Death of Virgil - Paperback

Begun while the author was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, this extraordinary and profound novel is widely regarded as one of the great works of 20th-century modernism. A work that is part historical novel and part prose poem, it recreates the last 18 hours on the life of Virgil, author of the Aeneid, and the squalor and splendor of imperial Rome.

Front Jacket

It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound. Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, The Death of Virgil is part historical novel and part prose poem -- and always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.