Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Alice.

I'm Irene.

And I'm Eli.

And today we're talking about relationships between women in ancient Rome.

Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that we're recording this podcast on the lands of the Wurundry Woyurang people of the Koolan Nation and pay my respect to their elders past and present.

They're the custodians of an oral history tradition far older than this podcast.

We have some content warnings before we begin this episode.

This episode will include discussions of historical

and modern racism, sexism and queer phobia, as well as of prejudice against intersex

people in the ancient world, including infanticide of intersex children. It will also contain

discussions of castration and claderectomy, explicit discussions of sex, and some explicit language

in quotes. We also include mentions of bestiality, excessive consumption of alcohol, relationships between

adults and minors, rape and slavery.

If any of that sounds like something that you don't want to listen to, please skip this episode

and check out our other content instead.

So we've talked about ancient Rome a fair bit on this podcast, and we've talked about Roman

women's sexuality once before in our episode on the so-called Two Maidens of Pompeii.

I'm going to talk about some examples from Roman literature that I also talked about in that

episode, but we are going to look at them in more depth than we did then.

So you should still get something out of this, even if you've heard that episode recently. Well, I meant to

relisten to those episodes, including that one, and I fully didn't. So will I have the same

...