The Scarlet Fig: Or, Slowly Through a Land of Stone, Book Three of the Vergil Magus Series

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THE SCARLET FIG is the third and last Vergil Magus novel to come from Avram Davidson’s pen. It is steeped in the millieu of its predecessor works, The Phoenix And The Mirror and Vergil In Averno, and — perhaps more comprehensively than any other of his works — in the knowledge, lore, mysteries and other enquiries that engaged Avram’s mind in the production of his magnum opus.

As Avram explained in his introduction to The Phoenix and the Mirror: “From the Dark Ages to the Renascence the popular view of the ancient world as reflected in the Vergilean Legends was far from the historical and actual one in more than the acceptance of legend and magic and myth. It is a world of never-never, and yet it is a world true to its own curious lights — a backward projection of medievalism, an awed and confused transmogrification of quasi-forgotten ancient science.”

This process of transmogrification takes place in THE SCARLET FIG in endlessly inventive ways; in the substitution of SQPR for SPQR, in the conflation of the two Diomedes (of Argos and of Thrace) into a single figure, in the delightful neologism of Byzantinople.

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