Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. He was used to fear. In the two decades since his first campaign, the man from Prynesti, a day's walk from the city of Rome, had marched all over Italy. He had fought Samnites and Gauls, Etruscans and Lucanians, and never wavered or broken.
Even when javelins whistled through the air by the hundreds, swords clashed on shields, and the howls of the injured pierced his ears, he had stayed firm in the face of danger. Over the years, the Pryonestine had given far worse than he'd taken. Killing had long since ceased to bother him. Scars, souvenirs of fights won and lost, covered his arms and face. His tile-roofed farmhouse was full of trophies and mementos he had acquired everywhere between Magna Gracchia and Etruria.
But now, he ran. He ran until his chest heaved and his legs burned with the exertion. His helmet and shield were gone. All his spears had long since been thrown. His sword had snapped in two at some point during the melee. The only weapon left to him was a dagger, and a dagger wasn't going to do him any good against an elephant. The animals were terrifying. He had lost control of his bladder at the side of him, the liquid dribbling down his sweat-soaked legs.
Judging by the smell, he wasn't the only one. Fighting them was far worse than simply seeing the elephants. A tusk gored the man next to the prynestine so badly that he could see daylight through the hole in his chest. Another man, the Prynestian's wife's cousin, had been crushed under one enormous foot. One brave youngster had hurled a javelin at the creature with all his might, like some demigod in one of the stories. But the missile simply bounced off the elephant's hide.
and then the animal trampled him into the ground. The javelin thrower's brains oozed out of his helmet. And so the man from Pridesti ran. His lungs were on fire. Hooves pounded on the earth behind him, far closer than he would have preferred. Screams trailed in his wake. The enemy cavalry was running down the soldiers, fleeing from the defeat. A bit further, he thought, and he would reach the camp in the safety of its temporary fortifications. The cavalry couldn't reach him there.
Now there were voices audible over the thundering hoax, yelling words at him in a tongue he couldn't understand. Greek, probably. He didn't turn around, didn't slow, didn't even chance a look behind him. If a spear pierced his back, he preferred not to know about it until it spitted him like a boar. There was the camp, earthen banks piled high. He could practically feel the breath of the horses behind him.
Men on the ramparts called out to him, encouraging him to run faster in their odd Roman accent. One final burst of energy carried him up the gentle slope to safety. He collapsed on the ground. Tears flowed from his eyes. He thanked the gods, each and every one he could think of, and promised them sacrifices of all kinds in return for the aid they'd given him. Voices were asking him questions, but he didn't have anything to say.
They would soon see for themselves what the army of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, could do. The Pyrrhic War was a confrontation of very different ways of thinking about and waging war. The Romans had emerged as the dominant power in Italy over decades of grinding attrition, while Pyrrhus was heir to the military legacy of Alexander the Great, the champion of decisive battles and lightning campaigns. But when the dust settled and the fight was over...
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Thanks so much for joining me today. By 280 BC, the political worlds of the Mediterranean were beginning to merge into a single unit. The previous century had seen the emergence of strong territorial states across much of the central and eastern Mediterranean
replacing the patchwork of city-states, tribal groupings, and petty kingdoms that had once dominated the region. In the East, the conquests of first Philip and then Alexander the Great had remade the Greek world from the fringes to the core. inaugurating an era of powerful kings and military innovation. In Italy, the Romans slowly expanded outward from their home city, fighting annual campaigns and forging alliances with the peninsula's local elites.
In Sicily, Syracuse and Carthage battled for supremacy, transforming both cities into imperial centers capable of waging wars that lasted for decades on end, everywhere from the interior of North Africa to the coasts of southern Italy. All three of these regions were becoming increasingly interconnected as the decades wore on. More and more, disputes between Hellenistic kings impacted the relationships between the Greek palais of southern Italy and their aggressive Italian neighbors.
The tyrants of Syracuse could look to the Hellenistic world for allies, and vice versa. As the third decade of the 3rd century BC dawned, the Romans finally succeeded in defeating their Samnite rivals. Syracuse collapsed as a power center after the death of the tyrant Agathocles, and the boundaries of the Hellenistic kingdoms became increasingly solid. It was inevitable that the aggressive energies that had previously been contained within these regions would spill over into a major conflict.
It was a figure named Pyrrhus of Epirus who actually brought this new era of larger-scale politics and war into being. Pyrrhus is one of the truly fascinating individuals of the Age of the Successors. He was the ruler of a minor kingdom, Epirus, on the edge of the Greek world, encompassing much of what is today northwest Greece and southern Albania. Growing up in the aftermath of Alexander the Great's death,
He learned the trade of war from some of the most accomplished practitioners of the age. Antigonus the One-Eyed, Demetrius the Besieger, who was Pyrrhus' brother-in-law and later rival, and Ptolemy. Before his 18th birthday, Pyrrhus had already fought in one of the largest battles in history to that point at Ipsos. By 35, he had become one of the most respected soldiers of his era, turning Epirus into a real power in the politics of the early Hellenistic world.
It was only natural for this ambitious man, who had imbibed the spirit of Alexander the Great from people who had known him firsthand, to seek out new conquests of his own outside the limitations of the emerging Hellenistic system. The way toward those opportunities would eventually lie in the West. But before we get there, we have to understand just why Pyrrhus was so highly regarded by his peers.
The answer to that can be found in what Pyrrhus was doing in the years between his final takeover of the throne of Epirus in the early 290s BC and his arrival in Italy almost 20 years later. That was where we left off last time, and it's where we'll pick things up today.
So a quick note here, I'm relying on the historian Patrick Allen Kent's recent book, A History of the Pyrrhic War, throughout today's episode. I'm also using Catherine Lomas's book, The Rise of Rome from the Iron Age to the Punic Wars. It was Ptolemy who made Pyrrhus ruler of Epirus again after his first reign ended unsuccessfully in revolt. Within a few years, Demetrius the besieger, who then controlled much of Greece, was no longer married to Pyrrhus' sister.
The formerly close relationship between those two kings had broken down, and quite simply, a victory for one would be a blow to the other. After the death of the Macedonian king Cassander in 297 BC, his two young sons divided Macedonia between them. But neither was happy with that arrangement. Both went looking for allies, and one of them, Alexander, came to terms with Pyrrhus in 295 or 294 BC.
The price for Pyrrhus' aid was steep, as the king of Epirus ejected one of the two Macedonian kings and took a substantial chunk of Macedonia as his reward. In the process, he nearly doubled the size of his kingdom. Demetrius was away on other business at the time, besieging Sparta, and only marched north to seek his own advantage in Macedonia after Pyrrhus had already taken his new territories.
Demetrius then murdered Alexander, the youthful king of Macedonia, and took the throne of the kingdom for himself. The rivalry between these two kings, Demetrius and Pyrrhus, would define the next half-decade. Pyrrhus invaded Demetrius' territories in Thessaly and supported rebellions against the Macedonian king's rule among the Greek cities. Demetrius allied himself with Pyrrhus' former wife, Lannasa, the daughter of the Syracusan tyrant Agathocles.
and invaded Pyrrhus' allies in the Greek region of Aetolia. In 289 BC, the two kings invaded each other's territories, but they took different roads and narrowly avoided meeting in battle. Pyrrhus did succeed in cornering one of Demetrius' generals, however, and both defeated him in single combat and routed a phalanx of elite Macedonian pikemen. This victory secured Pyrrhus' reputation as one of the finest generals of the era.
The lowly king of Epirus had defeated an army of the finest soldiers in the Hellenistic world. Finally, in 288, Pyrrhus allied with a coalition of the other Hellenistic kings to get rid of Demetrius once and for all. While Demetrius was busy defending Macedonia from Lysimachus, the king of Thrace, Pyrrhus penetrated deep into the neighboring kingdom and convinced most of Demetrius' veteran army to desert and join him instead.
The deserting soldiers then proclaimed Pyrrhus king, and he and Lysimachus divided Macedonia between them. But far from guaranteeing a new age of peace, This too simply led to more wars for another several years, as Lysimachus eventually forced Pyrrhus out of his half of Macedonia and then ravaged Epirus in retaliation.
It was probably around this time that Pyrrhus began to turn his attention west rather than east. The world of the successors was a snake pit of ambitious, dangerous men and women who were more than willing to murder their own kin and betray their family to get ahead. Plutarch, the famous biographer of Demetrius the Besieger and Pyrrhus himself, put it like this, quote, For how men to whose rapacity neither sea nor mountain nor uninhabitable desert sets a limit.
men to whose inordinate desires the boundaries which separate Europe and Asia put no stop, can remain content with what they have and do one another no wrong when they are in close touch, it is impossible to say. No, they are perpetually at war, because plots and jealousies are parts of their natures, and they treat the two words, war and peace, like current coins, using whichever happens to be for their advantage, regardless of justice.
To someone who had been raised in that den of vipers and had done his absolute best with the resources available to him, a change of venue probably looked like a good idea. To begin that process, Pyrrhus campaigned north into Illyria, winning several victories, sacking the Illyrian capital, and capturing the Greek city of Apollonia.
Apollonia was a bit inland, situated on a riverbank, and it was the perfect springboard to use for an invasion of southern Italy. According to the much later Roman writer Pliny, Pyrrhus even intended to build a bridge across the Adriatic Sea. a construction project of the kind the successors of Alexander loved to contemplate and almost never finished.
Pyrrhus was both keeping himself busy with conquest and avoiding the intrigues within Lysimachus' family over the succession to his now vast territories in Europe and Asia. It was these disputes that led to the final battles of the wars of the successors. as the now 77-year-old Seleucus led a campaign against the 80-year-old Lysimachus. The last two prominent survivors of Alexander's campaigns duked it out, with Lysimachus dying in battle and Seleucus emerging victorious.
It seemed like Seleucus was on the cusp of reuniting Alexander's entire empire, sans Egypt, until a son of Ptolemy, Ptolemy Caranos, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt, murdered Seleucus and claimed Macedonia for himself.
Now, Pyrrhus had just as good a claim on Macedonia as Ptolemy Chiraunos, but he must have known that any conflict of that kind would inevitably involve the Seleucids, Ptolemies, and any other interested party in the Hellenistic world. Despite his obvious talents, Epirus and the remote territories of Greece and the Balkans, Pyrrhus-controlled, were vastly overmatched in any conflict with a mainline Hellenistic power.
For a wildly successful, ambitious warrior king in the prime of life, a man inculcated in that post-Alexander culture of constant war and treachery, simply not participating wasn't an option. Standing still and trying to maintain one's territories was effectively the same as losing. Pyrrhus would have to fight somewhere, and Italy must have looked like far easier pickings. Thus far, we've only examined Pyrrhus' side of things.
But what was happening on the other side of the Adriatic, a journey of a mere day or two from the Illyrian coastline that Pyrrhus now controlled? To understand that, we have to recall the increasingly intertangled nature of political relationships across this region.
Agathocles of Syracuse, Pyrrhus' one-time father-in-law, had briefly succeeded in dominating the Greek cities of southern Italy, positioning himself as their defender against the aggressive, italic-speaking peoples such as the Lucani and Brutii. At this same time, the first two decades of the 3rd century BC, the Roman expansion into Italy had reached a critical juncture. The wars with the Samnites were drawn to a close after the two sides made peace in 290 BC, but the fighting didn't stop.
Instead, the Romans redirected their attention to the north of their city, waging a series of wars with the Etruscans and Gauls. Not all of these campaigns went the Romans' way. An entire army was crushed by a combined force of Etruscans and Gauls, probably mercenaries, while trying to relieve a siege of the city of Aretium, modern Arezzo, in Tuscany. The next armies that marched against these foes devastated the Gauls' territory in northern Italy.
pushing east toward the Adriatic coast and north to the Po Valley. Simultaneously, the Romans were still pursuing their interests in the south. Their first substantial move into the complex politics of the Italian Greeks came when they allied with the city of Thurii, located on the sea roughly on the arch of the Italian boot, to drive off an attack by the Lucani and Brutii in 285 BC. Some Samnites joined the Lucani and Brutii for another attack on Thurii in 282, and again the Romans intervened.
The consul Gaius Fabricius Luskinus led an army south and defeated these Italic allies. Whatever their original intentions had been when they allied with Thuri, the Romans were now fully enmeshed in this new, larger, and extremely dangerous world.
The city of Tarentum, then known as Taurus, was one of the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful Greek cities in Italy. The Tarentines had been under pressure from the neighboring Italic groups for decades, and had developed a quite successful strategy for dealing with them. Whenever they were in trouble, they appealed to a nearby power for aid. In the 330s BC, that had been Alexander the Molossian, the king of Epirus. In the 320s, that was the restored democracy of Syracuse.
And in the 290s BC, it was Agathocles who succeeded in making Tarentum part of his burgeoning empire. Rightly or wrongly, the Tarantines viewed themselves as the rightful hegemonic power of southern Italy. the leading city among the Greeks, and resented any intrusion into what they saw as their sphere of influence. That interest in keeping themselves as the swing power in southern Italy meant that the Tarentines were distinctly unhappy about the Romans moving south.
Here was a new, aggressive, and absolutely relentless force, seemingly immune to military exhaustion, with a ruling class of aristocrats whose ambitions could never be slaked. Even if the Tarantines made what looked like a good deal with one Roman consul one year, who's to say that next year's consul wouldn't weasel out of it because he wanted to lead a campaign and make a name for himself? The Romans weren't operating in the way the Tarantines were used to.
Their political culture was different. Reading between the lines of the sources, that greatly alarmed the Tarantines, and it led them to make some disastrous errors. While the Romans were aiding three on land, they had also sent a small fleet to coordinate efforts offshore. The sources offer a variety of stories about what happened next, but the course of events is fairly clear.
The Tarentines attacked the Roman ships, sank several and captured others, and then sacked Thorea itself. The city's Roman garrison was captured or expelled, along with a pro-Roman faction within the city. Open war between Tarentum and Rome was now inevitable. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're looking at the life of the most famous Queen of France, Marie Antoinette.
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we open the file on Witold Pilecki, the spy who infiltrated Auschwitz. Resistance fighter Witold Pilecki has heard dark rumours about an internment camp on his home soil of Poland. Hoping to expose its cruelty to the world, he leaves his family behind and deliberately gets himself imprisoned. The camp is called Auschwitz, a hellish place where the unimaginable becomes routine. Pilecki is determined.
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It's up for debate as to whether the clash between the Romans and Tarentines in 282 BC should be blamed on Rome or Tarentum. Several ancient sources claimed that the Tarentines were drunk and disrespectful, mocking the Roman ambassadors' accents when they attempted to speak Greek.
and impulsively decided on an attack. Others state that the Romans were in fact violating a treaty by sending their ships into the Tarentine Gulf, the body of water under the arch of the Italian boot. The latter is probably true.
The Romans weren't going to stop expanding to the south no matter what rights the Tarentines thought they had as would-be local hegemons. There probably had been a treaty, the violation of which was an embarrassment to the Romans when they tried to justify their actions. On the other hand, the Tarantines probably were insulting. Their claims to hegemony in southern Italy were pretty obviously absurd, and they did, in fact, attack first.
Both the Romans and the Tarentines reacted to the outbreak of hostilities precisely according to the patterns they'd followed over the prior decades. The Romans, obsessed with following the correct procedures to justify their involvement in a major war, sent envoys to Tarentum in 281 BC the following year. They demanded the return of the Roman prisoners taken during the fighting, the return of the exiles to Thurgii, and the handover of any Tarentines responsible for the city's actions.
The Tarantines obviously refused, insulting the Roman envoys in making war inevitable. At the same time, the Romans were still engaged in fighting to the city's north against the Etruscans and the Gauls. We're told that the Roman people were incensed by the Tarentines' insults and demanded action, while the Senate, wise council of elders that it was, cautioned moderation. That's likely to be a post-facto invention.
reflecting later historians' prejudices against popular political pressure. In any case, the Romans decided to simply pursue both conflicts. The fact that they could even contemplate doing so says a great deal about the resources that were available to the city at this point.
While the envoys were still negotiating, a Roman army marched south under the command of the consul Lucius Aemilius Barbula. It had originally been sent to conclude the campaign against the Samnites and other Italic peoples threatening Thurii, But now its mission changed, and it headed for Tarentum. Still, all-out war was not yet inevitable. Aemilius made the same demands the envoys had previously, with the added inducement of ravaging Tarentine territory to show how serious the matter was.
This was standard Roman practice, a clever mixture of military, political, and diplomatic pressure designed to either get what they wanted immediately or justify a future larger-scale intervention. The Tarantines, we're told, debated what to do.
They could call on the nearby Italic peoples for aid, but considering the Romans' recent successes against them, that wouldn't be enough to save Tarentum. They needed outside help, just as they'd previously called in Alexander the Molossian and Agathocles of Syracuse. The best candidate for that job was Pyrrhus of Epirus. For Pyrrhus, the timing couldn't have been better.
His path to the Macedonian throne, or any other prize of the Hellenistic world, was temporarily blocked by the machinations of powers far beyond Epirus. Italy, by contrast, was right there. With a professional army of the highest caliber at his disposal, Pyrrhus must have assumed that he would pretty quickly establish dominance over the Italian and Sicilian Greeks, and then build a miniature empire of his own spanning the Adriatic.
For later Roman writers, it was obvious that Pyrrhus' ultimate goal was conquering Rome, Carthage, and the rest of the western Mediterranean, just like Alexander the Great, his hero. In reality, the sources are quite specific that Pyrrhus aimed at hegemony over the Italian Greeks and possibly the conquest of Syracuse. Maybe he dreamed of further conquests, but his objectives were actually concrete and limited.
They were also entirely reasonable considering the resources at his disposal. So, with that goal in mind, late in 281 BC, Pyrrhus sent across two key subordinates with several thousand troops to stiffen the Tarentine's spine. They ejected the pro-Roman faction that had temporarily come to power in the city and put a stop to Aemilius' campaigning in the vicinity of Tarentum. Now, we often treat Rome's incessant campaigning as a given.
The default state of affairs, but it was a choice. The Romans could have looked at this situation, a prominent Hellenistic warrior king ready to bring a massive, dangerous army to Italy to fight them, and decided to make peace. There was no absolute strategic imperative to subjugate Tarentum. They were already at war with some groups of Etruscans and Gauls in central and northern Italy. They had plenty of other enemies to keep themselves busy, if that was the concern.
They could have simply waited for the situation to cool down and then gone back to their diplomatic maneuvering and pressure. The fact that they didn't do any of that and promptly went forward with a full-scale war tells us everything we need to know about Rome's position in Italy in 281 BC. The Romans acted like their hegemonic position depended on never taking their foot off the gas.
Now that the city's aristocrats and their allies among the elites of dozens of Italian communities had had a taste of success, they weren't going to want to stop. The historian Nicola Terrenato estimates that the last two decades of the Samnite Wars had enslaved nearly 70,000 people who could be sold on the market or put to work.
Who knows how much in livestock, movable wealth, and land came to the Romans and their allies as a result of all that fighting. They benefited, and they were going to keep benefiting. But I don't think this was so much about the risk of losing existing allies as it was about the possibility of gaining them in the future. In fact, it probably would have been better for the Romans if they'd played for time to consolidate their position among the recently defeated Samnites.
But that simply wasn't how the Romans were used to operating. The sources are scanty, but it seems obvious that members of the Roman aristocracy had made deals with their counterparts in Thurii and probably Tarantum itself, exchanging support for protection. If the Romans didn't fight for them, how could they make the same offer with a straight face in the future? Following Nicola Terranato's arguments, this is how Rome had expanded throughout Italy.
There was no real distinction between the private actions of the aristocracy and the public actions of the Roman state. The state was a vehicle for aristocratic ambitions. And if someone like Lucius Aemilius Barbula turned a Tarentine oligarch into one of his clients, then the whole city of Rome and all its Italian allies were probably going to be fighting the Tarentines if that oligarch was exiled.
As long as war remained a mostly profitable proposition, they were going to keep doing it until they won. This was how Rome had come to operate over the previous decades. And I seriously doubt that the Tarentines, much less Pyrrhus himself, really understood that mindset. Pyrrhus arrived in Italy in 280 BC.
The army he brought wasn't huge by the standards of the successors. 20,000 infantry, pikemen trained and organized in the Macedonian fashion. 3,000 cavalry, probably of the kind represented by Alexander's companions. 2,000 archers. And 20 War Elephants, another staple of the wars of the successors, but a fundamentally new introduction to Italy.
This would have been a huge army at the beginning of Alexander the Great's reign, and organizationally it was probably modeled on the expedition he took to Asia, plus the elephants, but it paled by comparison to the forces other Hellenistic monarchs were deploying by 280 BC.
Some of these soldiers were men who had been with Pyrrhus for a long time, probably from Epirus originally, but others were mercenaries drawn from across the Hellenistic world. Ptolemy Kiraunos, the new king of Macedonia, supported Pyrrhus in this endeavor to get him out of Greece. Ptolemy II, king of Egypt, supported Pyrrhus so that he would eventually be powerful enough to be a valuable ally against Ptolemy Caranus. Such were the politics of the Hellenistic world.
Upon his arrival in Tarentum, ferried over by the powerful Tarentine fleet, Pyrrhus was named Strategos Autocrator, Supreme General, and took command of the whole war effort. The Romans responded immediately, showing just how well they understood the larger strategic context of the conflict. They couldn't simply stop fighting the Etruscans, so one consul went north with an army to keep them busy.
Aemilius Barbula retained his command and his army and marched into the mountains of central Italy, showing the recently pacified Samnites that there would be no easy escape from Roman hegemony. And the second consul, elected in 280 BC, Publius Valerius Livinius took another army south into Magna Graecia to lay the foundations for a successful war. Publius Valerius Livinius, and for that matter any Roman consul or aristocrat, wasn't going to be Pyrrhus.
He hadn't been schooled in the intricacies of professionalized Hellenistic warfare, with its combined arms approach to maximizing the effectiveness of pike phalanxes, elephants, and cavalry. He certainly hadn't learned from men who rode with Alexander the Great.
But the Romans were not amateurs when it came to warfare. By the time a member of Rome's elite was old enough to be elected consul, he'd been fighting on campaigns for most of his adult life. The Roman aristocracy had been fully militarized for centuries. Perhaps not as obviously as the Samnites with their rich weapon burials, but no less completely. And the scale of war in Italy had grown dramatically, just as it had among the successors in the previous decades.
Questions of organization, logistics, and overall strategic intent were no less relevant to the Romans than they were to Alexander's heirs. The Romans loved to portray themselves as relentless underdogs who triumphed through sheer tenacity. But by this time, they were also very, very good at what they did. And what they did was war. Livinius' first priorities were to secure his supply lines.
Magna Graecia was a long way from Latium, and to secure a viable base for future operations close to Tarentum. He left some garrisons along the route in Lucania, whose Italic-speaking inhabitants had consistently been hostile to the people of Thurii, and then continued south. This probably left Livinius with somewhere around 20,000 men, perhaps half Romans and half allies. Pyrrhus, for his part, grasped immediately what Livinius was up to.
The king marched out with his army, which was of roughly the same size as that of Livinius. The two sides encountered one another at the river Syris, near the city of Heraclea, about halfway between Torii and Tarentum on the coast of the Italian Boots Arch.
The Romans drew up on the right bank, with Pyrrhus on the left. One side would have to cross the Cirrus River to meet the other, and Livinius was happy to be the attacker. Pyrrhus stationed a portion of his army at the river's edge to meet the crossing, but kept the main body back from the bank.
The Romans were repulsed on their first attempt, so Livinius sent his cavalry to cross out of sight of the defenders. On the second attempt, the cavalry hit the men guarding the riverbank from behind, and the Romans were able to make it across. But Pyrrhus used his own cavalry to cover the retreat of the Meneth River, which gave his phalanx time to form up and meet the advancing Romans. The two main bodies of infantry then collided in what must have been a titanic clash.
Precisely what happened then isn't clear, but piecing together details from various sources makes it seem like Pyrrhus's pikemen pinned the Roman infantry in place while his cavalry and elephants maneuvered around the immobile blocks and then charged into the Romans. Confronted with veteran cavalry and terrifying elephants, the Romans ran. They left thousands of their dead behind on the field. It was their worst defeat in 40 years. But Pyrrhus had hardly come through unscathed.
he lost nearly as many troops as the Romans did. This first Pyrrhic victory left the king of Epirus in command of the field, and temporarily dominant in southern Italy. But how many more such victories could he afford to win? A few miles from the glass spires of midtown Atlanta lies the South River Forest. In 2021 and 2022, the woods became a home to activists from all over the country. who gathered to stop the nearby construction of a massive new police training facility, nicknamed Cop City.
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Danny DeVito try to persuade the mean old Grinch that there's a lot to love about the insufferable holiday season. But that's not all. Somebody stole all the children of Whoville's letters to Santa, and everybody thinks the Grinch is responsible. It's a real Whoville? Who done it? Can Cindy Lou and Max help clear the Grinch's name? Grab your hot cocoa and cozy slippers to find out.
Follow Tiz the Grinch Holiday Podcast on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Unlock weekly Christmas mystery bonus content and listen to every episode ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. The Battle of Heraclea was a worst-case scenario for the Romans. That wasn't because of the simple fact of battlefield defeat. They had lost before, and they would lose again.
What was really damaging was the fact that Heraclea gave all their recently cowed enemies, namely the Samnites, Lucanians, and Brutii, the excuse they'd been looking for to march against Rome once more. This time, they would do so as allies of a powerful, recently victorious Hellenistic warlord. Rome's italic-speaking enemies flocked to Pyrrhus' banner in the aftermath of the battle. The Samnites knew the terrain, and they knew how the Romans fought and thought.
The sources aren't particularly forthcoming about this, but it seems certain that their expertise guided Pyrrhus' actions as he continued to prosecute the war. That's most visible in what Pyrrhus did next. Following the pattern the Samnites had laid down, by the late summer of 280 BC, he was marching north into Latium, accompanied by a growing force of Italian allies. While he could put Rome under siege, that probably wasn't the goal.
Instead, it was to show Rome's many other enemies that there was a new hegemon on the peninsula around whom they could rally, and to demonstrate to Rome's allies that their patrons among the senatorial class couldn't protect them. This was a savvy strategy that would keep the war as short as possible, remember Pyrrhus couldn't afford to fight for years on end, and strike at the real heart of Roman power, its dense network of ties to other Italian communities.
All of Rome's agreements with its allies were bilateral between Rome and each allied community. They had no formal ties with one another that didn't run through Rome. That made it more difficult for them to organize against Rome, but it also meant that when Rome itself was threatened, their support could disappear practically overnight. That was the scenario Pyrrhus and his New Metallic allies were aiming to fulfill.
Yet, as Pyrrhus marched north through Campania, he found that Rome's support wasn't as fragile as he or his new allies might have hoped. The people of Capua, who had been Roman citizens for decades by this point, had no interest in abandoning Rome. Neither did the many other communities with some form of Roman citizenship. Still, other Campanians had little interest in allying with the Samnites who had troubled them for the better part of two centuries.
Would you want to be friends now with someone who had repeatedly come down from the mountains to steal your crops and your animals? Moreover, the Romans themselves weren't overly concerned about their crushing loss at Heraclea. It was, as Plutarch tells us, not a Roman defeat, but Livinius' defeat. The Senate thoroughly took Livinius to task for his failings, but he remained consul, and the city had no problems raising an army to replace the one Pyrrhus had so badly mauled.
They made peace with the Etruscans to the north, which left them with only one war to fight instead of two. And as Pyrrhus entered Latium, the scale of the war he was fighting must have become clearer to him. He got within either 20 or 40 miles of the city, between 30 and 60 kilometers, before turning back, realizing that he was deep in enemy territory, surrounded by unfriendly communities.
and without either the troops or the equipment necessary to besiege a wealthy, well-defended city with over 100,000 inhabitants. The king beat a hasty retreat to the south, narrowly avoiding encirclement as multiple Roman armies tried to pen him in. He spent that winter at Tarentum, and both he and the Romans prepared for another round of fighting the next year. Pyrrhus' plan for the summer of 279 BC revolved around securing firm control of southern Italy.
As the historian Patrick Alan Kent points out, another raid north into Latium would have achieved just as little as the first. The Romans were clearly determined to fight on, their allies weren't peeling off as Pyrrhus had hoped, And the king's fragile coalition of Italian friends was vulnerable if the Romans could attack them one at a time. So Pyrrhus made for Apulia, roughly the heel and Achilles tendon of the Italian boot.
If he could keep that area under control, he would effectively block the Romans from easy access to the Samnite homelands in central Italy, which would free up more of his allies to fight on the battlefield. This went well for Pyrrhus, and the Romans responded by sending both of the year's consuls with a much larger army that probably numbered around 40,000 men, half Romans and half allies.
The king of Epirus had roughly the same number under his command, around half of them professionals from the Greek world and the rest a variety of Italian allies, some of them Greeks and others italic speakers. The two armies faced each other for a few days before they joined battle. As they waited, later Roman sources tell us that one of the consuls offered his life and that of the enemy army to the gods of the underworld, a practice known as devotio in return for victory.
This was almost certainly a later invention that didn't actually happen, but it does speak to the peculiar intensity with which the Romans approached warfare. We have two versions of how this battle, the Battle of Ausculum, proceeded. One of them is from Plutarch's biography of Pyrrhus, and the other is from Dionysius of Halicarnassus. These two authors had dramatically different purposes for writing, and those purposes color how they present the battle.
For Plutarch, the point was to show just how skilled Pyrrhus was as a military commander, while for Dionysius, the objective was demonstrating the rise of Roman power and how important the city had become by this point. Plutarch's version of events holds more water, though Dionysius' point is well taken. By contending with Pyrrhus, the Romans had indeed reached the level of regional hegemony. At Ausculum, unlike the year before at Heraclea, it was Pyrrhus who went on the attack first.
He crossed a river and assaulted the Romans, where they occupied a patch of high ground. This time, the Romans held on tenaciously, using the heights to keep Pyrrhus' cavalry and elephants at bay and mauling his phalanxes as they attacked uphill. For an entire day, the Romans and their allies held Pyrrhus at bay. They still held the high ground as night fell. But Pyrrhus wasn't quite ready to give up. The following day, Plutarch tells us, Pyrrhus employed some kind of stratagem.
He unfortunately neglects to mention what it was to force the Romans to fight in more open country that better suited his cavalry and elephants. On this second day, the Romans threw themselves at Pyrrhus' phalanx, trying to overwhelm the infantry before the king could bring his mounted troops to bear. But instead, they were once again pinned in place by the spears and pikes of Pyrrhus' Greeks.
As the vicious hand-to-hand combat swirled, Pyrrhus' elephants and cavalry swept aside their Roman counterparts and crashed into the Roman infantry. As at Heraclea, the Romans broke and ran, leaving thousands of dead behind on the field. Yet once again, Pyrrhus had suffered heavily in victory. Plutarch says he lost 3,505 men, a really specific number that probably comes from the king's own memoirs. That's a now-lost source that Plutarch had access to.
Another such victory, Pyrrhus is reported to have said, and I am undone. But despite his losses, Pyrrhus was firmly in control of southern Italy. Most of what the Romans had accomplished over the past two decades, defeating the Samnites and barging into the political world of Magna Graecia, had been effectively undone.
The Romans had lost thousands upon thousands of soldiers in those two battles alone, many of whom must have been irreplaceable veterans with years of experience. Still, Purus wanted peace. He had no real interest in central Italy except insofar as the Romans challenged his hegemony in the south. The king's diplomacy was extremely skillful. He simultaneously released all his Roman prisoners without ransom,
and began building personal ties with members of the Roman aristocracy. This was playing the same kind of game, blurring the distinctions between public and private interests that the Romans had used to expand their own influence. Yet the Romans weren't swayed. and they soon found support from an unexpected direction. The Carthaginians had been watching Pyrrhus with increasing alarm. Agathocles' stillborn Syracusan empire was only a decade in the past,
and Pyrrhus looked far more formidable than his former father-in-law ever had. The collapse of Roman power in southern Italy and the emergence of a new power led by Pyrrhus would be disastrous for Carthaginian holdings in Sicily and could even threaten them in Africa, as Agathocles had done. And so Carthage dispatched an embassy to Rome to negotiate a new treaty of mutual support that forbade either from making peace with Pyrrhus without the other's approval.
The Carthaginians also negotiated separately with Pyrrhus, trying to suss out his intentions and maybe make a deal. Later Roman writers, and those influenced by the Roman tradition, treated this diplomatic engagement with both parties as yet another example of Carthaginian treachery, called Fides Punica. It was anything but that. It was simply smart politicking, and the Romans were always inclined to view Carthaginian actions in the worst possible light. At this point, Pyrrhus had a few options.
He could try to press home the war against the Romans and win a crushing victory, systematically separating the city from its allies and then forcing an eventual capitulation. Given his previous diplomatic efforts and the fragility of his position in Italy, which included a fractious coalition of diverse allies, all of whom had their own interests, well, prosecuting a long war was not an ideal situation.
That was even before considering the stubbornness and tenacity the Romans had already displayed, which would become their hallmark in all the wars to come over the next couple of centuries. Patrick Allen Kent argues that the Romans, unlike Pyrrhus, were already used to long, bloody, grinding wars. This was nothing new for them.
Now, alternatively, Pyrrhus could simply claim victory and return to Epirus with his reputation burnished. Ptolemy Caraunos, Pyrrhus' rival for the crown of Macedonia, had recently been killed in battle by invading Gauls. And at least some Macedonians wanted Pyrrhus as their new king. But going down that path without any increase in his available resources would leave Pyrrhus precisely where he'd been before.
fighting an uphill battle against richer, more powerful Hellenistic opponents. There was a third option, though, and this was what Pyrrhus had probably intended all along. He would cross the narrow straits separating Italy from Sicily, and follow the path Agathocles had laid down in the previous generation, creating his own empire among the Western Greeks. With the money, soldiers, and ships that the Western Greeks could provide, Pyrrhus' path to power in the Hellenistic world to the east
would be assured. As 279 BC turned into 278, a delegation from Syracuse made the choice for Pyrrhus. The Syracusans, beset by factionalism inside the city and pressured by their many enemies outside it, invited the king to join them. Pyrrhus accepted. But now he faced another problem. The Carthaginians, who had profited from the death of Agathocles by expanding their own zone of control in Sicily.
Not wanting to deal with Pyrus, they sent an army to besiege Syracuse and a squadron of warships to blockade its harbor and patrol the waters between Italy and Sicily. Pyrus nevertheless found a way across. relieved the besieged city, and entered Syracuse without any resistance. Embassies from the Sicilian Greeks poured in, offering support for a war with Carthage.
Pyrrhus also began minting his own coins, mostly to pay for the ongoing and rising costs of continuous fighting, but also as a statement of intent. Syracuse hadn't submitted to Pyrrhus, not formally, but with his family ties to the city and a potential victory over Carthage, he could easily turn it into the center of a new Hellenistic kingdom, as Agathocles had so nearly done.
Rome's fortunes had taken a serious blow, but things had never looked brighter for Pyrrhus. That's where we'll pick up next time on Tides of History, as Pyrrhus expands the war to Sicily. continues the fighting with the Romans, and events reach their bloody climax. By the end of the war, Mediterranean politics had been transformed for good.
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The sound engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffe. From Wondery, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Louis. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Wondery, this has been Tides of History. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune...
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