Historical Artifacts

by D.B. Libby

What needs hath a simulacrum of a man?

Seneca was a very handsome specimen. With a wonderful aquiline nose, clear far-seeing eyes and an erect posture, he was a credit to his ancient Italic origins. However, according to the recently revamped ICEE (the International Convention on Extirpated Ethnicities), technically—and legally—he wasn’t even alive.

He could, of course, answer questions, providing he was in the mood and also providing that the interrogator would pose them in ancient Latin, but usually he disdained to even look down the handsome slope of his most prominent facial feature at the annoying crowds of gawkers.

The surrounding exhibits were mainly filled with anthropoid representations, although a woolly mammoth nicknamed ‘Susanna’ had lately been a sensation until, not comprehending the fact that she was not technically ‘alive,’ she had trampled her diorama to bits as well as destroying most of the adjoining stalls in a rampage to regain her faux-remembered freedom. Seneca had sadly shaken his head at the destruction—what had they expected? Now, he was joined in his monotonous existence only by other replications of humans, though he was the sole example of his own long-assimilated tribe.

The endless days spent in striking poses for the paying visitors to the museum weighed heavily on the Roman. Draped in an elaborately-folded toga, he shifted from foot to foot in uneasy boredom and leaned on cardboard Tuscan columns. Although telomerically speaking, Seneca was but a babe, he had the outward appearance (and the inward certainty) of noble senescence, an aging Senator of the golden days of Empire. In truth, he had to study hard off-hours to acquaint himself with his supposed history, and often shed a tear over Gibbon’s magnum opus, especially Volume Two. Indeed, he once was taught by a fussy backstage dresser in the forgotten art of how to wind his silky robe, and sad to say his Latin came from an faded primer, his American-mannered English from CSPAN-2.

Just next door to Seneca, the gruff ‘Cnut’ paced his confines daily, without the comfort of any scholarly tomes to remind him whom he ought to be. The grizzled Dane was prone to outbursts in a guttural language of his own devising, not having any patience with tutorials. And he reeked—his lack of bathing at the common dormitory was surely an ingrained memory of his past, or so thought the fastidious Seneca, who reveled in the baths. But still he understood that wrath, and the implicit helpless anger. He himself had once declaimed upon the splendor of the gardens of Grasse as beguilingly described by Procopious, while a little brat with a runny nose had pelted him with peanuts.

At the end of the day, Seneca would wearily trudge the dusty guarded halls back to the common rooms, and try to strike up conversation with his bunkmate ‘Poeas,’ a putative scion of ancient Greece. But they had naught in common save their love of democratic truth, and Poeas spent all his time in fantasies of office, dreaming of the time he might attain a measure of the rights of citizenry and straighten out the world, while spouting rhyming nonsense in a language no one any longer spoke. Seneca had no illusions of his own—he had come to know the world’s ways, and despaired of any hope.

What right had he to claim he knew what history showed inevitable? He who was not even a legal man, and had no rights, no voice. In a world of billions of sentient beings where every natural human individual’s contribution can be lost forever in the endless clamor, who would ever deign to listen to a lab-constructed ‘thing’ like him? The duality of his convictions nightly tore his thoughts apart—he felt himself in firm possession of an innate wisdom that must surely have some intrinsic value to humanity, while simultaneously comprehending that his non-human status disqualified him from the very legitimacy he sought. And time seemed to be paramount—though he was born old, he was quickly growing older.

Once he had sought the counsel of the law when a delegation from the international organization POSSE, People Opposed to Semi-Sentient Exhibitions, came to check on the museum’s conditions. After the lead delegate got over her shock at being addressed directly by one of the exhibits, she condescendingly (and somewhat self-consciously) patted his arm, and stammered out, “There, there… ,” then hurried off in consternation to look in scarcely-quelled horror at the spectacle of Cnut. It was apparent to the delegation that the creatures of the exhibition were treated with concern, and provided with the necessities of life, save the necessities of sentient life itself.

And indeed the time came when the crowds began to thin. The museum staff decided that the ‘human’ exhibit had run its course, and the space would be better put to use to pander to the current fad in sexy Dinosauria. “Sorry, old man,” said one as he injected the noble Roman, then moved to the next, now obsolete, exhibit.