Shout, Icenian, Catieuchlanian; shout, Coritanian, Trinobant!
Bloodily, bloodily fall the battle-axe, unexhausted, inexorable!
Take the hoary Roman head, and shatter it, hold it abominable,
Cut the Roman boy in pieces in his lust and voluptuousness.
Fall the colony, city, and citadel, London, Verulam, Camulodune!’
‘Ye gods! What cannot a poet do?’ exclaimed Seneca, with enthusiasm. ‘Those lines would have made me die in battle, if I had been a Briton.’
‘They have caused eighty thousand to die in battle,’ said Aulus. ‘A later letter of Paulinus tells us that, after a fearful massacre of the Romans at the three colonies of Londinium, Verulamium, and Camulodunum, the Britons assembled two hundred and thirty thousand warriors, with whom he fought a tremendous battle near Verulamium. But how could those woad-painted fighters withstand the skill, the discipline, the heavy armour of our legionaries? We lost but four hundred, Paulinus says; and Boadicea, who, in a chariot with her two daughters, had raged through the battle like an angry lioness, has taken poison in despair.’
The wild passionate verses had produced strangely different effects on the little audience. The old king started up from his couch, his breast panting, his eyes full of fire, and then sank back again and hid his face in his mantle. For the lines recalled to him his own heroic struggles, and his great father, Cunobalin, and his noble brothers. Claudia mused in silence, thinking of the day when the Prince of Peace should come again—a thought which Pomponia divined as she laid her hand on the fair head of her friend. Vespasian looked grave, and thought it rather treasonous of a Roman poet to turn such verses into Latin. Pudens and Titus felt a pang of regret that, in combat with a free people, the name of Rome should be stained with the infamies of scamps and weaklings who had provoked that terrible revolt.
Seneca little knew that Aulus, in reading extracts from the letter of Suetonius, had suppressed a passage in which the general had indignantly stated as one cause of the insurrection, not only the wrongs of Boadicea, but the fact that Seneca himself had suddenly called in large sums of money which he had lent to the British at usurious interest, and that the demand for repayment had reduced the poor Iceni to bankruptcy and despair.
‘We have been talking about Britain all this time,’ said Titus; ‘but here is our friend Julius straight from Palestine, and he must have plenty of news to tell us about those odd fanatics, the Jews.’