Catabasis

Katabasis or catabasis (Ancient Greek: κατάβασις, from κατὰ "down" and βαίνω "go") is a descent of some type, such as moving downhill, the sinking of the winds or sun, a military retreat, a trip to the underworld, or a trip from the interior of a country down to the coast. The term has multiple related meanings in poetry, rhetoric, and modern psychology.

The term katabasis can refer to a trip from the interior of a country down to the coast (for example, following a river), in contrast to the term "", which refers to an expedition from a coastline up into the interior of a country.

The main meaning given for katabasis by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) describes "A going down; a military retreat, in allusion to that of the ten thousand Greeks under Xenophon, related by him in his Anabasis:

1837 DE QUINCEY Revolt Tartars Wks. 1862 IV. 112 The Russian anabasis and katabasis of Napoleon. 1899 Westm. Gaz. 17 May 4/1 Little space is devoted to the Anabasis; it is, as in the story of Xenophon, the Katabasis which fills the larger part.

In the opening of Plato's Republic, Socrates recounts "going down" to the port city of Piraeus, located south of his native Athens. Several scholars, including Allan Bloom, have read this first word, κατέβην ("I went down") as an allusion to Odysseus' journey into the underworld.

In poetry and rhetoric, the term katabasis refers to a "gradual descending" of emphasis on a theme within a sentence or paragraph, while anabasis refers to a gradual ascending in emphasis. John Freccero notes, "In the ancient world, [the] descent in search of understanding was known as katabasis", thus endowing mythic and poetic accounts of katabasis with a symbolic significance.

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