♀️ Feminist Friday ♀️
Theodora
Empress Theodora was born into the lowest classes of Byzantine society, eventually advancing to rule over the Byzantine Empire equally with her husband.
She grew up on the outskirts of the Byzantine Empire with a father who was an animal trainer. After his death, Theodora took the stage as an actress to support the family. During this time, the profession was considered scandalous—being an actress was synonymous with being a prostitute—but Theodora took every opportunity to move up in a very rigid class system. In 516, at the age of sixteen, she traveled to Alexandria, Egypt, where she discovered and adopted Monophysitism, the belief that Jesus Christ was wholly divine. Theodora converted, renouncing her former career and lifestyle.
Theodora met Justinian I in 522, who was at that time heir to the throne. Justinian wanted to wed immediately, but as heir, he was forbidden to marry an actress, even one who had reformed. Justinian had this law repealed the following year, and the two were married in 525.
Theodora and Justinian were known for ruling as intellectual and political equals, and Theodora was responsible for much of the reformation of Byzantium. In 528, construction began on the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, built as an imperial church on the outskirts of the Byzantine Empire. The basilica’s mosaic, completed in 548, depicts both the emperor and the empress participating in an imperial procession, signifying her equal role and importance in ruling the empire.
In 532, religious unrest plagued the region. A conflict between two political and religious groups, the Blues and the Greens, began during a chariot race at the Hippodrome and quickly grew into what is now known as the Nika Revolt. This revolt destroyed much of Constantinople, and many saw this as a chance to overthrow Justinian, who wished to flee. Instead, Theodora spoke out, preferring to die a ruler than to be removed from power, and her courage prompted Justinian to send in troops to calm the rebels. After quelling the revolt, Theodora and Justinian confronted the destruction of important monuments in Constantinople, including the original Hagia Sophia. The couple rebuilt the basilica, which was rededicated in 537. It was the largest church of the period and later became one of the greatest examples of Byzantine architecture.
During her time as empress, Theodora fought for the persecuted. She attended to the rights of prostitutes in particular by closing brothels, creating protective safe houses, and passing laws to prohibit enforced pro stitution. In addition, she passed laws that expanded the rights of women in divorce cases and abolished a law that had allowed women to be killed for committing adultery. Finally, she strove to protect the persecuted Monophysites, building houses of worship that served as refuges.
Theodora died in 548, but her influence was apparent in Justinian’s subsequent rule. He sought to maintain the same level of freedom for women, setting a precedent for women’s equality. He also fought for the Monophysites, despite his own conflicting orthodox beliefs.
The wheel is ready!
I’ve made the tasks as easy as possible for you all to complete by choosing items you can find in your home
You will need:
A wooden spoon
Clothes pegs
Toothpaste
A tie
See you at 8pm GMT!
SLAVE TASK WEDNESDAY
💻 E SERVITUDE 💻
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Today's workout complete!
I'm going to share my workouts over the quarantine period to inspire you all to get some exercise in. Remember, a fit slave lives longer! More bang for your Mistress' buck!
20 seconds on, 10 off
Jumping Jack + Tap Down x3
Mt Climber + Plank Jack x3
Jump Squats + Front Kick x3
High Knees x3
Push Ups x3
Jumping Lunges x3
Pop Squat x3
Burpees x3
Curtsy Lunge Jumps x3
Squat Pulses x3
Bicycle Crunches x3
Squatted Side Steps + Jump x3
Up and Out Jack x3
Get this post to $50 in tips and I will post a set of post workout body worship pics!
HIIT Tabata workout complete!
Here's what I did:
20 seconds on, 10 seconds rest
Butt Kickers
Static Runners L
Static Runners R
Jumping Lunges
Plank Walk Downs
Power Skips
x2
High Knees
Mt. Climbers
Quick Feet (narrow and wide quick taps in squat)
Pop Squats
Plyometric Push Ups
Star Jumps
x2
45 seconds on, 10 off
Jackknife Crunches
Back Bows Cross Crunch
Side Crunch L
Side Crunch R
Russian Twists
x2
♀️ Feminist Friday ♀️
Boudicca
A freedom fighter, the woman who almost drove the Romans out of the country, Boudica is one of the most iconic queens of Britain. Despite being one of the first ‘British’ women mentioned in history, there is no direct evidence that she even existed. Instead, we have to rely on the accounts of two classical authors, Tacitus and Cassius Dio, both writing decades after the alleged battles between Boudica’s rebel army and their new Roman overlords. Their accounts were constructed with a specific political agenda, and a Roman audience, in mind but they are the only references we have. We don’t even know her real name: Boudica derives from bouda, the ancient British word for victory.
Any biography of the warrior queen is therefore a marriage of the classical histories with limited and circumstantial archaeological evidence. From these fragmentary sources, and what we know about Iron Age and early Roman Britain, we can weave together some of the strands of this woman’s achievements.
Boudica first appears in the historical record of AD 60 after the death of her husband, Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni people. They lived in an area covering modern-day Norfolk, north Suffolk and north-east Cambridgeshire. Prasutagus had become a ‘client king’ of the Romans shortly after they had invaded Britain in AD 43, allowed to keep his lands in exchange for supporting the Romans politically and paying them dues as a tribal leader.
Prasutagus would doubtless have been granted Roman citizenship, along with his wife and two daughters. As a client queen, chances are that Boudica would therefore have been a wine-drinking, fine-dining and possibly even Latin-speaking aristocrat, with her future, and that of her daughters, assured.
According to Tacitus, the trouble began when Prasutagus died having bequeathed only half his wealth to the Roman emperor, Nero: the other half was signed over not to Nero or even to Boudica, but to his two daughters. His reasons for doing this were unclear. Perhaps he was attempting to shore up the girls’ dynastic claim to rule the Iceni; perhaps he didn’t trust Boudica to support the Romans; perhaps he was trying to show his tribe that he was not a puppet leader of a foreign invader. The result was catastrophic. The Romans looted his palace, sacked his kingdom, enslaved his relatives and stripped all Iceni chiefs of their ancestral lands.
There was worse to come: the Romans flogged Boudica and gang-raped the princesses. For a Roman audience, this defilement of the ruling class, Roman or Briton, was reprehensible; for the Iceni, Boudica was not just a queen, she was also a priestess and possibly the embodiment of their goddess Andraste. This was more than a violation of their earthly leaders – the rapes and floggings desecrated the Iceni’s entire culture and system of beliefs.
The historian Cassius Dio gives a different root cause to the events that followed, focusing instead on the sudden recall of substantial Roman loans to tribal leaders, leaving them humiliated and in serious financial crisis. Whatever the trigger, the Iceni had a motive for rebellion; all they needed was a leader. Into this space stepped the outraged Boudica – a symbol that though they might be bruised, they still had their dignity, and it was time to fight back.
Boudica wasn’t the first Iron Age warrior queen to lead her people to war. Cartimandua, the first British woman to be named in the historical record, ruled the bellicose Brigantes tribe in what is now the north of England. Meanwhile, at Chedworth Roman villa in the county of Gloucestershire a portable Roman altar depicts a spear-wielding goddess entitled ‘Dea Regina’ – Queen Goddess.
With such earthly and divine sanction, Boudica plotted the Iceni’s revenge on their Roman overlords, aided by her southern neighbors, the Trinovantes. They were the first native Britons to sign a treaty with Rome – in 54 BC after Julius Caesar’s second attempt to invade. But that treaty was about to be broken: they, too, had seen their lands devastated. Their former capital, Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), had been taken by the Romans as the seat of their new administration, with tribal lands redistributed to retired Roman soldiers. Even worse, the Trinovantes had been ordered to pay for, and build, a gigantic new temple to the Emperor Claudius. As fermenting hatred exploded into fury, Boudica gained her army.
The campaigning season of AD 60 saw the Roman forces busy in the western fringes of Britannia as they battled to suppress the political power of the druids on Anglesey. Boudica took her chance and swept down to destroy the very heart of Roman Britain. Tacitus calls the uprising a “sudden revolt”, suggesting it caught the Romans unawares. After years of collaboration, there was now no mercy shown to the few thousand Romans left defending their capital, not even when they fled for their lives into the sanctity of the temple. They were butchered or burned alive as Camulodunum was annihilated.
The classical accounts correspond with a grim discovery: a burned layer in the ground, from a few centimetres to half a metre deep. Whether the burning was by the Romans as they fled or by Boudica’s army has never been answered but the burned layer is evident in Colchester and in Boudica’s next targets: London and St Albans.
The relatively new Roman town of Londinium nestled on the banks of the river Thames, around 40 miles south-west of Camulodunum. A centre for trade, it offered rich pickings for Boudica’s army and very little in the way of defence. With the Roman governor of Britain Suetonius Paulinus around 300 miles away in the west and Catus Decianus the administrator in charge of the outrage on Boudica long fled to Gaul, the 30,000 people of the town knew they were on their own. Taking what they could, they abandoned their homes and fled.
Cassius Dio regales the savagery of the Britons’ attack: women with their breasts hacked off and sewn into their mouths, their bodies then skewered full-length on wooden poles. The mass executions, religious sacrifices and “indescribable slaughter” echoed Tacitus’s account of the sexual and religious violence meted out to Boudica and her daughters. Now, with London burning at temperatures of almost 1000C (1800F), Boudica could look back and smile at her second success.
Two of the largest towns in Roman Britain now lay in ashes; Boudica’s army had done its job well. But the thirst for revenge had not yet been slaked: to the north-west lay another symbol of the hated foreign rule – not a Roman town but a town of British collaborators who appeared to glory in everything Roman-style. For Boudica’s army, this cultural insult from their enemy Catuvellauni tribe was too much to bear. Slowly gathering their people around them, the tribes began their next journey northwest to their third target: Verulamium, the modern day town of St Albans, in Hertfordshire.
By the summer of AD 60/61, the Catuvellauni knew they were next. The third largest Roman settlement in the province, Verulamium had been designated a municipium – a status affording Roman citizenship with all its benefits to its local magistrates. But with no garrisons or Roman officials, they were left to face their fate alone. As Boudica mobilised her rebel army, excited with their success and weighed down with plunder, the Catuvellauni had no option but to evacuate. While this might have saved the population, it didn’t save the town, which was burned to the ground before the hordes spread out into the surrounding countryside to devastate their old tribal enemy.
According to Tacitus, some 70,000 Roman citizens and allies had now been killed, plus 1,500 of their crack troops ambushed en route to Camulodunum. While the numbers are almost certainly exaggerated, this gave Suetonius Paulinus a problem: to lose thousands of troops and civilians not only looked bad in his despatches back to Nero, it weakened the might of the Romans in Britain and slowed his campaign to conquer and ‘civilise’ this barbarian land. But, worst of all, the Roman humiliation came at the hand of a woman. Not since Cleopatra’s seduction of both Caesar and Mark Antony had the empire suffered such shame.
Few details survive of Paulinus’s march south-east to confront Boudica. We don’t even know the location. Tacitus describes the site in the vaguest terms: the head of a valley with woods to the rear and an open plain in front where the enemy gathered. According to Cassius Dio, Boudica’s forces numbered 230,000 to the Roman’s 10,000 but the critical difference was in fighting style: while the Britons were expert at guerilla tactics, the Romans were a highly organised killing machine.
Boudica’s stirring speeches in both Tacitus and Dio’s accounts almost certainly owe more to hyperbole than history; however, they are of interest in how they portray her against her Roman oppressors. Tacitus describes how Boudica rallied her troops in warrior queen style, arguing she had morality, bravery and the gods on her side. In contrast, Cassius Dio’s prolonged battle speech for her draws upon Roman ideas of Britons as ethereal, almost mythical beings – brave but using ancient and secret arts, goddesses and an auspicious hare to beat their opponents in place of cold, hard steel.
Even the gods could not save the Britons this time: the Roman soldiers held their formations before unleashing a devastating attack. Boudica’s vast army was trapped on the plain with no way forward and any retreat blocked by their own families and possessions. With no space to fight and no way to flee, the Britons were massacred.
And Boudica? Tacitus says she killed herself with poison; Cassius Dio says she fell ill and died. Her daughters disappear from the record, while their tribespeople faced an onslaught little short of genocide. The lands and roundhouses of the Trinovantes and Iceni were destroyed. In their p
That was a sweaty workout! Join me at 3pm GMT for Coffee and Feet! Get your kettles on and get settled for a little chat and foot worship over coffee with me live at 3pm GMT here on OnlyFans!
SLAVE TASK WEDNESDAY
😳HUMILIATION😳
Easter is just around the corner, and I have the perfect way for you to celebrate and entertain me at the same time.
How many creme eggs can you fit up your bum?
I want video proof for this one boys 😂😂😂
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Creating content during quarantine can be a challenge. As I’m sure most of you can see, I like to film with subs. That’s my favourite dynamic for recording clips. I want to do some POVs for you all, but I’m going to need a little help: what would you like to see?
Keep fit with me during the quarantine!
A little workout video for you all.
Yes, I know, I wore my lace frenchies to try and distract you. There's only one rule to this: complete the workout before you touch yourself. It'll be a much more rewarding experience.
