Long before chatbots, writers were already putting words into dead people’s mouths. In the second century, Lucian of Samosata wrote thirty short dialogues set in the Underworld. Rulers, heroes, philosophers and rich men discover that death is a ruthless equaliser. Status travels badly; the powerless get the best lines.
The Underworld also makes impossible meetings possible. People divided by centuries can gossip, argue and judge one another. Fontenelle’s New Dialogues of the Dead (1683) used these encounters to test reputations, ideas and vanity. The dead were very useful for criticising the living.
In the eighteenth century, David Fassmann turned the form into a popular periodical mixing biography, politics, news and entertainment. His Secretary even carried letters, books and reports from the living into the realm of the dead. Audience messages from “above” are therefore less unprecedented than they look.
Historically Yours turns this old literary trick into a podcast. Earlier authors decided every line in advance. Here, Cleo, Toinette and Henri respond to one another and to the visitor as the conversation unfolds. AI does not recover the women or their voices; it keeps producing new words for fictional approximations of them.
Read Lucian — Perseus Digital Library ↗
View Fontenelle’s 1683 book ↗
The early German dialogues — Brill ↗
The form’s later European life — Sorbonne Nouvelle ↗
