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
December 4, 2025 • 79 mins
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Ah, Christmas—it's a time of cheer, of gift-giving and generosity; and a time to eat yer babies.
This year, we’re focusing on two different cannibalistic monsters from Christmas folklore: Père Fouettard and Hans Trapp. Because it turns out that child cannibalism really is the reason for the season—and perhaps Santa Claus is the biggest cannibal of all.
What is Santa h...
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December 2, 2025 • 73 mins
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For thousands of years, horses have been essential to human
civilization from warfare to trade and empire-building. All over the world, people have captured horses, tamed horses, mythologized horses, and trained them to be ideal companions in the project of human advancement.
How has the relationship between human and horse changed over time? When did people start t...
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November 27, 2025 • 77 mins
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In our last episode, we detailed the rise of the Beast of the Gevaudan, some of its most gruesome attacks, and the doomed efforts of professional hunters to take it down. In this one, we’ll discuss how the Beast finally died—and the theories that arose after its death about what exactly just happened in the Gevaudan.
The thing is, even with a body—and a detailed auto...
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November 20, 2025 • 75 mins
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From 1764 to 1767, an area of southeastern France called the Gevaudan was stalked and terrorized by a mysterious beast. Some said it was a wolf. Others that it was “like a wolf, but not a wolf”—far stronger, faster, more brutal and more intelligent than other wolves. Still others provided much more strange and otherworldly descriptions that did not resemble a wolf at al...
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November 13, 2025 • 72 mins
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We’ve covered werewolves in the ancient world before—and their connection to the Berserker myth. But wait til you hear what happened to werewolf mythology when the Catholics got their hands on it.
This episode is a wild ride, taking you from the ancient Greek and Roman werewolves to a Medieval monster tied to the mysteries of serial killing, mental illness, domestic ab...
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November 6, 2025 • 80 mins
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The werewolf myth as we know it today generally involves getting bitten by a werewolf, transforming during the full moon, and being very susceptible to silver bullets. But werewolves in ancient Greece and Rome were a little different.
Join us for a spooky-season deep dive into ancient werewolf mythology from thousands of years ago. We'll take a look at the pre-Christia...
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November 4, 2025 • 56 mins
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Today on the podcast, we’re thrilled to welcome bestselling
author Ayana Gray. Ayana is the author of the blockbuster YA novel Beasts of Prey, and is now joining us to discuss her adult fiction debut: I Medusa, an exploration of one of mythology’s most misunderstood “monsters.”
Join us as we discuss all things Medusa—from the true nature
of her snakelike hair to her ...
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October 30, 2025 • 82 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 of Justinian.
T...
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October 23, 2025 • 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 weather.
But...
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October 16, 2025 • 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 on the slopes o...
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October 9, 2025 • 95 mins
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Teotihuacan is an ancient pre-Colombian city in central America, founded two thousand years ago. It’s the home of some of the most iconic Mesoamerican monuments in existence, including the Pyramids of the Moon and Sun.
The city was abandoned after about 750 years of habitation. When the Aztecs first encountered it, it had stood empty for 600 years. Walking through the ...
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Lucian’s A True History has been called the world’s first work of science fiction—but above all, Lucian of Samosata was a satirist. And he had a bone to pick with the famous historians of his time—guys like Herodotus and Ctesias of Knidos. They were Lying Liars who Lied, you see, and Lucian was mad about it.
So he set out to write his OWN monument to lies—lest he be th...
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September 30, 2025 • 59 mins
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AD Rhine is the pen name of the authors Ashlee Cowles and Danielle Stinsen, who have been friends and creative partners for over 25 years. Their novels Horses of Fire and Daughters of Bronze follow the Trojan War saga. They are our kind of nerds—so naturally we had to interview them.
The story of Troy and its fall still resonates with us thousands of years later. Cow...
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September 25, 2025 • 23 mins
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It is the End of Season 13--and what a wild ride it's been. We've had so much fun triangulating the Goths for you--and we hope you now are as obsessed with them as we are.
Join us as we debrief the previous season, talk about how our year has gone (it's been a big year for BOOKS, for both of us!) and discuss what's coming up next!
Find Jenny's book, Enemy of My Dream...
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September 11, 2025 • 57 mins
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In our last episode we talked about the opulence of Goth–Gothic architecture, fashion, and art of all kinds–and the connection between this and the opulence of the Visigoths and their vast state treasure plundered from Roman cities and towns.
But there’s more to Goth than plunder. There’s a romance to Goth. A dark romance steeped in obsession. Many of the original Goth...
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August 28, 2025 • 69 mins
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We have come to the end (or almost the end) of our long, sweeping epic history of the Goths. But we have one corner of Gothic history as yet uncovered: what is the connection between Gothic literature, music, art and fashion, and Goths (the Germanic / Hunnic / etc. people who sacked Rome and occupied Italy)?
Join us as we make some questionable leaps in logic and t...
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August 14, 2025 • 62 mins
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Long after the smoke from the battlefields died down, long after the ravens had eaten their fill, the Migration Era lived on in Germanic heroic legend, well into the Middle Ages.
For centuries after the battles and events of that era, people throughout Europe were crafting legends and sagas that repurposed and mythologized those events, sometimes recasting major fi...
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July 31, 2025 • 77 mins
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We've told you the story of the Ostrogoths, the Amal ruling family, who built an imperial dynasty only to see that rulership dissolve within two generations. But what happened to their cousins, the Visigoths? The Tervingii tribe and the Balthi royal family? Alaric’s Goths?
Turns out they lasted much longer. But they weren’t necessarily the ones who had it most toge...
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July 24, 2025 • 27 mins
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For a while now, Genn has been hinting at a "Secret Project" in the works--and now it's out in the wild: the Official Lore Olympus Cookbook. Genn was heavily involved in this project, weaving together the history and mythology of Greek cuisine with the world of Rachel Smythe's Lore Olympus to create a cookbook that's not only delightful to cook with, but fun and edu...
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July 17, 2025 • 93 mins
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When Alaric of the Visigoths sacked Rome, it shocked the world—not least because Rome hadn’t been sacked in a thousand years. But also, while Rome was a Christian city by now—it had been for decades—the Visigoths were Christian too.
And they weren’t recent converts, either. They had all been Christian for over 160 years. Theirs was the earliest conversion of a Germ...
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