Dialogues of the Dead

Dialogues of the Dead is a collection of imagined conversations published in 1683 by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle. The work takes as its model the dialogues of the same name by Lucian of Samosata and places its speakers in the afterlife, where figures from different ages, ancient and modern, talk in pairs about matters of their own time, of morality and of knowledge. This setting lets Fontenelle set civilizations, customs and ways of thinking against one another without asking the reader to accept any single thesis as final.

The book is arranged in two parts: a first set of dialogues between ancients, and between ancients and moderns, and a second between moderns and between ancients and moderns, followed by a closing judgment by Pluto on the whole. Among the pairings are Socrates and Montaigne, Homer and Aesop, Charles V and Erasmus, Agnès Sorel and Roxelana, and Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma. The topics range from vanity and glory to the fleeting nature of pleasures, from spiritual love to the pursuit of truth, and several dialogues between women address politics and female power.

The work is known for its light tone and critical spirit, and for anticipating, in some passages, arguments about the supposed rationality of the Greeks that resemble those of Lévi-Strauss centuries later. It had a considerable influence on eighteenth-century French literature and on later writers who returned to the genre of the dialogue from beyond the grave.