In the middle of the twentieth century, as perhaps in its later reaches, when many readers of Virgil became alienated from the authority of the state, they seemed to acquire the ability to read Virgil with an eye to oppositional possibilities. They did not necessarily reject him as a representative of that authority, as some like Auden and Graves did, but rather they gained access to, and exploited in their own thinking and writing, the ways in which the Augustan Virgil is an appropriation, not always coincident with the Virgil of their own experience. I here offer some case studies of such readings, all through the lense of the dispossessed of Europe, for whom, as for Meliboeus, Orpheus or Turnus, there was no place in the New Order.

Vienna to New York

Within his general appreciation of Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil and of its place in the modernist reception of Virgil, T. Ziolkowski has convincingly demonstrated Broch's general unfamiliarity with classical philology, Latin, and Virgilian scholarship. With that no critic can easily disagree, but does it necessarily lead to the conclusion that when Broch “attributed Virgil's decision to burn the Aeneid to metaphysical doubts involving the crisis of values and the illegitimacy of art, he is projecting onto an ancient author modern anxieties that have no basis in history or the extant texts”? Are we any more justified in insisting that Virgil's motivations could only have to do with the poem's lack of finish, as some ancient texts assert?