Bold, fickle, just, a brilliant military man and a restrained ruler, he is considered one of the great men of his time and one of the most famous enemies of the fledgling republic of Rome. Even Hannibal praised his talent, including him along with Alexander and himself in his list of the three best strategists in history...
Pyrrhus (318-272 BC), called the blond or red-haired, was also nicknamed αετός (eagle) by his soldiers. His ancestry was as solemn as his deeds:son of King Eácides of Epirus, distant relative of the great Alexander through his mother's side and head of the noble Molossian clan (according to legend, direct descendants of Neptolemus, son of Achilles), Pyrrhus was king of Epirus (today northern Greece and Albania) for two periods, from 307 to 272 BC, as well as of neighboring Macedonia, on two brief occasions:in 287 and later from 273 BC. C. until his death. But why did this brave Hellenic adventurer end up fighting in Italy itself against the puny Romans?
Let's get background. In the year 282 B.C. Southern Italy, what we know as Magna Graecia, was still independent of the Roman Republic. Each city state, mostly former Greek colonies, had its own agreements with Rome. In the case that concerns us, Tarentum and Rome had signed a pact whereby the latter did not have permission to send ships beyond the Cape Lacinium (west end of the Gulf of Taranto), but during the celebration of the great Dionysiacs of that year ten Roman triremes were sighted from the theater heading for Thurium (today Terranova da Sibari, Calabria) in clear defiance of the signed treaty. According to Appian's account, the Tarentine ships rushed out to meet the triremes, sinking four and capturing one. That impulsive skirmish was a serious diplomatic incident that brought Ambassador Postumus to the Tarentines demanding explanations. According to Dio Cassius, the Roman embassy was received with ridicule and insults, making fun of the lousy Greek spoken by the Roman emissaries and their strange clothes, one of the members of the Council urinating on Postumus's toga, who replied gracefully afterwards:
Laugh, laugh, your blood will wash my clothes
Aware of the bad turn events were taking, and how little they could expect from neighboring Greek cities, the Tarentine Council was forced to ask for help from an old friend, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, a ruler they had already helped to conquer. the island of Corfu. Only a year after that affront, the consul Lucio Emilio Bárbula stormed Tarentum. They were about to negotiate an unconditional peace treaty when the ships of the Epirote Milo and his three thousand men appeared on the horizon. They were the outposts of King Pyrrhus, who was preparing his jump to Italy in aid of his Tarentine allies. The Roman, forced by the unexpected appearance of the Greek fleet, chose to retreat, covering his retreat with Tarentine citizens, using them as human shields, so Milo gave up attacking them.
In the spring of 280 B.C., King Pyrrhus appeared off the coast of Tarentum with part of his fleet, because a storm as soon as he set sail broke up his imposing army made up of twenty thousand infantry, three thousand horsemen, two thousand archers, and several squadrons. five hundred slingers and something unusual in Italian lands:twenty war elephants. Determined to avert the threat with a single blow, Rome mobilized nearly eighty thousand men, a military force such as had never been assembled before, though it was divided into four armies:one to control fractious Etruria, another to defend Rome itself, the third to control the Samnites and Lucanians and the fourth, commanded by Publio Valerio Levino, ended up positioned in Heracleia, a city near Tarentum, as a spearhead against the Hellenic advance. The Roman and the Epirote had diplomatic activity prior to coming to blows. Pirro offered his mediation in the conflict with haughty words, but his interference was disdained by the consul. As Dionysius of Halicarnassus left us, this is how Levino replied:
As for us, we are used to punishing our enemies, not with words, but with actions. We will not make you the judge in our problems with the Tarentines, Samnites or the rest of our enemies, nor will we accept you as guarantor for the payment of any compensation, but we will decide the result with our own weapons and fix the punishments that we wish. Now that you are aware of this, prepare to be not our judge, but our rival
The time for diplomacy had expired. Levinus had four legions, nearly twenty thousand auxiliary infantry and twelve hundred cavalry, an army far superior in number to Pyrrhus. At dawn on a hot July day, the Roman troops crossed the Sinnio River and with it a confrontation broke out for hours as even as it was fierce. In the heat of the battle, a Roman auxiliary decurion located Pyrrhus thanks to his showy equipment and plume and very nearly did not shoot him down, a fact that moved the Epirote to be more cautious and give up his helmet and chlamys to one of his officers. , Megacles. He did not miss. When he was killed in combat, the rumor that Pyrrhus had fallen spread throughout the army and the king, as he used to do, trotted out with his face uncovered among his men so that they would recognize him and see that it was just a hoax. It was in that moment of moral effervescence of his when he decided to use his most deadly and unprecedented weapon up to that moment:the war elephants. To this day we cannot describe what anguish the Roman legionnaires felt when they saw those twenty masses appear before them trumpeting and raising their trunks, on whose backs were towers full of archers. The vast majority of them had never seen a pachyderm in their lives, much less equipped in such a hideous fashion. Neither the infantry nor the cavalry could control the panic and, ignoring the officers, they all fled from the battlefield in terror, abandoning their own camp in their mad flight. Something like this was an absolute defeat in ancient times, since supplies, slaves, personal equipment, etc. they were at the mercy of the victors.
There is a disparity in the actual number of casualties, but I prefer the count left by Dionysius of Halicarnassus:fifteen thousand Roman dead compared to thirteen thousand among the Epirote-Tarentine coalition. I bet on this huge figure because it is known that Milo and others of his lieutenants congratulated Pyrrhus for his great victory on the same battlefield, but the king replied:
Another victory like this and I'll have to return to Epirus alone
It is also said that Pyrrhus, who always behaved as a soldier of honor and not as a butcher, praised the Roman dead for their bravery, all with wounds on the torso, and not on the back, burying them with the same honors as the Roman dead. their men. He is credited with the phrase:
With such men, he would have been able to conquer the universe
Heracleia's victory caused Tarentum's reluctant neighbors to reconsider their alliances. Bruttii, Lucanians, and Samnites soon changed sides, rebelling against Rome. Meanwhile, Pyrrhus decided to send to the Senate one of his most talkative and intelligent chancellors, Cineas of Thessaly, whose eloquence was said to have won more cities for Pyrrhus than his armies. Within his brilliant exposition flavored with an ultimatum, the Thessalian marked three immovable points for the return of the Roman prisoners:first, Rome had to recognize the independence of the Italiots; In addition, the Lucanians, Samnites, Apulians and Bruttii had to be compensated for their losses in the war and, last but not least, the Senate had to sign a peace treaty with Epirus and Tarentum.
After a heated debate, the Cineas proposal did not catch on; Although many senators were willing to accept it, the old and blind Apio Claudio Ceco, censor that year, delivered a fiery speech extolling the country from which one of his lapidary phrases has come down to us:
“Faber suae quisque Fortunae”
(Every man is the architect of his own fortune)
The plea concluded, old Ceco expelled the Thessalian from Rome that same day. Cineas informed Pyrrhus of the unsuccessful result of his visit to Rome, comparing the Senate to the Hydra. There would be no peace. Willing to definitively conclude that campaign that was choking him, Pirró led his army only 35 km. from Rome, causing panic in the city when it became known that he was only a day away, but for a very short time he was able to maintain his advanced position, since the Etrurian army was already back and he had Levinus in the rear with two more legions, for so he chose to retire to Tarentum to winter. Gaius Fabricius Luscinus headed the Roman embassy that sought to negotiate the return of the prisoners. Pirro cordially attended the Roman, but did not agree to the exchange of prisoners that the latter proposed. On the other hand, he did agree that the Roman prisoners return home to spend Saturnalia with their families, as long as they return later if at that time the Senate had not ratified the conditions that Cineas had proposed to them. The Senate did not agree and all the captives returned to Tarentum once the holidays were over.
The following year hostilities resumed. The next great battle took place in Apulia, specifically in Asculum. On this new occasion, the Roman troops of the consul Publius Decius Mus were alert to the elephants, having made long antlers like the sarisas fruit salads and more projectiles with which to annoy the pachyderms. The battle took place over two days tactically and was very similar to the one at Heracleia. Fierce combat, charge of cavalry, elephants and throwing weapons to contain and curl them. In the end, the Roman line broke and the consul himself fell along with six thousand of his men. Pirro lost three thousand five hundred and five in that set, not obtaining any advantage for his victory because of the enormous casualties he suffered. Awarded by his own, he replied:
Another win like this and I'm done for!
The Epirote king was not wrong in judging him. Today we call "Pyrrhic victory" any triumph that harms the winner more than the loser, as happened to Pyrrhus in the battles of Heracleia and Asculum, where the king won and almost lost his entire army in it while Rome remained. defeated but renewing its legions based on levies among citizens and allies. While Pirro was exchanging emissaries with the Senate in search of a truce that would allow him to recover from so many losses, an embassy from Syracuse arrived in Tarentum inviting him to help the city in the face of the Carthaginian threat. That new challenge was more appealing to him than the ongoing war with Rome, already seeing himself as the great conqueror and lord of Sicily.
The opportunity to reach a pact with Rome came in early 278 BC. in the most unexpected way. One of Pyrrhus' doctors, a certain Nicias, defected to the Roman side and proposed to the consuls Fabricius and Aemilius to return to Tarentum and poison his former lord. What this Nicias could not imagine is that the two consuls sent him back to Tarentum, but not to poison his lord, but as a captive so that Pyrrhus could dispose of him as he pleased, since for them there was no honor in getting rid of such a formidable rival by means of poisons. Pyrrhus, moved by this noble gesture, sent Cineas to Rome with all the prisoners of war without demanding any ransom for them. His gesture led to a kind of armistice, not peace, between both sides that facilitated Pirro's departure to Sicily.
Less than two years lasted his Sicilian adventure, achieving some early successes, but crashing in front of the strong walls of Marsala. Well into 276 BC, Pyrrhus, after losing seventy ships when attacked by a Carthaginian fleet as soon as he set sail from Sicily, appeared off the coast of Bruttium, landed and had to face the Mamertines who were at large before he could reach to Tarentum. He then had troops similar to those he had when he arrived in number, but not in quality. Barely a phalanx remained of his twenty thousand Epirote soldiers, and his new army was made up more of adventurers and mercenaries than self-sacrificing subjects. The Sicilian campaign had been hard, very hard, so much so that Plutarch left us written in his “Sayings of Kings and Commanders ”That Pirro said when setting sail looking towards the old Trinacria he said:
What a good fighting arena we leave here for Romans and Carthaginians!
Goaded by the pay of his new soldiers, he soon sprang into action, seizing the treasure from the temple of Proserpina at Locri. As if by a divine curse, the fleet that was supposed to transport it to Tarentum had to abort the trip when it was surprised by a violent storm, so the king, superstitious like almost all the sovereigns of his time, returned the treasure to the temple and sentenced to death to the epicurean who had suggested such an infamous act. That event left him traumatized for life. As Appian wrote in his “Samníticas ”, from that moment Pyrrhus lived tormenting himself that the wrath of the goddess would fall on him, persecute him and lead him to ruin.
The final battle took place a year later at Benevento. Pirro entered Lucania trying to surprise the army led by the consul Manio Curio Dentato. This homo novus was an energetic man and his second consulship. Wary that Pyrrhus would return to Italy, he had sternly recruited his legions, confiscating the property of anyone who refused to serve the country. Due to a host of miscalculations, what would have been a sudden night attack turned into a dawn attack in which the Epirote troops were tired from a night's march against rested Roman troops. The battle was bloody, but the trump card of the elephants was neutralized with the use of arrows with burning wax, something that scared the elephants, who ran amok in fear, crushing their own and others and turning the battle into a carnage. Pyrrhus was able to return to Tarentum with a small cavalry force, leaving Benevento with any chance of winning that contest and thousands of dead soldiers. Aware of his precarious situation, at the beginning of 274 B.C. he sailed for Epirus with what was left of his army.
The consul Manio Curio Dentato celebrated his brand new triumph over Pyrrhus and the Samnites through the streets of Rome with all the pomp that such a feat required, exhibiting four of the captured elephants, animals never seen by the Roman plebs until that date. In turn, the consul gave the republic the war treasure seized from Pyrrhus, which would be considerable, keeping only for himself a wooden container with which he offered his victory to the gods. For his patriotism and austerity, Dentatus was praised by Cicero as an example of a man of integrity. His victory over Pyrrhus and his allies in Benevento caused all of Magna Graecia to end up under the tutelage of Rome.
The king of Epirus did not stop enrolling in new campaigns with which to placate his desire for glory. His bellicose temper had only received a setback. After the Italian fiasco he fought against Macedonia, against Sparta and then against Argos, meeting death in that city in the most unexpected way. Riding his steed to the rear of the battle raging there, he was slightly wounded by the point of a spear wielded by a young argyro. As he turned to fend off the attack, an old woman, probably the assailant's mother, threw a tile at him that hit him in the back of the head and left him shocked, falling after her horse. That moment of confusion was taken advantage of by one of Antigonus' soldiers to assassinate him, behead him and send his head to his lord.
Thus died Pyrrhus the redhead, king of Epirus, one of the greatest strategists of all antiquity. He was forty-seven years old.
Collaboration of Gabriel Castelló, author of Archenemies of Rome
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