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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

Book VI is largely devoted to the story of Regulus taken from the first Punic War. His son, Serranus, severely wounded, reaches the door of Marus, one of his father’s old soldiers, who preaches endurance amidst the reverses of Rome:

The old man’s tale of Regulus is partly legendary, partly historical: it begins with dragon-fighting, and proceeds, not without rhetoric, to relate how Regulus kept his parole when the Carthaginian senate sent him to Rome in the vain hope that he would advocate an exchange of prisoners. There must always be a moral greatness in this story of self-abnegation and Stoic austerity:

And yet Silius’s long-drawn narrative has not the moving force of Horace’s brief treatment of the same episode in the third book of the Odes. The digression ends at line 552, where Silius returns to his true subject—panic in the city and Jupiter’s prompting of the Romans to entrust all to Fabius.

The saving of Rome by Fabius’s delaying tactics is the theme of Book VII. The digressions include the legend of the 300 Fabii told to Hannibal by a prisoner, a story of Bacchus occasioned by the Carthaginian inroad on the Falernian vineyards, and, at the approach of the Carthaginian fleet, the introduction of Nereids with the Virgilian cave of Proteus. The delays are not confined to the inaction of Fabius: Proteus is asked to prophesy, but first he must hark back to the Judgement of Paris. There is, however, a foil to Fabius’s caution in the impetuous Minucius, who is magnanimously rescued from the consequences of his foolhardiness by his colleague.

Book VIII forms a prelude to the battle of Cannae, as related in the two following books. The unreal device of Juno’s despatch of the nymph Anna to encourage Hannibal leads us back to the Dido story for a time.⁠[1338] Then the narrative is resumed. The consuls have been changed, and Aemilius Paulus dreads the abyss to which the arrogance of his colleague Varro may lead. His arguments are stated in the debating manner of the schools,⁠[1339] making brief ironical points one after another—“the impetuous consul fears that he might leave Rome’s ruin for another man’s consulate; it might be well to summon a consul from Carthage, for even a Carthaginian would not be so dangerous!” The catalogue of Italian warriors, extending to over 260 lines, gives a chance of introducing famous names. There is, for example, a Tullius, descended from King Tullus, and destined, as ancestor of Cicero, to give in later days a noble citizen to Ausonia: next follows a eulogy on the orator:

So too there is a Scaevola, a Sulla, Nero the Sabine, a Piso, a Galba, a Brutus and others. Among the men of North Italy those are not forgotten who come from Virgil’s birthplace,

In the description of the battle of Cannae, Silius’s aim is not historical accuracy, but epic embellishment. His true model, therefore, is not such brief narratives as those in Polybius (III. 115-116) or Livy (XXII. 47-49), but the manner of the Iliad and the Aeneid, so that the account is expanded to fill nearly two books, IX and X; and is diversified by similes, divine interferences, Homeric slaughter, and episodes like the unwitting slaying of a father by a son. Though it be mythological, there is a grim suggestiveness in Charon’s rejoicing in the expectation of receiving the dead:

and the poet has a conception of Roman greatness in adversity:

There is nobility in Hannibal’s character as drawn by Silius, when he decrees funeral honours to the fallen consul, Paulus, and muses over his body:

and, later, in his address of almost envious farewell:

The sorrow-stricken capital is again saved by Fabius, who wins a nation’s gratitude because he did not despair of the republic, though Silius unhappily uses the stilted expression, “he did not despair for the city of Laomedon’s descendants.”⁠[1346] Indeed some twenty lines towards the close of the tenth book are full of indirect and far-fetched expressions.

Book XI brings Hannibal to Capua, where luxury begins its demoralizing work. The banquet has an obvious Virgilian basis. At Carthage the news of victory and the heap of rings from the fallen Romans fail to induce Hanno to join in the general plaudits for Hannibal. Instead, he advocates making terms with Rome, pleads war-weariness, and extols peace:

In Book XII, with the coming of spring, Hannibal stirs forth from Capua, like a serpent after hibernating. Henceforward his luck wanes, for the Romans win their first victory in the war. Among those celebrated for bravery is Ennius, whose poetry is eulogized. Hannibal appears outside Rome and rides round the walls to reconnoitre; but Jupiter checks his plans by raising storm after storm. It is a ludicrous see-saw of good and bad weather.

Book XIII, the longest book (895 lines), contains, besides digressions, the recapture of Capua, and its rescue by Pan from burning though not from pillage. Sent to inspire mercy, Pan is minutely described—horned and horny-hoofed, peak-eared, bearded and tailed, nimble and sportive, carrying a shepherd’s staff, altogether a strangely incongruous figure in the midst of historical events. In Spain, the two Scipios—father and uncle to the younger Scipio, afterwards Africanus—meet their death; and this leads to a long passage founded on Aeneas’s visit to the Underworld in Aeneid VI. Scipio, as the ultimate victor, is a kind of hero for Silius. As in the Odyssey, sacrifice and the blood-trench are indispensable preliminaries to holding converse with departed spirits; but the interview with the shade of Appius Claudius becomes ridiculous when Scipio lectures the ghost on different ways of disposing of the dead. The Sibyl is asked to unfold the mysteries of the Underworld and of the different souls admitted through the Ten Gates. The infernal rivers, the personified evils of human life, and the monsters of mythology burden the description, and thereafter the wraiths of Scipio’s father and mother appear. Not only do the shades of Aemilius Paulus and of others killed at Cannae drink of the blood and speak, but Romans of ancient times appear as well as Hamilcar, Alexander the Great, and the god-like ghost of Homer. Among souls of the great fancied to be not yet incarnate are those of Pompey and Julius Caesar. When the Sibyl has foretold the eclipse of Hannibal’s career, Scipio returns to his men rejoicing.

In Book XIV the Muses are invoked to turn to Sicily, where Marcellus captures Syracuse after a defence prolonged by the mechanical ingenuity of the famous Greek mathematician Archimedes (who is referred to,⁠[1347] but, owing to hexametric exigencies, not named). In Book XV the Roman Senate anxiously consider the question of finding a general to succeed the two Scipios killed in Spain: and at this juncture Silius introduces the young Scipio confronted with the figures of Virtue and Pleasure after the model of the fabled Choice of Hercules. Gaily attired, Pleasure is one whose

Her alluring promises, coloured with an Epicurean idea of bliss,⁠[1349] contrast with the appeal directed by Virtue to the celestial element ennobling man. Virtue’s offer is “not purple or scents but victory over the enemy”; and, on Scipio’s acceptance, Pleasure retires displeased, but satirically prophesying that one day her hour will come in Rome. So Scipio mounts the rostra asking for control of the war. He afterwards justifies his selection by the capture of Nova Carthago in Spain. The book is crowded with other incidents such as the alliance of Philip of Macedon with Carthage, the funeral honours paid by Hannibal to Marcellus, and the defeat by Claudius Nero of Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal at the Metaurus on his way to join Hannibal. Book XVI recounts Scipio’s operations in Africa and Spain, and his games to honour the dead—chariot-race, foot-race, sword-fight, javelin competition, in which traditional epic elements are discernible. His request in Rome to be allowed to transfer the war to Africa, though hotly opposed by Fabius, is granted by the Senate: so in Book XVII he crosses to Africa and is thus the means of forcing Hannibal to quit Italy, to his poignant sorrow.⁠[1350] After a display of Homeric prowess by Scipio and deceits practised by Juno on Hannibal, the decisive victory of Zama is won. Hannibal may be overwhelmed, he reflects, but Jupiter himself can never blot out the memory of Cannae, nor will the nations pass over his deeds in silence. He will live still to be a menace to Rome.⁠[1351] Scipio recrosses the sea to hold his triumph, with Syphax and Hanno as notable captives, and the work closes with an apostrophe to him as the unvanquished sire, in merit comparable with Quirinus or Camillus, and truly claimed in Rome to be an offspring of the gods.

Even a summary betrays many of Silius’s weaknesses. His theme, the struggle of two peoples for world-supremacy, as derived from Livy, was a great one; and yet his quest after poetic embroidery divorced it from reality.⁠[1352] He makes gods interfere where a historian would investigate causes and motives: he relates battles, not as matters of strategy, but as conglomerates of individual combats. Military history is, therefore, not to be demanded from him; but a more penetrating genius, even though he might in epic spirit, like Silius, have concentrated largely on occurrences affecting the heroic figure of Hannibal, would still have placed in true perspective the evolution of the conflict. As it is, one would never grasp from Silius the significance of events like the siege of Syracuse and the younger Scipio’s Spanish campaign; nor would one learn what the defeat of Carthage meant for the world. Traces there are, it is true, of the imperial note, but Silius does not convey through his poem a sense of the greatness of Rome as his master Virgil did. Author and reader are alike oppressed by the outworn conventions of invocations, apostrophes, similes,⁠[1353] lineages and colloquies of antagonists who fight in the Homeric fashion, intervention of mythological deities, unilluminating geography, and lack-lustre catalogues of names, in using which Silius has no Virgilian or Miltonic gift of making beautiful music.⁠[1354] All this goes to constitute the head and front of his offending—he is, taken altogether, dull and uninspiring. Hardly any of his characters live. Hannibal may be said to live at times, Scipio scarcely at any time: and interminable longueurs, verging on the dismal, force one in the end to wonder what imaginable constraint other than editorial necessity should ever drag one to a second perusal of these seventeen ponderous books.

Yet, even so, Silius has merit. He can be rhetorical, but he is not so insistently in search of striking points as the other epic-writers of his century. A curious nemesis overtakes him when he imitates; for some of his least natural effects arise from his enslavement to the example of Homer; Virgil and Lucan. It is particularly to the baleful influence of Lucan that one must ascribe his misdirected attempts at realism. One wishes that Silius, over his slain warriors, had felt a portion of the Virgilian pity; but instead he overdoes his descriptions. The last notes of a bugler, mortally hurt at the Ticinus, pass lingeringly through his instrument after his lips are already mute in death; the final breath of a gigantic soldier stirs the dust on the plain; a head is struck off, but the body runs on from its own impetus; or a victim’s murmured appeals continue after his head is severed.⁠[1355] Lucanesque reminiscences overpaint the naval engagement off Syracuse in Book XIV—a man is cut in two by a prow; oars splash blood; hands grasping an enemy ship are hacked off and carried away still clinging; open wounds admit the sea.⁠[1356] In similarly exaggerative manner he makes corpses bridge a river,⁠[1357] and copies more than once Lucan’s idea of the wounded having no room to fall.⁠[1358] Yet there are not nearly so many of these excesses as in Lucan; and there are comparatively few strained conceits, like the topsy-turvy one, which he approves sufficiently to repeat, of fighters avenging their deaths in advance by abundant slaughter.⁠[1359] More often he is straightforward and non-rhetorical, with touches of natural description, as of the river Ticinus crystal-clear and gliding softly between shady banks to the notes of birds;⁠[1360] with an occasional eye for colour, as where he marks the rosy dawn over the blue waters, the glint of the Roman arms at Cannae, or the Carthaginian priest’s robe of blue on which precious stones glitter;⁠[1361] or, again, with a gleam of romance to light up the catalogue of Hannibal’s host, when from the far eastern gardens of the Hesperides came a leader,

Traces of Stoic thought in Silius may be in part prompted by the Stoicism recurrent in Lucan’s epic, but may conceivably be due to its contemporary prevalence. Among instances may be cited the unflinching constancy of the slave tortured by the Carthaginian whose “mind remains untouched, surmounting pain with smiles”; Decius’s claim that nature has granted no such boon to man as the open doorway out of life; the rivalry between Pleasure and Virtue for control over Scipio; and the fortitude with which Hannibal, when his brother’s head is exhibited on a spear,

His sententiae, because not too numerous to be tedious, are the more effective. Some of the most telling are “The test of manhood is adversity” (IV. 603); “Banish delay: short-lived is fortune’s smile” (IV. 732); “War must have craft: a leader’s stout arm wins less fame” (V. 100); the cynical observation “in happy days the altars seldom reek” (VII. 89); “Anger against one’s country is sin” (VII. 555 succensere nefas patriae); “never doth love abandon hope” (VIII. 95 non unquam spem ponit amor); “valour is her own most fair reward” (XIII. 663); and Alexander’s counsel on celerity in fighting:

In spite of his debt to Virgil and Lucan, Silius gives signs of originality in his language. Occasionally he ventures on bold expressions: “a draught of Hannibal inflames” his soldiers (I. 345, haustusque medullis Hannibal exagitat); and, in reference to Capuan demoralization, “the yelps of vice (XI. 426 uitia adlatrantia)⁠[1365] shake a character so far unsmirched by prosperity.” He employs a large number of compound adjectives, especially in -fer and -ger. Some are Lucretian words transmitted through Virgil like aestifer, saetiger, horrificus. The adverb regifice he shares with Ennius. Many of his compounds had been used by Ovid and Lucan. Others cannot easily, if at all, be discovered elsewhere; uiticola, austrifer, nubiuagus, pharetriger, criniger (possibly in Lucan, unless he wrote cirrigeros in Phars. I. 463). Diffulminat seems to be Silius’s own invention. It is to be expected that he should share several compounds with his contemporaries, e.g. with Valerius Flaccus, luctificus (also in Cicero and Virgil), securiger (also in Ovid), gemmifer (in Propertius and Pliny), and with Statius uuifer, sceptriger and other words. Whether these last are instances of the influence of Silius on Statius cannot be determined, but Statius certainly borrowed the gold-digger of Dalmatia from Silius’s “greedy Asturian.”⁠[1366] Silius’s use of sonipes, quadrupes and cornipes for equus (which he does not however entirely renounce) becomes wearisome.

Apart from Virgilian influence on incidents like the cave of Proteus (VII. 419 sqq.), tree-felling for funeral pyres (X. 527 sqq.), the banquet at Capua (XI. 267 sqq.), the Sibyl’s exposition of the lower world in Book XIII, and the funeral games of Book XVI (down to the detail of fouling transferred from the foot-race of the Aeneid to a chariot-race), there are frequent reminiscences of Virgil’s language in such phrases as quaerentia lumina caelum (VI. 11) or ille quidem cruda mente et uiridissimus irae (V. 569). Still more old-fashioned echoes are his ac tuba terrificis fregit stridoribus auras (V. 189);⁠[1367] ensis contunditur ense, pes pede uirque uiro teritur (IX. 325);⁠[1368] and the ancient legal form capital (XIII. 155). Silius did not write in a style so elaborate as that of Valerius Flaccus or Statius, and he did not try to be so clever as Lucan; but he is composite enough to be acquitted of bald simplicity. His hexameters are often highly alliterative, some lines having alliteration on three different consonants. There is much also which proves the metrical influence of Ovid, though Silius is less dactylic and moves less lightly than any of the epic poets of his time.