V.d.B.'s monograph offers an excellent contribution to the literary exegesis of Silius Italicus’ Punica and a highly appropriate addition to the series The Language of Classical Literature. The basis for v.d.B.'s examination of four embedded narratives within the Punica is the theory of narratology supported by a meticulous exploration of the poet's intricate web of intra- and intertextual allusions that colour these ‘case studies’, highlighting poetic resonances that echo through imminent events. By revealing the ambiguities implied by allusion, he shows that the ‘embedded narratives’ are strategically positioned within the structure of Silius’ Punica, leading up to the epic's crux and central panel: Hannibal's greatest victory and Rome's worst defeat (Pun. 9–10).
The four embedded passages appear in a significant chronological order. Bostar's visit to Hammon's desert shrine to seek, on Hannibal's behalf, and triumphantly bring back a prophecy of Carthaginian victory, neatly bookends Punica 3 and simultaneously frames Hannibal's Alpine crossing into Italy. The Carthaginian victory at Lake Trasimene closes Punica 5 with Hannibal surveying the ominously ruthless determination imprinted on the faces of the slaughtered Roman; ominously, since Marus’ narrative in Punica 6, potentially an example of mise en abyme, reveals significant flaws in the exemplary fides associated with the hero, Regulus. In the same way, Bacchus’ theoxeny and his gift of wine to the Italian peasant-farmer, Falernus, will prove an ambiguous gift to the Punic invaders. Finally, to herald the paradoxical outcome of the Battle of Cannae, ambiguities abound in the intertexts associated with the embedded narrative of Anna, Dido's sister, now the Italian nymph Anna Perenna, instigated by Juno, to urge Hannibal to fight (Pun. 8).
V.d.B. perceives the first embedded passage as a mirror text. In addition to Silius, as primary narrator, there is Bostar, as a secondary narrator, assuming the role of Hannibal, who, gullibly, receives with delight the ambiguous oracle of the god Hammon represented by a tertiary narrator, Arisbas, priest at the desert shrine. V.d.B. substantiates Silius’ (unspoken) hint that Hannibal follows in the steps of Alexander the Great at Siwa by citing Quintus Curtius’ allusion to the spring that boils at midnight and cools at noon (Pun. 3.669–72). Illuminating is his meticulous list of allusive echoes of Venus’ white dove, Cytheria ales, from the foundation of Hammon's temple through Venus’ twin doves who help Aeneas to find the golden bough (Aen. 6.190) to Silius’ (white clad) priest Arisbas who warns Bostar/Hannibal of the dangers of waging war against the race of Assaracus (Pun. 3.700–1), underscoring Jupiter's reassurance (Pun. 3.573) that Cytherea's descendants will rule long in Italy.
Following the grim narrative of the Romans’ triple defeat at the rivers Trebia and Ticinus and at Lake Trasimene, Silius reverts, in the second and longest embedded narrative, to an epic topos in which a seasoned warrior offers healing and hospitality to a youth or stranger, here Serranus, the wounded and demoralised son of Regulus, who has fortuitously crawled to the doorstep of his father's comrade in arms during the First Punic War. Following a characteristically Silian web of Homeric and Virgilian allusion, v.d.B. selects for close analysis an apparent contrast with Caesar's heavy-handed demand for admission to the hut of the fisherman Amyclas in Lucan's Bellum Civile (bis terque quassantia … | limina, 5.519–20). V.d.B. rightly cites Lucan's epic as a ‘fundamental intertext for many passages in the Punica’ (p. 258), evoking memories of Roman civil conflict, past and recurrent.
In conjunction with Regulus’ heroic duel with the monster serpent beside the vast and muddy Bagrada v.d.B. engages with and contributes to the literary discussion of rivers as generic markers, aptly recalling Lucan's Rubicon, which swells, in epic fashion, after Caesar's momentous crossing (inde moras soluit belli tumidumque per amnem | signa tulit, 1.204–5). V.d.B.'s perception of the network of allusion drawn on by Silius to characterise Regulus’ duel beside the Bagrada reaches into the Stygian regions that bred the monster snakes deployed in the infamous Gigantomachy (Pun. 6.181–2: quantis armati caelum petiere Gigantes | anguibus), a significant Silian metaphor.
V.d.B. points out that Silius’ Regulus, whilst seemingly a model of Roman fides, shares with Flaminius a dangerous love of glory. His Marus witnesses the anguish of Marcia on seeing her husband boarding the ship to return to certain death in Carthage and her conflicting emotions at the sight of her wounded son after the debacle at Lake Trasimene. V.d.B. might usefully have supported this theory with a clinching citation. When Silius closes this embedded narrative, he reverts to the main narrative with an appearance of Jupiter inspiring the senate to entrust the command of the Roman armies to a man entirely devoid of ambition for glory: the supremely selfless Fabius, the hero of Punica 7 (Pun. 6.613–17).
Silius’ third embedded narrative is aptly introduced by the subheadings ‘A New Beginning’ and ‘A Georgic World’ (pp. 131, 135). Silius sets Falernus’ world meliore in aevo (Pun. 7.166), but later than the Golden Age; for, although Falernus sets out spring water for his divine guest, Bacchus, he willingly partakes of the wine he is offered. In keeping with the rustic innocence of Silius’ theoxeny, Falernus’ unsteady progress to his bed causes only divine merriment (pede risum | … titubante moues, 7.200–1). V.d.B., however, traces an intertextual journey from Cleopatra's banquet for Lucan's Caesar (BC 10), to argue that Silius’ innocent narrative introducing Bacchus’ eastern luxury into rural Italy foreshadows the moral disintegration of Hannibal and his troops at the banquets of Capua in Pun. 11 and again in Pun. 13, where Virrius arranges a drinking orgy to ease the suicide by poison of his fellow Capuan traitors. He might have added that Silius’ intertextual allusions to Virgil's Georgics, present in the passages concerned with vines and cattle, show that, since rural Italy, endowed with Bacchus’ gift of wine, had entered an Age of War, Hannibal's nocturnal incineration of 2,000 Italian oxen may be interpreted as a subversion of the Roman triumphator's victory sacrifice to Jupiter. This intrusion of martial narratology paves the way for v.d.B.'s analysis of Bacchus as conqueror, mirroring the Roman leader Scipio, who is likened to both Hercules and Bacchus in his triumph (Pun. 17.647–50).
Silius’ fourth and final ‘embedded narrative’ occurs on the eve of the Battle of Cannae, aptly, as v.d.B. maintains, for he sees the paradox of Hannibal's victory at Cannae mirrored in the conflicting double identities of Anna, Carthaginian sister of Dido and Hannibal's illustrious ancestress, and Anna Perenna, Italian river goddess ominously honoured on the Ides of March. Although Anna's acquiescence to Juno's command that she incite Hannibal to fight at Cannae might be regarded as the normal epic response to Jupiter's Queen from a minor river nymph, v.d.B. examines with forensic precision the verbal significance of Silius’ intertextual allusions to Virgil's tragedy of Dido and Aeneas, signalling the generic crossovers that mark Dido's affinity with Catullus’ abandoned Ariadne and Ovid's elegiac sequel to Anna's encounter with Aeneas observed jealously by Lavinia in Fasti 3.
This book is a splendid addition to Silian studies. It is suitable for a wide range of readers from the undergraduate level onwards. The clarity of its layout, helpful subheadings, detailed contents, bibliography, general index and index locorum, is enhanced by v.d.B.'s agreeably succinct and modestly magisterial style, very occasionally marred by linguistic inaccuracy and contorted spelling.
