The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (30 page)

After a brief demurral, the Senate agreed to a third treaty with Carthage, the terms of which survive in the Greek translation of Polybius. The previous accords had in large part been designed to protect Carthage’s trading interests and had set down the parties’
respective zones of influence and exclusion, with Rome mostly as the junior partner. These restrictions were now overridden in the current emergency. The key clauses read:

Whichever party may need help, the Carthaginians shall provide the ships both for transport and for operations, but each shall provide the pay for its own men.

The Carthaginians shall also give help to the Romans by sea if the need arises, but no one shall compel the crew to disembark against their will.

The Republic knew little of the sea and had few warships. The treaty was weighted in its favor, for it brought into play the resources of the Mediterranean’s naval superpower; so it would now be easy to blockade Tarentum by sea and reduce the likelihood of any new reinforcements coming in from Epirus. By contrast, Rome was under no obligation to go to Carthage’s aid in Sicily.

PYRRHUS’S ADVENTURES IN
Sicily followed a familiar pattern. Before his own arrival there, he sent Cineas ahead to prepare the ground diplomatically. Then, in the summer of 278, he set sail, this time with a comparatively small army of eight thousand infantry and some cavalry and elephants. He lifted the
Punic siege of Syracuse and entered the city to a hero’s welcome. He marched triumphally across the island, liberating city after city, and besieged the port of Lilybaeum (today’s Marsala) at Sicily’s far western end, the only stronghold not under new Greek management.

The Carthaginians changed their tune and proposed peace terms, which included a large indemnity and the provision of ships. Clearly, they were tempting Pyrrhus to return to Italy (despite the treaty with Rome), and he
was
tempted. In his absence, consular armies were regaining their dominance in Greater Greece and the situation needed to be retrieved before it was too late. Unfortunately,
the royal council, which included Sicilian representatives, rejected the offer. No deals were to be struck until the last Carthaginian had been chased from the island.

The shine was rubbing off the Molossian king. Lilybaeum proved to be impregnable by land and would fall only to a sea blockade, but unfortunately the Greeks did not have enough ships for the purpose. So Pyrrhus, who had been behaving despotically, decided to play double or quits. He would invade Carthage on its home territory. To transport the war to Africa meant commissioning a new fleet, and that, in turn, meant taxing his Sicilian allies and demanding oarsmen and sailors. The plan aroused furious opposition.

Carthage spied a chance to turn its fortunes around and dispatched a powerful new army to the island. Meanwhile, the Samnites and Sabellian tribes in Lucania and Bruttium sent an embassy to Syracuse begging the king to return as quickly as possible, for Rome was forcing them into submission. In other words, his overland link to Tarentum was under threat and unless he acted now his entire position in Sicily and southern Italy might collapse.

So in the late summer of 276, Pyrrhus set sail from Syracuse with 110 warships and many transports. On his way north up the Sicilian coast, he was surprised by a Punic fleet that sank 70 ships and severely damaged others. Luckily, the transports escaped and his army landed safely at Locri. It was an ignominious end to a high undertaking.

Before marching to Tarentum, the king tried to capture the strategically important city of Rhegium, which was garrisoned by the Romans and some Italian mercenaries. The attempt failed and the mercenaries mauled his army as it made off. Pyrrhus himself was badly wounded on the head. A huge enemy soldier in splendid armor challenged him to a duel “if he is still alive.” With typical chutzpah, the new Achilles accepted. Plutarch writes, if we are to believe him:

Wheeling round he pushed through his guards—enraged, smeared with blood and with a terrifying expression on his face. Before the man could make a move he struck him such a blow on the head that, what with the strength of his arm and the fine temper of the blade, his sword cut down through the body and the two halves fell apart.

The king managed to extricate his forces from the fight and made his way back to Locri. He had under his command twenty thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry, and was in urgent need of funds with which to pay them. He again required a substantial sum from the Temple of Zeus. He also foolishly plundered another temple for its treasures, which, he had to acknowledge, was an act of sacrilege. The ships transporting the stolen goods ran into a storm, and Pyrrhus superstitiously gave back most of what he had taken.

All sides in the war were tiring. Plague at Rome depressed public opinion and Livy reports that the number of citizens fell from 287,222 in 280 to 271,224 in 275. The Samnites and other Italian allies of Pyrrhus had been weakened by heavy losses during five long years of war. Nevertheless, in the spring of 275 two consular armies marched south and took up positions designed to prevent an advance on Rome. Meanwhile, Pyrrhus, in order to help the hard-pressed Samnites, moved northward with a force of about twenty thousand men. He meant to meet the consuls singly and found one of them at the Samnite town of Malventum (later Beneventum).

He detached part of his army to intercept the other consul in case he came up to help his colleague. With the remainder, he was now outnumbered by the Roman legions, and decided on a bold night operation. His idea was, under cover of darkness, to find high ground from which he could make a surprise attack on the enemy camp. He set out after sunset, with his best troops and his fiercest elephants. He marched on a wide circuit through dense woods, but
his soldiers lost their way and straggled. This created delay, their torches failed, and daybreak revealed them to the Romans as they descended the heights. The consul led his forces out and routed the Epirotes. Some of the elephants were captured. This engagement was followed by a conventional battle on the plain. Showers of burning arrows stampeded the remaining elephants, which ran in panic among their own men. Pyrrhus’s camp was captured and his army driven from the field.

The king did not entirely give up his dream of a western empire, but this was, to be realistic, the end of the expedition. As token of a hopeful return, he left a strong garrison at Tarentum under his son Helenus’s command, but with the rest of his troops—about eight thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry, less than half the number he had brought with him six years earlier—he set sail for Epirus. Despite his optimism, Italy had seen the last of him.

The Romans spent the next three years subduing the Samnites and their Sabellian cousins. Then they turned their attention to Tarentum, forcing out the Epirote garrison in 272 and compelling the Tarentines to hand over their fleet and pull down their walls. Tears in plenty rather than laughter now. Eventually, all the Greek cities in southern Italy came under Roman control.

As for Pyrrhus himself, his career went from good to worse. He defeated the existing king of Macedon, Antigonus Gonatas, and, to great applause, won back his throne. However, he had learned nothing from past experience and almost immediately alienated the Macedonians by occupying their towns with his troops and allowing some Celtic mercenaries to plunder the royal tombs at Aegae (archaeologists rediscovered them in 1976).

Unable to keep still, he suddenly turned up at the head of an army in the Peloponnese, with a mission to restore the ancestral rights of a Spartan general in his employ. Bogged down by a fierce Spartan defense, he then announced his intention to expel Antigonus
from Greece and marched to Argos to do battle with him. Maddened by the killing of one of his sons, he challenged the Macedonian ruler to come down from the hills where he was encamped and fight for his kingdom. “
Many roads to death lie open to Pyrrhus if he is tired of life,” came the dismissive response.

Argos begged the king to go away and leave them to their neutrality, but Pyrrhus was having none of it. An Argive friend of his let him and his soldiers into the city at dead of night. The alarm was raised, and Antigonus sent in some troops to help repel the Epirotes. Pyrrhus was in the marketplace and saw he was in trouble, so sounded a retreat. He sent a message to troops outside the walls, asking them to create a diversion. Due to a mishearing, reinforcements were sent into Argos through the same gate by which Pyrrhus was trying to leave. The result was that he was immobilized in a traffic jam. He attacked a local man, whose mother happened to be looking down from a rooftop. Seeing that her son was in danger, she flung a roof tile at Pyrrhus, which struck him in the base of the neck. His sight blurred and he fell off his horse. The man pulled him into a doorway. He decided to chop Pyrrhus’s head off but, made nervous by the recovering king’s glare, slashed him across the mouth and chin. It was some time before he finished the job.

PYRRHUS ACHIEVED NOTHING
that lasted. Achilles and Alexander were his evil angels, but in his case the pursuit of glory was not accompanied by the necessary unswerving obsessiveness. Unlike his cousin, the conqueror of the Persian Empire, Pyrrhus’s cult of himself was not conducted within a broader framework of policy but was undiluted egoism.

He certainly had good qualities. He had a charismatic personality, a generous nature, and, on the battlefield, he led from the front. He enthusiastically flung himself into hand-to-hand combat, taking wounds and risking death. Famous for his chivalry, he was a
courteous paladin of the ancient world. He was much admired for his genius as a field commander. Contemporaries said that other successor kings resembled Alexander,

with their purple costumes, their bodyguards, the way they copied the poise of his neck which was tilted slightly to the left, and their loud voices in conversation, but Pyrrhus, and Pyrrhus alone, in arms and action.

From our perspective thousands of years later, it is hard to understand his military reputation. This may not be his fault so much as that of our literary sources, whose accounts of his battles are confused and maddeningly vague just when precision is most needed.

For all the brilliance, energy, and charm, a cloud of pointlessness hangs over Pyrrhus’s career. He was an opportunist who failed to make anything of his opportunities. The danger the Molossian king posed to Rome was serious but never life-threatening. One senses that he failed to research his projects sufficiently. He did not understand until it was too late the extent of the Republic’s human reserves. The rapid Hydra-like rebirth of Laevinus’s mangled army came as a severe shock, but by then he was committed to Tarentum and war.

However, the failure of his Italian expedition had one major consequence. The Greeks now recognized that a new player had joined the international table. They were hypnotized by the steely stare of this warlike state that now dominated the Italian peninsula. For their part, having bloodied Pyrrhus’s nose, the Romans hoped they had persuaded the quarrelsome Hellenic world to mind its own business and leave them free to conduct theirs without interruption.

Now that they had won responsibility for the city-states of southern Italy, they wondered whether they might have to keep an eye open for trouble in Sicily, just across the narrow strip of water
between Rhegium and Messana (today’s Messina). Instability there would act like an airborne infection capable of blowing across seas to an exhausted peninsula, which more than anything needed a period of peace and quiet.

After all, Pyrrhus had warned them. On his final departure from Tarentum, he discussed with his entourage the consequences of his failure in Sicily: “
My friends, what a wrestling ring we are leaving behind for the Carthaginians and the Romans.”

11

All at Sea

O
N ITS MISSION OF EXPLORATION, THE FLEET
sailed out of the Mediterranean, through the Pillars of Hercules, and into the unnerving swell of the Atlantic Ocean. It turned south and set its course along the generous bulge of western Africa.

The Pillars are on either side of the narrow stretch of water we call the Strait of Gibraltar, and for most well-informed people of the fifth century they marked the
western limits of the known world. The name was a reminder that the demigod once passed this way while undertaking his labors. So, too, did Greek explorers and traders, but their heyday was over. Massilia and some settlements in northern Spain were the only Hellenic outposts left. These Occidental waters had become the monopoly of Phoenician merchants, especially those from the great North African city of Carthage.

Sixty galleys with fifty oars apiece were commanded by Hanno, a member of a leading Carthaginian family. His orders, issued sometime about or after the year 500, were to found trading outposts on the African coast. Two days from Gibraltar, the explorers set up their first mini-colony and then arrived at an inland lagoon that was covered with reeds. Elephants and other animals were
feeding there. They continued sailing and established some more settlements along the way, which in due course probably became the source of pickled and salted fish that Carthage exported to Greece; perhaps also Tyrian purple dye was extracted from sea snails harvested on this coast.