Sine Funeris Vllo Ardet Honore Rogus: Burning Pyres in Lucan and Silius Italicus’ Pvnica

Abstract

This paper offers a discussion of the intertextual relationship between Lucan’s Cornelia and Silius Italicus’ Saguntine women. The act of metaphorical burial is exploited by both poets as a device to deconstruct and then reconstruct Roman identity. Silius exploits both sides of the Lucanian Cornelia, as both the monstrous and the sympathetic, the maenadic and the philosophical, to create a complex intertextual nexus with those mothers that historically precede but literarily follow Lucan’s epic.