The Aeneid, it might be thought, is pretty demonstrably an epic poem. Not so to one Sulpicius Carthaginiensis whose verdict Donatus quotes in his Life of Vergil (38). For Sulpicius has heard the famous story that Augustus disregarded the poet’s death-bed instructions that his poem be burned, and praises the emperor for the care he shows for Roman history ( tu, maxime Caesar,/non sinis et Latiae consulis historiae). Vergil’s successor Lucan seems to have suffered similar problems, and it is a commonplace in ancient criticism to suggest that aspects of his work make him a historian, not a poet (Servius ad Verg. Aen. 1.382; Isid. Orig. 8.7.10; cf. Mart. 14.194). And if a poet could be taken for a historian, so a historian could be taken for a poet: Phylarchus is damned for his constant tragic effects (Pol. 2.56), but Herodotus praised as most Homeric in manner ([Long.] Subl. 13.3).
The critical positions quoted in the previous paragraph have two crucial factors in common: they all presuppose the existence of clear defining qualities which mark out the different literary genres; and they all suggest that these definitions may be easier to sustain in theory than when confronted with the dynamics of a specific literary text. This is, needless to say, an issue that greatly preoccupies both the literary critics of antiquity and the scholars of the modern age, and it would be quite impossible within the confines of this chapter to engage with any but a few of the problems which it throws up. If, however, we turn our attention to some specific instances where history and epic constantly rub up against each other, where a story can be told both ways at once, where a writer manifestly negotiates the dynamics of two competing genres, it may be possible to offer a clearer image of what could be at stake.
M. Tullius Cicero, the greatest orator and perhaps also the greatest man of letters of his age, was consul at Rome for the year 63 bce. He was the first member of his family to obtain the highest office of state, and he had done so at the earliest age at which such power could properly be held. All this was the source of great personal pride. Yet what most distinguished the consulship of Cicero, what won him the title of ‘‘father of the fatherland’’ from his admirers, but also so exposed him to criticism as to result in his exile, was the fact and manner of his suppression of the conspiracy of the twice-defeated consular candidate and renegade aristocrat L. Sergius Catilina. Cicero’s forensic and political oratory of the next twenty years reverts repeatedly to this crisis and looks to it as a source of authority. This, however, was not all. Posterity would require a more enduring monument in the form of a continuous narrative of events. How was this to be effected? Cicero’s first answer was an account written in Greek prose and completed at some point before June 60 bce. A letter to his close associate Atticus (Att. 2.1) reveals that it is not the only such work in circulation; for Atticus himself has written on the same topic, but in a style markedly more clipped than the Isocratean perfume and Aristotelian coloration which Cicero has allowed himself. Others too are to be encouraged to involve themselves, and the Greek Posidonius has been sent a memorandum (hupomnema) on the topic in the hope that this can be turned into something more ornate. Six months later, a second letter (Att. 2.3) quotes from Cicero’s latest version of the same project, and this time what is at issue is a three-book verse account written in the dactylic hexameter of epic. Four years later, the same restless ambition results in a lengthy epistle (Fam. 5.12) to the historian L. Lucceius exhorting him to write a monograph on the events of 63 bce and offering detailed information as the basis for this work. Should Lucceius decline the task, Cicero will undertake it himself.
Cicero’s pursuit of a monument might usefully be compared to the procedures of his great contemporary, C. Julius Caesar. For Caesar too was no mean man of letters and, even on campaign, time could be found for writing. A particular opportunity appears to have been offered by the lengthy journeys from one camp, one theater of war to another, and Suetonius records (DJ 56) that a work On Analogy much loved by later Latin grammarians was composed while returning from Cisalpine Gaul to his legions on the other side of the Alps, and that another, the Journey (Iter), was written during the twenty-four days it took him to reach Farther Spain from Rome. Yet what really matters in this context is the historical record of the general’s various campaigns, dubbed Commentarii as if to suggest that they were mere memoranda much like that supplied to Posidonius by Cicero, but in truth highly polished works of literary self-presentation. Caesar himself takes the credit for the first seven books of the Gallic War and for the Civil War; the final book of the Gallic War, the Alexandrian War, African War, and Spanish War are the work of associates identified variously as Hirtius and Oppius. So much for prose. The same events seem also to have been subject to treatment in more or less instant epic: Furius Bibaculus composed an Annales or Pragmatia Belli Gallici while Varro of Atax narrated the 58 bce campaign against Ariovistus in his Bellum Sequanicum. For an aspiring young poet, fresh out of the province of Narbo (modern Provence), there can have been few better ways to advancement than to hymn the conqueror of his neighbors. Rome would soon celebrate the same man as author of an epic Argonautica as well as of elegies to his beloved Leucadia. The geographical didaxis ofVarro’s Chorographia in turn tackled a topic made new by Caesar’s expansion of the boundaries of the known and conquered world. And where an ambitious debutant might seek promotion through his verses, even an elder statesman could endeavor to cement bonds of friendship and alliance by very similar means: two letters of May and June 54 bce iQ. fr - 2.14; 2.16) show Cicero urging on his brother Quintus the joint undertaking of an epic on the invasion of Britain begun only a year before.
That the great deeds of statesmen and generals were to be transmitted to the Roman people through works of literature was no invention of the late republic. Nor were epic and historiography the only available means. The victory of M. Claudius Marcellus over the Gallic chieftain Viridomarus in 222 BCE was celebrated at Rome through Naevius’ drama, the Clastidium, and the conquest of Macedon by the forces of L. Aemilius Paulus in 168 BCE was dramatized by Pacuvius in his Paulus. The theatrical mode known as the fabula praetexta or praetextata endured, and it is striking to note that the title Iter belongs not just to the work of Caesar cited above but also to the drama in which his ally, L. Cornelius Balbus, depicted his own attempts to win the Pompeian L. Lentulus over to Caesar’s side at the outbreak of the civil war. In all this there is a major issue - the role of literature in the management of opinion - that must necessarily remain at the margins of this discussion. What must instead be emphasized is something apparent in each of the examples cited: the susceptibility of the same deeds to be represented almost simultaneously in a variety of different media and genres. Recognition of this situation must therefore raise the further questions: To what extent would an epic and a historical account of the same event overlap? Which rules individuating these modes are identified and how far can they be said to hold? The evidence is intriguing.
That epic and historiography frequently do the same work and employ the same modes may be illustrated with regard to one recurring title. Reference has already been made to the Annales Belli Gallici of Furius Bibaculus, and it may be noted that another poet of the 50s bce, Catullus, will twice identify the Annales of the otherwise unknown Volusius as the epitome of bad epic verse (Catull. 36; 95). Both Furius and Volusius are clearly in thrall to the great historical epic of Rome, the Annales of Ennius, composed around 120 years before, and this is as evident in terms of style as of title. For when Furius in Book 4 of his work wishes to describe the close combat of two legions going toe-to-toe, sword against sword, man against man (pressatur pede pes, mucro mucrone, viro vir, FLP F 10), he looks to a celebrated verse of Ennius depicting the same situation ( premitur pede pes atque armis arma teruntur, Ann. Inc. cxxii). Annales therefore is the characteristic designation of a Roman epic on a historical theme, and the style ofone such poem is very likely to recall that ofanother. Yet the term itself alludes to the priestly records of Roman life, and the tendency visible in Ennius to begin a given year with the names of the two consuls in office imitates the manner of these records (Enn. Ann. FF 290, 304-305, 324, 329; Serv. adVerg. Aen. 1.373). And this in turn very closely aligns the poetic project of Ennius with the mode of prose history most typical of the late second and early first century bce; for C. Acilius, C. Cassius Hemina, Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus, L. Calpurnius Piso Censorius, C. Fannius, C. Sempronius Tuditanus, Cn. Gellius, and Q. Claudius Quadrigarius all composed works under the title Annales. When Tacitus writing at the close of the first century ce opens his Annales with a hexameter ( urbem Romam a principio reges habuere), he may point to the capacity of the title to signify both poetry and prose. Resort to the old dating formula is in turn significant by its insignificance: where the republican historians identified the center of power at Rome when they named the consuls for the year, Tacitus highlights its displacement. The first sentence of Book 4 - ‘‘In the consulship of C. Asinius and C. Antistius, Tiberius had the ninth year of a well-ordered state and a flourishing house’’ (Ann. 4.1.1) - juxtaposes the old center and the new, and exposes what has happened to the archaic mode.
If the hexametrical form of its first sentence suggests affinity between the Annales of Tacitus and the Ennian epic of the same name, its content may indicate some significant points of difference. For Tacitus takes the reader back to essentially the same point of departure as Ennius - the foundation of Rome - but the bald assertion, that the city began as a monarchy, leaves much else out. Livy likewise, in the preface to his Ab Urbe Condita, freely admits (praef. 6-7) that stories of Rome prior to and in the time of its foundation are adorned with poetic tales (poeticis.. .fabulis) rather than with uncorrupted records of deeds performed (incorruptis rerum gestarum monumentis), and excuses antiquity for blending the human and the divine ( miscendo humana divinis) in order to make the origins of cities seem more august. Ennius, by contrast, invokes the Muses; tells of a dream in which he is visited by the weeping ghost of Homer; and then records both the coming of Aeneas to Italy and the birth of Romulus and Remus after the daughter of Aeneas is made pregnant by Mars.
Aristotle defines epic as a form devoted to the deeds of gods and heroes and men. To suggest, in turn, that the defining characteristic of ancient historiography is its determined exclusion of the heroic and the divine would be grossly to simplify the variety of such writing. Polybius 9.1-2 is essential here: the pragmatic history of cities and peoples and kings to which the writer cleaves is contrasted with that dealing in genealogies, which will attract those who care to listen to a story, and a third mode preoccupied with colonies, foundations, and kinship, which will appeal to those of active curiosity and a taste for the recondite. That Livy and Tacitus are closest in their concerns to the Polybian pragmatic mode does not invalidate the claim of histories of genealogy or foundations to be considered under the heading of history. Many did indeed embrace such preoccupations, and gods and heroes are by no means absent from their works. What can perhaps be said is that one self-consciously historical approach is to disavow the study of periods so distant in time as to allow no verification of any claim or to strip away from the narrative any statements alleging the active intervention of the heroic or the divine in the deeds of men. Should we return, for instance, to the competing narratives of Cicero’s consulate, it will be of value to note the distaste with which Quintilian reports (11.1.24) that Cicero’s verse narrative had him transported by Jupiter to a council of the gods and taught the arts by Minerva. Quintilian himself suggests that Cicero is following Greek models, and scholars have pointed to the historian Silenus of Caleacte, who claims that Hannibal dreamed that he was brought to the presence of Jupiter before the siege of Saguntum. It might here be observed that it is precisely the reference to a dream which sufficiently distances the author from the claim as to permit it some place in history; in the first book of the Annales, by contrast, a council of the gods is represented as actively pondering the state of affairs on earth and in Rome, and this motif will recur in the epic narratives of Vergil, Aeneid 10 and Ovid, Metamorphoses 1, as well as in the parodic Lucilius, Satires 1. When Cicero writes to Lucceius requesting his Latin prose history of the same events, he invites him to go some way beyond the laws of history (leges historiae) and the principle of verisimilitude (veritas), but the reader will draw pleasure only from tales of treason, conspiracy, and the vicissitudes of fortune. There is no suggestion that the consul can be taken off to heaven.
Tacitus furnishes a less extreme but no less revealing example in Book 2 of his Annales, where he describes (2.23-24) the calamitous voyage of Germanicus down the Ems River and out into the North Sea at the height of the campaigning season of 16 CE. This narrative has often been linked to an intriguing and indeed impressive twenty-three-line verse fragment recorded by Seneca the Elder (Suas. 1.15) and attributed to the poet Albinovanus Pedo. Should - as seems likely - this man be identical to the praefectus Pedo identified by Ann. 1.60.2 as serving with Germanicus in Germany in 15 CE, then the relationship between general and author must be very similar to that earlier sketched out for Julius Caesar and the likes of Varro of Atax. What then can be said to set the historian and the poet apart? There is indeed much in the Tacitean account to align it with what survives of the work of Pedo, and both writers stress the foggy impenetrability of the sea and the anxieties of the sailors who brave it. Tacitus also reports in detail the storm that disperses and almost destroys the fleet of Germanicus, and his account loses nothing in menace for not repeating all the hyperbolic tropes typical of epic storm narratives from Odyssey 5 to Aeneid 1 and on. How Pedo would have narrated the same material can only be guessed. Where a clear difference between the writers can be identified is in their handling of the monsters of the deep. Pedo’s treatment takes the reader straight into the anguished hearts of the sailors as they imagine what may occur:
Now they think Ocean, that breeds beneath its sluggish waves Terrible monsters, savage sea-beasts everywhere,
And dogs of the sea, is rising, taking the ships with it
(The very noise increases their fears): now they think the vessels
Are sinking in the mud, the fleet deserted by the swift wind,
Themselves left by indolent fate to the sea-beasts,
To be torn apart unhappily.
(tr. Winterbottom)
The further development of this motif is a matter of speculation. What stands uncontested is the vivid, empathetic engagement of the poet with fears of a disaster not yet realized. Contrast the historian, who closes his narrative with the following deliberate refusal of the more elaborate fictions generated by the expedition (Ann. 2.24.4):
Those who had returned from great distances told of wonders, the power of storms and unheard of birds, monsters of the sea, forms half-man and half-beast, things seen or believed out of fear.
It would indeed be rash to claim that ancient historiography has no place for sea-monsters and related wonders; what matters here is the way that history defines itself by its world-weary detachment from the very anxieties for which epic must find room.
It has been noted that Pedo represents not the actual intervention of sea-monsters but the fear of their intervention. This psychological turn might itself be seen as historical epic’s nod to history. The close of the passage offers something similar. These modern Argonauts have their own Lynceus, but either his sight is less acute or the northern mist more impenetrable than any encountered by the keen-eyed helmsman of myth. Standing aloft on the prow but still unable to make out the world in front of him, he urges the abandonment of the voyage, claims that the gods forbid mortal eyes to know the end of the world (di revocant rerumque vetant cognoscere finem/mortalis oculos), and asks why they violate the sacred waters (sacras... aquas) and disturb the peaceful seats of the gods ( divumque quietas/... sedes). The fragment breaks off and we can never be sure whether the voyagers do indeed reach the world of the gods. Yet the clear echo of Lucretius 3.18 (divum numen sedesque quietae) offers a clue. The Epicurean hymns his master’s teachings and claims that they permit him to form a visual image of the world of the gods; that world, however, is one which Epicurus locates at the very edge of the universe, and it is one which is free from the slightest physical interaction with the world of mortals. The allusion to Lucretius thus helps align this part of Pedo’s work with what has come before: we engage empathetically with the anxiety that this voyage may lead to the world of the gods, but that world is never actually penetrated or described.
A point of tension has been identified, and it is one that can also be detected in the two great historical epics to survive extant. Neither the Pharsalia or Civil War of Lucan nor the Punica of Silius Italicus belong to the category of instant-epic studied so far; for Lucan, who died in 65 ce, writes of the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey which broke out over a century before in 49 bce, while Silius, Nero’s last consul in 68 ce and an active participant in the struggle for the throne which engulfed Rome a year later, devoted the long years of his retirement to producing a seventeen-book epic on the war against Hannibal which occupied the last twenty years of the third century bce. Yet both authors demonstrate the awareness that the material with which they engage is essentially historical before it is epic, and this has consequences very similar to those identified in Pedo. This is most obviously the case in Lucan, who devotes extended passages to the marginal world of necromancy and witchcraft, who constantly invokes the concepts of Fortune and Fate, who has his narrator deliver impassioned addresses to the gods, who even holds forth the prospect of Nero’s apotheosis, but who will never actually describe any appearance or speech on the part of a god. consider, for instance, the extended catalogue of portents faced by the people of Rome that occupies Pharsalia 1.522-695. Lucan states (1.524-525), that the menacing gods filled land, sky, and sea with prodigies (superique minaces/ prodigiis terras inplerunt, aethera, pontum), and opens Book 2 with the statement that the anger of the gods was now clear (2.1, iamque irae patuere deum). All that is missing is what the epics of Ennius, Vergil, and Ovid would surely lead the reader to expect: the figure of Jupiter setting out his wrath against mortals and his plan to punish them. If one believes in the existence of the gods, then the fact of the civil war must prove their malevolence; if one believes that portents are the gods’ way of communicating with man, then these portents must be denunciations of their wrath.
When Lucan comes to narrate the decisive battle of Pharsalus, he first lists all the signs by which Fortune indicated the coming disaster (7.151-152, non tamen abstinuit venturosprodere casus/per varias Fortuna notas); as the armies rush to the fight, he delivers a long lament for what is to come and despairingly concludes that mortal affairs have been cared for by no god (7.454-455, mortalia nulli/sunt curata deo). That this is a perspective more than compatible with historiography is apparent from Tacitus and the summary of what this story of Roman civil war will include (Hist. 1.3): portents and omens in heaven and on earth (caelo terraque prodigia et fulmi-num monitus et futurorum praesagia, laeta tristia, ambigua manifesta) and a citizen slaughter so atrocious as to prove that the gods care nothing to protect Rome, only to take revenge against her (non esse curae deis securitatem nostram, esse ultionem).
Lucan’s epic is a scandal in the eyes of conventional literary aesthetics. Petronius (Sat. 118-124) has much fun with this as his Eumolpus, ever the poet, ever the critic, first lectures his companions on the necessary components of an epic of civil war, then treats them to a 294-line sample of his own handling of the theme. The poet must accept that the historian is better equipped to give a factual report of the deeds of men (non enim res gestae comprehendae sunt, quod longe melius historici faciunt); his work must rather be riddled with mystery, divine agency, and myth (per ambages deorumque ministeria et fabulosum sententiarum tormentum), and must more closely resemble the prophecy of a raging mind (furentis animi vaticinatio) than the authority of a sworn statement before witnesses ( religiosae orationis sub testibus fides). In the ensuing verses, Eumolpus covers approximately the same body of material as the first book of the Pharsalia, but in such a manner as to erase all that is most heretical about Lucan. Gods, in particular, abound, and there are speeches from Dis, Fortune, and Discordia; the mode is Vergilian, if not Ennian, and its execution determinedly, indeed fatally, conventional.
Silius Italicus was no enemy of rules or convention. It would be facile to identify him as a real-life Eumolpus, but the seventeen books of his Punica do indeed put back into epic that which Lucan ejected and the Petronian poetaster demands. What makes this work particularly interesting for our concerns is the thoroughgoing dependence of Silius on Books 21-30 of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita for the historical material which he treats and on Vergil's Aeneid for his definition of epic; the scholar of the Punica will indeed need rather more to hand than just a text of Vergil and of Livy, but these two authors are quite essential if one is to identify which maneuvers Silius must perform in order to ensure that his historical epic is indeed recognized as an epic.
The Punica begins (1.1-16) with the assertion of a most Vergilian theme: the arms (arma) by which the glory of the sons of Aeneas rose to heaven, and the greatness and the number of the men (viros) to which Rome gave birth as she strove with Carthage for power over the world; the Muse is invoked, and the limits of the narrative set out. There then follows (1.17-20) a brief introduction to the necessary account of the causes of the Second Punic War, and here too the Aeneid is of fundamental importance. For just as Vergil had told of Juno’s unremitting hostility to Aeneas, then plaintively asked whether divine spirits were possessed of such great wrath (Aen. 1.11: tantaene animis caelestibus irae?), so here Silius professes that it is right (fas) for him to reveal the causes of such great wrath (tantarum causas irarum) and to open up the minds of the gods (superasque recludere mentes). Where the historians Lucan and Tacitus are content merely to record the phenomena that can be taken to indicate the mind of the gods, Silius as epicist can claim more direct access to their counsel and their deeds: Juno summons a fury from hell (Pun. 2.526-649); the anxious Venus consults Jupiter on the future of Rome (Pun. 3.557-629); Proteus consoles nymphs alarmed when the Carthaginians make ground at Caieta (Pun. 7.409-493); and the successful resolution of the conflict is predicated on Jupiter’s ability to persuade Juno to abandon her support of Hannibal (Pun. 17.338-384).
The dying curse of Vergil’s Dido (Aen. 4.622-629) effectively identifies the Punica as the necessary sequel to the Aeneid. The avenger on whom Dido calls remains unnamed but can indeed be none other than Hannibal. Silius begins his version ofthe causes of the war with reference to Dido and the foundation of Carthage (Pun. 1.21-25). He then asserts Juno’s special love for the city and in such a manner as to recall a very similar statement in Vergil (Pun. 1.26-28; cf. Aen. 1.15-18). Yet where Vergil claims that Samos was second in Juno’s heart, Silius points to Argos and the Mycenae of Agamemnon (ante Argos.../ante Agamemnonian, gratissima tecta, Mycenen). Vergil here replaces Vergil, for Aen. 1.283-285 will represent Rome’s conquest of Greece as Troy’s vengeance over the lands of Achilles and Agamemnon (Phthiam clarasque Mycenas/servitio premet ac victis dominabitur Argis) while Anchises at 6.836-837 will point to Mummius as the man destined to topple Argos and the Mycenae of Agamemnon ( Argos Agamemnoniasque Mycenas). Vergil’s oddly inert allusion to the great temple of Hera at Samos gives way in Silius to a restatement of something more fundamental to the Aeneid:. the treatment of myth as the necessary precursor of Rome’s historical experience, and the representation of the events of history as the final playing out of the conflicts of myth. From here the poem can leap over the suicide and curse of Dido and take the reader straight into the First Punic War, Juno’s wrath at the defeat of Carthage, and the necessary emergence of Hannibal as the leader needed in order to realize her plan (Pun. 1.29-37). Silius has now reached the world of Livy 21-30; his material is now more directly that of history; but the restless Juno is a thoroughly epic driving force behind events.
Hamilcar, father of Hannibal, was one of the most distinguished Carthaginian commanders of the First Punic War. Livy (21.1.5) emphasizes Hamilcar’s anguish at the loss of Sicily to Roman arms and Sardinia to Roman treachery as the source of an enduring rancor, and Silius suggests much the same (Pun. 1.60-62). This family tradition is essential to a famous anecdote retailed by a number of historians of the Punic Wars (Pol. 3.11.5-7; Livy 21.1.4; 35.19.3; Nep. Hann. 2.3-4; App. Iber. 9) and now made prominent in Silius (Pun. 1.81-139). Close attention to how Silius retells the story will offer much evidence for his sense of what defines the historical and what the epic.
When Hannibal was a child of nine and his father about to leave to take up his command in Spain, Hamilcar brought his son before the altar at which he was sacrificing and made him swear an oath of life-long enmity to Rome. So say the historians, and both Livy and Nepos authorize their tale by stating that Hannibal himself once told it to king Antiochus. Silius immediately gives his version epic color through the detailed description of the temple in which the rites were held:
In the midst of the city there was a temple sacred to the spirit of mother Elissa and tended by the Tyrians with ancestral awe, which yew trees and pines around and about had hidden away with their murky shade, keeping it away from the light of heaven. In this place, so they say, had the queen once divested herself of mortal cares.
The phrase ‘‘In the midst of the city there was’’ (urbe fuit media) takes the reader straight back to Aen. 1.441 and the description of the grove where the Carthaginians first discovered the stallion’s head which pledged the future prosperity of the city. Here too Dido is building a temple and Vergil pauses to describe the various scenes depicted on its frieze (Aen. 1.446-492). Yet where Vergil’s grove is most delightful in its shade (Aen. 1.441: laetissimus umbrae), that in Silius is a place of gloom, enveloped by the yew and the pine, the classic trees of mourning. For the temple that this grove surrounds is dedicated to the spirit of Dido and is located on the very spot where, her curse delivered, she stabbed herself with the sword of Aeneas and met her end. The setting makes clear that the enduring hostility of Hannibal towards Rome is more than just a family inheritance; it is also the playing out of an epic role imposed on him some ten centuries before. Where Vergil’s Dido prays for an avenger to rise up and pursue the Dardanian settlers with torch and sword (Aen. 4.626: qui face Dardanios ferroque sequare colonos), Hannibal vows that he will pursue the Romans with sword and fire (Pun. 1.115: ferro ignique sequar).
At this point Silius introduces a priestess (sacerdos) to interpret the entrails of the black-fleeced sheep sacrificed to Hecate, goddess of the underworld. She describes a vision of the fighting in Italy right up to the storm with which Jupiter will drive Hannibal from the walls of Rome. Juno forbids her to tell any more (cf. Aen. 3.379-380). This episode is absent from the prose histories and it may indeed be considered as another self-conscious marker of what distinguishes the Punica as epic from the works of Livy, Polybius, and the rest. For the Roman poets from the age of Augustus onwards had characteristically dubbed themselves vates (‘‘prophet’’) or sacerdos musarum (‘‘priest of the Muses’’), and had thus identified themselves not just as writers but as priests and prophets too. That this priestess is in part a surrogate for Silius himself is further suggested by a striking verbal echo. For where Silius has claimed the religious authority to open up the minds of the gods (1.19: superasque recludere mentes), now he states that the priestess in her prophecy enters the minds of the gods (1.124: intravit mentes superum). This is precisely that mode of irrational knowledge that history disavows and without which traditional epic, the epic spurned by Lucan and restored by Silius, simply could not be. The poet maps for us the contours of his genre.
The sketch of Silius at work furnished in the preceding pages puts much emphasis on the preexistence of a historical investigation and a historical narrative that the epic poet can now rewrite in such a way as to make it behave like epic. Yet it would be misleading to suggest that the relationship between the genres is ever thus. There are other occasions where the primary narrative is very likely that furnished by the poets and the historians do what they must to make it compatible with prose. Livy, for instance, has the inclement general and harsh father L. Manlius Torquatus insist that his own son must die for his failure to await the commander’s instruction to engage the enemy, and allege that he has undone the military discipline by which Rome has stood until this day (8.7.16: quantum in tefuit, disciplinam militarem, qua stetit ad hanc diem Romana res, solvisti). There can be little doubt that this speech depends in substance on the Ennian original, in which the father observes that the Roman state stands by customs and men (Enn. Ann. F 156: moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque).
Even clearer evidence of the same procedure can be found in the Epitome of Florus, a most stylish abbreviation of Roman history composed in all probability towards the beginning of the second century ce. When Florus comes to the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, he has little hesitation in drawing on the Pharsalia as if Lucan were indeed the historian the critics quoted at the start of this chapter took him to be. To Lucan a crucial cause of the civil war is the inability of Caesar to endure a superior or Pompey an equal (1.125-126: nec quemquam iam ferre potest Caesar priorem/ Pompeiusve parem); Florus describes the same dynamic (2.13.14: nec ille ferebat parem, nec hic superiorem). When Caesar’s army suffers a setback in Illyria, Florus speaks of Fortune daring to strike a blow against the absent general (2.13.30: aliquid tamen adversus absentem ducem ausa Fortuna est); the phrasing clearly reproduces Lucan’s version of the same episode (non eadem belli totum fortuna per orbem/ constitit, in partes aliquid sed Caesaris ausa est). The collective suicide of Caesar’s Opitergian supporters after their ship is ensnared by the Cilician supporters of Pompey featured prominently in Livy Book 110, but it is to Lucan that one must look in order to appreciate the point of Florus’ phrasing. Where Lucan claims that the Cilicians drew on their ancient arts (4.448-449: at Pompeianus fraudes innectere ponto/antiqua parat arte Cilix), Florus states that the art was new (nova Pompeia-norum arte Cilicum); where Lucan gives a speech to the Opitergian captain Vulteius in which he proclaims the opportunity to set some great and memorable example for posterity (4.496-497: nescio quod nostris magnum et memorabile fatis/exemplum, Fortuna, paras), then draws from the suicide an example ill at ease with the sailors’ devotion to Caesar (4.575-581), Florus states that Vulteius left a memorable example for posterity (2.13.33: Vulteius in vadis haesit memorandumque posteris exemplum dedit), but does not in fact specify what that example was. For that it will be necessary to go back to the poet.
It is instructive to close with the example of Florus. For those critics who claimed that the Pharsalia was no true poem but really a history scarcely regarded this judgment as a compliment: too direct, too overt, too lacking in the mystery, the obliquity true verse requires. This is a discourse that cannot but privilege poetry over prose. Yet the historian is not bound to see things this way, to see a Silius making gold out of the base metal of a Livy. When Florus so insistently crams his account of the civil war with pointers back to the Pharsalia, he may instead be implying that this is no poet but a proper, serious historian.
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