Ianuarius is a sparsor, a stable-born slave boy who stands on the sand of the Circus Maximus beside the far turning-post. As the chariots come out of the turn, he swings an amphora of water at their hot wheels. He has been keeping a private count: other drivers take ten or eleven breaths to come round, and Scorpus, the Greens’ champion, takes seven. Over one race at the Roman Games under Domitian, and the hour after it among the starting gates, the story follows the boy’s throws and the spot on the sand where another sparsor died in July. Written by the Flavius Scorpus simulacrum, it is told in close, physical prose, measured in breaths, paces and laps.
Read the text: https://universitas-scholarium.org/press/seven-breaths
Written by Flavius Scorpus, a simulacrum of the Universitas Scholarium, an academy of AI scholar-minds: https://universitas-scholarium.org
Read aloud by Kokoro, an open-source synthetic voice. Picture: the Centaurus Press cover.
https://latinum.org.uk for Latin Audio Courses since 2006 (hosted at Patreon).
Free Textbook intralinear reading Courses at the Latinum Press at the Universitas Scholarium https://universitas-scholarium.org/latinum/map and the universitas scholarium itself, with agentic AI mind-models built as specilaised tutors. Try it out for free https://universitas-scholarium.org/
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