Arthur M. Eckstein |
Review of Jeff
Champion, Pyrrhus of Epirus. Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword Books,
2009. Pp. xx, 156. ISBN 978-1-84415-939-0. |
There is a marvelous story that, after the Second Punic War, Hannibal
and P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus met at the court of the Seleucid
monarch Antiochus
III.[1] Scipio
asked Hannibal who was the greatest general the world had ever seen.
This was a typical question of concern to ancient aristocrats: "Who is
Number One?" Hannibal answered that Alexander the Great was the
greatest of all generals. Scipio agreed and then asked who was second.
Hannibal answered Pyrrhus of Epirus. A little irritated, Scipio then
asked who was third. Hannibal answered that he himself was third--the
third greatest of all generals. Scipio exclaimed, "But I conquered
you!" And Hannibal replied, "Yes. But given the imbalance of
resources between myself and the Romans, if I had conquered you,
Scipio, then I would be the first of generals, not third."
The story is probably apocryphal, but Alexander, Pyrrhus,
and Hannibal had
two things in common. First, at the strategic level, all three
achieved great things in war with comparatively slender resources.
(Actually, Scipio worked with limited resources, too, both in Spain
and later in his invasion of Africa, because the Senate had to provide
forces to so many different fronts during the Hannibalic War.)
Second, at the tactical level--despite the terrible noise, dust,
confusion, and violence of ancient battle, combined with the primitive
means of communication available to them--they effectively maneuvered
large sections of their forces against the enemy, instead of urging
all their soldiers simply to push forward, as was more typically done.
(Again, this was true of Scipio as well.) And they did all this while
fulfilling the traditional, Homeric role of ancient generals, which
was to lead from the front, risking wounds or death at the enemy's
hands, thereby setting an example of courage for their men and
supporting their morale. These strategic and tactical accomplishments
of great commanders led the ancients to judge achievement in war to be
the greatest of human endeavors.
Jeff Champion rightly stresses these two themes in his Pyrrhus of
Epirus. First, regarding the paucity of resources, the Epirote
confederation of polities (three major "tribes") the Pyrrhus ruled was an undeveloped and impoverished region of northwest Greece and
never produced armies of truly impressive size. At best, Pyrrhus
could field a force of about 20,000-25,000 men,
including mercenaries, a significant army, but no match for either the
full levy of Macedon (as he found out three times in the 280s [34,
53]) or the Romans' seemingly endless supply of military manpower,
despite significant Italic and Italiote Greek help. It took a great
general to achieve what Pyrrhus did, given so slender a resource base.
Champion correctly observes that Pyrrhus spent his entire career
trying to increase his resources by acquiring populous,
wealth-producing territory.
Champion is also correct to emphasize that Pyrrhus's success derived
from an unusual ability to maneuver large sections of his army on the
battlefield. The best example of this is the battle of Asculum (279 B.C.), where Pyrrhus dealt with three crises caused by major
Roman breakthroughs in his battleline by deploying reserves kept back
for such an eventuality or judiciously redirecting large forces
from other parts of the battleline to the breakthrough points (without
jeopardizing any part of the line). It is difficult for moderns to
imagine just how difficult this maneuvering must have been (94). That
Pyrrhus was ultimately defeated in all his grand projects was thus
beside the point to both Hannibal and Scipio in their evaluation of
Pyrrhus as a general.
Pyrrhus was born in 319 B.C. into a divided and violent Epirote royal
family. As a child, he was forced into exile during a coup d'état by
one branch of the family. He grew up among the barbarous Illyrians to
the north of Epirus (their major economic activity was piracy). As an
adult, he served as a mercenary for Antigonus the One-Eyed, the best
of Alexander's Successor-kings. Eventually, he murdered his way to the
Epirote throne (297 B.C.). During the next fifteen years, he tried
without success to increase his domains (and hence his resources) via
conquest, always aiming to become king of Macedon--which in this
period was itself beset by civil wars alternating with tyranny. Though
he failed to take Macedon, he did gain a reputation for personal
courage in battle (like his Homeric archetypes, he loved the mano a
mano duel with opposing commanders). When the large Greek
city-state of Tarentum in southern Italy became embroiled in a war
with Rome, the Tarentines asked him for assistance (as they had asked
previous kings of Epirus to help them in their struggles against
Italic hill peoples). Pyrrhus answered their plea, thereby missing a
chance to become king of Macedon when it fell into chaos around 280
B.C. because of civil war and large-scale attacks from Celtic tribes
to the north. Pyrrhus brought an army of 25,000 to Italy (perhaps half
of them actual Epirotes). He no doubt aimed to establish his own
empire in the West and draw on its resources to defeat the powerful monarchies
founded by the generals of Alexander in the decades after the
Conqueror's death in 323 B.C.
In Italy, he at first swept all before him: the Greeks of southern
Italy went over to him; he beat Roman forces at Heraclea
in 280 B.C. and at Asculum the next year, though his casualties were high; and
he marched north to the
gates of Rome itself. But Rome's central Italian and Campanian allies
remained loyal and the Romans refused to make peace. Moreover, these
"Pyrrhic" victories had come at a huge cost in dead. Disappointed now
with his Italian prospects, Pyrrhus accepted the appeal of the great
city-state of Syracuse in Sicily to serve as champion of the Greek
polities on the island against the threat of Carthage. Once more, he
enjoyed initial success, expelling the Carthaginians from all their
strongholds except Lilybaeum (278-277 B.C.), where Pyrrhus gave up his
siege after only two months, and instead planned a new
expedition--this time to Africa to attack Carthage. In preparation, he
made major requisitions from the Sicilian city-states (especially for
the building of warships); these were unpopular and led to resistance,
which Pyrrhus met with bloody purges and executions in the cities.
Meanwhile, the Carthaginians had landed a large army on the island,
and, faced with this, the out of favor Pyrrhus abandoned the Sicilian
Greeks, returning to Italy.
Pyrrhus rallied the southern Italian states for one more effort
against the Romans; the result was a bloody drawn battle at Beneventum
(275 B.C.). Pyrrhus now returned home and tried to use Epirus as a
base from which to expand his power. He was again successful--at
first. He drove Demetrius the Besieger's son, Antigonus II, from
control of Macedon, the whole of the Macedonian army coming over to
him. Here at last were the large-scale resources he had always sought.
But Antigonus held the coastal towns with a large fleet, and, instead
of finishing him off and stabilizing his rule over Macedon, Pyrrhus
turned toward perceived new opportunities to the south, in the
Peloponnese, where Sparta was undergoing civil strife. But his large
army brought down from Macedon failed to take the city, thanks to the
staunch bravery of the Spartans (including their women). Pyrrhus,
again wary of a siege, marched on to Argos, another large city in the
Peloponnese suffering civil unrest. There, he was killed during
confused street fighting. With his death, everything collapsed:
Antigonus II regained control of Macedon, establishing a dynasty that
ruled for 120 years, while Epirus sank back into third-rank status.
In the first English-language book about Pyrrhus since Petros
Garouphalias's encomiastic Pyrrhus: King of Epirus over thirty
years ago,[2]
Jeff Champion tells this exciting and puzzling narrative of ups and
downs--eventually leading nowhere--with clarity and verve. But
who in reality was this adventurous king of the Epirotes? Our major
source, Plutarch, in his "Parallel Lives" format, linked Pyrrhus with
the Roman general Gaius Marius, depicting both as grim military men
with little learning or charm. Champion is dubious about the parallel,
but offers few new insights into Pyrrhus's personality, as opposed to
narrating his adventures. Pyrrhus was literate, even a writer--but
only of military manuals. His statues show a strong-jawed brute of a
man (a genetic defect evidently made his upper teeth appear to be one
continuous bone). He enjoyed personal combat with spear or sword, and
gloried in his nickname "The Eagle." His ambitions were nearly limitless,
no surprise in a cousin of Alexander the Great. He had came up via a
hard school: his childhood was spent in exile among the fierce
Illyrians and his adolescence in the military encampments of Antigonus
the One-Eyed, where he was influenced by Antigonus's talented but
erratic son Demetrius the Besieger (from whom he later tried to seize
Macedon). He murdered a cousin who was about to become king of Epirus
before (so he said) the cousin could murder him first.
Pyrrhus's restless energy--and his demands for Epirote soldiers and
funds--were never-ending. He showed outstanding physical bravery in
many single combats, most famously in personally leading the
assault on the huge walls of the city of Eryx in Sicily in 277 B.C.
(109). But he lacked staying power: hence his abandonment of the
Italian campaign in midstream to go to Sicily, of the Sicilian states
to go back to Italy, and then of the unfinished Macedon project to go off
in hopes of conquering Sparta. When the Greek states of the West
wanted a champion, they got a harsh military tyrant. (He did like
animals, however, and his pet eagle is said to have starved itself to
death over his grave.) But the problem here was not personality
alone: Pyrrhus needed to expand well beyond the assets of Epirus to
realize his huge ambitions. In taking on Rome, Carthage, or the other
Hellenistic monarchs, he confronted regimes with far more resources
than he could handle. Once the futility of a situation became clear,
he moved to another target in his confrontations with both Rome and
Carthage. His setting out to conquer Greece in 272 B.C. when he should
have focused on consolidating his rule in Macedon is less
understandable. All in all, Pyrrhus is a formidable figure, not a
likeable one.
Champion's book offers a needed corrective to at least one major
misunderstanding of the period. He rightly doubts the claims of
ancient writers, and some modern ones, that the Tarentines, because of
their "wealth and decadence," were of limited military value to
Pyrrhus in Italy (65). The ancient historians were engaging here in
traditional moralizing about the alleged debilitating effects of
wealth, something belied, as Champion indicates, by the fame of the
Tarentine cavalry, the large numbers of infantry and cavalry the
Tarentines put into the field for Pyrrhus, and the occasional
Tarentine victories over the Romans on their own ( 54). Moreover,
Pyrrhus could never have crossed the Adriatic to Italy in the first
place without the protection of the Tarentines' war-fleet, and he
acknowledged their contribution to his victory over the Romans at
Heraclea in his thanksgiving dedication at Dodona in Epirus. Champion
could have made this point even stronger, had he referred to the
contemporary thanksgiving dedication by the Tarentines themselves at
Delphi, which honors their cavalry general at Heraclea: "From the city
of Tarentines, that fights on horseback."[3] Our
sources indicate war-weariness and draft protests at Rome--not at
Tarentum (119)--before the climactic clash at Beneventum. When Pyrrhus
gave up and returned to Epirus, the Tarentines held out against the
Romans for three more years. Even in the absence of Pyrrhus, the
Romans had faced a formidable opponent: they found the Tarentine gods
frightening (Livy 27.16).
Champion has a First in Classics and Ancient History from Western
Australia University, but he is not a trained ancient historian.
Sometimes it shows, as in the following errors: the Romans were not in
fact at war with Tarentum in 303 B.C. (42); the great Roman victory
over the Seleucids at the battle of Magnesia occurred in 189 B.C.,
not in 171 (63)--not a small detail, since this battle brought Rome to
world power status in the eastern Mediterranean as Zama had done in the
western Mediterranean. The Roman assembly responsible for declaring
war was the comitia centuriata, not the comitia curiata, and it
neither comprised primarily "poor plebeians," nor always followed
senatorial recommendations (49)--famously, it rejected a proposal for
war against Macedon in 200 B.C. Polybius 1.11 refers not to Roman
war-weariness after Asculum (95), but to conditions fifteen years
later, in 264. The cities of Himera and Selinus in Sicily are not east of
Agrigentum (102), nor is Messene east of Sparta (130). The Romans had
no long-standing alliance with Carthage, renewed for the third time in
279 B.C.; their treaties with Carthage were in fact
commercial--there was never a military alliance (though the
Carthaginians proposed one against Pyrrhus in 279). Enemy generals
were not offered as a sacrifice at the culmination of a Roman
triumphal parade (115). Finally, Polybius (1.37) says Romans depended
on bia to accomplish much in life; Champion[4]
translates
bia as "military violence" and makes the passage his principal
evidence for the alleged exceptionally violent militarism of the
Romans (45). Actually, bia as used in this particular passage
of Polybius--where he
is explaining why Roman admirals ignore threatening weather at
sea--merely means "will-power."
A more serious shortcoming is a general lack of analysis. Champion
provides an exciting enough, detailed narrative of Pyrrhus's triumphs
against the odds, mixed with eventual disasters. His accounts of Roman
and Epirote/Macedonian military organization and tactics are very good
(24-25, 61-62). But there is no discussion of what growing up as a
royal child in exile in barbarian Illyria would have meant to Pyrrhus;
what the vicious infighting among Alexander's cousins for control of
Epirus would have meant to him when he was old enough to understand;
what participation in the huge but even more complex, violent, and
treacherous struggles of the great Successors meant to Pyrrhus as an
adolescent. Above all, there is no extended discussion of what the
model of his cousin Alexander the Great would have meant to him. I am
not asking for psychoanalysis, but simply for some insight into
Pyrrhus's character.
Further,
Champion does not seek to explain why the Romans were so successful in
bringing large territories under permanent hegemony, while Pyrrhus was
not. We get no sense that, in the centuries-long seesaw struggle of
Carthaginians and Greeks for control of Sicily (recounted in detail),
the Carthaginians had gradually gained the upper hand by the 280s. Why
that occurred, what it meant to the Greeks, and why the Punic
government poured such enormous resources into this struggle--these
question remain unaddressed. Nor do we learn why, even after Pyrrhus's
victories at Heraclea and Asculum, Rome's allies in Campania and
Central Italy remained loyal. Had they not, the course of
Mediterranean history would have been starkly different. These
questions lie at the core of Pyrrhus's career and of his ultimate and
total failure; the exciting fighting is merely histoire
événementielle.
Champion has, nevertheless, written a generally lucid and useful
introduction to Pyrrhus and his tumultuous career; the reader who
knows little of this period will learn a great deal. But Pyrrhus still
awaits a more thorough and rigorous study in English.
The
University of Maryland
amekst1@umd.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] See Livy 35.14, Appian, Syriaca 9-10, and
Plutarch, Flamininus 21.
[2] London: Stacey International, 1979.
[3] See Arthur M. Eckstein, Mediterranean
Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome (Berkeley: U Cal Pr, 2006)
157.
[4] Under the influence of William V. Harris, War
and Imperialism in Republican Rome (Oxford: OUP, 1979).
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