The Pyrrhic War: Rome's First Encounter with Hellenistic Power
Pyrrhus of Epirus beat the Romans twice in Italy and lost so many men doing it that he gave the language a phrase. He was invited in 280 BC by the Greek city of Tarentum, which had insulted a Roman embassy and needed protection, and he came with some 25,000 men and twenty elephants — the first the Romans had seen. At Heraclea and again at Asculum the elephants and the phalanx broke the legions, and after the second he is reported to have told a congratulating officer that another such victory would ruin him. The strategic problem was that Rome would not negotiate. His envoy Cineas offered generous terms after Heraclea and was nearly accepted, until the blind and aged Appius Claudius had himself carried into the senate house to say that Rome would not treat with an enemy on Italian soil. Cineas reported back that the senate had struck him as an assembly of kings. Pyrrhus went to Sicily instead, campaigned successfully against Carthage for three years, alienated the Greek cities there by governing them, and came back to Italy to be beaten at Beneventum in 275 BC. He returned to Greece with about a third of what he had brought and was killed in a street fight in Argos in 272 BC by a roof tile thrown by an old woman. Rome controlled the whole peninsula within five years and faced Carthage next. His war also introduced Rome to the Greek world and the Greek world to Rome. Egypt sent an embassy in 273 BC, the first diplomatic contact between the two, and the Mediterranean powers began to take account of a state most of them had never heard of.
- Year: 280 BCE
- Category: Military
