Chapter V: Silius Italicus

Life—An ancient Southey—Evidence for date of the
_Punica_—Scheme of the seventeen books—Weaknesses—Certain
merits—Stoic notes—_Sententiae_—Imitations and
innovations—Virgilian echoes.

Few literary figures of the first century are so well known biographically as Ti. Catius Silius Italicus.[1323] The information comes mainly from a letter by the younger Pliny (III. vii), who, writing in A.D. 101 about the recent death of Silius, took the opportunity to sketch his career. Other facts of his life are learned from Martial and Tacitus.[1324] He is called Silius Italicus in MSS., in Pliny and in Tacitus; Martial calls him either Silius or Italicus; his full name we know from inscriptions.[1325] It is argued that, if “Italicus” implied birth at Italica in Spain, Martial would have expressly claimed him for a countryman. Pliny’s evidence that he was over seventy-five when he died enables us to date his birth as A.D. 25 or 26. Under Nero he had got an evil name as an informer. He was the last Neronian consul (A.D. 68), and, in the struggle for the succession, a supporter of Vitellius, whom Cluvius Rufus and he attended at his interview with Flavius Sabinus in the Capitol. The reputation which he gained as proconsul of Asia in Vespasian’s time and his subsequent life of literary retirement did something to wipe out the stain of his ill-employed activity in Nero’s days. Leisure hours in intervals of writing were devoted to the reception of a circle of visitors and to learned discussions, presumably philosophical. His readings from his own works were planned to be practical tests of his friends’ critical judgement. In the later part of his life he left Rome for the quiet of Campania, from which not even the accession of the new emperor, Trajan, in A.D. 98, could lure him back. A connoisseur (φιλόκαλος, as Pliny says), he could not resist the temptation to buy fine country houses, in this respect becoming even more extravagant than his friend Pliny. He surrounded himself with books, statues and busts, above all venerating the portrait of Virgil, the anniversary of whose birth he observed more scrupulously than his own. Virgil’s tomb at Naples was to him a holy place (_adire ut templum solebat_). Before he attempted an epic, he had made some name in oratory, especially as a pleader in court.[1326] His death on his Neapolitan estate was due to voluntary starvation. A tumour from which he was suffering was pronounced incurable, and he decided to refrain from food. It was a Stoical resolution; and he had, in fact, relations with the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.[1327] Of two sons one predeceased him, the other reached the consulship and survived his father. Among additional facts derived from Martial we learn that one of his villas had been Cicero’s, that Virgil’s grave was on one of his properties, and that he began his _Punica_ after his consulship. The ascription to him of the epitome known as the _Ilias Latina_ or _Homerus Latinus_ is mentioned elsewhere.

A diligent but usually uninspired writer, fitly described by Pliny as having composed with more pains than genius (_maiore cura quam ingenio_), Silius must have resembled Southey in his methodically calculated production of verse; and his _Punica_ may be said to occupy in Latin literature a position not unlike that of _Madoc_ in English. By A.D. 88, the date of Martial’s fourth book, the plan of Silius’s epic was apparently known and friends were acquainted with parts of it.[1328] By the end of 92[1329] some at least of the _Punica_, wildly praised by Martial as immortal, was in book form; but the reference to Domitian’s war in Silius, Book III, 607, cannot have been written before that same year, as the Sarmatian campaign was fought in A.D. 92-93. Since XIV. 686 refers to Nerva (96-98), we may assign the latest books to the beginning of Trajan’s reign. It has been contended that so comparatively early a part of the work as Book VII must have followed the death of Domitian (96), on the ground that the introduction of Minerva there as hostile to Rome would have been unsuitable during the life of an emperor attached to the cult of that goddess.[1330]

Silius’s narrative of the Second Punic War is told in over 12,200 hexameters distributed among seventeen books. Of the three conflicts between Rome and Carthage the author realizes, at the outset of his task (I. 12-14), that this middle one demanded the greatest efforts from the combatants, and that the victors themselves were imperilled. Book I relates how in Dido’s city Juno pits against fate the war-loving and indomitable leader Hannibal, who resolves to strike a blow at Rome from Spain by besieging Saguntum. The Saguntine danger is laid before Rome; then in Book II Rome is embroiled with Carthage; and Saguntum, after a heroic defence, is taken by Hannibal. During the fighting, Queen Asbyte, the Camilla of the Carthaginian side, falls, and the flight of the enemy before Hannibal as he seeks to avenge her is likened, in a typical simile, to the homeward flocking of birds or the swarming of bees to their hive:

As thro’ the gloaming late the evening star
Drives on light wing the birds from quest of food
Home to their nest, or as on Mount Hymet
By Athens swarms of bees among the flowers
Are summoned at the threat of watery cloud
To their sweet waxen toil, and honey-fraught
Haste to the grotto of their fragrant hive,
And massed in flying throng the threshold fill
With murmur hoarse.[1331]

Early in Book III there are digressions for the sake of descriptive writing. Neither the labours of Hercules on the portals of the temple where Hannibal seeks responses, nor the marvels (_mira_) of the inrushing tide are subjects possessing artistic necessity. The episode of the parting of Hannibal from his wife and child on the seashore is at once more natural and more relevant: it portrays her disappointment that she may not share his dangers; it also portrays his realization, as her ship waits, that the stirrings of ambition must tear him from her:

How differs unrecorded life from death![1332]

After such human motives it is weak to have intruded Jupiter’s designs for trying the Romans by peril and his despatch of Mercury to hasten Hannibal’s plans for the invasion of Italy. The catalogue of the Carthaginians and the crossing of Pyrenees, Rhone and Alps, with incidental episodes and risks, occupy the rest of the book. Opening with alarm in Italy, the next book narrates the fighting at the Ticinus and the Trebia. Warriors on the field after epic fashion are invoked in the second person and perform prodigies of valour, while the unreality is increased by bringing Hannibal on the scene attended by Panic, Terror and Rage. The disaster caused by the Carthaginian elephants at the Trebia suggests the reflection:

The test of manhood is adversity,
And up Mount Difficult through jeopardy
Strides Valour undismayed to Fame.[1333]

Amidst the rigours of the Apennines Hannibal has lost an eye, when senators arrive from Carthage to claim in sacrifice his son. The demand had been debated at home, supported by Hanno because of an old grudge, but bitterly opposed by Hannibal’s wife Imilce, whose creed concerning sacrifice is thus avowed:

What piety is sprinkling shrines with gore?
Chief cause, alas! of guilt in feeble man
Is not to know God’s nature. Go and pray
Aright with holy incense and avert
The barbarous ritual of butchery;
For God is kind and kindred unto man
(_Mite et cognatum est homini Deus_).[1334]

Book V is on Lake Trasimene, opening in legend and the mists of dawn, and then advancing, through Homeric armings and challenges, to the death of the consul Flaminius and to Hannibal’s chivalrous admiration for the bravery of his fallen enemies:

The brows still threaten and their looks are wrath.
I fear a land so pregnant with a brood
Of high-souled heroes may from Destiny
Win power imperial and by very woes
Yet subjugate the world.[1335]