Civil war, parricide, and the sword in Silius Italicus’s Punica

Abstract

Silius’s representation of dynasty, parricide, and the imagery of the ensis and sceptrum in the Punica comprises the focus of this chapter. Parricide emerges from Silius’s epic as the paradigmatic crime of civil war, revealing a particularly Flavian preoccupation with the role of discordia within familial and perhaps even dynastic systems. Within the Punica, the ensis and the sceptrum become interlocked images which foreground the violent potential embedded within Rome’s imperial structure. This image system is part of a wider, coherent, and yet still not often recognized strategy on Silius’s part to both distance the nefas of civil war from Flavian pax while simultaneously destabilizing that very distancing strategy.