Africa

Africa is an epic poem written in Latin hexameters by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca). It recounts the Second Punic War, in which the Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy, and how Roman forces were eventually victorious after an invasion of North Africa led by Scipio Africanus, the poem's hero.

Notable passages include the death of Hannibal's brother Mago Barca, the description of Syphax's palace, and the tragic love story of Sophonisba.

Petrarch began the poem in the valley of Vaucluse after his first visit to Rome in 1337. A draft was complete by about 1343, but he kept revising it, and the text was not made public until 1397, three decades after his death. He dedicated it to Robert of Naples, king of Sicily. It was first printed in Venice in 1501, as part of his collected works. Petrarch held Africa and his other classicizing works in high regard, though the epic was not especially well received, partly because it was a literary transposition of Livy.