Pyrrhus

Pyrrhus was born around 319 BC to Aeacides, king of Epirus, and Phthia of Thessaly, the daughter of a Thessalian general. Through his mother he was a second cousin of Alexander the Great, sharing the Aeacid bloodline of Olympias, Alexander's mother, and tying his Molossian house to the royal lineage of Macedon. When his father Aeacides was deposed in the wars of the Successors, the two-year-old prince was smuggled north and raised at the Illyrian court of Glaucias and his Molossian wife Beroea. He was first installed on the Epirote throne at twelve under Illyrian protection, exiled at seventeen while attending the wedding of one of Glaucias's sons, and spent his formative years amid the quarrelling courts of Alexander's heirs. The pattern of accession and expulsion that opened his life would never quite close; across nearly five decades of unceasing warfare he would win and lose kingdoms five times.

He distinguished himself fighting alongside his brother-in-law Demetrius Poliorcetes at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BC, the decisive engagement that fractured the empire of Alexander among his successors. Sent afterwards as a hostage to Ptolemy I in Alexandria under the terms of a treaty between Demetrius and Ptolemy, he married the king's stepdaughter Antigone and in 297 BC returned to Epirus with Ptolemaic men and money to reclaim his throne. According to Plutarch, the aged Antigonus Monophthalmus had already predicted that Pyrrhus, if he lived long enough, would become the greatest general of his age. The next decade of fighting with Demetrius, Lysimachus, and Antigonus Gonatas brought him briefly to the Macedonian throne in 288 BC and then drove him out again four years later.

His defining episode began in 280 BC, when Tarentum in southern Italy invited him to lead its war against the rising Roman Republic. Crossing the Adriatic with twenty thousand infantry, three thousand cavalry, two thousand archers, and twenty war elephants, he defeated the consul Publius Valerius Laevinus at the Battle of Heraclea in Lucania, then defeated the Romans again at the Battle of Asculum in Apulia the following year. Surveying the Roman camp before Heraclea he is reported by Plutarch to have remarked that "the line of these barbarians is not at all barbarian." To Roman envoys arriving to ransom prisoners he replied, "I have come not to trade, but to fight," and returned the captives without payment. Yet both victories cost him irreplaceable Macedonian officers and veterans whose numbers he could never replenish so far from home. His lament after Asculum — "If we win one more battle against the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined" — passed into the political vocabulary of the Western world as the phrase "Pyrrhic victory," a triumph whose price exceeds its reward.

From Italy he turned to Sicily in 278 BC, lifted the Carthaginian siege of Syracuse, captured the fortress of Eryx, and nearly drove Punic power off the island. Yet his autocratic recruitment, his forced contributions for a Sicilian fleet, and his garrisoning of Greek cities alienated the very communities he had come to liberate. In 276 BC he withdrew to Italy, turning to his companions on the deck of his ship and saying, in Plutarch's record, "What a wrestling ground, my friends, we leave behind for the Carthaginians and the Romans" — a prediction of the Punic Wars to come that would prove uncannily accurate within a decade.

After defeat at the Battle of Beneventum in 275 BC against the consul Manius Curius Dentatus he returned to Epirus, restless as ever and stripped of his Italian gains. He seized Macedon from Antigonus II Gonatas at the Battle of the Aous, allowed his Gallic mercenaries to plunder the royal tombs at Aegae, and then in 272 BC invaded the Peloponnese at the invitation of Cleonymus, a Spartan pretender. His assault on Sparta failed against unexpectedly fierce resistance, his eldest son Ptolemy was killed leading the rearguard during the retreat, and Pyrrhus then became entangled in a civic dispute at Argos. In a confused street battle inside the narrow city lanes by night, an old woman watching from her roof hurled down a roof tile, struck him from his horse, and broke his spine. A hesitant Macedonian soldier named Zopyrus, frightened by the look on the unconscious king's face, then beheaded him. The death of so feared a king to a non-combatant's tile became one of antiquity's great parables of military hubris, retold by Plutarch and by every later age that sought to teach a commander when to stop. Hannibal, in exile at Ephesus and questioned by Scipio Africanus, told the Roman general (according to Livy 35.14) that the three greatest commanders of history were Alexander, Pyrrhus, and himself — the most enduring monument to a king who could win every battle but never finish a single war.