Silius, however, had perfect poetic appreciation, with scarce a trace of poetic creativeness.
No writer has ever been more correctly and more uniformly judged by contemporaries and by posterity alike. Only the shame less flatterer, Martial, ventured to call his friend a poet as great as Virgil. But the younger Pliny gently says that he wrote poems with greater diligence than talent, and that, when according to the fashion of the time, he recited them to his friends, "he some times found out what men really thought of them." It is indeed strange that the poem lived on. Silius is never mentioned by an cient writers after Pliny except Sidonius, who, under different conditions and at a much lower level, was such another as he. Since the discovery of Silius by Poggio, no modern enthusiast has arisen to sing his praises. His poem has been rarely edited since the 18th century. Yet, by the purity of his taste and his Latin in an age when taste was fast becoming vicious and Latin corrupt, by his presentation to us of a type of a thousand vanished Latin epics, and by the historic aspects of his subject, Silius merits better treatment from scholars than he has received. The general reader he can hardly interest again. He is indeed of imitation all compact, and usually dilutes what he borrows; he may add a new beauty, but new strength he never gives. Hardly a dozen lines anywhere are without an echo of Virgil, and there are frequent admixtures of Lucretius, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Homer, Hesiod and many other poets still extant.
If we could reconstitute the library of Silius we should prob ably find that scarcely an idea or a phrase in his entire work was wholly his own.
The raw material of the Punica, which covers 17 books, was supplied in the main by the third decade of Livy, though Silius may have consulted other historians of the Hannibalic war. Such facts as are used are generally presented with their actual circum stances unchanged, and in their historic sequence. The spirit of the Punic times is but rarely misconceived--as when to secret vot ing is attributed the election of men like Flaminius and Varro, and distinguished Romans are depicted as contending in a gladia torial exhibition. Silius clearly intended the poem to consist of
twenty-four books, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, but after the twelfth he hurries in visible weariness to the end, and concludes with seventeen. The general plan of the epic follows that of the Iliad and the Aeneid. Its theme is conceived as a duel between two mighty nations, with parallel dissensions among the gods. Scipio and Hannibal are the two great heroes who take the place of Achilles and Hector on the one hand and of Aeneas and Turnus on the other, while the minor figures are all painted with Virgilian or Homeric pigments. In the delineation of character our poet is neither very powerful nor very consistent. His imagination was too weak to realize the actors with distinctness and individuality. His Hannibal is evidently at the outset meant for an incarnation of cruelty and treachery, the embodiment of all that the vulgar Roman attached to the name "Punic." But in the course of the poem the greatness of Hannibal is borne in upon the poet, and his feeling of it betrays itself in many touches. Thus he names Scipio "the great Hannibal of Ausonia"; he makes Juno assure the Carthaginian leader that if fortune had only permitted him to be born a Roman he would have been admitted to a place among the gods; and, when the ungenerous monster of the first book accords in the fifteenth a splendid burial to Marcellus, the poet cries, "You would fancy it was a Sidonian chief who had fallen." Silius deserves little pity for the failure of his attempt to make Scipio an equipoise to Hannibal and the counterpart in personal prowess and prestige of Achilles. He becomes in the process almost as mythical a figure as the mediaeval Alexander. The best drawn of the minor characters are Fabius Cunctator, an evident copy of Lucan's Cato, and Paullus, the consul killed at Cannae, who fights, hates and dies like a genuine man.