In 1765 (according to the date recorded in the manuscript) John Trumbull, one of the leading members of the prominent New England literary coterie known as the Hartford Wits or, more generally, the Connecticut Wits, translated the first two verses of the Punica as well as the first word of the third verse (Carthago), but he needed two heroic couplets to turn the Latin into English – twice the length of the original (Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University, #14–17–2641). Given that the rest of the page is blank, I have to suspect that Trumbull realised that he would need some 25,000 lines of English to translate the poem in its entirety, if that was his intention, and that he wisely abandoned the project in its infancy. Indeed, few have been chalcenteric enough to produce a complete translation of the longest Latin epic into English: Thomas Ross (1661/1672); Henry William Tytler (1828); and J.D. Duff (1934), the outdated Loeb; as well as the Rev. Thomas Chase (1756 [1759]: H. Furlong Baldwin Library, Maryland Historical Society, MS 229) and, most recently, A.S. Kline (2018: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/). Now, A. and B. have collaborated to publish the first complete English translation of Josef Delz's 1987 Teubner, the standard critical edition, with B. primarily responsible for Books 1–2, 4–5 and 7–11 and A. for Books 3, 6 and 12–17, as well as the introduction and the notes (p. 6). The publication marks a major milestone in the study of Flavian epic and should help to bring the Punica to a far broader audience of both students and scholars in Classics as well as in related fields.

The volume begins with an efficient and effective introduction to the expected topics, from ‘Silius Italicus’ Life and Career’ and ‘Structure of the Punica’ to ‘Sources’ and ‘Heroes’. More might have been written – space permitting, of course – to help first-time readers of the epic, especially on the fraught relationship between Rome and Carthage, as well as on the pivotal importance of the Second Punic War for Roman, and also for Carthaginian, history. In ‘The Text of the Poem and our Translation’ A. and B. explain their choice of prose over poetry: ‘most contemporary readers will still find a long narrative poem in English to be an unfamiliar form’ (p. 5). The point is well taken, and yet there is inevitably something lost in the process of making the Punica more ‘familiar’. Likewise, A. and B. understandably edit out Silius’ dizzying array of mythological and historical allusions, but the result is a prose rendering of the Punica that reads, at times, more prosaically than perhaps need be. The ‘Bibliography for Further Reading’ includes the most important anglophone scholarship on the Punica, but might have been expanded – again, space permitting – to include scholarship on the Second Punic War and the Flavians. Readers interested in immersing themselves in the recent deluge of edited volumes on Flavian Rome and Flavian literature, some published after this translation, might consult the following collections: Flavian Rome (2003), Flavian Poetry (2006), Flavian Epic Interactions (2013), Family in Flavian Epic (2016), The Literary Genres in the Flavian Age (2017), After 69 c.e. – Writing Civil War in Flavian Rome (2018), Intertextuality in Flavian Epic (2020), Elements of Tragedy in Flavian Epic (2021) and, of course, the many volumes edited by A. (et al.) not already included here.

The translation itself strikes a reasonable balance between readability in translation and fidelity to the original, from ‘I begin to sing of the arms’ (p. 8) to ‘claiming you are the Tarpeian Thunder God's offspring’ (p. 299). A. and B. do not devise a title for each book of the poem, but they insert subheadings within each book to guide readers, especially first-time readers, through the text. The occasional footnotes throughout identify textual issues and elucidate obscure references, while the asterisks after proper names and other key terms direct readers to the glossary at the end. The addition of a chronology of the Second Punic War and at least one map of the Mediterranean would have helped readers keep their bearings. While A. and B. signal their departures from Delz in the footnotes, any serious critic of the text will want to evaluate their editorial decisions as a whole: see pp. 12 n. 10, 15 n. 12, 17 n. 14, 23 n. 22, 45 n. 5, 47 n. 6, 50 n. 12, 51 n. 14, 56 n. 18, 58 nn. 24–5, 60 n. 3, 99 n. 6, 101 n. 7, 128 n. 24, 138 n. 17, 143 n. 30, 154 n. 14, 162 n. 4, 169 n. 10, 172 n. 13, 174 n. 16, 182 n. 13, 186 n. 17, 194 n. 4, 196 n. 10, 201 n. 20, 206 n. 31, 207 nn. 32–3, 214 n. 9, 220 n. 17, 225 nn. 31–2, 230 n. 51, 236 n. 14, 243 n. 32, 245 n. 35, 247 n. 38, 250 n. 4, 272 nn. 4–5, 275 n. 7, 278 n. 11, 282 n. 17, 298 n. 29. More broadly speaking, A. and B. regard the Additamentum Aldinum (8.144–223) as ‘likely not by Silius Italicus but by a later imitator’ (p. 132); they remain agnostic about the possibility of a lacuna after either 17.290 or 291 (p. 291 n. 12). The challenge of translating the Punica, whether into poetry or into prose, can be illustrated by the example of the words that the dying Solymus wrote in his own blood, at the behest of his dying father, Satricus, upon the shield of his dead brother, Mancinus: FUGE PROELIA VARRO (9.175). A. and B. justifiably translate this as ‘VARRO, AVOID THE COMBAT!’ (p. 149; cf. 9.260–1), but the more literal ‘VARRO, FLEE THE BATTLE!’ may better preserve the ambiguity of the oracular utterance in Latin, where the injunction fuge is initially interpreted as ‘avoid’ but subsequently (and ironically) fulfilled when Hannibal mockingly shouts fuge, Varro (10.514 bis), justifiably translated by A. and B. as ‘run away’ (p. 172).

The book has not been edited by the press as carefully as it could have been. There is an inconsistent use of capitalisation in ‘Book’ vs ‘book’, ‘Island(s)’ vs ‘island(s)’, ‘Ocean’ vs ‘ocean’ and ‘Sea’ vs ‘sea’, as well as ‘Mount’ vs ‘Mt.’ and ‘River X’ vs ‘X River’, and an inconsistent style for cross-references, which are usually to a numbered footnote (e.g. pp. 18 n. 16, 26 n. 4), but occasionally to the Latin by book and verse(s) (pp. 67 n. 9, 69 n. 12; see also 73 n. 14). Not every term asterisked in the text appears in the glossary, and not every term in the glossary is asterisked in the text. Some of the etymologies offered for place names are dubious: pp. 73 n. 15 (Thapsus), 305 (s.v. Casperia), 308 (s.v. Dindyma). Other (possible) errata include the following: pp. 89 n. 12 (Aequana = Aequa, near Vicus Aequensis, mod. Vico Equense: see B. Parascandolo, Lettera I. Sull'antica città di Aequa [1782], pp. xxxv–xxxvii), 126 n. 20 (the murex is a sea snail, not a ‘purple fish’), 185 n. 14 (cf. Livy 23.10.3–13?), 223 n. 24 (a reference to the Cocytus, cf. 13.426?), 260 n. 16 (castoreum comes from the beaver's castor sacs, not its testicles), 282 n. 16 (a misreading of the text?), 304 s.v. Byrsa (‘Dido purchased the land [of Carthage] with strips of a bull's hide’ is unclear to me). Perhaps most importantly of all, especially if we fall victim to the human foible of judging a book by its cover, the addition of the subtitle ‘Rome's War with Hannibal’ strikes me as potentially misleading: the poem is equally, if not more so, ‘Hannibal's War with Rome’, as we see when Hannibal swears his famous oath of eternal hatred early in Book 1 – ultimately, no subtitle may have been the best choice. Regardless, this is an important book, which will, I hope, convince those who need convincing that the Punica is worth the time and effort, both for its ‘epicization of history’ (p. 3) and for its ‘take’ on Flavian Rome.