Silius Italicus, a minor Latin poet, was born in 25 and died in 101 A.D. At an early age he became a prominent forensic orator, was consul the year of Nero's death (69), became a familiar friend of Vitellius, and was afterwards proconsul in Asia. He was a devoted student of Cicero and Virgil, and owned their estates at Tusculum and Naples. In old age, finding himself labouring under an incurable disease, he starved himself to death. His epic poem, Punica, in seventeen books and about 14,000 lines, has come down entire, and remains a monument of industry, of patient imitation, not of poetic creation. Scipio and Hannibal are its Achilles and Hector, its Æneas and Turnus; and every episode in his great originals is slavishly reproduced and degraded to a dead level of literary mediocrity.
The poem was discovered by Poggio about 1416, and the editio princeps appeared in 1471. Editions are by Ernesti (1791) and Lemaire (1823).