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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Chapter 6 explores the appropriation of late Republican and Augustan treatments of pestilence in Imperial literature. Seneca’s version of Oedipus’ tragedy turns to Latin epic, rather than Sophocles, to articulate conditions of pestilence in Thebes. This language reflects upon Oedipus’ traditional role as φαρμακός‎, both infected “carrier” and saviour to the civic body, clarifying how competing claims of individuality and collectivity have determined the pathology of earlier literary treatments of plague. By inscribing plague within a text that questions standards of good government, Seneca secures the role of contagion as a tool for examining the health of the body politic in Neronian Rome. The epics of Silius Italicus and Lucan also invoke the plagues of their predecessors in contexts of Roman civil discord, and use the plague’s power to enact the dissolution of individual identity as a way of indicting competition for political distinction. Lucan relies on the symptomology of his predecessors in his account of pestilence afflicting Pompey’s soldiers, but emphasizes the link between contagion and internal conflict by casting both the disease and the fervour for civil war as rabies. Silius, in the Punica, describes an outbreak of pestilence during the Punic Wars that brings about widespread destruction. But in answer to the status-leveling and dehumanizing effects characterizing preceding plague narratives, he depicts the Roman general Marcellus escaping the plague and recovering distinction or “exemplarity” in a way that does not threaten the health of the body politic.

This chapter explores the earliest traditions clustering around Virgil’s tomb. Its geographical location on the Via Puteolana, identified in the ancient lives, activates not only literary memories of the Aeneid (the landscape of Aeneas’ landfall and descent into the underworld), but also memories associated with the landscape itself in other sources. The chapter also investigates how the physical space of the tomb functioned as an early site of poetic succession: the land was acquired by the poet Silius Italicus, whose veneration of the tomb and claim to Virgil’s literary inheritance is taken up by Martial and Pliny the Younger. These accounts and traditions are examined within the context of the ancient topos of the neglected and rediscovered grave.

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.

This chapter examines the influence of epitaph, that is, actual funerary inscriptions, as well as the epitaphic subgenre of literary epigram, on the epics of Statius and Silius. It proposes that brief formulaic expressions such as the epitaphic address tuquoque serve as intergeneric (epic/epigram) and intermedial (text/stone) markers and thus promote a connotation of memorialisation. In addition, these markers are frequently combined with epitaphic motifs. By looking at the deaths of minor and major heroes from this perspective, this chapter illustrates the use of epitaphic gestures by Statius and Silius.

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.

This chapter considers how the pride script functions when the quality is attributed to a place. It investigates Roman attitudes to the city of Capua, which remained the proud place par excellence in Roman discourse from its star turn as a defector in the Second Punic War to late antiquity. The chapter begins with the distillation of the stereotypical picture of Capua in a poem of the fourth-century author Ausonius. Reading Capuan pride in Cicero, Livy, Silius Italicus, and Ausonius, the author shows how Roman ideas about pride interact with stereotypes about climate and ethnic character, as well as imperialist ideology, to create a remarkably durable portrait of a proud city that far outlasts its immediate historical motivation.

Silius depicts Fabius Maximus’ rescue of his Master of Horse, Minucius, from a skirmish with Hannibal near Gerunium as a virtual katabasis or descent to the Underworld, but one which self–consciously draws attention to, rather than occluding, its own symbolic nature. This emphasis on the virtual quality of the katabasis serves as a commentary on other poets’ exploitation of katabatic imagery. More significantly it contributes to the depiction of Minucius’ salvation as a sort of mystic initiation into the ways of Fabius. For the relationship between ‘literal’ initiation and ‘allegorical’ katabatic myth is parallel to that between the ‘literal’ skirmish and the ‘virtual’ katabasis it evokes. The depiction of Fabius as a figure of initiation and salvation contributes to the ambiguity of his status as simultaneously quintessential Republican and synecdochic hero.

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.

This chapter analyses the significance of Silius’ allusion to Virgil’s aetiological narrative of the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima with its underlying civic ideology. While Hercules’ monster–slaying and katabasis provide a metaphor to accentuate the moral fortitude of his descendant Fabius Maximus in Punica 7, the disparity of Roman with Carthaginian is poetically underlined by dualistic imagery of sunlight and darkness. This chapter demonstrates how the political metaphor of gigantomachy illustrates Hannibal's arrogance and impiety, while the Carthaginians’ notorious cult of chthonic powers invites the interpretation of Hannibal’s nocturnal conflagration of Roman oxen as a monstrous subversion of the Roman ritual victory sacrifice to Capitoline Jupiter.

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.