“Let us do our duty while the memory of freedom still abides within us, that we may leave both the name and the fact of it to our children. For if we utterly lose sight of the happy conditions amid which we were born and bred, what pray will they do, reared in bondage? . . . Let us show them that they are hares and foxes tryingto rule dogs and wolves.””

— Buduica on the plains of Northumbria, AD 61 (quoted by Cassius Dio)

for Patty Blackwell and Barbara Hand Clow

These are the two thousand year old words of a Roman writer who seems

remarkably like ourselves, an ordinary citizen brought up by decent

parents who cared about honesty, compassion and the nation to which he

was loyal. By comparison, the ups and downs of his life and times were

far more violent than ours. Emperors were liable to be sliced up as

they sat on their thrones, yet for most of the nine century run of the

Roman Empire, life was good and happy, although a capricious justice

that was inevitably sabotaged by corruption gradually dragged

civilization into what are now known as the Dark Ages.

Cassius Dio witnessed many of the events he wrote about in person.

This is the story he wrote about an enemy. Even so, the admiration he

conveys comes down through time as an astonishing homáge to a

miraculous foe.

This is the story of Nero, the Roman emperor who set his own city on

fire, and of his trusted adviser, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, whose

reputation survived his own corruption, and the greatest heroine of

them all, Buduica, archetype of the Celtic warrior goddess, the

sword-wielding blonde bombshell who scared the Romans out of their

wits, exactly as written by this high integrity historian of ancient

times.

Previewing the punchline, it should be noted than anyone making the

connection between the role of these ancient Romans and that of our

present day Jews should be forgiven if Buduica’s descriptions hit too

close to home, because our present day conditions mirror so much the

conditions of oppressed Britain under constant assault by the Roman

war machine.

Thus, I believe this to be an uncannily accurate forecast of what is

about to happen in the United States of America in the year AD 2011,

which is 1950 years after the recording of the following requiem to

freedom.

The story of Buduica by Cassius Dio, 61 AD.

. . . a terrible disaster had taken place in Britain.

Two cities had been sacked, eight myriads of Romans and of their

allies had perished, and the island had been lost.

Moreover, all this ruin was brought upon them by a woman, a fact which

in itself caused them the greatest shame.

Heaven evidently gave them in advance an indication of the

catastrophe. At night there was heard to issue from the senate-house

foreign jargon mingled with laughter and from the theatre outcries

with wailing: yet no mortal man had uttered the speeches or the

groans. Houses under water came to view in the river Thames, and the

ocean between the island and Gaul sometimes grew bloody at flood-tide.

The casus belli lay in the confiscation of the money which Claudius

had given to the foremost Britons — Decianus Catus, governor of the

island —  announcing that this must now be sent back. This was one

reason.

Another was that Seneca had lent them on excellent terms as regards

interest a thousand myriads that they did not want, and had afterward

called in this loan all at once and levied on them for it with

severity.

[Sound familiar?]

But the person who most stirred their spirits and persuaded them to

fight the Romans, who was deemed worthy to stand at their head and to

have the conduct of the entire war, was a British woman, Buduica, of

the royal family and possessed of greater judgment than often belongs

to women.

It was she who gathered the army to the number of nearly twelve

myriads and ascended a tribunal of marshy soil made after the Roman

fashion.

In person she was very tall, with a most sturdy figure and a piercing

glance; her voice was harsh; a great mass of yellow hair fell below

her waist and a large golden necklace clasped her throat; wound about

her was a tunic of every conceivable color and over it a thick chlamys

had been fastened with a brooch. This was her constant attire. She now

grasped a spear to aid her in terrifying all beholders and spoke as

follows:

 "You have had actual experience of the difference between freedom and

slavery. Hence, though some of you previously through ignorance of

which was better may have been deceived by the alluring announcements

of the Romans, yet now that you have tried both you have learned how

great a mistake you made by preferring a self-imposed despotism to

your ancestral mode of life.

“You have come to recognize how far superior is the poverty of

independence to wealth in servitude.

“What treatment have we met with that is not most outrageous, that is

not most grievous, ever since these men insinuated themselves into

Britain?

“Have we not been deprived of our most numerous and our greatest

possessions entire, while for what remains we must pay taxes?

“Besides pasturing and tilling all the various regions for them do we

not contribute a yearly sum for our very bodies?

“How much better it would have been to be sold to masters once and for

all than to ransom ourselves annually and possess empty names of

freedom!

“How much better to have been slain and perish rather than go about

with subservient heads! Yet what have I said? Even dying is not free

from expense among them, and you know what fees we deposit on behalf

of the dead.

“Throughout the rest of mankind death frees even those who are in

slavery; only in the case of the Romans do the very dead live for

their profit.

“Why is it that though none of us has any money, and how or whence

should we get it?

“We are stripped and despoiled like a murderer's victims? How should

the Romans grow milder in process of time, when they have conducted

themselves so toward us at the very start — a period when all men show

consideration for even newly captured beasts?

"But, to tell the truth, it is we who have made ourselves responsible

for all these evils in allowing them so much as to set foot on the

island in the first place instead of expelling them at once as we did

their famous Julius Caesar, — yes, in not making the idea of

attempting the voyage formidable to them, while they were as yet far

off, as it was to Augustus and to Gaius Caligula.

“So great an island, or rather in one sense a continent encircled by

water, do we inhabit, a veritable world of our own, and so far are we

separated by the ocean from all the rest of mankind that we have been

believed to dwell on a different earth and under a different sky and

some of their wisest men were not previously sure of even our exact

name.

“Yet for all this we have been scorned and trampled under foot by men

who know naught else than how to secure gain.

“Still, let us even at this late day, if not before, fellow-citizens,

friends and relatives, — for I deem you all relatives, in that you

inhabit a single island and are called by one common name.

“Let us do our duty while the memory of freedom still abides within

us, that we may leave both the name and the fact of it to our

children. For if we utterly lose sight of the happy conditions amid

which we were born and bred, what pray will they do, reared in

bondage?

 "This I say not to inspire you with a hatred of present

circumstances, — that hatred is already apparent — nor with a fear of

the future — that fear you already have — but to commend you because

of your own accord you choose to do just what you ought, and to thank

you for cooperating so readily with me and your own selves at once.

“Be nowise afraid of the Romans.

“They are not more numerous than are we nor yet braver.

“And the proof is that they have protected themselves with helmets and

breastplates and greaves and furthermore have equipped their camps

with palisades and walls and ditches to make sure that they shall

suffer no harm by any hostile assault.

“Their fears impel them to choose this method rather than engage in

any active work like us.

“We enjoy such a superabundance of bravery that we regard tents as

safer than walls and our shields as affording greater protection than

their whole suits of mail.

“As a consequence, we when victorious can capture them and when

overcome by force can elude them.

“And should we ever choose to retreat, we can conceal ourselves in

swamps and mountains so inaccessible that we can be neither found nor

taken.

“The enemy, however, can neither pursue any one by reason of their

heavy armor nor yet flee.

“And if they ever should slip away from us, taking refuge in certain

designated spots, there, too, they are sure to be enclosed as in a

trap.

“These are some of the respects in which they are vastly inferior to

us, and others are their inability to bear up under hunger, thirst,

cold, or heat, as we can; for they require shade and protection, they

require kneaded bread and wine and oil, and if the supply of any of

these things fails them they simply perish.

“For us, on the other hand, any root or grass serves as bread, any

plant juice as olive oil, any water as wine, any tree as a house.

Indeed, this very region is to us an acquaintance and ally, but to

them unknown and hostile.

“As for the rivers, we swim them naked, but they even with boats can

not cross easily. Let us therefore go against them trusting boldly to

good fortune. Let us show them that they are hares and foxes trying to

rule dogs and wolves."

At these words, employing a species of divination, she let a hare

escape from her bosom, and as it ran in what they considered a lucky

direction, the whole multitude shouted with pleasure, and Buduica

raising her hand to heaven, spoke:

"I thank thee, Andraste, and call upon thee, who are a woman, being

myself also a woman that rules not burden-bearing Egyptians like

Nitocris, nor merchant Assyrians like Semiramis (of these things we

have heard from the Romans), nor even the Romans themselves, as did

Messalina first and later Agrippina.

“At present their chief is Nero, in name a man, in fact a woman, as is

shown by his singing, his playing the cithara, his adorning himself.

“But ruling as I do men of Britain that know not how to till the soil

or ply a trade yet are thoroughly versed in the arts of war and hold

all things common, even children and wives; wherefore the latter

possess the same valor as the males: being therefore queen of such men

and such women I supplicate and pray thee for victory and salvation

and liberty against men insolent, unjust, insatiable, impious.

“If, indeed we ought to term those creatures men who wash in warm

water, eat artificial dainties, drink unmixed wine, anoint themselves

with myrrh, sleep on soft couches with boys for bedfellows (and past

their prime at that), are slaves to a zither-player, yes, an inferior

zither-player.

“Wherefore may this Domitia-Nero woman [Domitia was Nero’s wife] reign

no more over you or over me: let the wench sing and play the despot

over the Romans. They surely deserve to be in slavery to such a being

whose tyranny they have patiently borne already this long time. But

may we, mistress, ever look to thee alone as our head."

After an harangue of this general nature Buduica led her army against

the Romans. The latter chanced to be without a leader for the reason

that Paulinus their commander had gone on an expedition to Mona, an

island near Britain. This enabled her to sack and plunder two Roman

cities, and, as I said, she wrought indescribable slaughter.

Persons captured by the Britons underwent every form of most frightful

treatment. The conquerors committed the most atrocious and bestial

outrages.

For instance, they hung up naked the noblest and most distinguished

women, cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths, to make

the victims appear to be eating them. After that they impaled them on

sharp skewers run perpendicularly the whole length of the body.

All this they did to the accompaniment of sacrifices, banquets, and

exhibitions of insolence in all of their sacred places, but chiefly in

the grove of Andate, — that being the name of their personification of

Victory, to whom they paid the most excessive reverence.

[But the tide of history turned against Buduica. Armor and tactics

proved too powerful for the primitive Britons. As ancient Egypt had

finally been overrun by horses and chariots and bronze, so ancient

England was trammeled by the mechanized modern civilization of Rome.

Cassius Dio ends his narrative of this episode with a description of

the final battle, which concludes]

“ . . . They contended for a long time, both parties being animated by

the same zeal and daring. Finally, though late in the day, the Romans

prevailed, having slain numbers in the battle, beside the wagons, or

in the wood: they also captured many alive. Still, not a few made

their escape and went on to prepare to fight a second time. Meanwhile,

however, Buduica fell sick and died. The Britons mourned her deeply

and gave her a costly burial; but, as they themselves were this time

really defeated, they scattered to their homes. — So far the history

of affairs in Britain.”

Source: The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books

61-76 (A.D.54-211), by Cassius Dio

Title: Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211)

An Historical Narrative Originally Composed In Greek During The Reigns

Of Septimius Severus, Geta And Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus And

Alexander Severus And Now Presented In English Form By Herbert Baldwin

Foster.

Release Date: January 31, 2004 [EBook #10890]

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10890/10890-h/10890-h.htm#a68_32

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida

preaching the message that no problem in the world can be

authentically addressed without first analyzing tangents caused by

Jewish perfidy, which has subverted and diminished every aspect of

human endeavor throughout history. Support for his work, which would

come in really handy right about now, is wholly derived from people

who can understand what he’s saying and know what it means.

http://johnkaminski.info/  250 N. McCall Rd. #2, Englewood FL 34223

USA

Jan. 23, 2011