What can silence mean? And by what means can a narrator express it? This is the first study to look at the question of how quiet, silence, speechlessness and the refusal to communicate are employed in Roman epic. Apart from two comparative chapters each author is analyzed separately. In this way attention is drawn not only to continuity and intertextual play with individual motifs (e.g. in the case of the silence of the night), but also to individual differences in narrative techniques, in particular in the portrayal of the unsaid.