Petrarch and Silius Italicus: a Survey on a controversial Topic

as far as we know from the available historical documentation, the poem Punica by Silius Italicus (a Latin epic poet who lived in the first century a.D.) had no circulation during the Middle Ages, and it was discovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417. In the opinion of many scholars, however, Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) would have known the Punica about eighty years before Poggio’s discovery, and he would have imitated it in his poem Africa. As matter of fact, Petrarca’s Africa shows surprising similarities with Punica. In my research, I inspect some passages of the two poems and I elucidate that the similarities between the two works may be casual: at least in those examined passages, Africa depends on other different sources, with which Petrarca was surely acquainted.