The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (28 page)

As the Molossian king, Pyrrhus was ex officio the patron of the oracle at Dodona. He was an enthusiastic supporter and made it the religious center of his kingdom. At considerable expense, he upgraded its facilities. The Temple of Zeus was rebuilt on a grand scale, and an arts and athletics festival launched, with plays performed in a new open-air theater.

When the king was planning his Italian expedition, he consulted the oracle about his prospects of success. With his close connection to the oracle, he would be forgiven for expecting the king of the gods and his queen to allow him an auspicious outcome. However, the doves listened to the rustling leaves and offered an ambiguous interpretation. In the Greek, their words could be read two ways—either “If you cross into Italy, you will be victorious over the Romans” or “The Romans will be victorious over you.”

Pyrrhus was no fool and must have recognized the double meaning, but, as Cassius Dio put it, he chose to “
construe the advice according to his wishes, for desire is very apt to deceive.” He refused to countenance the slightest delay and would not even wait for the arrival of spring before setting off on his grand enterprise.

BEING ONLY A
constitutional monarch in Epirus, Pyrrhus could not simply do as he pleased. His first step was to win the federation’s backing and, more particularly, an agreement to supply troops. He made full use of his descent from Achilles: if the Romans claimed to be inheritors of the Trojan name, an invasion led by the Molossian king should be seen as a return match. Troy redivivus had to be cast down for a second time. Inheritor of the mantle of Alexander, Pyrrhus presented himself as the leader of a Hellenic crusade against barbarians. He was also the avenger of his uncle Alexander the Molossian.

Coins had a wide distribution throughout the Mediterranean, and for rulers with an instinct for public relations they were an invaluable means of communicating their message.
Those issued under Pyrrhus’s aegis at Tarentum could hardly have been more explicit. On some of them, the image of Zeus and Dione of Dodona appear, guaranteeing Pyrrhus’s optimistic expectation of their divine blessing. Others imitated the gold staters of Alexander the Great, and showed Athena Promachos, champion against the barbarians, and a personified Nike, or Victory, bearing a trophy. On one coin we see Achilles, possibly with Pyrrhus’s features. On another, Achilles’ mother, Thetis, is depicted, as Homer described in the
Iliad
, bringing a shield and new weapons to rearm her son after the death of Patroclus.

Pyrrhus got his way, winning the support not only of his Epirote tribes but also of other Hellenistic monarchs, Diadochoi, or their heirs, who were delighted to see this military and militant nuisance sail away and annoy other people elsewhere. The king recruited an army of up to 22,500 infantry, including 2,000 archers and 500 men with slings (both of them little used by the Romans but lethal at a distance). He also disposed of 2,000 cavalry and 20 elephants.

Elephants were something of a novelty. The Greeks first came across them when Darius III, the Persian King of Kings, fielded them, unsuccessfully, against Alexander the Great at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331. Alexander never used elephants himself, but they became a favorite weapon of his successors. They were imported from India and, unlike African bush elephants, were large enough to carry a howdah, with a mahout and a few soldiers armed with missiles.

Their main advantage was that they terrified the enemy; horses would not face them, especially if they had not encountered them before. On the debit side, they could do serious damage to their own forces if they were wounded or for some other reason panicked and ran amok.

Arrian gives a vivid account of what can happen in those circumstances, when describing another of Alexander’s battles, on this occasion against an Indian king:

By this time the elephants were boxed up, with no room to maneuver, by troops all around them, and as they blundered about, wheeling and shoving this way and that, they trampled to death as many of their friends as of their enemies. The result was that the Indian cavalry, jammed in around the elephants and with no more space to maneuver than they had, suffered severely; most of the elephant-drivers had been shot; many of the animals had themselves been wounded, while others, riderless and bewildered, ceased altogether to play their expected part, and, maddened by pain and fear, set indiscriminately upon friend and foe, thrusting, trampling, and spreading death before them.

In early 280, Pyrrhus wisely sent Cineas ahead with an advance guard of three thousand troops. Only when they had arrived safely at Tarentum and received their expected welcome did he follow with the main body of his army. They traveled in a fleet of transport ships that the Tarentines had sent across the Adriatic to Epirus. The king soon had cause to rue his insistence on sailing before the winter was over. His fleet was scattered far and wide by a storm. Some ships, including the flagship, which carried Pyrrhus, were unable to round the Iapygian promontory (the heel of the Italian boot) into the Bay of Tarentum. Night fell and a heavy sea drove them onto a bare and harborless coast, where many ships broke up on the rocks. An exception was the royal galley, which was saved because of its great size and sturdy build.

Saved only for the moment, though. The wind unexpectedly veered round and began to blow from the shore. The ship was likely to founder if it met the wind head-on, but to sail out to sea and
allow it to bounce about in the boiling swell was equally dangerous. The king took a bold decision, as Plutarch reports:

Pyrrhus jumped up and threw himself into the sea, and his friends and bodyguards, eager to help him, immediately followed suit. But night and the waves with their heavy crashing and violent recoil made assistance difficult. It was not until day had already come and the wind was dying away that he managed to reach the shore. He had lost all his physical strength, but with boldness and a refusal to give in he mastered his distress.

The king made his way to Tarentum, where he lay low for a time. Although immediately appointed commander-in-chief with unlimited powers, he did nothing that might alarm his hosts, until his damaged fleet limped into port and disgorged the Epirote army. Surprisingly, all his elephants survived the passage, although how a nervous animal weighing five tons was kept calm on board a twenty-meter-long galley in stormy seas must remain a mystery. Then Pyrrhus ran up his true colors. He believed, so Plutarch puts it, that “
the mass of people were incapable, unless under strict discipline, of either saving themselves or saving anyone else, but were inclined to let him do their fighting for them while they remained at home in the enjoyment of their baths and social festivities.”

This was not his idea of how to run a war. He occupied the acropolis, or citadel, with his own troops and billeted his officers in citizens’ houses. Military conscription was introduced for the Tarentine youth. All theatrical performances were banned, the gymnasiums were closed (people met there not only for exercise but also for conversation during which “
they fought out their country’s battles”), and the men’s communal messes (an institution peculiar to the communal lifestyle of Sparta, Tarentum’s founder) were prohibited. The city’s loungers and layabouts were shocked, and some of them
managed to evade Pyrrhus’s guards and left town. The king’s popularity fell, and opponents of the ruling democracy tried to stir up trouble. They were quickly rounded up and sent to Epirus or simply put to death. Tarentum was no longer its own master.

THE NEWS OF
Pyrrhus’s arrival on Italian soil caused consternation in Rome. A joint Celtic and Etruscan army had only recently been defeated in the north, and what the Republic needed was a period of recuperation. The heavy casualties in the third and last Samnite War were still a painful memory. However, there was nothing for it; another immense effort was required if the threat posed by Pyrrhus was to be met. Fresh troops were levied, even (apparently) from those citizens, the
proletarii
, who owned no property and so were usually exempt from military service. Such a step was taken only when there was a
tumultus maximus
, an extreme military emergency. Rome was garrisoned and an army in the north was tasked to prevent the Molossian king from making common cause with the Etruscans.

One of the consuls for 280, Publius Valerius Laevinus, marched a force of about thirty thousand men southward toward Tarentum. At this point, Pyrrhus intervened with a peace proposal. Although his highest value was prowess on the battlefield, he was not a warmonger. Throughout his career, he would always deploy diplomacy to win an argument before resorting to arms, and he recommended this policy in his well-known (but now lost) book on military tactics. If we can trust Cassius Dio, he wrote to the consul in the following terms:

King Pyrrhus to Laevinus, Greeting. I understand that you are leading an army against Tarentum. Send it away and come to me yourself with a few attendants. For I will judge between you, if you have any charge to bring against each other, and I will compel the party at fault, however unwilling, to deal justly.

This was the first direct dealing the king had had with representatives of the Republic, so it is hard to assess whether he expected a favorable reply. He certainly did not receive one. The consul asked, “What use have I got for trash and rubbish, when I can stand trial in the court of Mars, our forefather?”

Pyrrhus was slightly outnumbered by the Romans, for he had to leave a garrison behind in Tarentum. He was encamped on one side of a river near Heraclea, a town a little inland from the Gulf of Tarentum. The consul approached and made his camp on the other. He captured one of the king’s scouts and, rather than execute him, Laevinus drew up his army in battle formation and showed the man around. He asked him to report faithfully to his master what he had seen. Pyrrhus himself rode up to the river to get a view of them. When he had observed their good order, impressive drill, and the efficient arrangement of their camp, he remarked, “
The discipline of these barbarians is not barbarous.”

He was now less confident of victory and tried to avoid being forced into battle until reinforcements arrived. He prevented the Romans from crossing the river. Laevinus, in the light of his numerical superiority, was eager for a fight. The consul took a leaf out of Alexander’s book at
Granicus and sent his cavalry off to ride along the river and cross where they were unopposed. When the legions appeared unexpectedly in their rear, the Greeks guarding the riverbank pulled back and Laevinus’s infantry was able to begin crossing the river.

It is difficult to make sense of the surviving accounts of the battle, which opened messily. What exactly happened was probably confusing to those taking part. But it appears that Pyrrhus, much alarmed, rode with three thousand Epirote horsemen to meet the Roman cavalry and hold them up, giving time for his phalanx and the rest of his army to form themselves into order of battle. Unfortunately, he was unhorsed and severely shaken.

In an echo of the Achilles and Patroclus story, and presumably to
give him a breathing space in which to recover, the king handed over his richly ornamented armor and purple cloak shot through with gold to one of his companions, a certain Megacles, to wear in his place, for his disappearance would be fatal for his soldiers’ morale. For the time being, he stayed in the rear. Unfortunately, Megacles was killed. Pyrrhus mounted another horse and rode along the line with his head bare to show that he was alive, both by his appearance and his voice.

The king’s tactics were similar to those of Alexander, who combined an unbreakable phalanx with a flanking cavalry charge. The Epirote phalanx, with its bristling pikes, was to hold or push back the Roman infantry. Elephants were usually deployed about fifteen to thirty meters apart along the front of an army, but Pyrrhus had too few of them to do this. So he placed his band of twenty as a reserve to be brought forward at an appropriate moment in the battle. His cavalry were on the wings, with instructions to rout the enemy’s horse and attack its infantry from the flanks. Although the legions, armed with short swords and throwing javelins, had some difficulty engaging with the phalanx, they stood their ground. The battle became a stalemate.

Pyrrhus decided to bring on his elephants, which thoroughly unnerved the Roman cavalry. Horses bolted and threw their riders. Men in the howdahs shot down many foot soldiers, and others were trampled. Disheartened, the legions pulled back and left the field. They managed to cross the river and retreated to Venusia (joining the Roman force that had originally appeared before Tarentum and ravaged the city’s territory). More than seven thousand men had fallen and eighteen hundred been captured.

But success was sour, for Pyrrhus had lost about four thousand men, including friends and officers whom he knew well and trusted. As we have seen, Rome commanded a very substantial reservoir of men of fighting age, and had no difficulty in quickly reinforcing the consul. However, the king would struggle to raise more troops.
When congratulations were offered him, he replied gloomily, “
Another victory like this, and I am done for!” (Hence the modern phrase a “Pyrrhic victory.”)

Nevertheless, he made the most of a good public-relations opportunity. Captured enemy weapons were sent to Dodona as a votive trophy. A small bronze tablet marking the gift has survived: “
King Pyrrhus and the Epirotes and the Tarentines to Zeus Naios from the Romans and their allies.” The Tarentines sent offerings to Athens to celebrate this triumph over barbarians, and the armor the king wore during the battle, or at least part of it, was sent to a Temple of Athena on the island of Rhodes. The underlying message was simple and clear: the Hellenic world would soon be hearing no more of the upstart Italian Republic.

The Samnites and the Sabellian tribes now declared openly for Pyrrhus, as did a number of Italiote cities that had been waiting on events before deciding whom to back. However, the king seems to have been unsure of his next military move. One of his rivals for the throne of Macedonia once said of him, “
He is like a player with dice, who makes many fine throws, but does not know how to exploit them when they are made.”