ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Vergil’s Aeneid and Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil in their respective historical contexts of the fall of the Roman Republic in the first century BCE and twentieth-century Europe’s world wars and totalitarian regimes. Both Vergil and Broch lived when long settled political structures and value systems were crumbling and reality was turned upside down. Both epochs looked to the distant idealized past to understand a terrifying present and project onto an uncertain future, with the modern period harkening to the ancient. Amidst world-historical confusions, both artists struggled with how to say true things while contradictory realities surrounded them.
