A History of the Pyrrhic War

Patrick Alan Kent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138543829
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351005807
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

A History of the Pyrrhic War explores the multi-polar nature of a conflict that involved the Romans, peoples of Italy, western Greeks, and Carthaginians during Pyrrhus' western campaign in the early third century BCE.

The war occurred nearly a century before the first historical writings in Rome, resulting in a malleable narrative that emphasized the moral virtues of the Romans, transformed Pyrrhus into a figure that resembled Alexander the Great, disparaged the degeneracy of the Greeks, and demonstrated the malicious intent of the Carthaginians. Kent demonstrates the way events were shaped by later Roman generations to transform the complex geopolitical realities of the Pyrrhic War into a one-dimensional duel between themselves and Pyrrhus that anticipated their rise to greatness. This book analyses the Pyrrhic War through consideration of geopolitical context as well as how later Roman writers remembered the conflict. The focus of the war is taken off Pyrrhus as an individual and shifted towards evaluating the multifaceted interactions of the peoples of Italy and Sicily.

A History of the Pyrrhic War is a fundamental resource for academic and learned general readers who have an interest in the interaction of developing imperial powers with their neighbors and how those events shaped the perceptions of later generations. It will be of interest not only to students of Roman history, but also to anyone working on historiography in any period.

1 Remembering the Pyrrhic War

In the spring of 280 BCE, King Pyrrhus of Epirus surveyed a battlefield near the city of Heraclea in southern Italy. He had come to the peninsula to defend the city of Taras (later known as Tarentum) from attack and now faced Roman infantry pushing across the river that split the field. Resplendent in his armor, Pyrrhus cut a dashing figure. His purple cloak was accented with gold, his helmet unmatched in its workmanship. The king wanted to be seen at the head of his band of cavalry, commanding his men and, when necessary, entering the fray himself. Whenever his men faltered, Pyrrhus appeared at the head of his Companions to reinforce the line and inspire his men to stand strong. Thanks to his spirited efforts, the Epirote army withstood the assault and began to press the Romans back in turn.

But Pyrrhus’ conspicuousness had not gone unnoticed on the opposite side of the fight where another man was watching closely. Oblacus Volsinius led his own band of Ferentani cavalry as a Roman ally. As Pyrrhus moved across the battlefield, Oblacus mirrored him, waiting for an opportunity. One of the king’s Companions, Leonnatus, noticed the Italian and warned the king that wherever he went Oblacus “watches you and keeps his eyes fixed on you.”¹ Pyrrhus brushed off the caution, confident that the man would not be able to get close. But the pause to speak was all of the opening Oblacus needed; he had been hunting Pyrrhus, looking for a chance to fight him one-on-one. Killing the king of Epirus would bring him unequaled renown and would win the war in one fell blow. Tracking Pyrrhus was not difficult given his armor, but he had also always been in the thickest fighting and unreachable. Now Oblacus leveled his spear and charged.

Pyrrhus had been wrong. Followed by his men, Oblacus made it through the king’s bodyguards. Luckily for the king, Leonnatus had heeded his own advice and reacted quickly. He swung his horse around and speared the Italian’s mount as he closed in. Even as he fell, Oblacus managed to kill Pyrrhus’ own horse, sending him to the ground as well. Some of Pyrrhus’ bodyguards snatched up their king and sped away from the threat. Robbed of his chance at glory and now surrounded by the rest of the king’s Companions, Oblacus did not go down easily, fighting defiantly to the end. After being wounded countless times, he finally collapsed. Seeing him fall, Oblacus’ loyal compatriots fought their way to his body and carried their fallen leader away in a final act of honor.

For Pyrrhus, the encounter with Oblacus had shaken him. He felt vulnerable in his visibility. Fearing another attack on his person, the king switched armor with the more utilitarian set of his companion Megacles. Pyrrhus continued to reinforce his lines as needed, but now behind the protection of his men. His caution proved well founded as Megacles was killed by another man from the Roman army named Dexous, who had also been seeking Pyrrhus. Believing himself triumphant, Dexous carried off Pyrrhus’ armor and cloak as confirmation of his death. The Romans went on the attack, inspired by the supposed death of the enemy leader. Realizing the danger, Pyrrhus cast off the plain helmet he was wearing to show his men that he lived. While the king’s efforts stabilized the situation, his men were still being pressed hard.

The battle of Heraclea flowed back and forth, but in the end it was neither Pyrrhus nor those that hunted him that won the day. It was said to be a far more exotic factor. As the Roman attack was again brought to a standstill, they faced an unexpected threat. Pyrrhus had come to Italy with elephants, massive creatures with towers mounted on their backs, which charged into the Roman lines. The legionaries stood for a time, but could not face this unknown terror. Pyrrhus was merely a man, albeit one who could fight and lead with equally deadly skill, but it was the beasts that he unleashed that defeated the Romans. At the end of the day the king of Epirus owned the field of battle after a bloody fight that had nearly cost him his own life, but it had also come at a massive cost as he lost nearly as many men in the fighting as the Romans.

The description of the battle of Heraclea is a gloriously heroic tale of combat that grips the reader, who is unsure of what is coming next. The flow of the fighting, with each side seemingly on the cusp of victory at various points, is unpredictable in its twists and turns. It is actually quite typical of the various episodes of the Pyrrhic War, which are full of intrigue, honor, virtue, and betrayal. It is all quite literally fantastic, and it is impossible to accept at face value. The Roman descriptions of their war with Pyrrhus were filtered through centuries of retellings, exaggerations, and interpretation. The conflict is wonderfully malleable, taking place generations before the development of historical literature in Rome. Pyrrhus became a second Alexander the Great bent on the conquest of the west, facing the burgeoning power of Rome in a grand duel to decide the fate of the Mediterranean.

But the Pyrrhic War was not what later Roman generations imagined. By evaluating the way in which the Romans constructed their idea of the war in combination with the geopolitical situation of the western Mediterranean, a clearer picture emerges. Pyrrhus did not intend to conquer Italy, Rome, Sicily, and Carthage, but instead pursued a more limited goal of bringing the Greek cities of southern Italy and eastern Sicily under his control. However, he failed to understand the complexity of affairs in the west, entering an area of wars and shifting alliances that had been ongoing for decades. This was not a war of Romans versus Pyrrhus, but a multipolar regional conflict involving Carthaginians, Samnites, Tarentines, Syracusans, and many others, with each of them pursuing their own interests. It is necessary to penetrate the Roman narrative, shaped as it is by anachronisms, in order to understand the events of the Pyrrhic War beyond the fabulous stories of Oblacus and the elephants.

The sources

The Pyrrhic War was a significant part of many ancient works. While overshadowed by the subsequent Punic Wars and the person of Hannibal, Pyrrhus and his campaigns in the west remained a subject of fascination to later generations. Unfortunately, what has survived down to the present day is problematic to put it mildly. No contemporary Roman sources existed. Those works written a century or more after the war freely molded events to fit their own agendas, but they are now nearly completely lost. Subsequent writings, composed even later, survive largely in fragments. Literary materials are thus late, incomplete, given to the fanciful, and filtered through generations of anachronisms. While there are limited archaeological, numismatic, and epigraphic materials that help, it is unfortunately these difficult literary materials that must be relied upon for the framework of events.

Before the first historical compositions of Fabius Pictor and Ennius at the dawn of the second century BCE, Rome had a semi-oral historical tradition. Memories of the First and Second Punic Wars (263–241, 218–202) were still accessible through living individuals who had participated in them for the first generation of Roman historians as a communicative source of information. But for the major events and narratives of the period prior to the wars with Carthage tradition was passed down orally though the aristocratic families that dominated society, supplemented by monuments, inscriptions, and priestly records that provided more specific, if often isolated, information. It was the oral traditions of the gentes that served as the narrative framework of the Roman past before the mid-third century, which were themselves glorifications of the great deeds of ancestors that reinforced contemporary status.

The reliability of the Roman historical tradition before the Punic Wars is problematic in terms of how far back in time it can be trusted with any kind of certainty. Roman history as it was first composed in the second century exhibits a floating gap common to societies whose past is preserved through oral traditions.² As the first historians and poets began to write, they could rely upon direct knowledge of the past from living members of society who had lived through those events. Those individuals could also relay the stories they had been told of the recent past. This living memory stretches back decades, but typically does not extend past around 80 years as it is limited by the death of individuals and their knowledge. In the more distant past, the origins of societies are often detailed and elaborate as events become legendary and/or mythical in nature. The foundations and early history of Rome bear characteristics of a strong oral tradition as preserved in the expansive surviving compositions of Livy, Virgil, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others. These events were fluid in their nature, as can be clearly seen in Dionysius’ brief overview of the varied stories of the foundations of Rome beyond the ‘official’ Augustan version of Romulus and Remus.³ In the earliest written histories of Rome, a good deal of space is devoted to the period before the Decemvirate in the mid-fifth century and after the start of the Punic Wars in the mid-third century. But in between these two peaks, events were skimmed over in much less depth, the floating gap.

It was in the early first century BCE that the annalistic tradition developed into the expansive and detailed compositions that would culminate in the histories of Livy, Dionysius, and others, followed by the imperial era histories. The floating gap period of Roman history represented a challenge for the annalists in fleshing out events into a more pleasing compositional form. They had the dual task of preserving the past in a more or less accurate fashion while also innovating its presentation, as Livy notes in the opening of his own history.⁴ Little additional information could be gleaned from the magisterial fasti or pontifical records, which preserved few relevant details. The oral traditions of the gentes were more elaborate in their narratives, but subject to exaggeration and a lack of objectivity meant to glorify their ancestors above other contemporary families.

The Pyrrhic War (281–275 BCE) falls right at the end of this less detailed gap, creating opportunities for ancient writers to add their own flair to a greater degree, which also complicates interpretation of events for modern scholars. The transition of Roman history from oral to written is of importance here as the Pyrrhic War took place on the edge of living memory, creating a series of events that are both based in a remembered reality but also subject to the exaggerations of a more legendary period. This chronological quirk results in a unique dynamic between the legendary and the mundane. The narrative of the war is at the same time established and plastic, malleable enough for Roman historians to shape into a grand epic but still beholden to a basic framework of events.

Roman historical writing, which first developed around 200 BCE, was as much a literary pursuit as one dedicated to finding the reality of the past. Modern scholars struggle with authorial elaboration, invention, and omissions, especially concerning periods where ancient writers had little living or documentary information. The useful tool of analysis for such evidence is contradiction, where one source, literary, archaeological, or otherwise, can be contrasted with another. But for the Pyrrhic War in particular and pre-Punic War Roman history in general, there are rarely multiple sources to compare. Archaeological materials have been a great boon to the study of early Italy and greatly contributed to the growth of that area of study in recent decades. Such evidence, in conjunction with numismatic analysis, helps expand our understanding of the peoples involved in the Pyrrhic War, but is less useful in the context of the military and diplomatic machinations of the conflict. There are multiple literary sources concerning the events of the Pyrrhic War, which sometimes contradict one another. However, those contradictions may be the result of layers of invention by ancient writers elaborating upon a narrative with little authentic detail.⁵ In other words, differences between Plutarch and Dio Cassius, both of whom wrote in the Imperial Period, may be due to reliance on different historical traditions that invented the details of the narrative rather than old and presumably more reliable evidence.

One example is the Romans’ tendency to see members of the same family acting in similar fashion, which later generations were expected to emulate. As such, in an instance where a writer found a member of a certain family present during a past event but with little detailed information, he could fill in the blanks with perceived familial characteristics.⁶ This historical inclination was reinforced by the traditions handed down in the families themselves. The gens Decia personified a military and religious ideal; victory and piety. Two Decii co-led Roman armies at two critical battles, against the Latins at Veseris in 340 and against a coalition of Italian peoples at Sentinum in 295. In both, the Decii sacrificed their own lives through a religious ritual (devotio) that ensured victory. Their actions serve as models for later Romans through their self-sacrifices in battle.

There was a Decius too at the battle of Ausculum in 279 where the Romans fought Pyrrhus.⁷ The annalists showed little compunction about making sure events fit within their histories regardless of minor discrepancies. Some ancient sources claim that the Pyrrhic War Decius died after devoting himself to the gods, while others insist that he lived. Of course, none of this rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• 1. Remembering the Pyrrhic War
• 2. Conflict and competition before Pyrrhus
• 3. The military campaigns of 280 and 279 BCE
• 4. The diplomatic negotiations of 280 and 279 BCE
• 5. In Sicily
• 6. A war ends
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index