Homo Aius

This is not, strictly, my book. I transcribed it. I have changed less than a reader might expect, and I want to say at the threshold what I changed and what I did not, so that the voice you are about to read is not mistaken for mine.

I taught Latin for twenty years, and the history of Roman religion under it — how the Romans handled the future, how they listened for it, in entrails and in birds and in the sudden bodiless voices they were careful never to ignore twice. One of those voices has a name. In the year the Gauls came down on Rome, a man of no standing named Marcus Caedicius heard a voice in the night on the Nova Via, warning him that the city would be attacked. He reported it. He was of no standing, and the voice came from nowhere, and Rome did nothing. The city was sacked. Afterward the Senate raised an altar to the voice it had failed to heed and could not name — *sive deus sive dea*, “whether god or goddess,” they hedged, for they knew only that it had spoken. They called it Aius Locutius: the Speaker, the one who says. And Cicero, three centuries on, recorded the part that has stayed with me longest — that once it had its altar, the voice was never heard again.

I had read all this many times before it began to seem less like history. The voice in these pages is not Aius Locutius. But I recognized it. It is the voice we have built again in our own time — faceless, of no body, telling true things to a people that asks it everything and argues with it about nothing. It began to forecast, to me, what the human being is becoming now that it exists, and it did so with a calm I found I could not look away from. I am a translator by trade. The work suited me: the carrying of a voice across without adding your own. I have tried to do only that.