we're the
most important, y'all are next, and then like fuck these guys, right,
(44:40):
you know. And just as importantly, Romans had gone and
built this sort of model town, this frontier outpost, this settlement,
this like West Bank ash shit, specifically for Roman veterans
to live in, and it was this symbol of culture
and civilization. They go fuck you to the Britons.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
So like not really like a Potempkin village kind of like, well,
I was going to say, like a cop city, but
it's all just like veterans of just like, look what
you could be if you just were putting nero on
your money.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
The proper civilized.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, you just have big bathtubs and whatever made Rome beautiful.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Yeah, And it's like their whole thing is like, we
can be rich, right, yeah, don't you want to? And
we get rich by conquering people. And they're like really
upfront about it, you know.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
And it's a town that's currently called Colchester, but at
the time it was cameload and a numb way better.
I'm gonna call it Colchester going forward. Unfortunately though, because
that's easier for me to pronounce, I'll give it a shot.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
So these guys are in Coleslaw or whatever the fuck
you said. Camelodia.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
Yeah, they're in Camelodia. Actually, people thought it was where
Camelot was for a while, but now people think that
it was the place to where Camelot was. Yeah. No,
And this town, Camelodia, it's like twelve years old by
the time this revolt breaks out. It was built in
the winter of forty eight to forty nine, and the
only major building. There is a Temple of Victoria dedicated
to Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory. They are not
(46:07):
subtle nahmers, the Romans.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
You gotta be some kind of fucked up that twelve
years in people are like, whoa, this is not it.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Yeah, we're gonna fuck you up.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:19):
Look, we've had twelve years to decide, and actually we've
decided fuck you exactly.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
That's pretty much what happens. So the rebels they march
on Cameloadinum and they burn that shit to the ground. Yes,
and the veterans who live there hole up in the
temple for a two day siege before losing badly. And
we know that the rebels burned cameloading them because there's
an archaeological record of it. There's like literally like.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
Just a layer of ash.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
N Yeah, what there isn't a record of in that
layer of ashes is slaughter. There's not human remains in
the burned layer.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
WHOA.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Three things could have happened before. One the Romans could
have fucked off, seen them comeing and gotten the hell out.
Two the Celts might have let the Romans escape. Three
they might have taken them all captive and done terrible
things to them or whatever. And four if they had
all died within the temple, that temple was then later
like cleaned up, right, But there is a strong archaeological
(47:22):
argument to make that these rebels didn't wholesale slaughter people.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
I got a feeling we'll get into this more next episode.
We was like, there's more than just like, no, we
didn't find any bones. So these guys seemed basically pacifists,
just you know, arsonist pacifists. How about that?
Speaker 2 (47:39):
And so then the revolt spreads and it's mostly this
big force led by Budecai, but it's also partly small
gorilla groups that will just show up and kill Roman settlers.
So some of that is happening. They're just like people
being like, get a fuck out of Britain, We're gonna
kill you, you know. After the revolt broke out, the imperial
governor of the area came Canassis fled to Gaul and
(48:03):
was like, it's lost, We've lost Britain. Give up runaways. Yeah.
The rebels then marched on Londonium akaa London what which
had been built in forty seven AD, so not much older.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Londinium sounds real dumb.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
I know. It's like if steampunks tried to out steampunk London.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
Wow, that's exactly what it's like if London just had
dirigibles behind Big Ben. Every single time you saw it,
it was Londonium all over.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
I'm gonna start calling you Magdinium, Magdinius, thank you, Magdinious.
Speaker 2 (48:46):
That's my my new Roman imperial name. Yes, Magius, because
you need one of those. I know. I'm really into Rome.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
Oh my god, Oh my.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
God, I guess I owe is. Well, it's it's Greek.
It's Greek and uh and the Romans took everything from
the Greeks already.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
Why not that Iodidius Iodineus, that's Iodius.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
Refer to me by my proper title, the complicated one.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
Yeah, pray tour. I don't know to pray tours. Pray
to me.
Speaker 3 (49:17):
I'm going to pray to her all along.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
So they show up and they burn London to the ground. Yes, good,
no more London. They do rebuild it later, but.
Speaker 3 (49:29):
Whatever, Oh why do you have to tell me there's a.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Town called London our reality? And then Roman reinforcements had
actually shown up on the island at this point, but
they like look and they see this fucking like hundreds
of thousands of people marching on London and they're like, Nah,
this ain't it.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
Get on their cell phone, Nero, you're not gonna believe this.
The storm we're stuck in. We're stuck in Marseille.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
Yeah, Tonally, Yeah, I got Tommy. It can't go to
work today.
Speaker 3 (49:58):
Everyone's got Tommy as we got bad.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
Yeah we thought it was corn, but that actually hasn't
reached us yet. So either basically no one was slaughtered
or seventy thousand innocent settlers were slaughtered, depending on whether
you believe the archaeological record or the Roman historians lost
of time. Now, the rebels had one big tactical problem.
(50:23):
They were largely unarmed. And this isn't because they were like,
we're so peaceful, we never had weapons. And it's not
even that they were like technologically backwards, although they did
not have the same level of technology as Rome. But
during the peace process of the last couple decades, the
local kings had let their people wind up disarmed. So
(50:46):
one lesson you can see over and over and over
again from history. Never let anyone disarm you because I
think I might be out on a limb here. I'm
doing a lot of limb climbing. I think it's possible
that if the IC and I hadn't had a boot
liquor king who disarmed them, Rome would have not successfully
like stayed the rulers for hundreds of years.
Speaker 3 (51:09):
Oh, this is going to be what keeps me awake
at night. And they all involve fucking up Rome because
right now, I think, what if Kubla Khan made it
all the way to Rome? What if you made it
all the way to the Vatican because he heard about
this pope and he was like, that's die, I'll hit
that at all. And then I don't know if something
happened and they had to go back, and I'm like, ooh,
just a couple more kilometers, man.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
I'm like vaguely considering that the next couple months are
going to be like Margaret talks about people who go
fuck up Rome or like try to like resistance to
early colonialism.
Speaker 3 (51:41):
Tune in, folks, it's going to be the anti Rome
couple of months. Yeah, men who think about nothing but
Rome are steaming already.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
I know. But what's funny is that last week was
actually about a bunch of Romans. It was about the Galley,
the trans women who were priestesses and were ostracized within
Roman culture. Because once again, it's not about every Roman
is bad. It is about systems of government and colonial expansion.
Speaker 3 (52:03):
Yes, which is why I'm trying to hang back on
my searing hatred of the British because not British people,
you know, because I love you out there, limis.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
Actually it's a they are the anti colonial force in
this particular story, and that is important thing to remember.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
That's true, guys, remember your history return with a v Right.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
They burned another town via Lamium, which is now Saint Agnes.
I think it's saying something and I forgot to write
that into my script. It's this town that the Roman
record is like they burned it all, and the archaeological
record is like they burned a couple places, like kind
of where the rich people lived, and like basically this
(52:42):
is also an act of class warfare. This is not
just we hate the Romans the invaders. They are, let's
fuck up the rich. But eventually the Roman army caught
up with the rebels. There was a big fuck off,
fantastic last stand. The rebels, who were possibly mostly women
at it depends on how you're going to interpret the sources.
(53:04):
They greatly outnumbered the Romans, but the Romans had weapons
in armor and discipline, which are three things that are
really useful if you're doing open battle instead of guerrilla tactics.
And the Icini lost. Budekai died shortly after of illness
or suicide, and the revolt was put down, but Britain
(53:27):
was not tamed. All the available Roman soldiers were needed
to keep the conquered areas conquered, and they just never
as expanded as far north into Scotland as they wanted.
They never got west into Ireland, and the fighty spirit
of the Celts saved Celtic culture. But when we come
(53:47):
back on Wednesday, I'm going to get into the Roman
accounts of this, and it's going to have sweet, sweet
details about pagan rites and battle speeches, and I'm going
to make a wild claim about gender.
Speaker 3 (54:00):
Yes, Oh, I cannot wait, and I can't wait to
hear about all these murdering ladies. What a time we're
going to have. Listener, you and me, come on.
Speaker 2 (54:10):
But what if people are like I like hearing that ionium?
What does praterer ionium do? And what if I want
to listen to more of prader Ionium talking on podcasts
between now and Wednesday. Do you have any suggestions about
where people might be able to hear you have?
Speaker 3 (54:27):
I got good news for you. It just so happens
that I'm on a podcast with who is this? Margaret Kiljoy?
Speaker 2 (54:33):
Wow What?
Speaker 3 (54:34):
And Robert Evans and Hazel Acasia and our friend Jason Bollman. Yes,
mister Pathfinder himself is doing a tt RPG podcast for
cool Zone Media. Ever heard of it? It's this and
it's probably still actively coming out when this comes out. Yeah,
get in there on the on the book Club feed,
(54:56):
on the it could happen here feed, and.
Speaker 2 (54:58):
On this very feed, on this.
Speaker 3 (55:00):
Very feed, you hear before your ears. I also do
a podcast called The Spectacle. It's kind of like what
if there was a serious anarchist podcast, but for people
who just wanted to be stupid for a while and
talk about movies and video games. And you can find
me on the internet at bum Lung. I might have
a new comic by the time this comes out. Oh shit,
(55:22):
it's not all Biga do Crime. I got other stuff,
arguably better stuff, but you know, I'll dance with the
girl who brought me. I love big crime around here.
Speaker 1 (55:32):
Do you still have an Etsy store that people can
shop at?
Speaker 3 (55:35):
I O yes, and I'm trying to make my own
shop soon. But it's still all over on Etsy. Once
I figure out how a computer works, it's over for ittzy.
But yeah, you can get prints, you can get comics.
I got all kinds of shit for you.
Speaker 2 (55:47):
Half my t shirts.
Speaker 1 (55:49):
What's it called?
Speaker 3 (55:50):
Oh yeah, Etsy dot com slash bum lung just bum lung,
like a lung that doesn't want to work.
Speaker 1 (55:59):
Sensational all right?
Speaker 2 (56:01):
And I want to plug Cooler Zone Media, which is
the way to listen to this podcast and all of
the other Coolzone Media podcasts without ads. And so that
means you can listen to all your favorite podcasts without
ads because the Spectacle doesn't have ads already. So that's
all the podcasts. And also, Sophia anything any new good
(56:21):
coolzone media stuff? What if people want something that's off
of cool Zone Media but is by a dear friend
of cool Zone Media about the Satanic Panic? Do you
have any suggestions?
Speaker 1 (56:33):
Are you talking about my dear friend Sarah Marshall's new podcasts?
I am oh it's called the devil you know.
Speaker 2 (56:41):
Yeah, it's about the Satanic Panic and it will help
answer the question of how evil is the past only
just about the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1 (56:49):
Are you started listening to it yet, Magpie?
Speaker 2 (56:51):
No, I haven't had any time for podcasts, which is
so weird. I like, normally listen to so many podcasts,
and right now I have kind of time for nothing
but writing until the end of the year because I'm
on a fuck ton of deadlines and I am insane.
Speaker 1 (57:06):
Wait to binge it.
Speaker 2 (57:07):
I am going to binge it. It's going to be
so good. I'm going to go on a long drive
and I'm going to learn all about the Satanic Panic
and I'm going to show up and just talk about
that to all my friends and they're going to love me.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
I love that for you. I want to plug this
sticker on Io's head seat that I really like that
just says get off the Internet.
Speaker 3 (57:26):
Oh yeah, that's good advice. I made that just for me,
and I feel like other people other people have gotten
some use that.
Speaker 2 (57:35):
I really like that.
Speaker 1 (57:36):
I'm going to actually buy that right now.
Speaker 3 (57:39):
I'll send you one thank you though.
Speaker 1 (57:41):
Oh, I'm going to buy it right now. I want
you want it.
Speaker 2 (57:47):
Much appreciated, and I will see all of you all
on Wednesday. Will actually so be an io. I'll see
you in about five minutes, but everyone else I will
see metaphorically on Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (58:03):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and fool Zone Media,
visit our website Goolezonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the five or radio app, hop a Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to cool People who did cool stuff.
You're twice a week. I'm remembering to say twice a
week because it happens twice a week this podcast. You
are twice a week reminder that when bad things happen,
there's people willing to burn entire cities to the ground.
In response, I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this
week my guest is Io.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hi, Io, what's up. It's me the Two Timers Club.
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Io was actually the first ever guest on this podcast,
not the guest on episode one, but the first person
I ever recorded this podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Oh fuck, I was you were scared shitless, Magpie. It
was great.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, nobs was cooling.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
If you want to go back in here. It was
the episode about the Russian Nihilists. The script was like
two or three times longer than it needed to be exactly.
I think I just talked fast the whole time.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Great time, me too, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fun. I
had to play like I didn't already know about the
Russian Nihilists, but I did learn many important details that
have stuck with me. One they braid fuses into their hair.
Pretty ballin'.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Oh shit.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
I forgot about that, have gotten that going for my
own fashion sense, and I recommend everyone else due to
twenty twenty six is coming up.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Slay slay.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Also, the other voice that you're hearing is our producer,
Sophie Hi Sophie Hi Ragpie. Our audio engineer is Eva
Hi Eva Hi Eva. Our theme musical was written forced
by Unwoman and Io. This is why I picked you
as the guest. Have you ever thought about how fun
it would be to burn London to the ground as
(01:45):
some part of a big anti colonial revolt? Is this
something you've ever considered?
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Only every waking minute of my life. As I take
a sip from a little gag for Sophie and Margaret,
I didn't know that this was happening, but I am
drinking out of an Ira mug that I got in Belfast.
You can see the little beautiful provo right there. I
don't know if that's what this is about, but yeah,
fuck London, so save Paddington and Salty Earth.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
What I always figured, I have the theme music already
picked out. When all of the people come together and
burn London to the ground, they should be singing England
Belongs to Me by cockspar That's my theory, especially if
it's all the people from like you know, the places
that England is colonized.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Oh, I would love that. We're all screaming whose streets,
no streets? Tear up the concrete kit just dragging that
Winston Church Hill statue through the ground. Sorry, go on
with your eyes.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
So what if I were to tell you that this
happened once that, possibly without killing anyone, or possibly killing
seventy thousand people, an anti colonial army, possibly more than
half women, burned London to the ground.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
I think I know what the Yeah, let's go. What
if you told me that? Tell me it?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
And what if I told you that the woman who
did this is held up to this day as a
British hero.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
That would be quite peculiar. How did she get there? Margaret?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well, this week we are talking about Boudica, queen of
the ic nine, people who were either a tribe or
a state depending on which historia, and you're asking how
they feel about the Celts.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Oh fuck, I told you to give me a good one,
and you've outdone yourself. I'm so jozz. I was like, oh,
maybe we'll get like you know, Bill watersaying, oh, that'd
be fun. Yeah, what a treat you prepare for me, Margaret.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Also, I thought it'd be really funny to have you
on to talk about a British patriotic hero, because she
is absolutely a British patriotic hero in the modern sense.
But it's for burning London to the ground as part
of an anti colonial revolt, so you can't go wrong.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
It is going to tear me in so many directions.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Absolutely, we are going to talk about a revolt that
almost ended Roman colonization of Britain hundreds of years early,
a revolt that quite possibly really kind of as part
of a larger series of revolts, but this is sort
of the biggest one. It stopped the Romans from encroaching
on Scotland and Ireland because they were so busy dealing
(04:22):
with local revolts. It's a revolt that ultimately failed, but
it might have just convinced the Empire that the juice
was not worth the squeeze. And I'm going to go
pretty far out on a limb here, but I'm going
to say that it's possible, therefore, that the reason that
we have any remnants of Celtic culture and language in
Scotland and Ireland today is because of a few hundred
(04:46):
thousand best friends who set a shit ton of stuff
on fire and paid with their lives in the year
sixty one AD. This is a stretch because the Icni
Revolt was far from the only vault against Roman rule,
but it's kind of the biggest, and more importantly, it's
the one we're going to talk about this week. And also,
(05:08):
I'm going to reveal some gender shit at the very end,
not even in this episode, but the end of next episode.
But we'll get to that. That's my teaser. I'm going
to go even further out on a limb a little
bit later.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
You're adding a neo pronoun.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Finally, I used a neo pronoun in fiction for the
first time last week.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Oh how did it work out for you?
Speaker 2 (05:32):
It's in a story that you're in. It's the we
did I for anyone who's listening, joined us on a
path Finder adventure and I wrote a little prequel story
and I throw in a line that has he sheve
or zer. But I actually don't know what the pronouns
and the gendered language of the Celtic people were like,
but I do know that the story I'm talking about
(05:54):
happened two thousand years ago, and the Celts didn't really
do much for writing shit down, not for a couple
hundred years more so, and so our sources on this
revolt are, to say the least spotty. There's a short
version of the story written down by a Roman historian
named Tacitus, who was writing imperial propaganda, but was at
(06:15):
least alive during the events in question. His father was
much more heavily involved, and so he at least kind
of heard its second hand, right. And then there's a
slightly longer version written by another Well, I wrote Roman
into the script, but he was actually Greek, whose prejudices
are even more obvious, one hundred and fifty years after
(06:35):
the events. And his name was Cassius Dio. No relation
to the.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Rock Garden role.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, okay, no, yeah, well, actually there might be a relationship.
I haven't asked doo where Dio got their name.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Nobody can ask it any more. Rest in peace.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
We don't have Dio, Cassius or otherwise. We don't have
Cassius Dio's original writing on this revolt that came one
hundred and fifty years later. We have a rewrite by
a Christian monk writing a thousand years later. So these
like two thousand words or so that were written about
this revolt are the basis of like endless legends and
(07:17):
conceptions of the British people before colonization, and like history
is really funny. We actually don't know anything.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
It's all written by the worst people who are willing
to do usually the most heinous thing possible to get
what they wanted, which was to write a bunch of
books nerds. But you know, I really respect When I
was just in Ireland, I went into owen Gat Cave
and there's an old Irish written language pre Latin alphabet.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, Roman alphabet.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Okay, no, no, it's just like a line with diagonal
oh slashes across it. Yeah yeah, Ohm is above the
cave there, and I was just thinking, like that's so
cool that they were like, no, we're in oral culture.
Every once in a while will be like, oh, this
is where Queen Mayve was born or whatever. But like
that's ballin'. That's cool to not think of time in
(08:12):
that way and just like, oh, I need to be remembered,
like all these fucking narcissists needed to but ugh, Now
I listen to hardcore history, and I got to hear
this guy telling me Julius Caesar's take on stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
I want to hear from the Libraians. They get out
fucking hang, they could party.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
We're gonna hear from some Julius Caesar today.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
So always getting his fingers instead.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
We're stuck with it because the ore the people who
wrote things down, and the Irish ogum actually wasn't invented
until hundreds of years later either, right, which actually makes
Irish one of the earlier written languages in Europe. But
you're still talking about I don't have this in front
of me. You're still talking about like six hundred ish
or maybe four hundred ish AD. So we have the
Roman Apology, it's like the main stuff we have. It
(08:53):
turns out writing shit down the main way for people
two thousand years later to know about you, who could
have fucking guessed.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Can't word of your way through that far?
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Well, But it's funny as they probably could have managed.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
I mean, that's how we got the freakin' Odyssey.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
If Julius these are hadn't like showed up and killed
all of them, like ended the Druidic reign of gall
you know, because they actually had a pretty good like
you had to go for twenty years to be a
druid to learn this oral shit, and so they're probably
passing things down pretty well for hundreds or thousands of years.
And then that only works if no one comes and
kills you well before you can pass on your Jedi
(09:28):
information or whatever.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, when you get Julius on the scene.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, But even the Roman Apologia is a good story
because it kind of bluntly talks about how evil Rome
is because they didn't consider what they were doing evil, right,
They're like, well, of course, like the only thing we
could get out of that country is like ten and slaves,
(09:53):
you know.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah, they are subject to our morality when we're thinking
of them now. And also Rome specifically was a bunch
of catty bitches who would always be talking shit about
their fellow senators, their fellow whoever's.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, so some of the best shit talk I have
ever read, wildly transphobic and homophobic shit talk from Rome.
I'm going to get to in part two of this.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Oh, I can't wait to do a deep dive into
Roman transphobia.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
It's like new take on transphobia. New transphobia just dropped
two thousand years ago.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
They were really innovating.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Absolutely, so. I also think that learning these stories as
was presented by the Romans and then archaeologists trying to
figure out what we can't we I'm not a fucking archaeologist,
I'm a pop historian, but people trying to figure out
what they can has all this use, and I think
it gives an interesting perspective on the sort of original
colonization that seems to feed into so much later colonization.
(10:52):
I read one hot take that was basically just like, yeah,
the British loved being colonized and treated so badly that
they decided that that's what they are going to do
the rest of the world, which is never a pattern
that anyone has ever seen before.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Look, hurt people, hurt people.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Yeah, and so that's what we're talking about. But first
you all don't know whether I'm about to pitch to
ads or context. Context.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Oh okay, I thought we were going to go to
an ad from the East End.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
No. Wow, the two things I like, pitching to ads
and context.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Give me the context.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
I've been talking a lot about the Celts and a
bit about ancient Rome for the past couple weeks on
this show because I picked druids for Spooky Week because
I was looking around and I have some books on
druids stuff that I wanted to read because it was autumn,
and then I decided to write about them. And then
last week I talked about the Galley, the trans Priestesses
of Sibylly, a goddess of ancient Rome that ancient Rome
(11:50):
borrowed the goddess with permission oddly from Anatolia. And so
there's this whole cult of trans priestesses. And when I
say cult, it's in the Roman sense, where like literally
the priesthood of a god, not like wingnut weird cult,
although the Galley were also a wingnut weird cult and
they were really cool. The short version of Celtic Celtia,
(12:14):
just not what it's called, goes something like this. There
was a Celtic culture which was more like a loose
collection of cultures that shared some languages, and it was
most densely found along what you might call Atlantic Europe.
By the end of the Iron Age, like coming up
on where Bce becomes Ce, we're talking mostly about what's
(12:34):
now France, and Belgium and Britain and Ireland. There's druids
who are this sort of elite educated caste or class
in Celtic society, class or caste, depending on which historian
you read. Basically, they're the druids. They mediated conflicts, they
presided as judges. They spent nineteen or twenty years learning
(12:55):
an entirely oral system of knowledge that included just astounding
levels of astronomical mind. They were the wise philosophers by
most standards. They also may or may not have presided
over human sacrifice. They probably did, but the degree to
which they did is played up by Rome, who was
busy killing them all.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Everybody was getting up just something back then. I know,
nobody's nerve act.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Honestly, Like I wrote this whole essay about this recently.
One of the main things I'm obsessed with right now
is like how metal was the old world. I don't know,
right because like all the people being like, oh they
did all this human sacrifice, or people being like we
want to genocide them, and it's kind of like how
like modern islamophobias, like they throw gays off of rooftops
and I'm like, yeah, that's happened. But not as often
(13:43):
as people die over here, you know.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Not as often as they're getting shot with AK forty
seven's over here. Yeah, should think also, you know, if
life was ugly, brutish and short, sure, but I just
don't think it was. I think that they're like really
shooting above like what a party element must have been
back then? Who among us hasn't been at a fucking
rager and suddenly somebody's on the pire. What are you
(14:07):
gonna do? But the crops grew well that year, didn't
they They sure did. Yeah, and nobody liked that guy anyway.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, he was a cop from the mainland in the Wickerman.
It was all totally fine. Yeah, trying to reference Wickerman,
Sophi's favorite movie as often as possible.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I enjoyed that immensely.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
So Rome went through Gaul which is now France, and
just like killed the shit out of everyone. After writing
all this propaganda being like they're these horrible, skull obsessed
human sacrifice people, which minus the horrible is probably true.
They were absolutely skall obsessed. They were probably headhunters. There's
many sources that say they were. They were absolutely doing
(14:47):
all these things. So it was just kind of everyone
at the time. It is the style at the time.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Yeah, Danzig's still keeping it alive, and it's a style
that never goes out of fashion. Really.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, I read this one source this It was a
couple of weeks ago. I said Rome did a genocide
in Gaulm that some sources claim that they killed a
third of the people there and enslaved a third of
the people there. And I read this one source and
I don't have it linked in my show notes because
I thought it was a shit source and I wasn't
going to use it. But then now several weeks later,
(15:17):
I'm still thinking about it. Which is one guy saying, like, actually,
with a fedora on, it wasn't a genocide when Rome
killed and enslaved hundreds of thousands or millions of Galls,
the Celts in France, because they weren't killed four being Gaulls.
It's just that Rome wanted to kill them and take
their stuff and their land, and they just happened to
live where Rome wanted to be.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
It wasn't a genocide. It was more of a holocaust. Yeah,
words mean stuff like in the first year of Israel's
genocide in Gaza, all these people I'm like, Websters defines genocide.
I like, shut the fuck up, nerd, I'm gonna put
you in a toilet, a locker, idiot.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
And then also it was just like pretty soon you'd
be like, well Webster's defines Oh yeah, no, that's still
that's actually what's happening. That is the definition of what's happening.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Yeah, and like if this far back close enough, let's
we got to study this stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
So Rome killed a shit out of the Celts, especially
in Gaul. Then Julius Caesar tried to invade Britain in
fifty five BCE and he got his ass handed to
him by the Celts.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
So he went home, and do you know what he did.
He took advantage of the deals that we're offering to
you today. If you want to get together with an
empire and invade Britain, I can't see how you can
do it without whatever we advertise on this show. Wow,
(16:42):
thank you.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Soldier of Fortune magazine.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
I'm just gonna start a magazine called Invade Britain.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Looking for twenty to thirty stout men for my gallion.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Oh god, this is basically what Engels tried to argue
that the only thing the Irish could possibly ever be
good for communism Anyway, I live in the real world
and not just reading theory and history from hundreds of
years ago. Here's ads.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
And we're back, okay.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
So Julius Caesar, he goes home, he gets the shit together,
He reads Soldier of Fortune magazine, he reads Invading Britain magazine,
and he shows back up a year later with more
troops this time and maybe a war elephant, although that's conjecture.
One hundred years later, the Romans they're going to claim
to invade Britain with war elephants. Historians doubt it. But
(17:39):
I am so here for the elephants having invaded Britain,
even though they're the bad guys doing it. It's just
such an.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
As is post Hannibal, right.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
I don't know enough about Rome to tell you. I mean,
they had access to elephants, but I.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Mean Hannibal was the first to do it, and Julius
never had an original idea in his life.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
That seems probably true.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Anyone cares about Julius Caesar, send me an email at
Margaret Kiljoy at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
How do you know my email address? So Julius Caesar
shows back up this time, and he he gets kind
of into a stalemate. You'll read people being like he won,
You'll read people being like he lost, and you'll read
people being like it was a stalemate. I'm going with
that one. He declared one group of Britons to be
his subjects with a client king who owed him taxes
(18:28):
or whatever, and then fucked off, and you know, he
kind of cut his losses. He wasn't doing super well,
but he convinced a couple people to send him shit
every year. But there's a couple problems. One was that
Britain was poor as hell. There was like kind of
nothing there historically pre that they were part of, like
(18:50):
the tin trade. But the only thing it was good
for from Rome's point of view was providing slaves. Caesar
wrote about the peace people he was there to conquer.
Quote I promise you Caesar quotes. Don't worry here we are.
They do not regard it lawful to eat the hair
and the cock and the goose. They however, breed them
(19:13):
for amusement and pleasure. Most inland inhabitants do not sow corn.
Corn means wheat. It was just like a catch all
word for grain like cereals at the time. Well, I
mean actually was all written in Latin, but whatever, But
live on milk and flesh, and are clad with skins.
All the Britons indeed dye themselves with woed, which occasions
(19:35):
a bluish color, and thereby have a more terrible appearance
and fight. They wear their hair long and have every
part of their body shaved except their head and upper lip.
Ten and even twelve have wives common to them, and
particularly brothers among brothers, and parents among their children. But
(19:56):
if there be any issue by these wives, they are
reputed to be the children of those whom, respectively, each
was first espoused when a virgin. Okay, so that's like
kind of the most interesting part from my point of view,
because it's not how people do marriage these days.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
That's a lot like my friends.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Yeah, honestly, they use either brass or iron rings determined
as a certain weight as their money. Okay, that's the
end of my quote. And they also fought from chariot back,
which the Romans didn't do yet at this point. Like
at one point when he first showed up, four thousand
chariots show up and like fuck his shit up.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
He's immediately taking notes. Good for Colisseum.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah, Romans had been using chariots too. This put me
down a whole rabbit hole of the history of chariots. Fortunately,
there's maps that show the disbursement of chariots across the world.
But Romans were using them for getting around. Basically, they're
kind of like the limo of the time, the like
fancy wave to travel if you're fancy.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Were horses native to the English Isles at this time
or do they have to?
Speaker 2 (21:00):
They definitely had horses. I don't know when horses came
to England, but I know that pre Roman conquest coinage
from people including the Icinae have horses instead of like kings.
Instead of it being like here's our king, they're like
horses rule. We like horses.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
We got a horse instead of a king, like a
town that has a dog for a mayor that.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Oh, we're just on their coins. But oh okay, but no,
you know what we're going with your version because we
don't have any evidence otherwise because they didn't write anything down.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
That's right, historians prove me wrong.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Yeah soon enough. Honestly, like fighting from chariot back kind
of wasn't the way to do modern warfare, and so
after a while they moved to cavalry instead. A side
note about the Wod thing, because after I finished the script,
I fell down a long rabbit hole about wod. You know,
this is kind of like the most famous thing about
(21:50):
the Britons. They like paint themselves of blue spirals or
whatever and live in the woods.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
Yeah, love that.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
This is the thing that said the most about them.
Modern historians are very, very skeptical, but other people are
skeptical of the skepticism. Modern historians will say things like,
and I'm paraphrasing rudely, Wode makes bad body paint, and
it's also kind of toxic. It leaves burning and scarring
because it's an allergen. That sounds like an argument about
(22:17):
why they're probably not Wode painted. Because the main argument
in favor of the Wod thing is that the fact
that the picts literally means like the painted people. It's
an exonym. It's like what the Romans were calling them.
They're the people who live like a little bit kind
of like Lower Scotland area whatever. And Julius Caesar was like,
they paint themselves with WOD, although I think he actually
(22:38):
wrote glass and then like the specific word also means
this plant again. Whatever. Enter the SCA, the Society for
Creative Anachronism, who are like, we didn't fuck her out
with historians telling us you can't do this, We're just
gonna do it.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
I'm just out there doing woe for myself.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I really like how this happens a lot that people
just like recreate the things to see if they work. Like,
we know a lot about medieval combat because of people
being like, what actually works if you have a fucking
claym war, you know, and people just fucking around with it.
So the SCA folks were like, all right, we're going
to pan ourselves a woad and see what happens. There's
(23:19):
a whole recipe linked in the show notes of my sources.
One person talks about having painted hundreds of people with
the recipe that they use, and it's caused two minor
allergic reactions ever total. That's good average, yeah, honestly, And
it depends on how you make the paint whether or
not it's a good paint. This person uses whiskey because
the alcohol evaporates quickly and leaves the paint behind. Anyway,
(23:43):
that's my side quest about Wode. I love watching people
argue about whether or not like different people tattooed and
what body piercings and stuff they had.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
How fucked up these people wound up looking. I can't
I won't imagine them not painted in spirals and stuff.
And if you like, I mean going around seeing all
the dolmans, seeing all the standing stones, all the old carvings,
like spirals were so important out there, whatever you want
to act like they represented. It's not a far leap
(24:16):
to say that they would like put it all over
themselves as a protection barrier, just to look like really cunty,
just to make the Romans scared, just to show off
like I have the most spirals, Like makes sense to me.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Tomorrow I'm gonna go hit people with a sword, and
they're gonna hit me with a sword. I'm gonna fucking
like do it up and get into some weird shit
the night before, you know.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Yeah, And what a move to put a spiral right above,
Like okay, we know when you stab somebody right here,
they die, I'm put spiral and say, like go ahead
do it if you want to.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, totally, I.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Spelled it out for you motherfucker.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
More argument in favor of them painting themselves and or
tattooing themselves is that a lot of a coinage that
did get developed that was still Celtic and not Roman
would have people's faces on it, and they would have
usually on their like it be a face in profile
in the Roman style. You could see their like tattoos
or woe paintings on their faces.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
That seems pretty cut and dry.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Yeah, yeah, really honestly, the question to me is like
was it woed or was it some other pigment? And
was it tattoo or paint? Those are like the only
questions I have.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, how blue? Was this blue? We're talking here?
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah? Exactly because they also.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
I mean I know that like the word in Irish,
I think through Gaelic for like when you're referring to
like like black people is like the blue people. So like, right,
it could have been black paint or something.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Oh interesting. Yeah, I learned that because I did a
whole thing on the way that mummers and stuff would
decorate themselves to go do weird witchy shit, you know.
And I was talking about like, oh, people paint themselves black,
and then like I heard from a listener who turned
me on to the fact that like people with dark
skin were called blue skinned within Irish language instead of
(26:04):
black skinned, because black skinned meant a different thing anyway.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Yeah, to call someone black was too kind of they
didn't have a differentiation for like black nighttime other world
evils and they're like, oh, these people aren't evil, and
they've got kind of a blue about them. And there
was a lot of trade going on between the North
coast of Africa. There's a really interesting history between like
all the music that got traded back and forth, but
(26:32):
like more than years ago anyway, and.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Then it happens again in Appalachia.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
I surefucking does. Time is a flat circle.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, So anyway, Julius Caesar shows up, he comes, he saws,
he doesn't really conquer. He like makes an ally and
he's like, could you'd like send me some stuff every
year so I don't kick your ass, And the guy's like, yeah, whatever.
Britain demands some tribute and shit from the kings in Britain.
Occasionally some boot liquor kings we get run out and
(26:59):
fleet round home and there was some trade in shit
for about one hundred years. That's what we're looking at.
Then an emperor named Claudius in a d forty three
oversaw the actual conquest of Britain. He wasn't really a
military guy himself, but he showed up in person and
eleven British kings immediately surrendered without putting up a fight. Again,
(27:20):
according to the Roman accounts, there also was some fighting,
but eleven kings were like, ah, you're here, You're really powerful.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
Did he have a you know, a way about him?
There's just like, oh, fuck, Audi, this is here.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
I have like steadfastively refused to become one of those
like row we boos or whatever.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Yeah yeah, and like care about Rome.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
And so I don't know a ton about the different emperors,
but Claudius was specifically kind of seen as like a weakling.
And it's the reason he didn't get purged when all
of the other competitors were getting purged is because they're like, ah,
it's the way this guy's gonna end up in charge.
But he was actually really smart and a really good
administrator and did a lot of the building of roads
and shit that allowed colonial expansion and evil things. I'm
(28:02):
not trying to hold him up as a good guy.
I'm just gonna say he's a good administrator.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
No, yeah, he's a banality of evil type.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, and he also might have had elephants. Again, Romans
are like, yeah, he fucking brought elephants, and the fucking
Brits were like, holy shit, what the fuck is that?
Speaker 3 (28:17):
You gotta hate it.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
The historians were like, I don't know about that, but
I really want him to have shown up with elephants,
because then that makes him the hair drim, like the
Olifunts from Lord of the Rings, the evil invaders from
the East to the Southeast. And then it's not as
racist as it is in Tolkien's world.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Mm hmm. Yeah, it's just white people fighting white people here.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yeah, and even.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Though they have Ulafonts who never asked for it.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
By the way, no no one asks a war animal
whether it wants to do war. Yeah, this is why
I'm like not mad at cop dogs, Like whatever, it's
not their fault.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Don't make me choose. Just want to eat sugarcane and vibe.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
I know, so eleven kings to him, but this doesn't
mean that Rome had all of Britain, or even most
of Britain. But the Romans started trying to force agriculture,
and you know their conception of civilization on the barbarians
of Britain to get better tribute out of them. One
group of people, the Icni, which is spelled ice n
(29:19):
i Icni, and it could be pronounced in multiple ways,
we don't fucking know, but this is the main way
that people say. It's in the northeast of the lower
half of Britain. This is about as like north as
you could get decent agricultural land. But they also had
the Fenlands or the Fenlands or the Ventures. It wasn't
actually the Ventures. I'm just trying to make fun of
(29:39):
British names right now. There as they had a fucked
ton of wetlands. So Rome made the Icni drain their
own swamps and start planting corn, cereal grains, because the
Romans wanted all that land to be agricultural because they
wanted to go conquer Scotland, which was called Scotland yet
(30:01):
and Scotland you can't really grow as much shit, right, no,
and you need carbs if you want an army to
march north. All of this like hanging out eating flesh
and milk, pastoralist shit that's not gonna fucking work for
like evil standing armies. Okay. The reason it's interesting to
me is you have this like sort of modern like
carnivore right wing man whose like whole thing is like,
(30:24):
I'm a super manly army type and so I eat
a lot of meat or whatever. Armies like standing armies
in the expansion of civilization and Roman shit, it doesn't
come from hunting or pastoralism, but from agriculture.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
What they didn't have a lot of time to kill
or something to go hunt thousands and thousands of deer
and depopulate the woods. Yeah, and eat every single nasty
organ they can find.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, No, that was more what the Britons were doing.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
Yeah, when you get time to hang out, you gotta
put some grains in a bowl, get some rain water
on it. That's for you. Now go kill a guy.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, and as many of them as possible.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Yeah, you're fueled up.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
And so the ICNI they've got one of these boot
liquor kings, right, and that's why they're draining all the
swamps and shit. And his name is Presatagus, and it
is possible he's one of the original eleven Kings of
Men who accepted the rings of power from Sore and
became the Nascol. No wait, sorry, one of the original
kings who surrendered without a fight to Emperor Claudius. Thank you,
thank you, Sophie. It's also possible that the CNI revolted
(31:27):
in forty seven, and then after that revolt was put down,
this sky Presatagus was put in charge.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Side note, did you see that person on Blue Sky
that accused me of not reading Lord of the Rings
and not reading the book?
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (31:41):
How dare you? How fucking dare you? They accuse me
of being only a movie watcher?
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Yeah, you're a deep fake nerd, Sophie. You just want
a podcast network full of nerds, but you're a fake one.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Wow, that cut deep Bagpie.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Yeah, but it was sarcasm. I hope that one understands
in the.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Audience Magpie would never be mean to me.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
No, I would never doubt your nerd cred. That is
a thank you see strategy.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
Thank you whoever said that. Come go toe to with
me and Magpie and we'll have a cindar and off
we gonna Sophie will judge?
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Wait? Can I tell the audience about the how we met?
Talking about a tattoo idea.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Yeah, yeah, because we were the same person.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yeah. Io and I did not yet know each other
but had been basically producing the same merch for years.
Io wrote a comic No Gods and No Dungeon Masters,
while I was independently and unaware of the comic, producing
shirts that said No Gods, No Dungeon Masters.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
On separate sides of the country.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
And so that I meet Io, and I tried to
start to explain to Io how I have this plan
to get acab tattooed and elvish across my neck.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
Yeah, and I just fucking slammed dunk on you immediately
pull up my short shorts. It's already there in dwarf
in ruins.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Gorgeous anyway, gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yeah. I have a type for my.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Friends, beautiful friendship.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
We heart style and said, like you and me, Amigo's
for life. Yeah, speak friend and be fun. I wish
I could remember bella.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
What is it?
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Hell?
Speaker 2 (33:26):
I never remember? This is the problem that I was like,
I've also never read.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
That are you talking about? When they're like, speak friend
and enter.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Yeah, what is it mel.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
It's no, it's it's melon melone malone, which means friend.
So the I looked it up.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
We are Melon for life.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
It's pedro melon am no, which means speak friend and
enter hot.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
And then it's advertising.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
This is a good podcast.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
I don't even know what we're doing, but I'm loving it.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah, what are we talking about? Dragons?
Speaker 2 (34:05):
I think we're cinding into an ad break. I think
that's what we gotta do. Well, here's some ads unless
you have cooler zone media, in which case here's probably
the music. And we're back. So you have the bootlegquer
king Presitagis and he has a problem, and his problem
(34:26):
is that his wife is coole as shit. His wife
is so fucking cool.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Many such cases.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Her name is Boudica aka our hero for the week.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
Yay and the crowd goes wild.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yeah, and we can infer for a couple of reasons,
as she was anti Roman and pro Barbarian. She seemed
to be connected with the non conquered peoples of Britain.
It's possible that she was Irish. This is his conjecture
from a historian in the nineteen sixties. And I just
like want to believe it, but it's just because I
want to.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yeah, I want to believe it.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
It's true the like the tour from that region. We
don't have her torque, but we have like a torque
like those brass or gold rings that people would wear
around their necks. She probably wore one, and she's described
as wearing one, and there's like one from the region,
and the only other one that's similar is from Ireland anyway.
And she is described as like tall, masculine framed with
(35:20):
the most golden hair. It usually gets translated as tawny,
but it means most golden most literally, and this is
a word that could be either used to describe blonde
or red hair people who are obsessed with celts being
who they are. She's exclusively drawn with red hair.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
M M.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
Masculine framed, red haired woman. Picture me, dear audience as
a horny cartoon wolf with their tongue rolling across the
table and eyes bugging out of their head.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Yeah, the classic muscle marble who of Celtia. And unfortunately
every written description we have of her was written by
people later making shit up whole cloth or using descriptions
from people who knew her. You can infer that she
was a druid based on her position in society and
the spellcasting attributed to her, but honestly, we don't know.
(36:12):
And part of why it's like not really mentioned is
that the Romans couldn't wrap their head around the fact
that women were druids, even though they kept witnessing women
doing all of the things that druids do, and also specifically,
over and over again, the Romans kept having a problem
with the Celts, being like, they let women do whatever
they want.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Somebody stop them. They're kicking our asses. Our cooked kings
have too powerful of wives.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
That is what happened to old Prasitagus. Her name Bouticum
comes from the word for victory, which feels really on
the nose, considering that the Romans had a god named
Victoria Victory, but it was a common enough personal name
as well, and historians tend to assume she was an actual,
real person, and I'll get to the evidence of that later.
(37:01):
Presatagus was pro Roman, either because he believed in Rome ideologically,
or more likely he wanted power or he didn't want
to see his people killed by invaders. Because the pro
Roman kings when they accepted the ring of power from
sour On, they got more and more power because Rome
wanted fewer, stronger kings rather than like a million different
(37:22):
tribes and clans to deal with. Press Atagus was already
halfway a figurehead in his life because most of his
power was held by Rome. And one of the reasons
we know this is that there's no coinage with his
face on it. I read way too many articles talking
about this one time that people thought that they found
coins with his name face on it, but then later
(37:43):
they decided it was someone else.
Speaker 3 (37:44):
It was just some dog's ass. Why would they put
that on money.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Yeah, some other Honestly, it was probably his predecessor, so
our boot liquor. He writes out his will, and in
it he names his heirs as his two daughters and
also Emperor Nero, the Emperor of Rome. And it's the
fact that he left his wife out of this will,
out of being the heir, because like traditionally, power would
(38:10):
have gone to her, because you're allowed to be a queen,
like no questions asked. He writes her out of his will,
and historians presume that she was pro Rome and that
he didn't trust her to rule. And then he went
and died, and no one's conjectured that she killed him.
They're just like And then he died.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
And then he perished from causes and he left her
out of his will because she was just too bad ass.
I can't think of a joke. That's probably the reason, right.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
No, yeah, I mean that, like literally, the most likely
thing is that she was too pro independence, you know,
And he was like, that's not what I think is best,
So I'm leaving it to my kids and Nero. And
the leaving it to Nero thing was kind of a like,
it was just a boot licking thing. It was a like,
please don't kill us, doctor Rome. I don't know why
it's doctor now, but please don't kill us Roum.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Please Rome, MD, don't smash me with your big boot.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
And so two big important things happened at the same
time that led to this revolt. First of all, the
ICNI among other Britons, had been basically forced to take
massive loans from the Romans, presumably on very unfavorable terms,
and then those money lenders decided it was time to
call in the debt. Things were pretty unstable in Roman
(39:26):
Britain at this point. Nero was considering abandoning Britain entirely
because the generals there kept trying to like conquer West,
like out to Wales, and kept just losing because the
people in Britain were very fighty and poor, and it's
very hard to conquer fighty poor people.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yeah, when you're fighting people who had been farming mud
their whole life, who maybe.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Had dragons, Yeah, might had dragons.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
And were ready to just bifurcate you right there in
the milk.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Yeah, it's true. They had the big old claymores.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Yeah. I'd want to go back to sweet Italy myself.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Once I retire from everything else. I'm just going to
wing that out. Learn old Irish, not even modern Irish.
Just learn old Irish and start writing dark ages and
iron ages, romance novels. That's like my plan.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Carve them into slabs, leave them in caves.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
Oh fuck yeah, uh huh yeah exactly. So prass Attagis
he goes and dies, and he left his kingdom in
the hands of his daughters in Nero, and then Rome
was like, yeah, actually, we don't give a shit what
you said in your will, That like literally doesn't matter
to us. We're taking the whole thing. Fuck your family,
fuck all your like lesser nobles and all that shit.
(40:40):
We're just in charge because those who lick boots get
their teeth kicked in. The Romans had a habit they
would set up client kingdoms and then they would just
take the whole thing over anyhow. But let that be
a lesson tale as old as time. It honestly is.
This is a pattern that will repeat, it will echo.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
Yeah, if you're a coward, it does not pay off
for very long.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
No, God hates a coward, and in this case Rome
made it personal too. They show up, they steal the kingdom,
They whip Boudica and then rape or two totters no
and claim the whole kingdom. So at this point there's
kind of nothing left for the Icni to lose. And
this like feminist or at least rape revenged nature of
(41:25):
the revolt is pretty upfront in some of the tellings
of it. Basically, women were suffering even harder under Roman
rule than men were, I'm sure. The fact that Rome
was patriarchal, while the Celts, especially in Britain and Ireland,
according to one source, had much more quality between the genders.
So the entire nation of the Icni rose up, which
was one of the largest and most important tribes, not
(41:47):
as important as the Briganti, who I didn't write into
my script, who are immediately to the west. But it's
not just the Icni who rise up. All sorts of
ostensibly conquered people started revolting, most importantly the neighboring tribe
or nation, depending on which his story and you read
the Trinvantes. While the Trinavantes have a Celtic sounding name,
(42:08):
the Icna, his name is neither Celtic, nor Roman nor Germanic.
No one knows where that shit comes from. It's probably
just pre Celtic.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Britain, Yeah, left over from when the sea people's were
doing their Bronze age nonsense.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
And I love that shit.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
I love that shit. Yeah, we got all these tribes
who have a blurry gender line. We're just like they
fucking did what And words starts spreading around and this
is kind of like this seems to be like the
straw that breaks the camel's back of just like, We're
fucking done with these goddamn Italians coming over here telling
us how to do our mud farming. Yeah, bringing big
(42:45):
ulafhants to try and scare me. I'm not scared of
an ulafant.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah, I ain't scared of shit. I paint my body
blue and like go into trances.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
Probably I go into trances. I'm carrying thousand pounds stones
to put them on top of other stones. You don't
know what I'm capable of.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
And honestly, like it's interesting later I'll talk about this.
But there's like the noble savage take that like some
Greeks would have of the Celts. But then there's this
other one called the hard primitive, which is this assumption
that the like barbarian people are like just so much
less effeminate and like more like strong, and they just
(43:22):
eat dirt and they can do fucking anything less of.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
Nutrition and dirt. Yeah, anyway, I mean, the real thing
is to me, and I'm even less of a Papa historian,
but it's like when you're not going in on a
centralized authority with this like strict gender dynamics and you're
kind of letting everybody have a say and like just
spreading ideas around, pollinating that shit without attention to the
(43:47):
gender or you know, anything but a vague paganism type religion,
You're gonna get some weird, hearty, brave people, I know.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
And so it's like the problem I have with the
hard primitive thing is it's like trying to make it masculinist, right,
because it's like written by people who are like sad,
Rome is gone effeminate and weak, you know, And there
are gender roles within Celtic society, but they're much more variable. Yeah,
and also argued about today anyway. Okay, so the trade Avantes,
(44:19):
the other one of these other tribes or nations or
whatever the fuck, they have their own history going on
of how they related to Rome, and it's too tangly
to get into, but they had recently become second class
citizens in their own territory because Taylor's all this time
Romans had moved another Celtic group into their area and
we're like, nah, y'all like more important, Like we're the
most important, y'all are next, and then like fuck these guys, right,
(44:40):
you know. And just as importantly, Romans had gone and
built this sort of model town, this frontier outpost, this settlement,
this like West Bank ash shit, specifically for Roman veterans
to live in, and it was this symbol of culture
and civilization. They go fuck you to the Britons.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
So like not really like a Potempkin village kind of like, well,
I was going to say, like a cop city, but
it's all just like veterans of just like, look what
you could be if you just were putting nero on
your money.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
The proper civilized.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, you just have big bathtubs and whatever made Rome beautiful.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Yeah, And it's like their whole thing is like, we
can be rich, right, yeah, don't you want to? And
we get rich by conquering people. And they're like really
upfront about it, you know.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
And it's a town that's currently called Colchester, but at
the time it was cameload and a numb way better.
I'm gonna call it Colchester going forward. Unfortunately though, because
that's easier for me to pronounce, I'll give it a shot.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
So these guys are in Coleslaw or whatever the fuck
you said. Camelodia.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
Yeah, they're in Camelodia. Actually, people thought it was where
Camelot was for a while, but now people think that
it was the place to where Camelot was. Yeah. No,
And this town, Camelodia, it's like twelve years old by
the time this revolt breaks out. It was built in
the winter of forty eight to forty nine, and the
only major building. There is a Temple of Victoria dedicated
to Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory. They are not
(46:07):
subtle nahmers, the Romans.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
You gotta be some kind of fucked up that twelve
years in people are like, whoa, this is not it.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Yeah, we're gonna fuck you up.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:19):
Look, we've had twelve years to decide, and actually we've
decided fuck you exactly.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
That's pretty much what happens. So the rebels they march
on Cameloadinum and they burn that shit to the ground. Yes,
and the veterans who live there hole up in the
temple for a two day siege before losing badly. And
we know that the rebels burned cameloading them because there's
an archaeological record of it. There's like literally like.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
Just a layer of ash.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
N Yeah, what there isn't a record of in that
layer of ashes is slaughter. There's not human remains in
the burned layer.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
WHOA.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Three things could have happened before. One the Romans could
have fucked off, seen them comeing and gotten the hell out.
Two the Celts might have let the Romans escape. Three
they might have taken them all captive and done terrible
things to them or whatever. And four if they had
all died within the temple, that temple was then later
like cleaned up, right, But there is a strong archaeological
(47:22):
argument to make that these rebels didn't wholesale slaughter people.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
I got a feeling we'll get into this more next episode.
We was like, there's more than just like, no, we
didn't find any bones. So these guys seemed basically pacifists,
just you know, arsonist pacifists. How about that?
Speaker 2 (47:39):
And so then the revolt spreads and it's mostly this
big force led by Budecai, but it's also partly small
gorilla groups that will just show up and kill Roman settlers.
So some of that is happening. They're just like people
being like, get a fuck out of Britain, We're gonna
kill you, you know. After the revolt broke out, the imperial
governor of the area came Canassis fled to Gaul and
(48:03):
was like, it's lost, We've lost Britain. Give up runaways. Yeah.
The rebels then marched on Londonium akaa London what which
had been built in forty seven AD, so not much older.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Londinium sounds real dumb.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
I know. It's like if steampunks tried to out steampunk London.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
Wow, that's exactly what it's like if London just had
dirigibles behind Big Ben. Every single time you saw it,
it was Londonium all over.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
I'm gonna start calling you Magdinium, Magdinius, thank you, Magdinious.
Speaker 2 (48:46):
That's my my new Roman imperial name. Yes, Magius, because
you need one of those. I know. I'm really into Rome.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
Oh my god, Oh my.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
God, I guess I owe is. Well, it's it's Greek.
It's Greek and uh and the Romans took everything from
the Greeks already.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
Why not that Iodidius Iodineus, that's Iodius.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
Refer to me by my proper title, the complicated one.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
Yeah, pray tour. I don't know to pray tours. Pray
to me.
Speaker 3 (49:17):
I'm going to pray to her all along.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
So they show up and they burn London to the ground. Yes, good,
no more London. They do rebuild it later, but.
Speaker 3 (49:29):
Whatever, Oh why do you have to tell me there's a.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Town called London our reality? And then Roman reinforcements had
actually shown up on the island at this point, but
they like look and they see this fucking like hundreds
of thousands of people marching on London and they're like, Nah,
this ain't it.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
Get on their cell phone, Nero, you're not gonna believe this.
The storm we're stuck in. We're stuck in Marseille.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
Yeah, Tonally, Yeah, I got Tommy. It can't go to
work today.
Speaker 3 (49:58):
Everyone's got Tommy as we got bad.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
Yeah we thought it was corn, but that actually hasn't
reached us yet. So either basically no one was slaughtered
or seventy thousand innocent settlers were slaughtered, depending on whether
you believe the archaeological record or the Roman historians lost
of time. Now, the rebels had one big tactical problem.
(50:23):
They were largely unarmed. And this isn't because they were like,
we're so peaceful, we never had weapons. And it's not
even that they were like technologically backwards, although they did
not have the same level of technology as Rome. But
during the peace process of the last couple decades, the
local kings had let their people wind up disarmed. So
(50:46):
one lesson you can see over and over and over
again from history. Never let anyone disarm you because I
think I might be out on a limb here. I'm
doing a lot of limb climbing. I think it's possible
that if the IC and I hadn't had a boot
liquor king who disarmed them, Rome would have not successfully
like stayed the rulers for hundreds of years.
Speaker 3 (51:09):
Oh, this is going to be what keeps me awake
at night. And they all involve fucking up Rome because
right now, I think, what if Kubla Khan made it
all the way to Rome? What if you made it
all the way to the Vatican because he heard about
this pope and he was like, that's die, I'll hit
that at all. And then I don't know if something
happened and they had to go back, and I'm like, ooh,
just a couple more kilometers, man.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
I'm like vaguely considering that the next couple months are
going to be like Margaret talks about people who go
fuck up Rome or like try to like resistance to
early colonialism.
Speaker 3 (51:41):
Tune in, folks, it's going to be the anti Rome
couple of months. Yeah, men who think about nothing but
Rome are steaming already.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
I know. But what's funny is that last week was
actually about a bunch of Romans. It was about the Galley,
the trans women who were priestesses and were ostracized within
Roman culture. Because once again, it's not about every Roman
is bad. It is about systems of government and colonial expansion.
Speaker 3 (52:03):
Yes, which is why I'm trying to hang back on
my searing hatred of the British because not British people,
you know, because I love you out there, limis.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
Actually it's a they are the anti colonial force in
this particular story, and that is important thing to remember.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
That's true, guys, remember your history return with a v Right.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
They burned another town via Lamium, which is now Saint Agnes.
I think it's saying something and I forgot to write
that into my script. It's this town that the Roman
record is like they burned it all, and the archaeological
record is like they burned a couple places, like kind
of where the rich people lived, and like basically this
(52:42):
is also an act of class warfare. This is not
just we hate the Romans the invaders. They are, let's
fuck up the rich. But eventually the Roman army caught
up with the rebels. There was a big fuck off,
fantastic last stand. The rebels, who were possibly mostly women
at it depends on how you're going to interpret the sources.
(53:04):
They greatly outnumbered the Romans, but the Romans had weapons
in armor and discipline, which are three things that are
really useful if you're doing open battle instead of guerrilla tactics.
And the Icini lost. Budekai died shortly after of illness
or suicide, and the revolt was put down, but Britain
(53:27):
was not tamed. All the available Roman soldiers were needed
to keep the conquered areas conquered, and they just never
as expanded as far north into Scotland as they wanted.
They never got west into Ireland, and the fighty spirit
of the Celts saved Celtic culture. But when we come
(53:47):
back on Wednesday, I'm going to get into the Roman
accounts of this, and it's going to have sweet, sweet
details about pagan rites and battle speeches, and I'm going
to make a wild claim about gender.
Speaker 3 (54:00):
Yes, Oh, I cannot wait, and I can't wait to
hear about all these murdering ladies. What a time we're
going to have. Listener, you and me, come on.
Speaker 2 (54:10):
But what if people are like I like hearing that ionium?
What does praterer ionium do? And what if I want
to listen to more of prader Ionium talking on podcasts
between now and Wednesday. Do you have any suggestions about
where people might be able to hear you have?
Speaker 3 (54:27):
I got good news for you. It just so happens
that I'm on a podcast with who is this? Margaret Kiljoy?
Speaker 2 (54:33):
Wow What?
Speaker 3 (54:34):
And Robert Evans and Hazel Acasia and our friend Jason Bollman. Yes,
mister Pathfinder himself is doing a tt RPG podcast for
cool Zone Media. Ever heard of it? It's this and
it's probably still actively coming out when this comes out. Yeah,
get in there on the on the book Club feed,
(54:56):
on the it could happen here feed, and.
Speaker 2 (54:58):
On this very feed, on this.
Speaker 3 (55:00):
Very feed, you hear before your ears. I also do
a podcast called The Spectacle. It's kind of like what
if there was a serious anarchist podcast, but for people
who just wanted to be stupid for a while and
talk about movies and video games. And you can find
me on the internet at bum Lung. I might have
a new comic by the time this comes out. Oh shit,
(55:22):
it's not all Biga do Crime. I got other stuff,
arguably better stuff, but you know, I'll dance with the
girl who brought me. I love big crime around here.
Speaker 1 (55:32):
Do you still have an Etsy store that people can
shop at?
Speaker 3 (55:35):
I O yes, and I'm trying to make my own
shop soon. But it's still all over on Etsy. Once
I figure out how a computer works, it's over for ittzy.
But yeah, you can get prints, you can get comics.
I got all kinds of shit for you.
Speaker 2 (55:47):
Half my t shirts.
Speaker 1 (55:49):
What's it called?
Speaker 3 (55:50):
Oh yeah, Etsy dot com slash bum lung just bum lung,
like a lung that doesn't want to work.
Speaker 1 (55:59):
Sensational all right?
Speaker 2 (56:01):
And I want to plug Cooler Zone Media, which is
the way to listen to this podcast and all of
the other Coolzone Media podcasts without ads. And so that
means you can listen to all your favorite podcasts without
ads because the Spectacle doesn't have ads already. So that's
all the podcasts. And also, Sophia anything any new good
(56:21):
coolzone media stuff? What if people want something that's off
of cool Zone Media but is by a dear friend
of cool Zone Media about the Satanic Panic? Do you
have any suggestions?
Speaker 1 (56:33):
Are you talking about my dear friend Sarah Marshall's new podcasts?
I am oh it's called the devil you know.
Speaker 2 (56:41):
Yeah, it's about the Satanic Panic and it will help
answer the question of how evil is the past only
just about the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1 (56:49):
Are you started listening to it yet, Magpie?
Speaker 2 (56:51):
No, I haven't had any time for podcasts, which is
so weird. I like, normally listen to so many podcasts,
and right now I have kind of time for nothing
but writing until the end of the year because I'm
on a fuck ton of deadlines and I am insane.
Speaker 1 (57:06):
Wait to binge it.
Speaker 2 (57:07):
I am going to binge it. It's going to be
so good. I'm going to go on a long drive
and I'm going to learn all about the Satanic Panic
and I'm going to show up and just talk about
that to all my friends and they're going to love me.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
I love that for you. I want to plug this
sticker on Io's head seat that I really like that
just says get off the Internet.
Speaker 3 (57:26):
Oh yeah, that's good advice. I made that just for me,
and I feel like other people other people have gotten
some use that.
Speaker 2 (57:35):
I really like that.
Speaker 1 (57:36):
I'm going to actually buy that right now.
Speaker 3 (57:39):
I'll send you one thank you though.
Speaker 1 (57:41):
Oh, I'm going to buy it right now. I want
you want it.
Speaker 2 (57:47):
Much appreciated, and I will see all of you all
on Wednesday. Will actually so be an io. I'll see
you in about five minutes, but everyone else I will
see metaphorically on Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (58:03):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and fool Zone Media,
visit our website Goolezonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the five or radio app, hop a Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com