From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (whorl) Idyll on a quaestor
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 97 16:07:00 GMT


[Posted from WHORL, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

Whoops--in my previous message, "coo coup/fish & fowl," I used the
word "eidolon" when I should have used "aquastor" (even though I
think that they might be used interchangably by the commonality of
the Commonwealth, for my own sense of mental cohesion I like to keep
them separate: "eidolon" as beam-to-the-brain ghost, and "aquastor"
as physically manifested ghost of hologrammic silvery dust).

The ghosts of Main Frame seem to be eidolons, by our man Sciathan's
description and the experience of Silk's friends.

[Since "quaesitor" in early Roman times was a criminal investigator
(mainly homicide, I think), I continue to wonder if "aquastors" are
ghost detectives--that is, investigators of the living on behalf of
the dead.  Or there are the "quaestors," deputies of magistrates,
that grew through the years of the Republic from a population of two
to forty until Augustus reduced them to twenty: this job was the
entry-level magistry sought by ambitious young men.  In context of
"aquastor" this suggests a hierarchy and government of the dead.]

=mantis=