ABSTRACT
Odysseus and his friends, then, have set the agenda for conversations with the dead. And certainly there is no shortage of people later in antiquity who want to conduct some kind of conversation of the same kind, and one poetic form provided the most characteristic means. There are other places for men to go to encounter unlikely creatures. If heaven and hell are the favourites, they are by no means the only places: the moon, the planets and some exotic earthly paradise are obvious enough resorts. As more places become known to the Greek world through exploration, it was possible to construct travelogues to faraway places in which the natives are presented as somehow or other able to relate to the arrival of Greeks on the scene. Not all communications with elsewhere needed to be by direct spoken dialogue. The ancient world developed a considerable industry of fictitious letters.
