Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Dialogues of the Dead collects short philosophical conversations between famous figures of antiquity and the modern world, staged in the afterlife where rank, wealth, and reputation have lost their power to impress. The dead meet as equals and speak with the frankness that death permits; through their exchanges Fontenelle examines vanity, glory, love, learning, and the small springs that drive great events. John Hughes’s English translation, published in London in 1708, presents the dialogues in three groups—ancient speakers among themselves, ancients paired with moderns, and moderns alone—and adds two original dialogues by the translator in Fontenelle’s manner.
The Dead as a Court of Final Appeal
The premise that organizes the whole book is simple and severe: once the grave has closed, the distinctions that structured a life—crowns, conquests, beauty, learning—become material for conversation rather than grounds for deference. Fontenelle makes this rule explicit in his dedication to Lucian, the satirist whose idea he borrows. The dead, he writes, reason better than the living because they regard everything with indifference and tranquility; their dialogues are short because the dead ought not to be great talkers; and they agree with one another, since disputing belongs only to the ignorant. What follows from this rule is a kind of moral accounting in which each speaker’s pretensions are weighed against the reality of what he or she actually accomplished. Alexander the Great boasts of his conquests until Phryne the courtesan points out that a beautiful woman owes her triumphs entirely to herself, while a conqueror must share his glory with officers, soldiers, and Fortune. Demetrius of Phalerum, who once saw three hundred and sixty statues raised to him in Athens, watches them all pulled down in a single day and learns from Erostratus—the man who burned the Temple of Ephesus for fame—that vanity has a natural right over all human works, since vanity made them all and can unmake them at pleasure. The dead do not moralize in the manner of preachers; they simply speak without the illusions that kept them busy while alive, and the comedy of the book lies in watching each of them discover, too late, the gap between reputation and truth.
The Argument Beneath the Wit
The dialogues are not random sketches but variations on a single insight: that human beings are driven less by reason than by temperament, vanity, and chance, and that the wise man is the one who understands this and stops pretending otherwise. Fontenelle returns to the theme from many angles. In the exchange between Socrates and Montaigne, Socrates argues that the world does not improve or decline because human nature remains constant beneath changing manners—politeness, barbarism, learning, and ignorance are only the dress of mankind, while the heart, which is the man himself, does not change. Montaigne insists that the great souls of antiquity have no modern equals; Socrates replies that distance magnifies everything, and that among the prodigious number of irrational men born in a century, Nature produces perhaps thirty or forty rational ones, too few to bring virtue into fashion. The same skepticism about human self-knowledge runs through the dialogue between Stra. and R. Urb., where the two men debate whether prejudices are a supplement to reason that no one can do without. R. Urb. argues that reason proposes too small a number of certain maxims, and that the surplus of credulity goes to prejudices and false opinions; Stra. concludes that people should keep the prejudices of custom in order to act like men, but shed the prejudices of the understanding in order to act like wise men. Fontenelle does not resolve the question so much as display it, letting each speaker press his case until the reader sees that the argument itself is part of the human comedy.
The Comedy of Learning and the Comedy of Love
Fontenelle’s satirical eye falls hardest on the learned and the amorous, the two classes of people most convinced of their own seriousness. In the dialogue between Anacreon and Aristotle, the philosopher who spent whole nights beating his brains over dry distinctions is told that the poet purchased the name of Wise at the price of drinking, singing, and making love, while Aristotle won only the title of philosopher through enormous labor. Theocrates and Parmen exchange stories about laughter and gravity that turn the Delphic oracle into a joke: Parmen, unable to laugh, is sent to a wooden statue of Latona so badly carved that he bursts out laughing at the contrast between the shabby mother and her glorious son, and the Tirynthians, unable to stop laughing, are told to sacrifice a bull to Neptune without laughing—a feat they fail when a small boy asks whether they think he will swallow their bull. The point is not that learning is worthless but that it takes itself too seriously. The same deflation awaits the lovers. Dido complains that Virgil turned her into a coquette who ran mad for a stranger the first day she saw him, and Stratonice consoles her by observing that the poet gave her beauty and wit she could never have pretended to in life. Elizabeth of England explains to the Duke of Alençon that she kept him and half the princes of Europe in suspense for years because nothing is pleasanter than forming designs and making great preparations without executing any—possession always falls short of hope, and things lose considerably in passing from imagination to reality. The dead see through the stratagems that kept them occupied, and their clarity is the source of both the book’s wit and its melancholy.
What the Dialogues Leave Behind
The book’s final movement turns from satire to something closer to resignation. In the dialogue between Fernando Cortez and Montezuma, the conquered emperor asks the conqueror what he thinks of the stratagem by which Pisistratus regained the citadel of Athens by dressing a woman as Minerva and driving through the city with her at his side—and the polite Athenians submitted to the tyrant in pure obedience to a goddess of his own making. The implication is that the Spaniards’ cannons and ships were no less theatrical than Pisistratus’s goddess, and that the difference between the civilized and the savage is smaller than either cares to admit. Earlier, in the dialogue between Soliman and Julietta of Gonzaga, the sultan learns that the woman he spent his life searching for would never have made his happiness because he would never have made hers, and that vanity, at a certain point, is a vice, but a little short of that point, a virtue. Fontenelle’s dead do not arrive at wisdom so much as at a truce with their own natures. They laugh at themselves, which Moliere—appearing opposite Paracelsus—calls the great matter of comedy: to be drawn out of the world for a moment and see one’s own follies in perspective. The book ends not with a verdict on human vanity but with the recognition that the passions, like winds at sea, are necessary to give all things motion, though they occasion many a hurricane.
How the 1708 Volume Was Assembled
The Translator’s Frame: Title Page, Dedication, and Preface
The 1708 London volume announces itself plainly: Dialogues of the Dead, in three parts—ancient dialogues, dialogues of the ancients with the moderns, and dialogues of the moderns alone—translated from the French, with a reply to a critique called The Judgment of Pluto and two dialogues original to the translator. John Hughes, who signs the dedication, presents the book to Thomas, Earl of Wharton, as a foreign guest of wit and learning introduced to a patron of quick judgment and easy access. He admits his rendering is imperfect and says he shelters its faults under so illustrious a name, praising Fontenelle’s taste, imagination, and eloquence, and thanking Wharton for favours—crediting him, too, with a part in the late Happy Union, which secured the kingdom at home and strengthened it abroad against those who would weaken it by divisions. Importing these pieces from the enemy’s country, Hughes hopes, is as allowable as drinking their wines.
The preface turns to the translator’s craft. Hughes had long wished to know whether the Dialogues had been Englished, and found earlier versions had spoiled Fontenelle’s reputation through false constructions and bad English; most of his own work, he says, was done six years earlier. Translations, he reflects, meet a lenient reception—one famed translator of prose is seldom compared with his original. But pieces of wit are another matter: imitating them requires art, like copying a Salvator Rosa landscape rather than tracing a fortification. Language, he holds, is like colour, and English colours equal any modern tongue’s, though French excels in gallantry. Fontenelle he characterizes as a master of the gallant manner, choosing the style of conversation over formal authorship and delivering extraordinary things carelessly; Plurality of Worlds was admired by Sir William Temple. Fontenelle took his project from Lucian and refined upon him: Lucian laughs too loud, is licentious and coarse, and makes his dead scold and fight—Hercules and Æsculapius disputing precedence, Hercules calling the physician a quack and threatening to fling him out of Heaven, until Jupiter commands quiet.
Answering the Critick
Hughes then defends Fontenelle against the Jugement de Platon, quoting Fontenelle’s own letter welcoming all critiques, and rebuts the objections one by one: the treatment of Cato (compared with Adrian), the respect due to Antiquity, and Phryne’s remarks on Alexander. He praises the death of Pomponius Atticus above Cato’s, citing Cornelius Nepos. Against the charge of abusing Homer, he answers that Fontenelle rallies only the Greeks and Trojans, not the poet, and aims to show what slender and ridiculous springs produce great events—the Trojan war itself consuming nations’ blood and treasure for ten years over the quarrel of a cuckold and a whore. Virgil is arraigned as unreasonably: the Georgics make Augustus a god choosing his province in Heaven, though we rude islanders are unused to French panegyric. The dialogue between Augustus and Aretin, the critick mistakes: its business is to ask what praises are most valuable, and Aretin, the scourge of princes, taxes the vanity of emperors complemented into divinity. The critick’s raillery on sentences and words is dismissed—the dead, Fontenelle held, ought not to be great talkers. The complaint that Petrarch’s Laura is “turned a reasoner,” and that Anne of Brittany and Mary of England speak in speculations, is answered from Fontenelle’s letter to Lucian: he made all his dead moralize, or it would not be worth while to make them speak. The writer praises as a principal beauty that persons do not always act their most obvious character—death has enlarged their views. He confesses Fontenelle too bold with a queen of England, and ends by mentioning his own two original dialogues.
To Lucian, and Alexander and Phryne
The dedication proper addresses Lucian in the Elysian Fields, paying homage for the borrowed idea and lamenting that Lucian exhausted the fine subjects—equality among the dead, regret of life. Fontenelle’s dead all moralize, and reason better for regarding things with indifference and tranquillity; their dialogues are short because the dead should not be great talkers, and they agree, since disputing belongs only to the ignorant. History furnished real persons enough to excuse borrowing from fiction, and the dead may speak of events later than their own time.
In the first dialogue, Phryne tells Alexander she offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes, which he destroyed, at her own charge, on condition of an inscription naming her the restorer. He mocks her concern for posterity; she says she excelled in her trade, and that rebuilding Thebes put her in parallel with the greatest conqueror—her beauty repairing what his valour ruined. He asks whether she is satisfied with so many gallants; she retorts by asking whether he is satisfied making a desert of the best part of the earth, and says that had every city found a Phryne, no mark of his fury would remain. A handsome woman, she argues, owes her conquests entirely to herself, while a conqueror must divide his glory among officers, soldiers, and Fortune. He asks whether a fine woman reaches the same excesses as he; she admits she overstretched the character of a fine woman as he overstretched that of a great man, and proposes they shake hands. Both made too many conquests, she says—two or three intrigues would have been modest, but modesty could not raise money to build city walls. He answers that had he been sober with his valour and fortune he would never have been half so much talked of; she agrees that for making a noise in the world, the most reasonable characters are not the most proper.
Milo and Smindirides; Dido and Stratonice
Milo of Crotona boasts of carrying an ox on his shoulders at the Olympic Games, his fame reaching Crotona, and contrasts Sybaris, whose effeminacy became a proverb—its people banished all cocks for fear of being waked by crowing and invited guests to dinner a year beforehand. Smindirides says Milo boasted like the beast he carried, and defends his own complaint of a folded rose-leaf under him by analogy: a lover may be dissatisfied that gratitude, not inclination, won his mistress; a conqueror, that Fortune had more share than courage in his success. Milo calls these nice fops; Smindirides answers that delicacy springs from the best qualities of head and heart, though it lessens the number of pleasures—man’s natural condition affords little that is agreeable, and reason teaches him to taste it yet less.
Dido laments that Virgil turned her, who burned herself to avoid a second marriage, into a coquet mad for a stranger the first day—now burning only because her guest is leaving. What woman hereafter, she asks, will broil herself for conjugal fidelity if a poet may retail what tales he pleases? Stratonice suggests Virgil found some secret intrigue; Dido says he gave her Æneas, a fellow rotten three hundred years before she was born. Stratonice notes both fled their country and sought fortune abroad, he a widower and she a widow, and that Virgil resolved three hundred years should break no squares—designing to show that in intrigues appearance is no rule to judge by. Dido grants the scandal is the finest part of the poem: had he represented her as a woman of reputation, the Æneis had not been half so beautiful. Stratonice tells of a painter at the court of the King of Syria who painted her in the embraces of a common soldier; her subjects would have burned the picture, but because he drew her admirably she called him back and pardoned him—so should Dido pardon Virgil.
Theocrates and Parmen on Laughter
Theocrates opens by asking Parmen whether he could ever laugh again after descending into Trophonius’s Cave. Parmen says he never could; he grew wonderfully serious. Theocrates wishes he had known the cave possessed that virtue, since he laughed too much all his life and paid for it—an unhappy jest, he says, dispatched him to the dead. King Antigonus had but one eye, and Theocrates had grievously offended him; the king promised to let it pass if Theocrates would appear before him. Dragged along by friends urging him not to fear, Theocrates replied that if he were not pardoned until he appeared before the king’s eyes, he was lost forever, since Antigonus might forgive the crime but could not forgive the sarcasm. He lost his head for being merry out of season.
Parmen says he might have been glad of such burlesque humor even at that price; Theocrates replies he would have given much for Parmen’s seriousness. Parmen explains that seriousness would have been the death of him: nothing could divert him, he tried to force a laugh in vain, and all the world’s ridiculous things gave him no enjoyment—to him they were downright sadness. Almost distracted with his sable wisdom, he prayed the Delphic god to teach him means to laugh. The oracle sent him in ambiguous terms to the “maternal” something; he thought it meant his country and posted back there, but that could not relieve him. By chance he journeyed to Delos, where he admired the magnificence of Apollo’s temples and the beauty of his statues in shining marble and gold by the greatest masters of Greece. At last he happened on a Latona in wood, wretchedly carved with the haggish air of an ugly old woman, and could not hold from laughing heartily at the difference between mother and son. Surprised and ravished to find he had laughed, he understood the oracle’s true sense. He had no offerings to spare for the gold or marble Apollos—the wooden Latona had all his devotion; he sacrificed to her often and besmoked her with incense, and would have built and consecrated a temple “to Latona that provokes laughter” had he borne the expense.
Theocrates thinks Apollo might have afforded him the power of laughing more easily than at his mother’s expense, since objects as proper for it as the wooden Latona were plentiful. Parmen replies that when out of humor, men are not even worth the pains of laughing at—they were made to be ridiculous, so where’s the wonder; but a goddess pleased to be so is something extraordinary. Apollo would probably convince him his malady was not reachable by human art and needed the assistance of the deities.
Theocrates says this mirth and gaiety Parmen so passionately desired is the much greater evil: a whole nation was once possessed with it and paid dearly. Parmen asks how—a whole nation too disposed to mirth? Theocrates names the Tirinthians. Parmen calls them happy; Theocrates says they were so incapable of seriousness even on the most weighty occasions that everything fell into the utmost confusion: in public assemblies, instead of settling the state, all their discourse was buffoonery; giving audience to ambassadors, they grinned in their faces; in councils, the gravest senators’ speeches were all farce; one reasonable syllable or wise action was a prodigy among them. They found the plague of this droll disposition as much as Parmen did his sadness, and went to Delphos with a quite different prayer—to know how to recover a decent gravity. The oracle answered that if they could sacrifice a bull to Neptune without laughing, it should afterward be in their power to become wiser. A sacrifice is at all times no merry business, yet they made a world of preparations to make it more serious: they resolved to admit no young people, nor all sorts of old, but only such as were loaded with diseases, debts, or plagued with bad wives. When this choice company was mustered on the shore, notwithstanding wives, debts, diseases, and age itself, they still needed other helps—taking pains to set their countenances, rivet their eyes to the ground, knit their brows, and bite their lips. But a little boy crept among the crowd, and as they drove him away according to order, the child said, “Lord help ye, d’ye think I’ll swallow your bull?” This foolery ruined all and undid the charm of so many formal grimaces. They burst into a mighty laugh, the sacrifice was disturbed, and the Tirinthians remained as great idiots as before. Theocrates says they were to blame, after their bull failed, that they did not think of Trophonius’s Cave, which had the wonderful virtue of making people so serious and produced so remarkable a change in Parmen.
Parmen then reveals he actually went into Trophonius’s Cave, yet the cave that struck him with such melancholy is quite another sort of business. Asked what it is, Parmen says: “Reflections.” He had made some, and never laughed afterward. Had the oracle prescribed that specific, the Tirinthians had soon been cured of their jollity. Theocrates admits he doesn’t well understand what reflections are, but can’t imagine why they should be so chagrining.
Socrates and Montaigne on the World’s Degeneration
Socrates is pleased to meet a philosopher among the dead and asks Montaigne for news of the world above, since he has few visitors. Montaigne says the world is extremely changed—ten times more foolish and corrupt than ever—and expected Socrates to report on the honesty and integrity of his own times. Socrates, by contrast, expected wonders of Montaigne’s age and asks whether men have not shaken off the follies of antiquity. Montaigne calls Socrates an ancient for speaking boldly of antiquity, and insists manners are now a subject of lamentation and all things degenerate daily. Socrates thought his own time went as perversely as possible and hoped men would profit from experience; Montaigne replies men regard experience not at all, like silly birds caught in the same nets that caught a hundred thousand of their kind—each enters life a perfect novice, and the fathers’ follies are lost on their children. Socrates asks why the world in its old age should not grow wiser; Montaigne answers mankind has in all ages the same inclinations, over which reason has no power, so follies will last to the world’s end. Socrates asks why Montaigne values antiquity more than the present; Montaigne praises Socrates’ skill in reasoning, playing midwife to thoughts, and admits he is delivered of a proposition opposite to what he advanced, yet cannot give up the controversy. He claims the robust souls of antiquity—Aristides, Phocion, Pericles, Socrates—are not found now. Socrates asks whether Nature is exhausted, yet exhausted in nothing else but reasonable men, since her other works do not degenerate. Montaigne calls the degeneration matter of fact, as if Nature showed great men as patterns and formed the rest with negligence. Socrates warns that distance magnifies antiquity; had Montaigne known those men he would find matches in his own age. People favor antiquity out of displeasure with their own times; ancestors, the present, and posterity are all on the level, and the world’s prospect is dull because always the same. Montaigne objects that ages, like men, have different characters—learned or illiterate, barbarous or polite, serious or whimsical, ingenious or stupid—and so some more virtuous, others more wicked. Socrates denies the consequence: men change their habits but not the form of their bodies; politeness, barbarism, learning, ignorance are but the dress and outside of mankind, while the heart, which is the man himself, does not change. People are interested, but disinterest will never be the mode. Among the prodigious number of irrational men born in a hundred years, Nature produces perhaps thirty or forty rational ones, dispersed through all the Earth—too few to bring virtue into fashion. Montaigne asks whether this distribution is made with equality; Socrates says Nature acts with exact regularity, but we lack the skill to judge how.
The Learned as Heirs and the Rule of Chance
Chapter V opens with a claim about inheritance: the learned take possession of the ancients the way the wealthy take possession of riches, by succession. Men of letters revere ancient traditions as other men revere ancestral lands and houses, and they resent any change to what they have inherited. Eraf. pushes back. Great persons, he says, are born heirs to grandeur, but the learned are not born heirs to ancient knowledge. Learning is an acquisition, not an estate, and its very difficulty leaves room for glory. Chapter V answers that the pains of acquiring mental riches should be weighed against the trouble of preserving a fortune, and the scales come out about even; if difficulty alone is the measure, worldly business has more of it than the quiet speculations of the learned.
Eraf. sets learning aside and confines the dispute to wit, which does not depend on chance. Chapter V. denies it. Wit depends on a happy disposition of the brain, as much a chance as being born a king’s son. He tells Eraf., a great wit, to ask the philosophers how this happened and what prevented him from being a blockhead—almost nothing, a small disposition of the fibres that escapes exact anatomy. Yet the wits claim their goods alone are independent of Fortune and that they deserve precedence over mankind. Eraf. asks whether merit is the same in having coin or wit; Chapter V. answers that wit is the happier chance but still a chance. Eraf. concludes all is chance, and Chapter V. agrees, if by chance is meant a secret disposition and order we do not know. He says he has stripped men of finer feathers than Eraf. did: Eraf. robbed them of the advantages of birth, but he has taken those of the mind; if people examined their title, there would be no vanity.
Elizabeth and the Duke of Alencon
The Duke of Alencon complains that Elizabeth flattered him with hopes of marriage while resolved to conclude nothing. She answers that he has no particular cause to complain, since she served several others no way his inferiors so. She was the Penelope of her age, with the Duke of Anjou his brother, the Arch-Duke, and the King of Sweden as suitors hoping for an island more considerable than Ithaca; she held him in suspense several years and at last laughed at him. The Duke hints that some persons would scarce allow she was so like Penelope in every way. Elizabeth says she never took him for a wit. He mocks her ostentatious flourishing about her virginity and maiden-queen status, citing the great country in America named Virginia in memory of the most suspected of her qualities—a name that would never have passed had the place not been in another world. He asks one reason for her mysterious conduct and marriage projects ending in nothing: was it because her father Henry VIII. was six times married that she resolved not to marry at all, as the perpetual rambles of Charles V. taught Philip the Second never to stir from Madrid?
Elizabeth says she might stand by that reason: her father spent his life marrying and unmarrying, repudiating some wives and beheading others. The true secret of her conduct was observing that nothing is pleasanter than amusing oneself forming designs and making great preparations without executing any, since possession always falls short of hope and things lose considerably passing from imagination to reality. When the Duke came into England to espouse her there were balls, feasts, and continual rejoicing; she even gave him a ring; all had as smiling a face as possible because it was preparation and idea. Having exhausted all the agreeable belonging to marriage, she prudently stopped and sent him home. The Duke says her maxims would never have fitted him—he would have been for something more than chimeras. Elizabeth asks what pleasure mankind would have left if chimeras were taken away, and says he did not taste the most agreeable parts of his life.
The Duke recounts that he never succeeded in anything: four times he was flattered with hopes of a crown—first Poland in prospect, then England, afterward the Low-Countries, and lastly France in all appearance—yet in conclusion he was King of nothing. Elizabeth calls that his very happiness: to be always amused with hopes and imaginary prospects like visions of Fairy-Land, without anything real; he did nothing but prepare for royalty as she did for marriage. The Duke says an actual marriage would have done her no displeasure, and a true royalty would have pleased him. Elizabeth says pleasures are not solid enough to bear plunging into; we must play only on their surface—like marshy grounds a man may run lightly over, but if he fixes his foot they sink away beneath him.
The Poet Poisoned by His Own Muse
The Elector of Brandenbourg says he loves Cab. the better for having been out of his wits as well as himself, and asks the history of his folly. Cab. says he was a Provincial Poet much esteemed in his age, whence his misfortune: he fell in love with a damsel he had made famous by his verses. She took such pride in his poetry that, afraid he would employ it in honour of somebody else, to secure his Muse to herself she presented him with a damned potion that turned his brain and spoiled him for a verse-maker for ever. Asked how long he has been dead, Cab. says about four hundred years. The Elector says poets must have been very scarce in his age since people esteemed them so much as to poison them in that fashion, and wishes he had been born in his time, when he might have made verses on all the handsome women in Christendom with no danger of being poisoned. Cab. believes it, hearing no wit or poet here complaining of such treatment.
The Spring Refused and the Life Unused
Anfelm offers a fable: a thirsty wretch sat by a spring but refused to drink, hoping the water would flow purer later; he waited until the spring dried up and went away thirsty. J. of Naples says this was his own case and believes no dead person’s life was fully used before he made his proposed use of it. He argues there is great pleasure in forecasting, in employing Hope and Fear, and in having a Futurity to pry into. A wise man, on Anfelm’s notions, would be like one of the dead, to whom present and future time are the same, and thus would be as uneasy as J. of Naples. Anfelm laments man’s condition: born to aspire after everything and enjoy nothing, always on the march and arriving nowhere.
Julietta and the Sultan
Soliman asks why this is the first time he has seen Julietta of Gonzaga and why he lost all his life’s pains searching for her; he burned to have the most beautiful person of Italy in his Seraglio, but now sees only a fleeting shade resembling all the rest. Julietta thanks him for the passion conceived upon the reputation of her beauty, which augmented that reputation. She reflects with pleasure on the night the pirate Barbarossa, obeying Soliman’s commands, thought to surprise her in Cajeta and forced her to leave the city in disorder. She was transported with the search but more that she escaped it; nothing flattered her vanity more than being wanted by the happy Soliman and talked of in the Seraglio. But she desired no more: the Seraglio has charms only to those wished for there, none to those in it. Soliman suggests she feared the number of rivals. Julietta says she was affronted by the insufferable vanity of Sultans who lock up handsome women, most of no use to them yet lost to all the world, and who cannot bear a lover whose declarations are indisputable commands. She would never have made his happiness because he would never have made hers. Soliman says he doesn’t take the consequence. Julietta asks whether in love one can be happy without reciprocation, whether there are solitary pleasures not communicated. Soliman says he is a Turk and may be excused, and argues her desire to make others happy is itself a motion of vanity—a proud retribution, because people disdain to be in debt.
