Silius Italicus and His View of the Past PDF Download

Author: Carlo Santini
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004673164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Author: John Jacobs (Classicist)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350071070
Category : Carthage (Extinct city)
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
"In a much-needed comprehensive introduction to Silius Italicus and the Punica, Jacobs offers an invitation to students and scholars alike to read the epic as a thoughtful and considered treatment of Rome's past, present, and (perilous) future. The Second Punic War marked a turning point in world history: Rome faced her greatest external threat in the famous Carthaginian general Hannibal, and her victory led to her domination of the Mediterranean. Lingering memories of the conflict played a pivotal role in the city's transition from Republic to Empire, from foreign war to civil war. Looking back after the events of AD 69, the senator-poet Silius Italicus identified the Second Punic War as the turning point in Rome's history through his Punica. After introductory chapters for those new to the poet and his poem, Jacobs' close reading of the epic narrative guides students and scholars alike through the Punica. All Greek and Latin passages are translated to ensure accessibility for those reading in English. Far more than simply a retelling of Rome's greatest triumph, the Punica challenges its reader to make sense of the Second Punic War in light of its full impact on the subsequent course of the city's history"--

Author: John Jacobs
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350071056
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In a much-needed comprehensive introduction to Silius Italicus and the Punica, Jacobs offers an invitation to students and scholars alike to read the epic as a thoughtful and considered treatment of Rome's past, present, and (perilous) future. The Second Punic War marked a turning point in world history: Rome faced her greatest external threat in the famous Carthaginian general Hannibal, and her victory led to her domination of the Mediterranean. Lingering memories of the conflict played a pivotal role in the city's transition from Republic to Empire, from foreign war to civil war. Looking back after the events of AD 69, the senator–poet Silius Italicus identified the Second Punic War as the turning point in Rome's history through his Punica. After introductory chapters for those new to the poet and his poem, Jacobs' close reading of the epic narrative guides students and scholars alike through the Punica. All Greek and Latin passages are translated to ensure accessibility for those reading in English. Far more than simply a retelling of Rome's greatest triumph, the Punica challenges its reader to make sense of the Second Punic War in light of its full impact on the subsequent course of the city's history.

Author: Neil W. Bernstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198838166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book 9 of Silius Italicus' first-century Latin epic poem Punica begins the narrative of the Battle of Cannae (August 216 BC). This book is an integral part of the epic's three-book movement that narrates one of the largest battles in Roman history. It opens with the dispute between the consuls Paulus and Varro over giving battle, in the face of hostile omens and Hannibal's record of successful combat. On the eve of the battle, the Roman soldier Solymus accidentally kills his father Satricus, thereby presenting an omen of disaster for the Roman army. After Hannibal and Varro encourage their troops, the initial phase of the battle commences. The gods descend to the battlefield, and Mars and Minerva fight the sole full-scale theomachy in Latin epic. Aeolus summons the Vulturnus wind at Juno's request to devastate the Roman ranks. After the gods have departed, Hannibal's elephant troops advance and scatter the Roman forces. The book ends by recapitulating the opening episode: Varro admits his mistake in giving battle and flees the battlefield. This volume is the first full-scale commentary in English devoted exclusively to Punica 9. It features the Latin text with a critical apparatus and a parallel English translation. Detailed commentary notes provide information on literary style, use of language, poetic intertexts, and scholarly interpretation. The Introduction offers further context and background, including sections on Silius Italicus and his era, the historiographic and rhetorical traditions that he adopted, the inter- and intra-textuality of the Cannae episode, and the book's use of diction and metre.

Author: Tiberius Catius Silius Italicus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Punic War, 2nd, 218-201 B.C.
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Author: Antony Augoustakis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004217118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Only recently have scholars turned their attention to Silius Italicus' Punica, a poem the reputation of which was eclipsed by the emergence of Virgil’s Aeneid as the canonical Latin epos of Augustan Rome. This collection of essays aims at examining the importance of Silius' historical epic in Flavian, Domitianic Rome by offering a detailed overview of the poem's context and intertext, its themes and images, and its reception from antiquity through Renaissance and modern philological criticism. This pioneering volume is the first comprehensive, collaborative study on the longest epic poem in Latin literature.

Author: Thomas Biggs
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047213213X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Poetics of the First Punic War investigates the literary afterlives of Rome’s first conflict with Carthage. From its original role in the Middle Republic as the narrative proving ground for epic’s development out of verse historiography, to its striking cultural reuse during the Augustan and Flavian periods, the First Punic War (264–241 BCE) holds an underappreciated place in the history of Latin literature. Because of the serendipitous meeting of historical content and poetic form in the third century BCE, a textualized First Punic War went on to shape the Latin language and its literary genres, the practices and politics of remembering war, popular visions of Rome as a cultural capital, and numerous influential conceptions of Punic North Africa. Poetics of the First Punic War combines innovative theoretical approaches with advances in the philological analysis of Latin literature to reassess the various “texts” of the First Punic War, including those composed by Vergil, Propertius, Horace, and Silius Italicus. This book also contains sustained treatment of Naevius’ fragmentary Bellum Punicum (Punic War) and Livius Andronicus’ Odusia (Odyssey), some of the earliest works of Latin poetry. As the tradition’s primary Roman topic, the First Punic War is forever bound to these poems, which played a decisive role in transmitting an epic view of history.

Author: R. Joy Littlewood
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199570935
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Once stigmatized as 'the worst epic ever written', Silius Italicus' Punica is now the focus of a resurgence of critical interest and wide-ranging positive reappraisal. In a climate of flourishing interest in Flavian literary culture, Punica 7 now joins the rising number of commentaries on Flavian epic. While offering an insightful analysis of Silius' complex intertextuality, Littlewood demonstrates how his republican theme bears the imprint of Rome's more recent experience of civil conflict and the military and civic ethos of the Flavians, and illuminates the poet's engagement with luxuria, exploring tensions within the literary and political culture of the Age of Domitian. The narrative of Punica 7 is a tale of treachery and perseverance, of a battle of wills and the desecration of the Italian land, which is poetically interpreted through intertextual allusion to Virgil's Georgics. In the centre of the book Hannibal commits the anti-pastoral atrocity of igniting 2000 Roman ploughing oxen to simulate a nocturnal raid based on Homer's Doloneia. The burning flesh of this subverted sacrifice, interwoven with imagery evoking bacchanal madness and the rising smoke of the sack of Troy, sets the stage for a dramatic finale in which Rome's traditional virtues triumph over oriental guile and internal discord. This penetrating study explores how the historical narrative coalesces with mythology, the proto-history of Rome, and the genealogy of its protagonists. Littlewood's volume is the first full English commentary on a book of Silius Italicus' Punica and is supported by an extended introduction covering Silius' life, his literary models, the characterization of his protagonists, Fabius and Hannibal, his epic style, and the transmission of the text.

Author: Raymond Marks
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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From Republic to Empire challenges the long-held view that Silius Italicus' Punica is a nostalgic epic and argues that it is, instead, centrally concerned with and fundamentally shaped by the contemporary Flavian world in which it was composed. The epic documents how Rome's Republic took its first steps toward becoming an Empire during the Second Punic War and identifies the leader Scipio Africanus as the critical impetus behind this development: his rise to prominence in the war's later stages brings about a change in Rome's power-structure, a shift toward one-man rule, Scipio's - rule, that prefigures and paves the way for the political arrangement under which the poet himself lived, the Principate. In portraying Scipio as a good king and a virtuous princeps, Silius, furthermore, offers the emperor of his own day, Domitian, a leadership-ideal to aspire to and emulate."

Author: John Jacobs
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350071064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In a much-needed comprehensive introduction to Silius Italicus and the Punica, Jacobs offers an invitation to students and scholars alike to read the epic as a thoughtful and considered treatment of Rome's past, present, and (perilous) future. The Second Punic War marked a turning point in world history: Rome faced her greatest external threat in the famous Carthaginian general Hannibal, and her victory led to her domination of the Mediterranean. Lingering memories of the conflict played a pivotal role in the city's transition from Republic to Empire, from foreign war to civil war. Looking back after the events of AD 69, the senator–poet Silius Italicus identified the Second Punic War as the turning point in Rome's history through his Punica. After introductory chapters for those new to the poet and his poem, Jacobs' close reading of the epic narrative guides students and scholars alike through the Punica. All Greek and Latin passages are translated to ensure accessibility for those reading in English. Far more than simply a retelling of Rome's greatest triumph, the Punica challenges its reader to make sense of the Second Punic War in light of its full impact on the subsequent course of the city's history.