Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Nathan Ross]

'seat for war' is a literal translation of 'sedem bello' in the text and thus more literally accurate than 'seat of war' in the Church & Brodribb translation - but what does it actually mean?

It's an interesting phrase. It actually became very popular in 19th century military writing, when people were always off to 'the seat of war in the east' (ie the Crimea), for example. In these cases it's just a classicizing figure of speech for what we might call the 'warzone' or 'theatre of operations'.

I think that Tacitus in Annals is using the phrase more in the way that Lucan uses it in the passage I quoted above, to mean a campaigning base - the two translations you mention, the Loeb one and Michael Grant's, actually encapsulate the two slightly differing readings very well!