After some initial victories, Boudicca let herself be totally annihilated by an army smaller than hers, which she had trapped in a no-retreat , no maneuver position. And the vengeance of the legions on her people afterwards was terrible. Her courage and her cause were never in doubt, but her leadership of her people was disastrous.
Leonidas was a typical Spartan glory hound, I suspect he committed suicide (by Persian) out of shame. He died primarily because the bulk of his army was piddling around with religious rituals back in Sparta and never made it to Thermopylae in time to fight. And the 300 were not the only Greeks to die that day. Another city's troops (I can't recall which right now), several thousand, volunteered to fight by his side and were massacred with him to hold the pass long enough for the rest of the Greeks to fall back and regroup. They never get mentioned in the Hollywood versions.
Dido was a figure from Greek Mythology, not history, the Roman poet Virgil lifted her dramatically to write into the Aeneid. The whole Aeneid was not historical, it was political, and meant to legitimize the Roman state by somehow conflating it to the mythical survivors of the Trojan war. I doubt if even the Romans took it seriously as history.
Troy existed, for near a thousand years, and it was probably sacked and burned and occupied and rebuilt a dozen times because of its strategic location at the entrance to the Black Sea. No doubt it played a major role in the development of early Greek civilization as it expanded into Asia Minor, but the actual story by Homer is not a historical account, any more than Prince Valiant is a historical chronical of post-Roman Britain.
British poets did for Boudicca much the same Virgil does for Dido. In this little ditty, she foreshadows British Imperialism and Italian opera, even the Royal Navy gets a plug.
Boadicea: An Ode
by William Cowper
WHEN the British warrior queen,
Bleeding from the Roman rods,
Sought, with an indignant mien,
Counsel of her country’s gods,
Sage beneath a spreading oak
Sat the Druid, hoary chief;
Every burning word he spoke
Full of rage, and full of grief.
‘Princess! if our aged eyes
Weep upon thy matchless wrongs,
’Tis because resentment ties
All the terrors of our tongues.
‘Rome shall perish—write that word
In the blood that she has spilt;
Perish, hopeless and abhorred,
Deep in ruin as in guilt.
‘Rome, for empire far renowned,
Tramples on a thousand states;
Soon her pride shall kiss the ground—
Hark! the Gaul is at her gates!
‘Other Romans shall arise,
Heedless of a soldier’s name;
Sounds, not arms, shall win the prize—
Harmony the path to fame.
‘Then the progeny that springs
From the forests of our land,
Armed with thunder, clad with wings,
Shall a wider world command.
‘Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway,
Where his eagles never flew,
None invincible as they.’
Such the bard’s prophetic words,
Pregnant with celestial fire,
Bending, as he swept the chords
Of his sweet but awful lyre.
She, with all a monarch’s pride,
Felt them in her bosom glow;
Rushed to battle, fought, and died;
Dying, hurled them at the foe.
‘Ruffians, pitiless as proud,
Heaven awards the vengeance due:
Empire is on us bestowed,
Shame and ruin wait for you.’