017 - Pyrrhic Victories

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome. After defeating the Etruscans in the north and the Samnites in the east, the Romans now looked to Magna Graecia in the south for fresh conquests. All that stood between Rome and an Italian-wide empire was the fiercely independent and disunited Greek cities. Despite the collective threat they faced from Rome, the rivalry between the cities of Magna Graecia precluded any organized resistance. The Romans decided all they had to do was play the cities off one another, knowing they would have little trouble finding a few willing Greek accomplices who, in return for preferential treatment from their new Roman overlords, would aid Rome in subduing their Greek countrymen. But Roman plans were complicated by the introduction of an army from across the Adriatic led by the Greek king Pyrrhus. Answering calls for aid against the Romans, Pyrrhus had dreams of an Italian kingdom for himself, and though his dreams were ultimately foiled, the battles he fought against the Romans marked the opening salvo in a struggle between the Roman west and the Greek east that would end a hundred years later with a bewildered Greek nation kneeling before their new Roman masters.

Prior to the invasion by Pyrrhus, the eastern and western Mediterranean had, for the most part, been completely separate from one another. Divided roughly by the Adriatic and Ionian seas, the two halves had, politically at least, developed independently. Greek attention had always faced east, and been consumed by its rivalry with Persia when it wasn't consumed with battling endlessly within itself. There were, of course, Greeks who had migrated west to the south of Italy and Sicily, but once their cities were founded, it was like they lived in a different world. There was no attempt from the motherland to control them, and no involvement by the Italian colonies in persistent internal Greek squabbles. The only major historical overlap was the Athenian invasion of Sicily during the Peloponnesian War in 415 BC. The expedition had ended so disastrously for the Athenians—many point to it as the principal reason Athens ultimately lost that war—that the thought of going west filled the Greeks with prudent revulsion for generations. They had had enough to deal with in the east without courting disaster in the west.

When Alexander ascended to the throne in 338 BC, all of his ambition lay east with the conquest of Persia and beyond. It has long been a source of speculation how different things would have turned out had Alexander turned west and faced the nascent Roman Empire rather than going east to fight the Persians. It was only 650 miles from Athens to Rome, and Alexander, who marched 3,000 miles to India undefeated, could have taken Italy almost as an afterthought. But the Romans were granted a stay of execution, and the greatest general in the ancient world marched his armies east all the way to India, allowing Rome to continue to gather its strength unmolested.

Forty years of war, shifting alliances, and rivalries between Alexander's generals had followed his death in 323 BC. But by 280, things had fairly well settled themselves, so that when a Greek commander finally did look west with ambition, it was only because of the limited opportunities for conquest in the post-Alexandrian eastern Mediterranean.

That commander, Pyrrhus of Epirus, was born in 318 BC, right into the middle of the post-Alexandrian struggle. He was a prince of Epirus, a kingdom located in what is today the Balkans, on the periphery of the Greek world. He was a second cousin of Alexander, and found himself caught up in the volatile post-Alexandrian battles for control of Greece, Egypt, and Persia. His father was dethroned when Pyrrhus was only two, and the family was forced into exile. At sixteen, his father now dead, Pyrrhus was returned to the throne of Epirus by the powerful king his family had taken refuge with, but a year later he was deposed. Through marriage, Pyrrhus managed to gain some powerful friends, while enduring his second exile, taking a daughter of Ptolemy as his wife, and marrying his sister to Demetrius, the reigning king of Macedon. With these new allies, Pyrrhus regained the throne of Epirus. A few years later, his sister dead, Pyrrhus turned on his ex-brother-in-law, conquering Macedon and proclaiming himself king. His reign over Alexander's homeland was brief, however, and he was driven back to Epirus in 284 B.C.

By this time, the situation in the East had begun to solidify. What had once been Alexander's empire was now divided into three major kingdoms, Antigonid Greece and Macedon, Seleucid Persia and Asia Minor, and Ptolemaic Egypt. There was little room here for an ambitious thirty-four year old leader of a minor Greek kingdom. When then, in 282 B.C., Tarentum, one of the leading cities of Magna Graecia, sent envoys into Greece begging for aid against Roman encroachment, Pyrrhus leapt at the opportunity. The major powers disdained to get involved, but Pyrrhus saw a chance for glory. There may not be room for him in the East, but there was abundant space for a savvy general to acquire a rich and powerful empire in the West. Pyrrhus nobly answered the call for aid and readied his army of 25,000 to sail to the rescue of his besieged countrymen, who would soon, hopefully, also be his subjects.

Tarentum had run afoul of Rome, because Rome had run afoul of Tarentum. The Romans had formed an alliance with the minor city of Thurii, and when their new allies were threatened, Rome offered assistance. This annoyed the Tarentines, who considered internal Greek matters to be their domain. They were further incensed when a small Roman fleet, sent to garrison Thurii, was blown off course and ended up in Tarentine waters, a clear violation of a standing treaty between Rome and Tarentum. The Tarentines attacked the Roman fleet and sunk a number of the errant ships, so now it was Rome's turn to be incensed, and envoys were sent to Tarentum to demand an apology. The Tarentines, however, greeted the envoys rudely and sent them packing to a chorus of insults. Rome needed no further provocation and, in 282 BC, war was immediately declared.

Before aid could arrive from Greece, though, the Romans sacked Tarentum and had begun negotiations of peace with its aristocratic party, who favored an alliance with Rome. An advance party from Epirus, however, arrived in 281 BC, just as the papers were being signed, and drove the Romans out. In 280, Epirus arrived with his full army, including 4,000 cavalry and 20 war elephants. They landed in Italy without opposition, and the Greek king began to lay plans for the systematic conquest of the peninsula. But the Romans, who had just recently secured Italy for themselves, were in no mood to give it up easily. The Romans sent an army eight legions strong south to deal with this invading army, and met Pyrrhus near Heraclea, a Greek city located on the instep of the Italian boot.

Pyrrhus was confident of victory, but began to have doubts as he watched the Romans methodically build their fortified camps. This was not the barbarian horde the Tarentines had described, it was an organized and disciplined army of a civilized society. Mildly worried, but undeterred, Pyrrhus led his army out into the field. The disciplined Greek phalanx was more than a match for the Romans, and Pyrrhus' army soon gained the upper hand. But the Romans were stubborn in defeat, and the battle took its toll on the Greek army. Pyrrhus lost 4,000 of his best troops, and watched with consternation as the Romans, far from breaking and fleeing in panic, withdrew in an orderly fashion back to their camp. This was not going to be as easy as he thought.

The battle of Heraclea was important for two reasons. First, it was the first time the newly reformed Manipal legions had faced the might of a full Greek phalanx. True, the legions had lost, but the fight was by no means lopsided. Second, it was also the first time the Romans faced war elephants. The Roman cavalry was terrified by the huge beasts, and the presence of the elephants played a major role in tipping the battle in Pyrrhus' favor. The Romans would learn from their defeat, and craft new ways to attack the phalanx and tactics to deal with the hitherto unknown elephant. Tactics that would come into play when Hannibal deployed them time and again against the Romans in the Second Punic War.

The Romans next met Pyrrhus further north at Asculum, on the east side of the Apennines. By this time Pyrrhus had reinforced himself with some new Italian allies, most notably a collection of Samnite tribes. But the Greek king was disappointed by his inability to peel off more Italian allies from Rome. The Romans had done much to shore up their alliances, and Pyrrhus' plan of turning the Italians en masse against Rome was not coming to fruition easily. When the two sides met near Asculum, they fielded equal armies of about 40,000. The Romans were led by Publius Decius, son of the hero of the Third Samnite War and grandson of the hero of the First Samnite War, who brought with him new devices to deal with the war elephants, including chariots that would circle the legs of the huge beasts with rope and bring them crashing down. It was the same tactic that had served the rebel alliance so well against the imperial walkers during the battle for Hoth.

The first day of the battle ended in a stalemate. The Greek forces broke the legions they faced on the left wing, but the Romans defeated the Samnite and Tarentine forces in the center. Pyrrhus tried to press his advantage on the wing, but the beaten Romans retreated up a steep hill, too steep for the Greek phalanx to follow. Raining projectiles down, the Romans forced Pyrrhus to withdraw, and the day ended with neither side holding the advantage. The next day, Pyrrhus ordered his men to hold the steep ground, and they forced the Romans into the flat, open plain. This time, his elephants overwhelmed the Roman line, and they broke. Pyrrhus had won again, but the battle had been costly, and many of his best officers had fallen. Congratulated on his triumph, Pyrrhus famously commented, one more such victory, and we are undone, giving rise to the expression, Pyrrhic victory, to describe a costly success.

Worn down by fighting the Romans, Pyrrhus offered terms of peace, but was rebuffed by the Roman Senate. They were persuaded by the old, and by now truly blind, Appius Claudius, to deny any treaty with a foreign army, while it remained on Italian soil. At this point, Pyrrhus was in quite a bind, for the Romans had just concluded a new treaty with the Carthaginians, and now the true great powers of the western Mediterranean would not be turned against one another. So Pyrrhus decided to move on from Italy. It had, after all, been his plan all along to use Italian bases as a springboard for the real prize, Sicily. He was allowing himself to get bogged down with preliminary and unnecessary fighting. He did not need the Italian bases, they just would have been nice. His ego-saving rationalizations thus complete, Pyrrhus left Italy and sailed for Sicily in 278 B.C.

At this point, Sicily was divided between the Carthaginians, who held the west, and the Greeks, who held the east. Upon hearing the news of Pyrrhus's imminent invasion, the Carthaginians laid siege to Syracuse, the most important Greek city on the island, and attempted to capture it before Pyrrhus arrived. But they were unsuccessful and were driven off when Pyrrhus landed. The Greek king claimed Syracuse as his own, and led the grateful Greeks against the Carthaginians, who were pressed back until they held a single city on the west coast. The Carthaginians offered to relinquish claims to the rest of Sicily, as long as they were allowed to hold the one port, but Pyrrhus, confident in final victory, refused the offer. But unable to dislodge the Carthaginians from their stronghold, he decided to attack the North African mother city directly. He ordered the Sicilians to raise an army and build him a fleet for the invasion. But the locals had by this time grown tired of Pyrrhus's dictatorial style and refused.

The strength of his army sat by the campaigns in Italy and Sicily, and his rearguard pressed hard by the Romans, Pyrrhus decided to return to the mainland lest he find himself trapped on the island by the Carthaginian fleet. He would consolidate his holdings in Italy and return to Sicily with a large enough army to drive out the Carthaginians once and for all. So in 275 BC, he returned to Italy and immediately faced a Roman army determined to drive the Greek invader off. They faced each other near Maleventum, and, once again, Pyrrhus's army defeated the legions, but this time, Roman fire arrows had sent the war elephants crashing through Pyrrhus's own line, wrecking havoc and killing a good chunk of his infantry. By now the casualties had mounted up, and Pyrrhus, at his wits end, decided he had had enough of Italy. He gathered up what was left of his army and sailed back to Epirus. Never had a general won so many battles with so little to show for it.

The Romans, delighting in their non-victory victory, renamed Maleventum Beneventum, changing it from the place of bad events to the place of good events. Pyrrhus left behind a garrison in Tarentum, but the Romans quickly overran the outnumbered Greeks and, in short order, had solidified their hold on Magna Graecia. The Romans now controlled the entire peninsula and had proven themselves to be an emerging power in Pan-Mediterranean politics. The East began to wake up to the threat that was rising from Italy. As long as the Romans were confined to the peninsula, the balance of power that had settled in the post-Alexandrian world would hold, but if this new Roman force, which had just driven off a more-than-able Greek army, led by a man widely considered to be the best general of his generation, decided to expand its horizons, it spelled nothing but trouble for the old powers.

The Roman capture of Magna Graecia represented not just another step in Roman expansion, it also effectively brought to a close the era of the city-state in the ancient world. The polity that Plato and Aristotle had held as the ideal form of government was now a thing of the past. The Macedonian conquest of Greece had already ended forever the existence of the independent city-state there, but it had survived in the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia. Now though, the subjugation by Rome ended any official autonomy for the Greek city-states of Italy, and henceforth politics and government in the ancient world would move permanently into the hands of large empires. The only true holdout was Syracuse, which managed to survive more or less independently until the end of the Second Punic War, but its longevity was only secured by a close personal alliance between Hyrule, the king of Syracuse, and Rome. Had Hyrule been less of a friend to Rome, Syracuse would have fallen long before it did. The city-state as a political institution was effectively dead, and Rome had dealt the killing stroke.

As for Pyrrhus, he never got the chance to avenge his losses in Italy, and was allegedly killed in 272 BC while fighting in the Greek city of Argos by a tile thrown from a rooftop by an Argead woman. He never won the empire he sought, and his main legacy lay in teaching the Romans how to effectively battle a Greek army and introducing them to war elephants. The Romans, always adapting their techniques, would apply what they learned a hundred years later when they again met the Greeks in battle, though the tables would be turned the next time they met, and it would be the Greeks' turn to lose to an invading Roman army, though the Roman victories were far from Pyrrhic and Greece was conquered easily.

Next week, we will take a break from the narrative and jump ahead so that I may present the History of Rome Christmas Special. As Rome transitioned from pagan to Christian in the 300s AD, the Emperor Constantine introduced a number of edicts that ensured the success of the conversion, including the eventual choice of December 25th as the birthdate of Jesus. It is a fascinating and still relevant story, and I can't let the occasion pass without telling it. After that, we will be on hiatus for a week, but return after the new year fresh, recharged, and ready to pile headlong into the Punic Wars, the most important conflict in a long history of Rome.