Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Nathan Ross]

Tacitus* "for some there are that record that almost 80,000 Britons fell"

Interestingly, Dio claims that 'eighty thousand of the Romans and their allies perished' during the revolt. Tacitus says instead that 'about seventy thousand citizens and allies' were killed in Cochester and London.

Dio alone records the size of Boudica's army as 120,000 at the beginning of the revolt, and 230,000 at the final battle. Tacitus alone reports the story that 'little less than eighty thousand of the Britons' died in the battle.

Needless to say, I believe all these figures are hopelessly unreliable and probably hugely exaggerated. Estimating crowd sizes is hard enough today (just compare the figure given out by organisers of a demonstration with that recorded by the police, and try and determine which is closer to the truth!) - in antiquity it was notoriously difficult.

A recent survey by the Museum of London, however, estimated that the civilian population of London in AD61 was c.10,000. Colchester might have been a little larger, St Albans much smaller. There were probably fewer than fifty thousand Roman civilians in the entire province of Britain, and many of them would have been far from the rebel districts.

Tacitus's estimate of 'around ten thousand' for Paulinus's force at the battle is perhaps more reliable; armies in regular-sized units are rather easier to count. If we give him c.9000 infantry, he would have had 18 cohorts. I do not think we can any more exact than that about army composition, and beyond their being 'in close array' (frequens ordinibus) we know nothing definite about how they were deployed.