Poets and Teachers in Hades: The Katabasis as Authorial Satire

This lecture will focus on the underworld as a place where one may encounter authors and intellectuals of the past or the present; a platform where their issues may be displayed and discussed. These discussions may function as comical, critical, or subversive approaches towards power structures. Nilsson argues that this characteristic may be seen in early modern and modern European versions of the katabasis motif, but also in Greek models of late antiquity and in Byzantium. Special focus will be placed on twelfth-century Byzantium and the anonymous dialogue Timarion.