• Monday 17 March - Panel II

Challenging Roman Identity: Hannibal as a hero in Silius Italicus' Punica

Efrossini Spentzou

In the late first century AD the Roman poet Silius Italicus produced a new epic version of the Punic Wars, the great patriotic war of Roman history. In so doing he presents an old story with new heroes, Roman victors such as Fabius Cunctator and Scipio Africanus but also Hannibal, a character one might expect to have been the anti-hero of the piece.

Epic after Virgil's Aeneid was a poetic arena for the discussion and display of Roman ideas of leadership and masculinity. All subsequent epic heroes could be judged against Aeneas, whose dominant moral characteristic of pietas reflected his integration into the social and psychological universes he inhabited. In the politics of the first century elite, the ideals of Aeneadic integration were harder to achieve. With the power concentrated in the hands of the emperor, the historic role of the Roman elite male was severely diminished. Tyranny, as suffered under the later Julio-Claudians and during the reign of Domitian, forced at least part of the elite to withdraw from the public arena. The careers of certain 'martyrs' of this elite showed it was possible, perhaps even ideal, to live disengaged and in opposition to the system, a state which according to modern Lacanian/Foucauldian theories of the self could cause permanent psychological trauma to the individual. These examples raise the possibility of a hero who was not socialised in the Roman style, an oppositional figure who expresses his heroic masculinity in new, perhaps socially isolated, ways.

Silius Italicus' Hannibal, a non-Roman hero, an obvious anti-hero, allows the discussion of conflicting modes of heroism and models of leadership in tension to the heroism of Aeneas and the Roman character of Punica. Hannibal shows characteristics surprisingly close to these of conventional Roman or epic heroes. His social relations echo those of the elite. His wife can be seen as both matrona and elegiac puella (a fusion that we also encounter in the letters of Pliny the Younger), expressing and simultaneously disturbing the polarities of the previous Roman discourses. His military prowess, his success in battle, and his relationship with his troops look forward to the ideals of Roman leaders, a Domitian or a Trojan leading his troops into battle, sharing their hardship.

Hannibal is an amalgam of epic heroes, having something of Aeneas, Hector, Caesar, Turnus, and even Hercules. The hero is both Roman and barbarian disturbing the neat polarities of conventional Roman thought. In an epic on the formation of Roman identity at a moment in which Rome itself was under threat of annihilation, Hannibal is an intriguingly multivalent figure, surrounded by Romans of questionable heroic status, often less brave, less attractive, less energetic than either their Punic enemy or, for instance, the Saguntines whose destruction sparks the war. Hannibal is an archetypal 'Other' with whom the Romans of the first-century AD might be expected to empathise, as his unsettled status and position reflects the anxieties and disintegration of contemporary Roman elite identities.

Department of Classics, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX.

E.Spentzou@rhul.ac.uk