Historia Proxima Poetis: The Intertextual Practices of Historical Poetry

In his ninth book, Polybius contrasts his own style with the style of historians who
employ all the parts of history to attract readers to their works. He divides these parts of history
into three particular styles. These are the genealogical style (9.1.4: ὁ γενεαλογικὸς τρόπος), the
style suited to stories of colonies, foundations, and kinship (9.1.4: ὁ περὶ τὰς  ποικίας καὶ κτίσεις
καὶ συγγενείας), and Polybius’s style, which is suited to political and military affairs (9.1.4: ὁ
περὶ τὰς πράξεις τῶν ἐθνῶν καὶ πόλεων καὶ δυναστῶν).

Silian scholars have long acknowledged that the opening words of the Punica (1.1 ordior arma), are a nod to Livy’s AUC and Virgil’s Aeneid (Feeney 1982), so signaling Silius’ intent to reinvent epic with a decidedly historiographic twist. Since the Romans believed that poetry and history were closely related genres (e.g. Woodman 1988), and since Virgil had already openly challenged the ‘historicity’ of Livy, in that type of aemulatio that was common among ancient writers (Woodman 2012), Silius’ double allusion to the two most canonical works of the Augustan age is hardly surprising.

Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390 CE) asks in his diatribe against the dead emperor Julian: "Who might grant me the erudition and tongue of Herodotus and Thucydides, in order that I pass on to
future times his malignance and inscribe on a stele for posterity these events?"(Discourse 4.92)
Yet he does not follow in Herodotus' or Thucydides' prosaic footsteps; and it is not in his orations
or letters that he writes most explicitly as historian or historiographer, but in his poetry. Gregory's

This paper briefly reassesses why much of Latin epic depicted the things it did, Roman warfare and the Homeric (especially the nostoi), and how the contours of the genre formed around the specific challenges of narrating Rome’s first war against Carthage. It is by no means groundbreaking to approach ancient literature though categories of thought approximate to ‘myth’and ‘history,’ but new work continues to refine our perspectives (for Herodotus, Baragwanath and de Bakker 2012; for Ennius, there is much relevant material in Elliott 2013).