Silius Italicus’ poem Punica represents one of the longest extant epic poems to survive from the ancient world, yet its 17 books of tightly controlled and carefully composed hexameter on Rome’s Second Punic War have only relatively recently started to receive consistent scholarly attention. A respectable commentary tradition for Silius is now appearing at some speed, backed up by a range of companion volumes and a rich array of essay collections on Flavian literature more generally. Monographic studies of Silius’ text are fewer in number, and Theodore Antoniadis’s study is therefore a most welcome addition to the scholarly record.
In response to the volume of Silius’ poem, Antoniadis’s work is one of remarkable brevity, packing a huge quantity of academic synthesis and scholarly analysis into a mere 174 pages. Furthermore, this is not a volume which speaks solely to the still relatively tight community of Silius’ admirers but is written to be approachable by any with an interest in the literature, culture, and politics of early imperial Rome. It would serve well as an introduction to the poem more generally without at any point trying to fulfil the role of an exploratory survey.
Antoniadis’s reading of the Punica is political to its core and involves a number of intertwining strands of analysis: it focuses carefully on the protean concept of virtus as embodied in the poem’s many male protagonists (Hannibal remaining a dastardly but complex anti-hero ranged against a series of flawed Roman leaders) and in particular its moral and martial contradictions. Antoniadis develops the logic of Roman exemplarity which has framed much of Silian scholarship over the last two decades to place the poem more squarely in a contemporary political context. Specifically and more excitingly, Antoniadis takes Silius out of his narrowly ‘Flavian’ periodization and reads both poet and poem as a product of a much longer strand of Roman history: the Punica is a work of Neronian and post-Domitianic Rome, born of Silius’ own intense political engagement in the 60s CE and with ramifications which stretch beyond narrow critiques of Flavian society.
The book is divided into six main chapters and a seventh chapter offering some brief general conclusions. Chapter 1 explores morality as it is expounded by the gods in Silius’ poem and uses Hercules, a god much marginalised in Valerius’ Argonautica and Statius’ Thebaid, as the main exemplum. Hercules qua founder of Saguntum, a city whose population commits a mass suicide in the face of Carthaginian assault, is read mainly against his counterpart in Senecan tragedy, especially the Hercules Furens. Hercules’ powerlessness in the face of Hannibalic rage and his profound immorality exemplified in his rape of Pyrene suggest negative exemplarity. Yet Antoniadis sees the later books of the poem providing a ‘correction’ to the (Neronian?) model, particularly when he is set against the figures of Scipio and Domitian.
Chapter 2 explores the concept of ira in the Punica as it is portrayed by Hannibal, whom Antoniadis rightly identifies as a complex instantiation of the classical hero. A deft series of intertextual readings is underpinned by Silius’ invocation and incorporation of Senecan philosophical thought on anger. Seneca’s careful association of the worst traits of anger in the characters of autocratic rulers is picked up by Silius. Antoniadis provocatively reads Hannibal as a metaliterary extension of Nero at his most tyrannical and suggests that Silius is also responding to the contemporary phenomenon of the ‘false Neros’ who appeared in the Flavian period.
Chapter 3 returns us to the mass suicide of Saguntum in book 2 of the Punica and juxtaposes Silius’ narrative with the near cult of aristocratic suicide in the Neronian period, the ostentatious suicides of Vulteius and Scaeva in Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and mock-heroic suicides in Petronius’ Satyricon. Silius’ condemnation of the Saguntines’ behaviour as nefas is read as an implicit comment upon elite culture in the 60s CE and sensibly set against Tacitus’ well-known depiction of ambitiosae mortes in his Agricola.
Chapter 4 looks in detail at rituals in the Punica, especially devotiones, burials, and triumphs, to suggest a profound disruption in the epic economy constructed by Homer and Vergil in particular. Antoniadis questions the religious and political value of such rituals when performed by individuals who show such a flawed sense of virtus. This is true not only of Hannibal burying Roman consuls, but also of the Roman generals themselves, even in Silius’ account of Scipio’s triumph in the final book of the poem. Such rituals fail to provide a satisfying sense of closure and instead are unsettling, ambiguous and inadequate. Antoniadis suggests this reflects the profound politicisation of public ritual in the Neronian and Flavian period.
Chapter 5 presents a provocative reading of Silius’ Marcellus, the conqueror of Syracuse; for Antoniadis at least, Marcellus is the closest the Punica comes to a positive role model or purveyor of virtus. The ultimately bloodless (and, as Antoniadis points out, counterfactual) capture of the city is explicitly set against the violent rebellions in both Britannia and Judaea, the latter not only as a Neronian phenomenon, but also in Titus’ destructive reconquest of Judaea, complete with its own narratives of mass suicide and lavish triumph. Marcellus and Titus, both purveyors of military virtus who die before their time, make apposite comparands.
Chapter 6 focuses its attention on Scipio, setting up the youthful and energetic conqueror of Carthage as a counterpoint both to Nero and to Domitian, particularly as the latter behaved in the civil war of 68-69 CE. Both Roman emperors inevitably fail to meet to expectations of their Republican forebear, but the impulsive and reckless Scipio is himself a flawed model for them to follow. Five pages of ‘General Conclusions’ round off Antoniadis’s argument adroitly and sensibly confirm that the Punica is neither a straightforward condemnation of Neronian tyranny nor a propagandistic endorsement of his Flavian successors.
This is an enjoyable book to read, and Flavian scholars will doubtless find it useful. Typographic errors are few and confined almost exclusively to the footnotes.[1] The brevity mentioned above occasionally feels a little extreme; sometimes this reader wanted text and discussion confined to footnotes to be pulled up to the main body and explored a little more fully. The book is slightly skewed towards the first half of the Punica and the Saguntum episode in particular; Cannae and the ‘Scipiad’ in the latter part of the poem might have been more visible. The readiness to take the accounts of Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, and Cassius Dio as straightforwardly factual accounts of the 1st century is a little frustrating; the slight lack of nuance removes the possibility that Silius might be setting agendas for these later prose authors. These are, however, minor complaints.
Not all of Antoniadis’ readings will appeal to all of his readers; however, it might have been nice to see Antoniadis go just a little further with some of his more daring observations: the readings of Hannibalic ‘false Neros’, Marcellus and Scipio often left this reader wanting more. Nonetheless, Antoniadis’s overarching construction of Silius as responding to a longer period than 68-96 CE is an important one. His sensible and well-evidenced analysis of Silian virtus makes an important contribution to current scholarship on the Punica.
Notes
[1] One item, B. Martin (2014) ‘Blood, Honour, and Status in Odyssey 11’ CQ 64.1: 1-12, mentioned at 78n.3, is omitted from the bibliography.