The Death of Virgil

The Death of Virgil, novel by Hermann Broch, published simultaneously in German (as Der Tod des Vergil) and in English in 1945. The novel, the best known of the author’s works, imaginatively re-creates the last 18 hours of the Roman poet Virgil’s life as he is taken to Brundisium (now Brindisi) with a fever. Broch, an Austrian Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Europe, concerned himself here and in his other works with the place of literature in a culture in crisis.

Written in rich poetic language and rhythmic sentences, the novel has four “symphonic” movements. In the first, the poet who glorified Rome confronts its vile street life. Having decided that his writing, which excludes the ugly, is false and meaningless, Virgil in the novel’s second part decides to burn the manuscript of the Aeneid. In the third part, the emperor Augustus persuades Virgil to turn over the manuscript for safekeeping in exchange for the freeing of the emperor’s slaves. The fourth movement completes the first three as the moribund poet manages to reconcile the opposites of life and death, beauty and ugliness. In what is considered to be one of the most remarkable passages in modern literature, Virgil has a dying vision of himself on a rapturous sea voyage.