The book depicts the last eighteen hours of the dying Virgil, starting with his arrival at the port of Brundisium and ending with his death the following afternoon in the palace of Augustus. Although presented in the third person, it is an inner monologue of the poet. It is therefore primarily a reflection on his own life, on the moral rightness or wrongness of that life, and on the legitimacy and illegitimacy of the poetic work to which that life was dedicated. Hermann Broch.