Straightway Rumor flies through Libya’s great cities, 220Rumor, swiftest of all the evils in the world. She thrives on speed, stronger for every stride, slight with fear at first, soon soaring into the air she treads the ground and hides her head in the clouds. She is the last, they say, our Mother Earth produced. Bursting in rage against the gods, she bore a sister for Coeus and Enceladus: Rumor, quicksilver afoot and swift on the wing, a monster, horrific, huge and under every feather on her body—what a marvel— an eye that never sleeps and as many tongues as eyes 230and as many raucous mouths and ears pricked up for news. By night she flies aloft, between the earth and sky, whirring across the dark, never closing her lids in soothing sleep. By day she keeps her watch, crouched on a peaked roof or palace turret, terrorizing the great cities, clinging as fast to her twisted lies as she clings to words of truth. Now Rumor is in her glory, filling Africa’s ears with tale on tale of intrigue, bruiting her song of facts and falsehoods mingled . . . 240“Here this Aeneas, born of Trojan blood, has arrived in Carthage, and lovely Dido deigns to join the man in wedlock. Even now they warm the winter, long as it lasts, with obscene desire, oblivious to their kingdoms, abject thralls of lust.”

Inside it is close and smelly. There are no windows. The two prisoners lie bound on the floor. The smell comes from them, a smell of old urine. I call the guard in: “Get these men to clean themselves, and please hurry.”

it does not finally matter who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read.