Ancient History Fangirl
An ancient history podcast run by two Millennial women. Misbehaving emperors, poison assassins, mythological mayhem; it’s like if Hardcore History met up with My Favorite Murder in the ancient world, with a heavy helping of booze and laughter.
Episodes
October 27, 2026 • 64 mins
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Crater Lake is a caldera lake in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon—the remnants of an ancient volcanic eruption. It’s the deepest lake in the country and one of the deepest in the world. And this place is steeped in lore: unexplained events, murders and suicides, disappearances and hauntings, and a strange 200-year-old floating log that probably controls the we...
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October 22, 2026 • 99 mins
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In the last episode of our season, we’re taking an in-depth look at the life and writing of Ovid: pickup artist, poet extraordinaire, and all-around good-time guy who knew where all the best underground raves were in ancient Rome. Ovid loved city life, and he adored tweaking the nose of Rome’s First Citizen through his writing.
In this episode, we chart Ovi...
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October 20, 2026 • 52 mins
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In this episode, we’ll delve into the mystery of Aokigahara, known in Japanese as the Sea of Trees—and to the rest of the world as the Suicide Forest. After the Golden Gate Bridge, it is the second most popular suicide destination in the world.
The forest is over a thousand years old. It grew over lava floes laid down in a devastating volcanic eruption...
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October 15, 2026 • 30 mins
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We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this brilliant crossover episode!
Our very own Genn McMenemy made a guest appearance on Liv Albert's Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! to interview the co-authors of the BRAND NEW CAMP HALF BLOOD BOOK: Camp Half-Blood: The Wild Zone!
In this episode, Rick Riordan and Annabelle ...
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October 13, 2026 • 85 mins
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This is an episode about a plague that killed up to 100 million people by the time it was done—as many as 60% of its victims. It’s the first documented occurrence of a pandemic that we have, and it’s the first documented outbreak of the deadlyYersinia pestis. No, we're not talking about the Black Death of Medieval Europe. We're talking about the Plague ...
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October 8, 2026 • 63 mins
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What can we believe about the Odyssey?
This is the question posed by bestselling author Liv Albert, host of the Let’s Talk About Myth’s Baby! podcast, and author of three books including the brand new The Odyssey: A Modern Retelling. It’s an Odyssey for children, but one which readers of all ages will find it very easy to fall in love with.
Join us ...
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October 6, 2026 • 47 mins
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Mammoths existed on our planet for roughly five million years, and they were perfectly adapted to the ice age world they inhabited. So perfectly adapted that when the last ice age ended, so did they. No woolly mammoths have walked the earth for the last 10,000 years. Or did they?
It turns out that the last mammoths didn’t disappear 10,000 years ago. For thousands ...
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October 1, 2026 • 85 mins
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Among the poets of early Augustan Rome, Virgil had a niche: nostalgia. He wrote poems about the Roman countryside, farmers, and a mourned, simpler past that may have never existed. And when Augustus came to power, he recognized Virgil’s skill as one he could exploit.
Augustus commanded Virgil to write the Aeneid—an epic poem tying him (Augustus) to an ancie...
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September 17, 2026 • 67 mins
Enemy of My Dreams is just $2.99 on Kindle!
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Short answer: no.
Long answer: no, and they didn't function that well in pluralistic Roman society, either.
Many of the qualities of high-control Christianity--spiritual warfare, fascistic tendencies, the desire to bring on the end times through war in the Middle East, Christian persecution complex, refusal to follow societa...
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September 10, 2026 • 56 mins
Enemy of My Dreams is just $2.99 on Kindle!
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We are thrilled to welcome USA Today bestselling author Eva Leigh to the podcast. Eva has had two recent releases that piqued our interest: The Sea Witch (about a lady pirate who’s also a witch, paired with a hunky navigator) and a wild novella about a woman whose world is rocked by multiple werewolf highwaymen.
J...
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September 3, 2026 • 90 mins
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One of the most famous quotes from Augustus’ reign was “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” And Augustus did that—he had a real thing for construction. Augustus would leave his mark on Rome, and the city would never be able to forget him.
Turns out this is…how do we put this…fascism-coded. Other authoritaria...
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August 20, 2026 • 64 mins
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Have you noticed that our tech overlords cannot be normal
about the Roman Empire?
Elon Musk has approximately 14 known children, which he
refers to as his “Legion.” Mark Zuckerberg famously took the Emperor Augustus on his honeymoon. And in some of the darker corners of the Internet (and real life), wildly rich techbros openly fantasize about a “Red ...
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August 6, 2026 • 78 mins
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Slavery touched every part of life in ancient Rome. Depending on the time period and location, as many as one in ten or one in three people was enslaved.
How does it warp a democracy when so many of its people are not free? Today we talk to author, historian and podcaster Dr. Emma Southon, host of the History is Sexy podcast and author of Not Built in a Day: How Slaver...
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July 23, 2026 • 71 mins
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In our last episode, Livia and Octavia were at each other’s throats over which one of their sons would be chosen as Augustus’ heir. The unfortunate thing is that the heirs kept dying.
Meanwhile, the daughter and granddaughter of Augustus—Julia the Elder and Agrippina the Elder—were the first generations of the new autocracy. They never knew demo...
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July 9, 2026 • 85 mins
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In our last episode, Octavian had just defeated Cleopatra and Mark Antony. His sister Octavia had refused to renounce her wayward husband (Mark Antony), behaving with an intensity of loyalty that Octavian did not hesitate to use in his propaganda war against his enemy.
Meanwhile, Livia and Octavian had both divorced their spouses, shortly after children were born, to m...
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July 2, 2026 • 98 mins
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The romance between Mark Antony and Cleopatra has beguiled us for centuries. What most people don’t realize is that when Mark Antony met Cleopatra, he was already married—to someone just as epic. Her name was Fulvia.
Cleopatra had glamour and divinity and lots of money. But Fulvia had the gangs. She was a populist firebrand, military leader, and for a while,...
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June 25, 2026 • 76 mins
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The First Ladies of Rome—the women of Augustus’ family—played a role in building his empire. Octavia, Livia, Julia, Agrippina—these were the women who helped kill a democracy.
In this episode, we will explore how they were complicit in their own oppression—how they were manipulated, how they were used, and how they used their power and inf...
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June 11, 2026 • 69 mins
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Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex, took many lovers in the mythology. But perhaps the most important was Ares. They adored each other; they had many children together; they could not keep apart . Their relationship was (for the ancient Greeks) surprisingly…healthy?
Today we talk all things Aphrodite with bestselling author Jennifer Saint: her relationship with ...
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June 4, 2026 • 51 mins
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Due to changing marital laws (among other things), the late Roman Republic saw a rise in a certain kind of wealthy elite woman with more independence and power than her foremothers. These women were financially independent, highly educated, sexually liberated, and unafraid to seize the reins of power. One of those was a woman named Clodia.
Daughter of the aristocratic ...
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May 21, 2026 • 99 mins
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You may have noticed that MAGA (Republicans in general, really) are weird about women.
That weirdness is ancient. It goes all the way back to ancient Rome, all the way back to ancient Greece, and all the way back to the beginning of the city-state, when gender-based oppression was built into the foundations of the polis. Augustus was similarly weird about women, and so...
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