Getting Ahead: Decapitation as Political Metaphor
in Silius Italicus' Punica

Raymond D. Marks (University of Missouri, Columbia)

Over the past ten years the decapitations in Silius' Punica have attracted considerable interest from scholars, who have elucidated their meaning and significance in isolated passages of the poem (McGuire, Acts of Silence (1997): 80, 143; Marpicati, MD 43 (1999): 191-202; Augoustakis, Being There Together (2003): 110-27).  The theme of decapitation, however, is deployed on a much wider scale than these studies acknowledge, and as a political metaphor, in particular, it plays a central role in Silius' conception of the war.

In the epic's proem, Silius casts the three Punic Wars as a conflict between heads or, rather, over which city, Rome or Carthage, will be the head of the world: quaesitumque diu, qua tandem poneret arce / terrarum Fortuna caput (1.7-8).  Consistent with the political symbolism of the head, as outlined in these lines, decapitations become ways of measuring in the epic the different trajectories of the two sides in the war and their different outcomes.  A decapitation simile on the occasion of Paulus' death at Cannae (10.305-11) marks the low-ebb in Rome's fortunes, a point underscored by several allusions in that passage to Virgil's decapitated Priam (Aen. 2.554-8) and to Lucan's Pompey.  But when Rome recovers from this blow and pulls herself together, the image Silius uses is that of a city lifting her head up to the sky; Rome is, as it were, re-capitated (12.318-9).  The many decapitaions perpetrated by the Romans after Cannae, on the other hand, reflect Carthage's own slide toward final defeat, which entails her "decapitation" too.  Some of the decapitations leading up to that event are symbolic, such as Scipio's victory over New Carthage, Carthage's "head" in Spain (cf. 15.194-5), and some are real, most notably Hasdrubal's decapitation at the Metaurus (15.805-7).  Still others lurk below the surface of the text, such as the allusions to the Bellum Civile in books 16 and 17, which identify Hannibal with Lucan's decapitated Pompey, or Silius' announcement of the end of the war (hic finis bellos, 17.618), which not only recalls Paulus' death at Cannae (hic finis Paulo, 10.305), a passage in which the Roman army is compared to a headless trunk, but also the beginning of Virgil's description of Priam's headless trunk at Troy (haec fins Priami, Aen. 2.554).

It is also consistent with Silius' conception of the war as a conflict between heads that it settles a dispute between two competing claims to empire, claims that may be traced back to ancient omens involving severed heads, in Carthage's case, the horse's head found on her citadel during her foundation (Aen. 1.442-5; cf. Pun. 2.410-1), in Rome's case, the human head found on her citadel, the Capitoline, during the building of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Livy 1.55.5-6). Silius signals his indebtedness to both of these traditions at the beginning of his epic (note arce and caput in lines 7-8 of the proem) and returns to them at the end, where the triumphant Scipio makes his way to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline (17.647-54).  With this conclusion Silius puts into sharp focus for us what has truly been at stake all along in this conflict between Rome and Carthage: it is a war of heads, and a war that Rome wins not only by "decapitating: her rival, Carthage, but by preserving her own "head", the Capitolium, as well.