Word: virgil
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...DEATH OF VIRGIL - Hermann Broch-Pantheon Books...
...largest ship carried vast purple sails; its prow bore a golden lion's head. Lounging in a tent beneath the ornamented rigging was Augustus Octavian Caesar, Emperor of Italy, Gaul and the lands of the Nile. Lying on a pallet in the next ship was the Roman poet Virgil, coughing 'blood and clutching the manuscript of his unfinished masterpiece, The Aeneid...
...Virgil was dying. He would have preferred to die abroad, in peace. But his friend the Emperor had discovered him in Athens and brought him home again. Was it simply because Augustus feared the loss of the epic poem which celebrated his great deeds and the spirit of Rome? Or was it also because fate had ordained that by dying among his own people in Italy, Poet Virgil would learn the supreme lesson of his life...
...examiner when Q came up for his viva. "Well, at first they hardly knew which way to turn," said Q hopefully. "That will do, Sir. Good morning," said the examiner. Q failed to get a "first" (equivalent to summa cum laude) but was given an Oxford lectureship, with Virgil and Aristophanes as his subjects ("I tried to communicate my delight in them rather than to discuss niceties of textual criticism...
...After Mussolini and his mistress were killed: "Hand joined to hand and face to face; In noisome, pestilent embrace. So trickling down with foul decay, They wore their lingering lives away"-Virgil's Aeneid...