Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Renatus]

I suspect you are trying to have your translation cake and eat it!

Nope.  Just logic.  However, I think that there is some justification in one of your recent comments and, although I would not go so far as to disbelieve him, I would say that Tacitus has to be treated with caution.  I am happy to follow him on questions of fact but it is when he ascribes motives to certain actions that one has to be careful.  Like all ancient historians, he had his prejudices and these have to taken into account.  Deryk has commented that he had little time for governors whom he did not regard as being sufficiently aggressive but we can look at their supposed inaction and see why it should be so.  You yourself have remarked that he considered the Britons as being childlike in rushing to war while neglecting the necessities of life and I recall that a long time back in this thread you commented that, in saying that they flew to arms, he was applying the stereotype of the thoughtless barbarian.  To some extent, he contradicts himself.  He says that the Iceni engaged in a secret conspiracy with the Trinovantes and other tribes.  Such conspiracies are not formed overnight and the making of one is incompatible with the notion of their flying to arms on the instant.  Likewise, embarking upon a campaign that involved the uprooting of a whole tribe is not something that can be undertaken without at least some organisation.

So, I believe that we can trust him when he says that there was a famine and that the principal reason for that was the failure to plant crops (although Suetonius' reprisals may have contributed).  It is when he attributes that failure to carelessness, negligence, failure to have regard to the consequences or however you want to translate incuriosus that he betrays his biases.  In my judgment, the failure to plant crops was a conscious decision made on the assumption that it was pointless to waste time and resources on planting a crop that it would probably be impossible to harvest.