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It was the beginning of the Migration Era where the Goths’ history with the Roman Empire begins. The Migration era was a cycle of wars and conflicts lasting hundreds of years. Alaric’s sack of Rome was only a small part of it. 

What started it? Nobody knows. But it would have been an extremely chaotic time to be alive, when ordinary people had to leave all that they’d built and flee in the face of invaders—who were also refugees fleeing violence that had wiped out their own homes. There would have been no safety anywhere.

The Migration Era was a vortex of death, where displaced victims, starving refugees, desperate people often wound up enacting the next round of violence on the populations they crashed into. And in this episode, we try to plumb the depths of that vortex.

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In our last episode, we delved into the archaeology of the pre-Roman Goths. But what about Gothic culture? What do we know about pre-Roman Gothic culture, before the Goths were Romanized?

To get a real sense of what is authentically Gothic is really difficult. We don’t have much information about the Goths’ daily lives or culture. We know almost nothing about their pre-Christian religious practices and beliefs. What we do have is a lot of military history from a Roman lens, and accounts from chroniclers like Tacitus—which have a lot of issues.

In this episode, we try to peel back the layers and discover what we can about pre-Roman Gothic culture.

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The Roman Empire stood for a thousand years. Many causes have been given for its downfall—but if just one group of people could be said to be culpable, it would be the Goths.

They stormed its borders en masse, scored outsized victories that no one had won before, killed two emperors and raised up their own, sacked the city of Rome after a thousand inviolable years; and built their own kingdoms within the Empire’s decaying corpse. Their name has inspired the names of architecture, literature and fashion into the modern day. Whenever you set the date of the fall of Rome, there’s no question the Goths were instrumental in felling it. So who were these people? Who were the Goths?

In this episode, we’re going to find out.

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In Enemy of My Dreams, Jenny based her heroine Julia partially on Julia the Elder—rebellious daughter of Augustus who got herself exiled to Pandateria for being, as the ancients say, “too slutty.”

Julia the Elder refused, REFUSED to rein it in. And for that, we adore her. But accounts of her life are told by men, sometimes her political enemies. She may have been a victim of slander, or engaged in deeper plotting that her dad wanted to keep secret. And while Julia the Elder was exiled for roughly five years, her daughter, Julia the Younger, was exiled for 20.

Join us as we explore the lives of these indomitable women with historical fiction author and classics scholar Tana Rebellis, author of the Exile Duology and expert in Julio-Claudian exile.

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In 450 AD, the Imperial Princess Honoria--daughter of Galla Placidia--was desperate to escape her arranged marriage. So she made an indecent proposal--to Attila the Hun.

On this single action, cities were torched. Saints were raised. Thousands died. And Venice was founded. Find out how it all went down.

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He was a fierce barbarian warlord—a man who had stood between his people and the Roman Empire since the sack of Rome. She was a Roman Imperial princess with a core of iron strength.

Born enemies, the love of Ataulf and Galla Placidia is marked by tragedy—but in its time, it burned hot enough to reshape an Empire. This is their story.

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This week’s Book Club author interview is none other than up-and-coming romantasy and historical romance author Jenny Williamson, discussing her upcoming debut Enemy of My Dreams: her huge historical crush on Alaric of the Goths, the inspiration for her entirely-made-up hot-mess heroine, and how she adds “verisimilitude” to her fight scenes.

Join Genn and guest co-host Liv Albert, of Let’s Talk about Myths, Baby!, as they crack open a beverage, and conduct a wild and slightly tipsy author interview.

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Who was Alaric of the Visigoths, really?

It’s a difficult question to answer. Alaric left no manifesto. There is nothing in his own words to explain his motivations for sacking Rome, or all the choices he made leading up to that fateful day. All we have are the assumptions of his enemies, which sometimes don’t’ make a lot of sense.

Enter Douglas Boin. His groundbreaking biography, Alaric the Goth: an Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome, explores Alaric’s experience as an immigrant, marginalized by the Roman Empire and fighting for his place in it. Join us as we explore the life and times of this fascinating historical figure and what his life still has to tell us.

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This week, we feature a conversation with the OG romance novelist—the one all our romance novelist friends list among their favorites. Nalini Singh has an impressive, multi-decade career with several long-running, blockbuster romantasy and paranormal series featuring sexy shifters, fallen angels, and dangerous psychic warriors.

Join us as we explore these fascinating worlds and discuss the secrets to a long-running career in romance and fiction.

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On August 24, 410 AD, Alaric and the Visigoths sacked the city of Rome. Before he sacked it, he starved it. Before that, he went toe to toe with the Roman Empire for fifteen years—uniting disparate tribes, holding a people together, and achieving more against Rome than any barbarian leader before him.

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