Don’t forget, almost every historian in Western Europe in 60AD was a Roman.
We don’t actually have to accept either. And they certainly aren’t dependent. Sometimes a historian tells both a truth and a lie. And sometimes they exaggerate.
Then why was his middle name Elizabeth?
That was Standard Operating Procedure at the time. In fact, Sutonius, the Roman general who defeated her also killed women, and slaughtered more Britons than Boudica did. In the battle in which Boudicca was defeated (from here):
Suetonious conducted punitive campaigns against the Britons, which were too much even for Nero and got him sacked…
The Romans tortured and crucified people they defeated, especially rebels.
Well, we pretty much have to accept what the archaeologists say.
I accept those were brutal times, but that doesnt make her a hero by any means. But note- I didnt pick her as my most hated. She was wronged, she went way overboard in her revenge. There are worse women by far.
Interesting question. What woman in history is responsible for the greatest number of deaths?
I have trouble fully despising Hanson because I feel a tad of pity for her. She is dumber than a rock.
That was pretty much my point. She did some evil things, but they weren’t exceptional for the times. She seems an odd choice for worst.
Yeah, I went for Bathory. I mean, no excuse for that.
Mind you many people consider Boudica some sort of hero or “grrl-power” and that is kinda crazy too.
But worst? Nah.
Yes, I get that, but the unstated point was that hypocrisy was somehow worse than, oh, starting wars, supporting Apartheid, breaking an economy for generations to come, etc.
That hypocrisy has fuck-all to do with level of evil? That being an honest devil doesn’t excuse shit? I thought that was obvious.
Eve?.
Either
Isabella - she funded Columbus
or
Elizabeth I - she chartered the East India Company
Thanks to TheCuse for taking up the cudgels, and exceedingly well at that! Thatcher was disliked by many, but the “Ding dong the witch is dead” business was seriously over the top and merely illustrates, IMHO, how toxic British politics have become. Over the years a number of political commentators have said that they thought Thatcher caught so much flak because she was a woman. A man is resolute, a woman is bossy. A man is a strong debater, a woman is bitchy. The ovaries can’t win.
Saying Hitler was not a hypocrite might be true, but exceedingly irrelevant. In any case my comparison was with Mother Theresa.
" An estimated 70,000–80,000 Romans and British were killed…
Weeeeell, who did the estimating? The only sources we have are Roman. Was Dio a Roman propagandist?
Most of what we think we know about the pre_Roman Britons comes from Roman sources, the Britons left no written record. Not to excuse Boudicca, but I would guess that the non-Romans in the towns were viewed as collaborators, and in any case the main reason the Romans had an easy time of it in Britain was that the locals fought each other constantly and could not present a united front.
“Looted public resources in order to funnel millions into the pockets of her cronies…”
Can you be more specific? This sounds more like the current situation, not the one under Thatcher. The only instance that I know of, and it caught a lot of flak, was concerning her son Mark.
Well, Queen Fredegund doesn’t seem to have been a charmer. Though granted that the Merovingians in general do seem to have made something of a family hobby out of assassinating and messily executing one another left and right.
And Mabel de Bellême certainly seems to have been ruthless enough to easily qualify as a successful medieval dynast.
But I’m not sure dislike is the right word for my feelings about those sorts of historical figures. I mean I’m sure I’d dislike them if I knew them personally 
. However they’re just to far removed from me for me to work up much real emotion about them. Sure they’re pretty repellent, but I guess my view of them tends to be a bit more clinical than personal.
That’s even setting aide the inevitable haze of history that tends to leave only a very muddy view of the reputation of someone like a Boudicca. I mean did Cleopatra VII have her half-brother Ptolemy XIV poisoned? It seems plausible, maybe even probable, but it is hardly a sure thing. Sometimes good stories are just good stories and misogyny and partisanship was a real issue in particular with a lot of the monks that documented at least European history. And it’s not like these women even stand out from the general crowd of sadistic men. Mabel’s son Robert was probably a rather worse monster than his mother and as noted Fredegund was in stiff competition with some serious serial killers in her social circle.
Pre-modern people in general just tended towards the pretty fucking brutal.
Of all the women with power in the history of the world, the one responsible for the most deaths is Queen Victoria. Tens of millions of colonial subjects died under her long reign, in the Irish and Bengal famines, in the colonial wars, and by disease and neglect in newly acquired territories. Ask the Tasmanians about British imperialism - oh, you can’t, because they are all gone.
Of course, Victoria had very little real power, and barely even knew about these events - she was probably quite a nice person in herself, although she fell out with certain of her children.
But she was the figurehead at the forefront of a sophisticated machine which exploited a vast segment of the world, and killed very many of them, directly or indirectly.
And supported the Inquisition.
The Spanish Inquisition was horrible, but it didn’t have a very high death count, really.