Grice e Silio

 Silius was a Stoic, too: or at least, he was influenced by Stoic thinking.

He adopted Virgil's basic concept of seeing in the second Punic War a fateful step on the road to Rome's future greatness, preordained and hence supported by the majority of the gods. In his epic, however, Silius goes further than Virgil had done in trying to illustrate how the actions of the great Romans of the period - such as Marcellus or Scipio - reveal that harmony between divine-natural predestination and human choice which was demanded by Stoic philosophy. This is manifest in the fact that those Romans remain loyal to the ancient values of their nation, which are unknown to the antagonist Hannibal. Silius shows both Scipio and Hannibal as trying to emulate Heracles, that Greek hero whom Stoics and Cynics had presented as the archetype of a man whose unceasing endeavour and striving make him able to attain perfection through his own efforts. The Roman Hercules was, moreover, an important figure in popular religion and in Flavian Imperial ideology. In Silius' epic only one of the two claimants is Hercules legitimate successor: Scipio whose individual striving for perfection is subordinate to serving Rome, and thus in harmony with the universal order in which Rome has its divinely given place.

By using the Stoic doctrine of fate to explain the tradition of Rome's heroic past with its many Republican memories the epic poet Silius tried to establish a meaningtul connection between that tradition and the Imperial state which he himself lived in. Silius' aim was to prove that a Classicising frame of mind with its orientation towards the past could lead to an affirmation, instead of a rejection, of contemporary reality.