Thomas Ross’ Translation and Continuation of Silius Italicus’Punica in the English Restoration

Antony Augoustakis*

Virgil, , and Statius, to name just a few Latin epicists of the Augustan and post-Augustan age, enjoyed a continuous and at times well-documented trans- mission through the Middle Ages into the .1 The Flavian epic poet Silius Italicus produced the longest extant poem in Latin literature during the last decades of the first century ce (probably composed between 80 and 96).2 The poem relates the struggle of the Romans against the Carthaginian army of Hannibal during the long Second Punic War (218–202bce), their defeats at the hands of the Carthaginian and the final victory of Scipio Africanus over Hanni- bal in the battle of Zama. Upon its rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini, the papal secretary in 1417 during the Council of Constance (Constantia, modern Kon- stanz), Silius Italicus’ Punica immediately received special attention by philol- ogists and humanists alike,3 especially because of its value as a historical epic on the Second Punic War against Hannibal, in other words, as a versification of Livy’s third decade in an unmistakably Virgilian manner, as it was thought.4 More than half a century ago, in his 1953 study on Silius Italicus’ reception in England, Edward Bassett had demonstrated that in England, in particular, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, various authors from Sir Thomas Elyot

* I wish to thank the editor for his feedback and kind invitation to provide some reflections on Silius Italicus’ continuator, Thomas Ross. A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in Grand Rapids, mi (April 6, 2011). 1 See, for example, Comparetti (1997) and Wilson-Okamura (2010) for , D’Angelo (2011) and Hardie (2011) for Lucan, and for Statius the various studies on reception and translations by Braund (2015), Chaudhuri (2015), Edwards (2015), and Newlands (2015). 2 Biographical details and the overview of the question of chronology of the epic’s composition are provided by Augoustakis (2010b). 3 “The fifteenth century was Silius’ century of greatest popularity”, Muecke (2010) 401 notes, followed by the eighteenth century (Bassett [1953]). On Silius’ fortunes in the Italian Renais- sance, see extensively Muecke (2010) and the new edition of Domizio Calderini’s commen- tary by Muecke and Dunston (2011). 4 The reception of Silius across time is documented in von Albrecht (1964) 9–14 and most recently Dominik (2010).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004360921_019 336 augoustakis to Milton, Addison, and Macaulay (but not Shakespeare) alluded to, and widely excerpted from, Silius’ long poem on the exploits of the Romans against the cunning Carthaginian general.5 This chapter will look in detail at one of the English translations of Silius, one that includes a continuation of the Flavian poet’s unfinished poem, which at least the translator, Thomas Ross, considered as incomplete and left unfin- ished at the end of the seventeenth book.6 As others have already studied in this volume, examples of a continuation of Classical Latin epic poems can be found in Maffeo Veggio’s Latin sequel to Virgil’s Aeneid, Thomas May’s Supple- mentumLucani, or Giovanni Battista Pio’s Latin supplement toValerius Flaccus’ Argonautica.7 Of these three, Thomas May produced in English the Continua- tion till the death of of Lucan’s Bellum Civile (1630), which he then turned into Latin, the so-called Supplementum Lucani (a decade later in 1640), although the Latin Supplementum represents a thorough revision of the English poem, not a mere translation from the English Continuation. The translator, and in effect continuator, of Silius Italicus, Thomas Ross undertakes to ren- der the Flavian poem into heroic couplets, even though as J.D. Duff, the Loeb translator of Silius, puts it “his versification is unpleasing” and “the rhyming heroic verse which he chose for his metre was still in its infancy: Dryden had not yet seriously taken it in hand.”8 Thomas Ross’ undertaking as the earliest translator of Silius into English, constitutes an important step in the literary history of the reception of the Silian text; his translation was followed by sev- eral others in English, French, and German, leading eventually to Duff’s Loeb edition, which remains the most authoritative English translation today.9 This chapter will explore the literary value of Ross’ Continuation: as we shall see, the Continuation represents a development and completion of the themes and

5 Bassett’s study, though short, remains remarkably invaluable today: for example, his com- ments on Dryden’s possible references to Silius deserve further research. See Daemen-de Gelder and Vander Motten (2008) 36–37 on the merits of Ross’ translation ranked highly among others in the royalist exilic group (Denham, Abrahama Cowley, Edward Sherburne). 6 In his study of Thomas May’s continuation of Lucan, Bruère (1949) 145 criticizes Thomas Ross’ continuation as inept, since Silius’ poem ended where it should have: “such unity as Silius could compass was achieved with the triumph of Africanus, and no good is done by protracting the action until Hannibal’s death.” 7 On translations of Greek and Latin texts from 1550 to 1700, see Cummings and Gillespie (2009). 8 Duff (1934) xviii. 9 For H.W. Tytler’s posthumously published translation in heroic couplets (1828), see Bassett (1953) 165–166.