Silius Italicus

Tiberius Catius Asconius Silius Italicus (c. AD 26–101) was a Roman senator and orator who held the consulship in AD 68, the year of Nero's death. After a public career he retired to Campania, where he wrote the Punica.

The Punica, in seventeen books, is the longest surviving Latin epic. It tells the Second Punic War, from Hannibal's oath and the siege of Saguntum to Scipio's victory in Africa. Silius modelled it closely on Virgil's Aeneid. It is read here in the English heroic couplets of Thomas Ross (1661).