The Death of Virgil

Having agreed to read the galleys of Thomas Fuller's new book, "The Classical World: A Novel-log of Ideas", I come across a passage in which Mr. Fuller has one of his protagonist's follow the original line drawn by Giotto-the first artist to have drawn a complete circle by hand-as a way of finding his way back to his hotel in Rome. Improbably plausible, I think, as implausible as believing that any artist could actually draw a perfect circle by hand, even an artist as accomplished as Giotto. Fuller 's protagonist, lost late at night in Rome, a little drunk on red wine, wandering along the banks of The Tiber, meditates on Giotto's accomplishment and before he knows it is safely inside the gates of Anna Fendi's boutique hotel on avenue Lungovetere...

...it's a fiction loud and clear, it never really happened other than in Fuller's book, but it's amusing to ponder; following the line a great visual artist has made and believing it might lead you somewhere where you belong.

Later, the same protagonist finds himself in Naples and visits the grave of Virgil in the big park named after the poet. Only later does he learn that Virgil is not buried there at all.

Coincidentally, I'm also reading "The Death of Virgil," Hermann Broch's book on the final eighteen hours of the poet's life, some words of which appear in the image above. Broch began the writing in a German concentration camp, and his handling of material is dense, lugubrious, painstaking; Fuller's is frothier, quixotic, more spur-of-the-moment. I'm grateful to both Broch and Fuller for their willingness to wade into the muddy intersections of the ancient and modern worlds; most subjects are too big for us as readers and we run away from them unless we have such writers.