With the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 BCE, the political fortunes of one of Caesar's lesser political partisans began to wane. Gaius Sallustius Crispus, a minor political figure, formerly involved in scandal and now left without a backer, retired from politics and began to write history. His first project was an account of a failed coup d'état from some decades before. Sallust recorded the efforts of a thwarted candidate for Rome's highest office named Lucius Sergius Catilina to raise an army of disaffected Romans and foreigners and to install himself and his partisans at Rome. In the end, though, nothing much came of the plot: some were arrested and killed; some fought and died; others who had not been caught in too manifest support of Catiline were suddenly expressing their enmity for the monster.

In 65 CE, a Spanish writer appointed himself Virgil's heir and stepped into a breach that did not really exist. L. Iunius Moderatus Columella chose to attach to his self-styled prose ‘monument’ of agricultural instruction an ornamental didactic poem on gardening, to fill the gap apparently left by Virgil at the start of Georgic 4. The result has been regarded for the most part as a misguided experiment, an uninspired pastiche of clippings and half-lines from a greater poet. Yet in recent years, as part of the wholescale rehabilitation of ‘second-rate’ Latin literature, it has begun to be considered in its own right. Why is this forgettable poem worth another look? Partly because it exists and is average: it tells us how Virgil himself was read in antiquity, and how one middling writer responded to a particular task with its own set of rules. But it is also a surprisingly ambitious poem, a showpiece in which Columella concentrates all his resources, to give his immediate readers Silvinus and Gallio a ‘taste’, in his own words, of his poetic gifts. He takes an unpromising subject and overcompensates by making something new and monstrous out of it. It is not often that artichokes and cucumbers are forced into such lurid focus.

A recent English-language textbook on Greek and Roman historical epic begins its account of Silius Italicus by describing the author of the Punica as ‘not a literary person. Most of his long life was spent in the Roman civil service’. Then, after suggesting that the poet was seeking to make up for earlier missed opportunities by writing what is the longest surviving Latin epic, the potted biography concludes by declaring that his actual demise was in line with Stoic theory: ‘Silius met a bookish end…he starved himself to death.’

While these remarks will not be left unchallenged, the very venom of the reaction to them is instructive. Scandalised, a reader of an earlier version of this paper thought that they should never be mentioned or at best buried in a footnote. After all, Wallace Stevens worked for a living too. No, show us that Silius is a good poet.