The Hannibal of this book is Hannibal surnamed Barca. Scipio is Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. The final extra name (‘the African’) was given to him in recognition of his victory over Hannibal in north Africa. The Prologue explains that the model for this joint biograohy of Hannibal and Scipio is not so much Plutarch’s series of parallel Greek and Roman lives, as Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. Ancient, Renaissance, and modern explorations of the parallels between the two men are discussed, and a separate section sketches the career and approach of Bullock as a classically trained modern historian and biographer. Another section sets out programmatically the view of Roman and Carthaginian imperialism to be adopted in the book. The limitations of the evidence available to biographers of individuals from the ancient world are candidly acknowledged, and the use of the ‘past presumptive’ tense (so-and so- ‘will have’ done, known, or thought this or that) is renounced.

This chapter explores how the experience of Roman power impacted Polybius’ image of the shape of the world under Roman rule. Developing further classical uses of the body as political metaphor, Polybius is the first author we know of to use the body to conceptualise the impact of Roman rule on the oikoumene. He thus foreshadows the metaphor of the corpus imperii, a core element of Roman concepts of their empire in the imperial period. This significant and innovative development was prompted, I argue, by Polybius’ experience of the nature of mid-Republican Roman power and its material representation in the cityscape of Rome. Crucial to this process is the interlinking of previously unconnected parts of the world through the expansion of Roman rule. Movement is key to this process and Polybius’ geographical ‘digression’ (3.36–9), which inscribes Hannibal’s march into a global perspective, illustrates this. Evoking archetypal representations of Roman order and control, such as milestones, itineraries and building inscriptions, Polybius’ text both exemplifies how large-scale movements interconnected different parts of the world in concrete and tangible ways and how those movements, even when initiated by Rome’s enemies, eventually resulted in the establishment of Roman power all over the inhabited world.

In this paper I use speeches taken over or adapted from speeches in Ennius’ Annals as a window onto the treatment of Ennius as a historical source and the attitudes of Roman prose writers to the representation and transmission of historical speech acts. I argue first that allusions to the content of speeches and the specific language of speakers in the Annals draw productively on Ennius’ cultural authority with or without the presumption of parallel episodes. Next, I consider the question of accuracy in relation to the citation of Ennius. Finally, I attempt to draw these two strands together through the Ennian speech in which Hannibal addresses his troops before one of the major battles of the second Punic War, as adapted by Cicero, Livy, and Silius Italicus, arguing that these allusions do not presume that the Ennian version offers a through line to what was really said, but rather incorporate the authoritative Ennian tradition in a self-conscious nod to the “culturally truest” account of the Roman past.

The four most important Mark Twain centers in America are the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, Hannibal, Missouri; the Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, Connecticut; the Center for Mark Twain Studies, Elmira, New York; and the Mark Twain Papers, Berkeley, California. The Boyhood Home is a restoration of the Clemens home in Hannibal, and Hannibal itself is dedicated to Twain’s life and work, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The museum has artifacts from Twain’s life, as well as exhibits on the history of slaveholding in Hannibal. The Mark Twain House and Museum includes a painstakingly accurate restoration of the sumptuous Hartford mansion where Sam and Olivia Clemens raised their three daughters, as well as a museum and teaching center. The Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College includes the octagonal study where Twain wrote many of his best works while spending summers with his sister-in-law, as well as a large library, and Quarry Farm, the hillside house where the Clemens family summered in the 1870s and 1880s. The Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley houses the largest collection of Twain manuscripts, letters, and other documents, with editors who continue their work of producing definitive editions of Twain’s works. The center also welcomes scholars for research in the archives.

Samuel Clemens was born in 1835 in Missouri. He spent his childhood by the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri. He was a printer’s apprentice, then was a journeyman printer, then earned a pilot’s license on the Mississippi River. He went west to Nevada, avoiding the Civil War, then became a newspaper writer. In February 1863, he signed an article with the pen name “Mark Twain,” beginning the creation of his alter ego. His 1867 trip to Europe and the Holy Land led to his travel book The Innocents Abroad. Upon his return to America, he met Olivia Langdon in Elmira, New York, and they married in 1870. A son, Langdon, died in infancy, but Sam and Livy had three daughters: Susie, Clara, and Jean. Most summers were spent in Elmira, where Twain composed many of his most famous works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He turned his attention to business adventures, including starting his own publishing company, but also a series of investments, most of which ended in failure. In his last decade, he increasingly spoke out about politics. He died in 1910, his popularity assured by his works and his public persona.

Chapter 2 is a detailed examination of three scenes that target the most brutal form of epic mistreatment: decapitation and further abuses aimed at the severed head. The first section analyses the death and abuse of Pompey in Lucan’s BC 8. It turns next to abuses in the second half of Statius’ Thebaid: first Tydeus’ cannibalizing of Melanippus’ head in book 8, and second the Thebans’ abuse of Tydeus’ own corpse in book 9. The last section treats the decapitation of the Carthaginian general’s ally Asbyte by Theron in Silius’ Punica 2, and Hannibal’s subsequent abuse of Theron’s corpse in retaliation for Theron’s slaying of Asbyte. These scenes are all built explicitly upon model scenes in the Iliad and Aeneid which the later epicists have infused with post mortem abuse and grotesquery either ignored or only insinuated in the earlier poems. Through consideration of the ways in which Lucan, Statius, and Silius expand upon their models, this chapter offers a vivid glimpse into the evolution of the motif of corpse mistreatment from the ‘classic’ texts of Homer and Virgil, who had sought (in unique ways) to set a limit on the level of violence congruent with the world of epic.

Chapter 6 investigates funeral rites in Silius’ Punica with special focus on the figure of Hannibal. The chapter’s interest concerns the Carthaginian leader’s perversions of Roman funeral practice when he conducts rites over the corpses of three slain Roman generals (L. Aemilius Paulus, T. Sempronius Gracchus, and M. Claudius Marcellus). This analysis sets the stage for an examination of Hannibal’s quasi-funeral rites that close the poem in book 17, mimicking and masking the triumphal parade for Scipio Africanus that simultaneously doubles as a funeral parade. The chapter closes by considering the role of the civil wars following the death of Nero in 68 CE, in particular importance for Silius of the burning of the Capitol and the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.