The reign of Emperor Augustus sees Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar’s enchanter, summoned to the palace, where he will soon meet his end. From the final moments of Virgil’s life and the last stirrings of his consciousness, Austrian writer Hermann Broch crafts one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism. The Death of Virgil embraces an entire world with immediacy that is both sensual and profound. Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, this novel is part historical narrative and part prose poem, always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.