Les Romains et leurs alliés dans les Punica de Silius Italicus étaient-ils des exempla en matière de virtus, de fides et de pietas ?

Our work consisted of analyzing the defeats and victories of the Romans and their allies in Punica through the notion of exemplum applied to the exercise of uirtus, fides and pietas. During the Hannibal war, Rome first suffered multiple setbacks until it was on the verge of collapse. She then managed to straighten up, then eventually crush her barbaric enemies. For Silius, there is undoubtedly a link between the setbacks suffered by the Sagontins, Regulus, Solimus, Varro and other virtuous or little virtuous protagonists and their misapplication or inability to bind the fides to the pietas. Similarly, Scipio's victories in Hispania and then in Africa stem from a better understanding of these values. By the way he builds the central episodes of the Punica, the Flavian poet also compels us to question the type of virtue displayed by historical-epic actors and to consider different ways of interpreting events according to their moral conduct. If the reader must ask various questions related to virtue and morality, and evaluate the clues provided by Silius to finally understand the importance of moral and virtuous behavior, he must also realize that the schema virtuous proposed by the poet is far from being binary; the vision of the foreigner of the Romans in the Punica is not so either. Silius insists on the need to strike a balance between the uirtus, the fides and the pietas without ever excluding any of these three values of the mos maiorum to become a moral exemplum. To do this, he establishes a number of links between military failure and the lack of ethics underlying the inability to be an example of virtue. By providing a moral exemplum in the person of Scipio Africanus in order to show the reader how important it is to live virtuously, Silius, like his historiographic model Livy, fights the release, and participates in the effort of moral regeneration undertaken by Domitian.