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Updated: June 16, 2025
A Caesar deserves great credit for allowing a subject such liberty, and Italicus deserves the same for venturing to avail himself of it. He was such a keen virtuoso that he got the reputation of always itching to buy new things. He owned a number of villas in the same neighbourhood, and used to neglect his old ones through his passion for his recent purchases.
In the gorge of the Apennines he naturally remembers the hardships which Hannibal's army endured, and proceeds to cite, not the authentic narrative of Polybius, not the picturesque narrative of Livy, but the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus.
In this English use, it expresses the same difference as the Romans indicated by Hispanus and Hispanicus. The first meant a person of Spanish blood, a native of Spain; the second, a Roman born in Spain. So of Germanus and Germanicus, Italus and Italicus, Anglus and Anglicus, &c.; an important distinction, on which see Casaubon apud Scriptores. Hist.
He crammed his pages with quotation from Virgil and Horace, Ovid and Tibullus, Propertius, Lucan, Juvenal and Martial, Lucretius, Statius, Claudian, Silius Italicus, Ausonius, Seneca, Phaedrus, and gave even to his 'understanding age' an overdose of its own physic for all ills of literature.
The two other epic poets contemporary with Statius whose works are extant, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus, belong generally to the same school, but stand on a much lower level of excellence. The former is only known as the author of the Argonautica.
In the decline of his years he entirely quitted Rome, and lived altogether in Campania, from whence even the accession of the new emperor52 could not draw him. A circumstance which I mention as much to the honour of Caesar, who was not displeased with that liberty, as of Italicus, who was not afraid to make use of it.
Our city, true to its ancient tradition, became Rome's ever faithful ally, as you may read in the poem of Silius Italicus, and was dignified by treaty with the title of a confederate city; and of this fact Cicero reminded the judges when in that famous trial he thundered against Verres, the spoiler of our Sicilian province, and with the other cities defended this of ours, whose people had signalized their hatred of the Roman praetor by overthrowing his statue in the market-place and sparing the pedestal, as they said, to be an eternal memorial of his infamy.
If further confirmation were needed of the story that Virgil was laid here, it would be found in the fact that Silius Italicus, who lived at the same time with Statius, purchased the tomb of Virgil, restored it from the neglect into which it had fallen, and celebrated funeral rites before it. The tomb was originally shaded by a gigantic bay-tree, which is said to have died on the death of Dante.
Perhaps the greatest merit which this author has to plead, is his attachment to Ben Johnson, and admiration of him: Silius Italicus performed an annual visit to Virgil's tomb, and that circumstance reflects more honour upon him in the eyes of Virgil's admirers, than all the works of that author.
"Why, surely," cries Booth, "if he is not to be placed in the first rank with Homer, and Virgil, and Milton, I think clearly he is at the head of the second, before either Statius or Silius Italicus though I allow to each of these their merits; but, perhaps, an epic poem was beyond the genius of either.
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