About this ebook
The Punica opens with a paradox. Silius Italicus promises a war that raised Rome's glory to the heavens and ended with Carthage bowed under Roman rule. Almost at once he turns that triumph around. Fortune, he says, long debated which city would rule the world, and the people who finally won came nearer to ruin than anyone else. What follows is Rome's great struggle against Carthage, told as heroic poetry, with the dead piling up at Ticinus, the Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae.
The figure who drives the poem is not a Roman at all. It is Hannibal. In the first book Juno, who loves Carthage and fears Rome, finds her instrument in him, and he takes up her fury as his own. From then on his campaign is more than a general's ambition. It is a divine grudge carried out by a human hand, and the poem's energy comes from the enemy side.
Silius Italicus was a Roman poet writing in the tradition of epic, where gods take sides, dreams and prophecies announce what is coming, and the fate of nations is argued out on Olympus before it is fought on the ground. His Punica is a literary epic, not an eyewitness record, and it is best enjoyed as a poem: crowded, grim, and ambitious, narrowing again and again from whole armies to a single fighter's charge, wound, and death.
What makes this edition different:
• Translated directly from the Latin. Made from the Summers and Postgate text of 1905, with no existing English translation used.
• All seventeen books. The whole poem as it survives in the source edition.
• Honest about the gaps. The six places where the source text is missing are marked plainly. Nothing has been invented to fill them.
• Complete and unsoftened. Nothing cut or altered to suit modern sensibilities. This is not a children's edition.
• An introduction that explains how the poem works: the gods, the prophecies and speeches, and the single combats that give it its texture.
For readers drawn to Hannibal and the war with Carthage, for lovers of Virgil and Lucan looking for the next great Latin epic, and for anyone curious about a patriotic poem that dares to ask what winning cost and how close the winners came to being the losers.
