Ancient History Fangirl

The episode explores the mythology of a genderqueer Achilles and the man who loved him, Patroclus, among the queer myths that break the binary as the ancient Greeks saw it.

With Maya Deane

Debut author Maya Deane strips away the lenses of the Victorian era and Classical Greece to reveal an Illiad about transgender Achilles and found family in a Bronze Age world.

With Liv Albert

Ten years into the Trojan War below the walls of Troy, Achilles' feud with Agamemnon over a woman called Briseis rose to a fever pitch in a toxic wasteland.

Achilles spent several years of his life passing as a girl, a stretch this episode explores alongside his relationships with his mother Thetis and a girl named Deidameia.

With Ashlee Cowles, Danielle Stinsen

AD Rhine, pen name of authors Ashlee Cowles and Danielle Stinsen, tells the Trojan War saga through women who lived through it on both sides, and this conversation covers the martial women of the Bronze Age.

At the beach at Aulis, where the Greek kings gathered at the start of the Trojan War, Achilles clashed with Agamemnon, and a girl named Iphigenia met her fate.

With Jennifer Saint

With Jennifer Saint

Jennifer Saint introduces Clytemnestra and Elektra, the wife and daughter of Agamemnon, along with the prophetess Cassandra and the murderous curse over the House of Atreus.

As Spartan control across Greece receded, Philip of Macedon and his 18-year-old son Alexander emerged as one of the most dangerous new opponents of Thebes' Sacred Band.

In the 300s BC, Thebes fielded an elite military force of 150 male lovers, whose love for each other made them strong enough to break oppressive regimes.

Aspasia, long-term partner of the Athenian statesman Pericles and darling of the philosophical set, survived the plague of Athens and threw the best parties for a hundred miles.

After Theban rebels led by Pelopidas retook Thebes from Sparta, they formed an elite 300-man fighting force, the Sacred Band, to counter the dreaded Spartan hippeis.

A giant statue supposed to depict the god Helios was once pictured straddling the harbor at Rhodes, holding aloft a torch, though some said it looked more like Alexander the Great, on an island full of pirates and smugglers.

Mausolus was once an extremely powerful man, yet today he is remembered mainly for the grandness of his tomb, commissioned by his wife, who was also his sister; his name in English now means all tombs.

Perhaps first written down by Herodotus sometime in the 400s BC, the list of Seven Wonders did not really get popularized until the 200s, and this episode traces its history through the centuries since.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, built under the Ptolemies in Egypt and known as the Pharos after its island, stood for about 1,600 years and came to represent light and learning, and darker meanings too.

With Liv Albert

Hadrian, the Roman emperor who commissioned Hadrian's Wall, combined an obsession with architecture and a passion for everything Greek to transform the city of Athens, as guest Liv Albert explains here.

This is the Dionysus of Thrace, of Mithradates, of Spartacus and of revolutionaries across the classical world, the story of a wandering god who inspired people to rise against injustice.

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia was built of priceless hippopotamus ivory, tall as a three-storey building, and had to be oiled daily in the heat so it would not crack.

The third episode traces how the temple of Artemis at Ephesus was built, who burned it down, who rebuilt it, and what happened there beyond worship.

Sex workers in ancient Greece sometimes had more freedom than most in the Greek world could imagine, a freedom that came at a price for the famous Hetaerae of Classical Athens.

With Liv Albert

Lucian's A True History, which has been called the world's first work of science fiction, was a satirist's answer to historians like Herodotus and Ctesias of Knidos, and Liv Albert joins to explore this monument built entirely from lies.

With Natalie Haynes

Natalie Haynes, author of Stone Blind, argues ancient depictions do not always show Perseus as the hero of the Medusa myth, and that there is evidence that gorgons originally had a protective role in Greek iconography.

Aphrodite, one of the most powerful goddesses of the Olympian pantheon, was a free and unattached woman whose sexual agency directly threatened the patriarchy, and the stories about her show how the Greeks felt about love and lust.

The werewolf myth as known today generally involves a bite and the full moon; in ancient Greece it was different, and its pre-Christian origins connect to death, starvation, cannibalism and transformation.

The Thracians served as hired assassins, enforcers and mercenaries, the ones Romans and Greeks turned to for their really dirty work, and ancient sources plus modern archaeology build a picture of how they lived, loved, fought and died.

With Liv Albert

Ancient Greek ghost stories worked a little differently: fathers who devoured their children, disembodied baby heads, corpses standing on the battlefield to prophesy doom, and women returning from the grave.

This final Wonder on the list of Seven Wonders stood where seawater meets freshwater, and in that primal land the legend grew of a divine huntress: Artemis of Ephesus, fierce protectress of women and children.

With Liv Albert

Liv Albert from Let's Talk About Myths Baby explores Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which immerses players in Ancient Greece through the symposia of Athens, Corinth, the Peloponnesian War and Crete.

With Nikita Gill

Award-winning poet Nikita Gill, whose work is haunting and fiercely feminist, joins to compare the goddesses, heroines and monsters of Greek and Hindu mythology.

Atalanta, created in the image of an ancient Artemis who had a strong association with bears, is discussed as a gender rebel and sexually liberated heroine, perhaps an older image of that goddess.

Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love, beauty, sex and passion, was also the patron goddess of sex workers in the Classical world, and the Romans transformed her into Venus.

Hippolyte and her golden belt, Penthesilea and the fall of Troy, and the Daughters of Ares: fierce warrior women recur everywhere in Greek mythology, in a male-dominated society.

Heracles, son of Zeus and the strong man of Greek myth, lived for a time as a woman, submissive to a powerful female who took up his lionskin and club.

Artemis of Ephesus was older than her Classical Greek counterpart, rooted in the ancient Near East and cousin to deities such as Kybele and Egyptian Bastet.

Conventional wisdom divides sex workers in ancient Greece into enslaved pornai and elite hetaerae, a drastic oversimplification; life varied at every level of the profession, including those who fit neither category.

With Liv Albert

Liv Albert from Let's Talk About Myths Baby joins to explore how Dionysus subverted Roman patriarchy, plus theatre practices of the ancient Greeks, alongside retellings of Medea, Medusa and the playwright Euripides.

With Jennifer Saint

Bestselling author Jennifer Saint discusses Hera, trapped in a toxic marriage with the King of the Gods, and asks whether her story is more than misplaced vengeance.

With Elyse John

In this gender-bent retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, author Elyse John crafts warrior-poet Orphia's love for the shieldmaker Eurydicius, and the lasting power of women's voices, in a story of love, loss, grief and poetry.

With Ayana Gray

Bestselling author Ayana Gray, author of Beasts of Prey, joins to discuss her adult debut I Medusa, exploring the Gorgon as monster, mortal, sister and daughter.

Athenian symposia were all-male drinking parties, the playground and hunting ground of the city's elite courtesans, the hetaerae, where guests drank, flirted and debated with the philosophers, and they had their dangers too.

With Jennifer Saint

Bestselling author Jennifer Saint guides a discussion of Atalanta's heroine's journey, her connection to Artemis and an older concept of the feminine, plus what it was like being stuck on the Argo among so many men.

With Rosie Hewlett

With Bea Fitzgerald

Most myths present Athena as springing from Zeus's head already fully formed, yet there is one story of her youth and an intense bond with a girl named Pallas, perhaps the only person Athena ever truly loved.

Zeus kidnapped a teenage boy named Ganymede and brought him to Olympus as his cup bearer, a story used to send the message that the gods approved of pederastic practices widespread in ancient Greece.

With Leesa Charlotte

Sappho, the Tenth Muse and the first lyric poet of Western literature, openly loved women and wrote about it; Leesa Charlotte from Sweetbitter joins the attempt to piece her fragmentary story together.

At the ancient Olympic Games, cheating was punished with a public whipping, women were barred from attending on pain of death, and Opening Ceremonies involved making sacrifices.

Silphium was the miracle plant of ancient Greece and Rome; the people of Cyrene printed it on their money, and it was considered a medicine that could cure baldness, epilepsy and poisonings, and may even have been a contraceptive.

Genn McMenemy co-created the Official Lore Olympus Cookbook, weaving the history and mythology of Greek cuisine into the world of Rachel Smythe's Lore Olympus, and Jenny interviews her here about making it.