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Ovid's epic response to Vergil gives body to what the Aeneid already shadows forth: the intractable paradoxes undermining epic dreams of a harmonious, organically united polity. But the intertextual conversation among Latin epics did not stop with the Metamorphoses. This chapter examines briefly how Ovid crucially and fundamentally shaped his epic successors' civic visions, sketching the parameters of generic re‐vision from Lucan to Silius Italicus. The intrafamilial civil war regularly dramatized by Vergil's successors moulds their epic cities around political desperation and gendered conflict. Vergil shaped the beginnings of the urbs aeterna into a providential narrative whose logical telos was Augustan Rome, bequeathing to later epic intense engagement with the nature and limitations of the polity. But Ovid shared that engagement; what the post‐Augustan epicists read in Vergil they read in part through the lens Ovid had provided them. His Thebes particularizes just how the providential city comes to grief.

Silius Italicus' Punica should be the example of Roman epic, glorifying hard-won victory over an external enemy at the height of the republic, between the legendary beginnings that Virgil traces in the Aeneid and the decline into civil war that Lucan laments in the De bello civili. Yet even now, as ongoing antipathy to positivist aesthetics facilitates re-evaluation of potential subject matter for monographs, classicists are less familiar with the Punica itself than with the sort of faint praise or outright condemnation that has, since antiquity, characterized literary-critical response to Silius' poem. This chapter shows how Silius' epic merits close attention both per se and for its rich interrelationships with other works, especially its main generic paradigms, Virgil's Aeneid and Lucan's De bello civili.

This chapter argues that the Punica is a poem at war with itself. The past Silius portrays is at once an ideal that contrasts with subsequent decline, the source of that decline, and disconcertingly parallel with the present. For Silius also, at times, and from a certain point of view, presents exemplary Roman conduct as intact across history: Romulus, Scipio, and Domitian (for instance) are all model Romans, and approximately modelled on one another. But that point of view is temporary and partial. If the typological parallels involved in such a triumvirate achieve a mutual heroization of past and present exemplars of Roman conduct, they also entail tensions that cannot be wholly suppressed. The affinity of the republican Scipio to fratricidal king and extravagantly autocratic emperor papers over ideological fissures that remain, or are all too easily rendered, visible. It also raises the possibility that the emergent hero of Silius' epic is precisely an example of and for the domination of the individual over Roman destiny.

This chapter explores the character Hannibal in Silius' Punica. It argues that it is Hannibal's compelling, meta-poetic, absent-presence in Scipio's triumphal parade that asserts his power over Silius' epic. If the play of textual temporality, and of aperture and closure, in the Liternum episode serves to re-emphasize that the Punica is a tale told by a Roman victor, it also illustrates not only the openness of the poem to a Punic point of view, but, more broadly, Silius' limited power, as Roman epicist, over openings and closings. His poetic celebration of Roman victory, or victories, cannot altogether control its portrayal of Rome's greatest enemy, nor the problematic lapse between Roman past and present, nor, indeed, how, or how much of, the Punica will be read.

This chapter explores the character Fabius in Silius' Punica. Fabius is a singular figure, whose unique representation of the Roman cause Silius most conspicuously brings to the fore in the Punica through play on unus but also simply by making him, for a time a focus for its epic action. In that sense, he is a prototype for such future single rulers as Augustus. Fabius, despite (meta-)epic moments of proactivity and velocity, is pointedly a paradigm of cunctation.

This chapter explores the character Scipio in Silius' Punica. The Punica ends with a triumph, and triumph is strongly closural. Yet by echoing Lucan's De bello civili, Silius points to the way in which the figure of Africanus is himself unclosed, the stuff of epic representation and its reception. There is a further Lucanian dimension to the undermined closure of the Punica. With the final, apostrophizing couplet of the poem, the narrator places himself among the citizens who watch Scipio's triumph. Participation in his own narrative here places him at a particular point in history, as if certain events, including, of course, Scipio's political downfall, were part of a future still to come.

This chapter summarizes the arguments presented in the book. The book began with the assertion that the Punica should be the Roman epic. In so doing, it provided an instance of a text taken to exemplify a literary tradition. In the ensuing exploration of patterns of paradigmatic heroism, it identified instances of example as theme in literature. The central contentions have been that heroization of exemplary Romans by reference to Herculean heroism or Punic otherness operates less straightforwardly in the Punica than might at first appear, and that even those Roman heroes whose example seems unquestionably protreptic in Silius' poem are, on examination, significantly flawed. Such a reading of the Punica is more sensitive to complex intertextuality and correspondingly complex levels of signification than one according to which Silius as epicist simply labours to rehabilitate Rome by reference to exemplary heroes of the past.

In the second chapter, attention is paid to the construction of what constitutes same and other in the early books of the Punica, by looking at the role of patria, Italy and Africa respectively: the word patria is closely associated with the male protagonists of the poem, especially pairs of fathers and sons, who try to protect their respective fatherlands, quite unsuccessfully. Alienation from one's patria is also evident in Rome's allied cities, especially Saguntum, where women are either silenced (the Amazon Asbyte) or inspired by bacchic frenzy, with a borrowed voice (Tiburna). The appearance of Tellus in book 15, however, marks a change, as the figure of the mother-earth empowers the male warriors to initiate war and discover a new identity.

This chapter focuses on the sixth book of the Punica, an analeptic narrative on the adventures of Regulus during the First Punic War, as retold to Regulus' son, Serranus, by Marus. Regulus' wife, Marcia, is fashioned by the poet as an emblem of female liminality. Marcia's voice, filtered through Marus' male perspective, enhances our understanding of the ideological orientation in Rome at a crucial moment in the Second Punic War. The female figure points to the male protagonist's failure to secure stability for his own family in the private domain, a weakness that by and large, extends to the public sphere. By pointing to her husband's failures and disagreeing with a particular course of action, Marcia's presence mobilizes a departure from established norms and as a result constitutes a driving force for a new model for future Roman leadership.

This chapter examines the portrayal of Imilce, Hannibal's wife, and Masinissa's mother, i.e. of two women from the periphery of the empire, to demonstrate the significance of gendered otherness. Imilce is fashioned as a reasonable Roman matrona, who denounces child-sacrifice, yet she is marked as a hybridic, unclassified, other. By contrast, Masinissa's mother promotes alliance with the Romans and is placed within reach of the centre, as she preaches Roman ideals of fidelity and piety. At the end, Claudia Quinta's intervention for the arrival of Cybele, a foreign deity, proves that the conflation of Romanness and otherness is no longer a threat but a necessary condition for a prosperous future.

This chapter focuses on the epilogues of the Thebaid and Punica and their relationship with the figure of the emperor Domitian 81–96ce). Through an examination of representations of motherhood and virginity in Flavian art, this chapter shows that the poets of the period endorse and problematize the emperor's strategy of acculturation and assimilation of foreign, female otherness.

This chapter explores the wide range of closural issues that the Punica raises. It shows that the Liternum episode may be seen to illustrate not only the Punica’s openness to a Punic point of view, but more broadly Silius’ limited power, as Roman epicist, over aperture and closure: his poetic celebration of Roman victory — or victories — cannot altogether contain the dominant figure of the enemy, who thus perhaps becomes this ‘Punic’ poem’s anti-hero, nor control the problematic lapse between Roman past and present, nor, indeed, determine how, or how much of, the Punica will be read.

After Lucan, the Flavian epicists return to a superficially conventional theology of highly active and interventionist deities. The two martial epics - Silius Italicus’ Punica and Statius’ Thebaid - take a particularly strong interest in epic theomachy. The chapter offers two different kinds of case study which illustrate the main debts to, and departures from, the epic tradition, and which show the importance of non-Vergilian influence on Flavian epic, especially by Homer. The first case study examines the mache parapotamios, the epic topos of the struggle between mortal and river god. This section surveys the Iliadic and Flavian episodes in order to show the different ways that the texts frame the relative power of gods and mortals. The second case study takes a different approach by looking at the synchronic as well as diachronic intertexts for the topos of the agon between a seer and a theomach. Focusing on Silius’ argument between Flaminius and Corvinus, and the subsequent account of the battle of Trasimene, the section combines evidence from the Greek epic tradition, connections to a near-contemporary agon in Statius’ Thebaid, and intratextuality within the Punica itself to show how a multilayered representation of theomachy can be interpreted.

In the Punica, Silus Italicus combines the stereotypical impiety of Hannibal in the historiographical tradition with the literary figure of the theomach that had become especially prominent in imperial epic. The chapter shows how Silius presents the hero’s two most theomachic moments - the crossing of the Alps and the assault on the Capitol - as underlining the power and supremacy of Jupiter in the world of the Punica. In each episode, Silius uses the notion of theomachy both to aggrandise Hannibal and to demonstrate the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between mortality and divinity. The majority of the chapter illustrates this simultaneous process of elevation and undercutting, while identifying important complicating factors. First, Silius invests Hannibal with considerable metapoetic significance through the concepts of loftiness and audacity that attach to his march across the Alps and attempt to ascend the Capitol. These two scenes put Silius’ conventional condemnation of impiety in tension with theomachy’s aesthetic importance for the Punica. Second, the burning of the Capitol in Silius’ own lifetime during the civil wars of AD 68-69 turns Hannibal’s theomachy from a stereotype of Carthaginian wickedness into an image of the very impiety Roman aspirants to the principate had themselves perpetrated.

This chapter defines the geographical limits of Roman Campania before engaging with the poetic blend, symbolism, and prolepsis with which Silius constructs his fictional and mythological digressions and his conjunctions of people and places. The confrontation of his protagonists, Scipio and Hannibal, is anticipated first in Hannibal’s visit to the temple in Liternum, prominently adorned with images of Roman victory in the First Punic War, and secondly by Scipio’s charismatic leadership of Italian contingents from remote parts of Campania. The contrast of the epic’s protagonists continues against the backdrop of Campania to which Hannibal returns as the triumphant victor of Cannae in Book 11. The geography of Campania is again interwoven into Silius’ epic narrative, for Capua’s treacherous defection will receive stern retribution at the end of the Campanian sequence in Book 13.

This chapter posits a martial role for Campanian otium and socordia. Beginning with Silius’ description of Hannibal’s struggle through the marshes with Campania in the role of delayer (6.651–2), it suggests that, in blocking his progress, gentle, pastoral Campania joins forces with the old Cunctator, Fabius Maximus, in Punica 7, in retaliation for Hannibal’s devastation of her herds and vineyards. The balance, ingenuity, and proleptic force of Silius’ fictional ecphrases are a key facet of this chapter: whereas Hannibal threatens to obliterate the painted images of defeat on the temple walls at Liternum with scenes of Carthaginian triumph, Scipio is given indications of Roman victory by the Roman and Carthaginian heroes whom he encounters in his Nekyia in Punica 13. Finally, it will be Campanian otium and luxuria, dangerously excessive and grotesquely abused in Capua, that will extinguish Hannibal’s military ambition.

Hannibal’s Capuan feast, modelled on Dido’s banquet for Aeneas, is the starting point for this chapter’s exploration of Silius’ wide-ranging allusions, in diction and thematic material, to the Augustan poets, Virgil and Ovid. These predominate in the ecphrases which adorn the two songs of cosmology and erotic genealogy chosen by the Cumaean bard, Teuthras, a distinctively Hellenic lyric poet, and in the variants of the Cretan myth engraved on the doors of Apollo’s temple, which also embrace more widely diffuse literary allusions. As Silius engages with the topography of Cumae in Punica 12, his reference to the Carthaginian’s failure to gain access to the ‘gleaming temple’ points not simply to Hannibal as an inversion of Virgil’s Aeneas, but also to the metapoetic hint that the Flavian poet, like Hannibal, falls short of his illustrious model.

This chapter discusses how Hannibal’s eruption of fury at the Capuan patriot Decius mirrors the violence of Campania’s volcanic landscape and the mythic monsters who lurk beneath the surface, punished for transgressing boundaries. Hannibal’s tour of the Phlegraean Fields suggests a travesty of Aeneas’ tour of Evander’s modest settlement in Aeneid 8. In perfidious Capua, a city whose depravity flouts every mark of Roman decency, now driven by furor to impious war, Hannibal, a monster in a land of monsters, is honoured as divine. In rivalling the demigod Hercules (11.134–7) his transgression is as theomachic as his emulation (of the human rather than the divine Hercules) is misguidedly flawed.