A commentary on Silius Italicus, Punica 13.381-895 : with special reference to language, metre and rhetorical tropes
| dc.contributor.author | Bennett, Thomas Cyril | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-08-13T00:08:03Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-08-13T00:08:03Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 1978 | en_US |
| dc.date.issued | 1978 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of Classics | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of Greek and Roman Studies | |
| dc.degree.level | Master of Arts M.A. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | Silius Italicus wrote an epic poem on the Second Punic War in seventeen books comprising more than twelve thousand hexameter verses. This commentary deals with 515 of them from Book 13 (ZZ.381-895). Here Silius describes his Nekuia, the Greek technical term for a spiritual seance, wherein the hero, usually at some critical moment of his life, calls up and questions the dead about his future prospects and plans. The Introduction describes the two maj or literary sources of Silius' Nekuia, Odyssey 11 by Homer and Aeneid 6 by Vergil, and shows Silius' use of them. The Commentary consists of a series of notes on the text showing Silius' artistic use of his poetic predecessors' language, in particular Vergil's and Ovid's. Our author, like all Roman poets of the Classical and post-Classical pe riods , had a rhetorical education and would have been extremely familiar with and skilled in the use of tropes and figures of speech. I have attempted, therefore, to identify in the text as many of these as possible and, since most people today are unfamiliar with them, have listed and defined them in Appendix A. Appendix B describes the basic metrical structure of the Latin hexameter. Silius was a highly skilled metrician and prosodist and when he deviated, as all the best poets did at times, from the normal pattern or rhythm of hexameter writing, it was usually for artistic reasons. Note is taken in the Commentary of major rhythmical breaks and the author's use of them examined. Appendices C. 1-9 list some of the means by which Silius, using the techniques developed by Vergil, is able to maintain the hexameter's basic unity while achieving movement of thought from line to line. After taking note in the Commentary of·the rhythmica l device known as the five-worded line, I examine its relationship to the poem in Appendix D, while in Appendix EI treat the ubiquitous styl istic feature of Alliteration or front-rhyme. Since the treatise is mainly a philological study based on a close-reading of Punica 13 , 381- 894, I deal briefly in the conclusion with Silius' relationship to Lucan, the other major post-Vergilian epic poet to include a Nekuia in his poem. | en_US |
| dc.format.extent | 126 pages | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/17219 | |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | en_US |
| dc.title | A commentary on Silius Italicus, Punica 13.381-895 : with special reference to language, metre and rhetorical tropes | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
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