Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine, Britain's

bestselling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Corthon.

Today we're going to be talking about werewolves and in particular their presence in the myths

and legends of the ancient world.

Werewolves are of course one of the main stays of horror fiction in the modern day, but

you might be surprised to learn just how far back the creatures origin stretch.

Professor Daniel Ogden of Exeter University has just written a book on the ancient werewolf

and he was joined in conversation by BBC History magazine editor Robata.

Daniel, in the introduction to your book you write that if a job in class assist were

to compile a list of good ancient werewolf stories, they would essentially only be one.

And I realise you go on to challenge that notion within the book, but as a way into this

story, I wonder if you could summarise that story by Patronius?

Well the story is told by Nouveau Riesh and rather Tasellus Friedman, former slave,

but a dinner party of a group of similar people, part of Patronius's dinner of Tremelkeo.

And Nouveau tells the story about when he was previously a slave.

He had a girlfriend, this is somewhere in campaigning in southern Italy.

He had a girlfriend who obviously lived a certain number of miles away, we're not really

given details about the locations.

And he decided to go and visit her one night, soldier was lodging with his master and agreed

to come along for the journey.

So there they were proceeding down the road and it was one of those roads that the Romans

...