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b. 103
Silius Italicus (c. 28 – c. 103) was a Roman consul, orator, and Latin epic poet. His only surviving work is the 17-book Punica, an epic poem about the Second Punic War.
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Men leave arms and legs behind, severed by the frost, and the cruel cold cuts off the limbs already broken.
Doubt not a woman's hardihood; no danger is too great for wedded love to face.
Groundless superstition ill becomes an army; Valour is the only deity that rules in the warrior's breast.
Manhood is tested by trial, and valour climbs unterrified the rocky path and difficult ascent that leads to glory.
The wheel of time rolls downward through various changes.
Valor, gradually overpowered by the delicious poison of sloth, grows torpid.
Away with delay; the chance of great fortune is short-lived.
Make haste! The flood-tide of Fortune soon ebbs.
Victorious Carthage measures the downfall of Rome by all the heap of gold that was torn from the left hands of the slain.
Here I begin the war by which the fame of the Aeneadae was raised to heaven and proud Carthage submitted to the rule of Italy.
Virtue is indeed its own noblest reward; yet the dead find it sweet, when the fame of their lives is remembered among the living and oblivion does not swallow up their praises.
He had the folly to believe that to be feared is glory.
Huge as the snakes that armed the Giants when they stormed heaven, or as the hydra that wearied Hercules by the waters of Lerna, or as Juno's snake that guarded the boughs with golden foliage.
Nowhere do men remain loyal for long when Fortune proves unstable.
And Poverty, an unsightly plague that leads men to crime; Error, with staggering gait, and Discord that delights to confound sea with sky.
Mantua, the home of the Muses, raised to the skies by immortal verse, and a match for the lyre of Homer.
And he held it a nobler thing to conquer adversity by endurance than to avoid it by precaution.
And their manliness is slowly sapped and weakened by the seductive poison of indolence.
War calls for strategy: valour is less praiseworthy in a commander.
Altars seldom smoke in prosperous times.
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