Chapter Nine
Pyrrhus may have just escaped an inferno of battles against Romans and Carthaginians but crestfallen was never a condition suggested by the man from Epirus and certainly not sometime in 274, the probable date for his return from Italy. This was despite the battered state of the army of 8,000 foot and 500 horse that survived the wreck of his western dreams and had mustered on the Adriatic shore, dispirited but determined to get paid. On his return he found his son Ptolemy, by Antigone, the princess he had married in Alexandria, had at least been fortunate when deputed to look after the homeland while his father took ship across the Ionian Sea. In the recent perilous years the Gauls had largely passed him by, considering his country not high on their list of places wealthy enough to bother with, and now these self-sufficient people protected by mountain ramparts showed they were adventurous as well as lucky and, like the Gauls, far from averse to the feel of other people’s property. They had always worried their neighbours because they were tough and dangerous, looking with envy at the waving wheat fields, ample orchards and vineyards of their lowland neighbours. So soon drafts of young people who had grown to manhood in the years their monarch had been away arrived at the muster to bolster the army. Farmers, shepherds and drovers filled out the files of the phalanx and the sons of rich folk, with growing estates in the valleys of expanded Greater Epirus, beefed up the numbers of the cavalry.
Pyrrhus, finding nothing appealing in a life of ease, ‘he had no greater delight in ruling than in warfare’ and with a militarily refurbished tool to hand, knew there was a pressing need for funding, so naturally he cast around for a convenient war. The need to make conflict pay for itself was always the glittering prize for these Hellenistic warlords and Pyrrhus exhibited a towering confidence that it could be done. Whether this enterprise really started as just a great razzia to fill his coffers is a moot point; other records suggest he believed he had unfinished business in Italy, or why had he left troops with his son Helenus and an officer called Milon to hold Tarentum, and that his real aspiration was to conquer Macedonia and even West Asia to win the resources he would need to have another crack at the Romans. That this sounds far-fetched in the light of what happened is true, but of course thinking big was something that since Alexander had hardly been incredible, particularly for a man who very consciously followed the pattern of the all-conquering Macedonian.
Yet if his ambitions always soared to the heavens, even immediate policy was not exclusively about the need to pay his men; there had also been encouraging whispers from the wings. It seems Antigonus Gonatus had upset Ptolemy II of Egypt by flirting not just with Antiochus but also with the Egyptian ruler’s greatest bugbear, Magus the rebel potentate in Cyrene, who looked to Alexandria almost like an existential threat when in 276 he began to march in arms on the Nile kingdom. So after receiving financial encouragement from African moneybags to harass the Macedonian ruler, Pyrrhus’ eyes turned acquisitively south and east where any truly dominating presence had been removed since he had last stood on Balkan soil. Antigonus was in situ, but how strong was he? He intended to find out and had no trouble in unearthing an excuse. The king of Macedonia had been a natural to approach for assistance for his last Italian campaign, but now there was a very unsubtle threat: ‘Unless he sent him some, he should be obliged to return to his kingdom, and to seek that enlargement of his dominions from him which he had wished to gain from the Romans.’1 Antigonus had cold-shouldered him. Help was refused, despite many an advisor having muttered that it was in his interest to back the Epirot in more adventures over the Adriatic and keep him out of the Balkans. Pyrrhus was spoiling for a fight and hardly needed to trump up a pretext; it had been years since anything but might and opportunity made the difference in a world where revolution and disruption had made tenuous anything that might have been left to legitimacy or dynastic loyalty. Probably spending the winter at Ambracia with offspring raised to command and other officers eager to share in the glory, the Eagle king lingered until the weather allowed campaigning to begin.
It had been in 277 while Pyrrhus was shedding Carthaginian blood that Antigonus had recovered the throne of Macedon lost by his father just over a decade before and this was going to be his first and the most severe test of a reign that finally lasted almost forty years. Though he had benefited from a few trouble-free years in which to bed in his administration, still there existed no great reservoir of popularity to call on and he would have spent a twitchy winter waiting to receive the blow and gathering what fighting men he could to oppose an enemy led by undoubtedly the greatest general still left standing from the great Successor Wars. This precocious prince, a glamorous blend of Alexandrine chic and effective violence, had a reputation to be envied and even the great Hannibal would regard him as almost in the same league as Alexander himself in terms of martial talent. The threatened party’s desperate need for troops would have meant that Antigonus called out some of the phalanx but not the full levy of the toughest warriors available; no one hoping to retain any popularity could afford to press troops willy-nilly among this key but depleted demographic. So much of his rank and file would have been his veteran mercenaries bolstered by thousands of those Gauls who had become so central to the military establishments of almost all Hellenistic rulers.
When Antigonus was sure the strategy Pyrrhus had mapped out was a direct assault on his kingdom, naked aggression from an expected quarter ensured columns of professional warriors mixed with farm boy soldiers and Macedonian and Thessalian gentry marched to meet the invader in battle. The direction of attack was from Ambracia, from where the route led north before following the Aous River through the pass it had cut in geological time, where intelligence agents had suggested any Antigonid garrisons or defence forces could be vulnerable. Turning to cross Tymphaea and through the Pindus Mountains towards Thessaly, Pyrrhus’ spies proved prescient as arriving on the Macedonian borderlands the welcome was considerable, with several towns and 2,000 soldiers going over to the intruder, places and people who remembered that Pyrrhus had been their ruler in very recent times. Every day’s journey into upper Macedonia persuaded the Epirot king that there was a real groundswell of support in the regions he was going through, emphasizing that much more than just a raid could be on offer here. Yet this was no undefended country, and emerging from the Aous pass, he ran into his enemy’s army drawn up to defend a kingdom where the incumbent had been in possession for only a few years. It is clear from what occurred that Antigonus’ confidence in the loyalty of his new subjects was not profound. He might have gained something of a standing with his victory over the Gauls, but he was still acutely aware that this might not count for that much, particularly when his father, as king of Macedon, faced Pyrrhus, it had ended very badly. Then the Macedonian levy had deserted and that exactly this might happen again was surely on his mind, particularly with several thousand of these soldiers already having gone over to the Epirot side.
After Pyrrhus drew up his ranks of Italian veterans, bolstered by the Gauls’ Lagid money had help to recruit, they debouched from the narrow gorge to confront a shaky and reluctant Antigonus almost caught napping and now with little alternative but to face the risk of open battle. Quickly things went wrong as the invader ordered his men forward, an attack that threw the Macedonian army into disorder, causing the Antigonid command to order a withdrawal, leaving a rearguard of their own Gauls to buy the rest of the army some time to escape. So the attackers found themselves face to face with the dread warriors who had terrified the Balkans for more than half a decade behind a line of body shields, a barrier held solid by men with pot helmets or characteristic wild manes of hair lime-washed into spikes. Moustachioed faces glistening above bared chests were presented by men prepared to die for their salt. The veterans of the Epirot phalanx advanced over the no man’s land between the two lines to the shrilling of high-pitched pipes with coloured flags raised to trigger the movements agreed in the command tent, while heralds attached to each almost 256-man unit (syntagma) transmitted the orders along, although if the clamour of battle made this impractical, the trumpeters and standard-bearer relayed instructions to lower pikes and advance. One of the manoeuvres drummed in by months of drill rocked the earth with the tremor of rhythmic steps of men who had bested Romans and Carthaginians in the past few years. A wall of bronze-skinned button shields and a hedge of 18ft pikes was chilling to behold, with colour provided by scarlet cloaks caught at the shoulders and the distinctive plumes on top of their helmets. Beside them, appearing out of the dust of battle, were Pyrrhus’ own Gauls, brawny in body and brave to a fault; it was said that a belief in reincarnation, ditching concerns over eternity in the realm of Hades, made them laugh in the face of death. They certainly had no qualms at all about setting about their compatriots in the enemy ranks with great long slashing broadswords, showing no reluctance at all to tear into fellow countrymen holding the pass for a different employer.
The Antigonid rearguard, failing to hold its station against this smashing attack, was eliminated as a fighting force after a hard struggle, ensuring the defenders were now in real trouble. Never averse to a bold display of initiative, Pyrrhus ordered his men on towards the Macedonian elephants who they found caught in march formation. These put up no fight at all, with their Indian drivers surrounded, succumbing to threats from levelled javelins and hedged sarissas and happily adjusting their contracts of employment in the Epirots’ favour. These men were as crucial as the beasts themselves; after all, it was not just anyone who could mount and control these temperamental animals. The relationship between the rider and mount was famously close, and on one later occasion would have fatal consequences for their new proprietor. Where Antigonus’ corps of elephant had come from is never explained; that they were left over from the great herd that fought at Ipsus and escaped with Demetrius to be retained as part of his military over the years is possible but improbable. This is not because they might not have lived that long – elephants can survive for up to sixty or seventy years – but it is not likely that, running from the victorious enemy, he would have had the leisure to take many with him and, difficult and expensive in terms of upkeep, it would have made little sense to stable such animals for years in one of the Fetters of Greece. Nor do we hear of the animals being much used in Europe in the admittedly poorly-recorded decades after the battle of Ipsus took place. The more likely sequence is that these beasts were the remnants of the herd that came with Seleucus when he confronted Lysimachus and accompanied him across the Hellespont, only to be acquired by Ceraunus when the army proclaimed him king. That we know he had elephants when fighting the Gauls is suggestive, so if there was a small herd kept at the Macedonian court and some survived the vicissitudes of the Gallic nightmare, they would have been available to Antigonus once he inherited the Macedonian military establishment.
After this the attackers encountered the main Antigonid phalanx turning to fight, but these men despite showing a bristling hedge of pikes, had fear in their eyes, having just seen the huge animals who were the prestige arm of their military go over to the enemy and who might in no time turn against them. Already demoralized, there would be no fight to the bitter end here: when natural pauses in the fighting were caused by aching arms and stressed psyches, Pyrrhus hailed the men of Antigonus’ army calling on them not to waste their lives in pointless resistance but instead accept an offer of wages and glory in his own forces. Soon their sarissas were raised, pointing to the sky, indicating pacific intent, while their officers approached their opposite numbers to formalize the agreement to change teams. In the rear of this confusion Antigonus could only look on in horror, despite him presumably being aware of these men’s track record of turning coat. Facing not just defeat but obliteration, quick-witted attendants and loyal officers removed any insignia that might indicate his status to prevent his immediate capture and, covering him in common soldier’s clothing to conceal who he was, cleared a path for their monarch to flee the scene of disaster. So soon after what must have seemed like the time he had finally come into his own, Antigonus, just like his father, ‘divesting himself at once of all the marks of royalty’, ran from Pyrrhus in disguise, and while looking back over his shoulder for the dust clouds of pursuit, was not even sure where he might be able to find adherents of proven loyalty who could help him salvage something from the wreckage of his fortunes. It had been a crushing defeat, showing once again the value of military reputation, the Epirot king having something of the Alexandrine glamour that really registered when it came to these Macedonian levy pikemen who had so happily switched allegiance to take orders from the coming man.
To exactly fathom the invader’s intentions from the start is difficult; it may have been he was just looking to obtain the wherewithal to pay his men or he may have had high hopes of expanding Greater Epirus at the expense of a neighbour that had provided him with significant territory in past years. However, with the welcome he had received in a number of border communities and with the unconvincing attitude shown by so many of the men Antigonus had hoped would be motivated to defend their country, his ambitions grew. He had good memories of contesting with the Antigonids for control of Macedon, and if the expedition was originally planned to be limited in scope, such developments ensured the invader was bound to review his timetable. So with the first blow well struck, an overjoyed Pyrrhus, now definitely ratcheting up the level of his ambitions, pressed on deep into enemy territory, wide open now, his forces spreading over much of upper Macedonia and Thessaly before entering the antique capital of Aigai, after which successful incursions other cities soon followed suit in pledging their fidelity to the conquering warrior king.
The result of these decisive events was that he once again held most of the Macedonian kingdom from the upper cantons to the old heartland in the Axius valley, while Antigonus was left clinging on in certain coastal towns. Unfortunately he was not careful of his reputation when it came to this new constituency. He allowed some Gallic warriors to desecrate the tombs of Macedonian royalty situated near Aigai where recent finds at pristine internments show just what riches they would have found as they dug into the burial mounds, scattering hallowed bones while scrabbling for gold. That Pyrrhus probably could not have stopped them was not felt to be sufficient excuse, and reports were soon circulating that this was all calculation and he did not even try to curb these pet barbarians, seeing their activity as revenge for Lysimachus’ desecration of Molossian royal burial grounds more than a decade earlier.
Pyrrhus’ son Ptolemy had recently proved himself a chip off the old block. He had been only a teenager when his father left him in charge on leaving for Italy, but had already made a considerable splash by taking over Corcyra with an invasion force of only sixty and on another occasion, while in a naval engagement, leaped with a party of seven men into a fifty-oared galley, overcame the crew and captured it. This prince, with a considerable reputation from a young age, was rapidly becoming his proud father’s strong right arm, so it was no surprise when he was left in command of the army of occupation in Macedonia while his father withdrew, probably returning to Ambracia to consider his next move. His enemy Antigonus had shown that he, like his father, knew how to run after defeat, though on this occasion he headed for Thessalonike. Here he proved just as resilient as his father, though he must have needed all his Stoic resolution to sustain not just the setback on the Aous but what turned out to be a double blow. Perhaps he had acquired a taste for regal trappings, sitting where Philip, Alexander, Cassander and his father had done before, that ensured he could not just sit it out in Thessalonica, but immediately on reaching safety had busied himself evaluating his assets. Outside maritime Macedonia he still had his Greek resources to fall back on, so stripping garrisons to the bare bones and ordering his treasurers to disgorge sufficient to hire a new band of Gauls, he soon had these mustering and eager to stake their lives on another martial gamble.
So despite the mauling he had just received, Antigonus resolved to carry on the fight. After receiving news that he would not have to face Pyrrhus in person, he convinced himself he might win against the son even if not against the father, so decided to strike immediately, leading out his mint new force for an autumn campaign, but all these endeavours foundered when history repeated itself and he discovered the young prince left holding the fort was himself too hot to handle. Antigonus had made a career out of circumspection, so he must have considered his prospects for victory at least reasonable, but he had miscalculated once again and this second army was so roughly treated, ‘utterly defeated’, that he had to flee the field again, this time with only seven companions. So the king of Macedon, almost disdainfully rebuffed, had now lost two battles against a people who were once their subjects and twice had to flee in terror, hiding his face from recognition. It suddenly looked like the victory at Lysimachia had been an aberration and that he too would be just one more on the long list of those occupying the Macedonian throne in the past years. There is even a report that he ‘no longer indulged hopes of recovering his kingdom, but sought only hiding places for safety and solitary ways for flight’, a reaction that hardly seems like the disciple of Zeno, the steady man whose most effective strategy in the past had been to stonewall and see what transpired.
Happy tidings of this latest victory fully repaid Pyrrhus’ confidence in his son, meaning that it was a doubly joyous occasion when some of the spoils from the earlier victory were consecrated at Dodona.2 The inscriptions on these dedications show the Epirot king had decided not to tread a well-travelled road. It might be expected he would have been thinking this was just like old times, and collecting enough of the Macedonian elite to arrange for some sort of election by the people assembled in arms; after all, the pro forma for this was well-known and he had done exactly that almost fifteen years earlier when Demetrius had fled his throne while he and Lysimachus divided the country. Probably his loyal Epirots expected this and some might have been looking forward to becoming important placemen in the larger and more considerable kingdom than their own land of savage herdsmen. Now Pyrrhus broke the mould, and the telling inscription ‘Spoils of war, reft from much-vaunted Macedonia’ showed it was as conqueror of the Macedonians that he wanted the world to see him. Nor can this be seen as aberrant as earlier when he took over Thessaly, this was not touted as any Macedonian return. He had dedicated the shields of the Gauls killed while fighting for Antigonus at the temple of Thessalian Athena situated between Pherae and Larissa, emphasizing again that he had destroyed an army led by the reigning king of Macedon. All this shouted that as king of Epirus, he revelled in crushing Macedonians, an idea he intended should seep south by word of mouth. This public relations onslaught was no mere caprice; his reasoning concerned the reception he hoped to receive among the Greek communities. Much depended on the stance he took. If he advertised himself as the new king of Macedon, he would be donning the garb of a generations-old bugbear and threat, but as the man who had humiliated them he would find it far easier to uncover friends in Boeotia, in Attica and the Peloponnese while also maintaining warm relations with the Aetolians. He needed these people as allies if he was going to dig Antigonus out of his Greek strongholds and completely neutralize him as a significant rival.
Pyrrhus might show withering condemnation, deriding Antigonus as a shameless man for still wearing the purple despite having no entitlement to the name or raiment of kingship, but even if he had beaten him convincingly in battle, he knew that this had not completely solved his problems. The Epirot, with hardly a navy at all, could not contest Antigonus’ command of the sea, ensuring that not only could Antigonus hang on in the Fetters of Greece but also in those important Macedonian and Greek cities along the Thermaic Gulf that his garrisons still held. He wanted him out of Greece too, but how to achieve it? He certainly needed the locals on his side, and there were some signs that this was coming to pass. The Athenians for one, despite knowing that Antigonus would hardly approve their involvement in an Aetolian event, sent emissaries to Delphi to participate in the Amphictyonic council for the first time for years, while it is also probable that the Antigonids lost their control of the island of Euboea at this time, only regaining possession after campaigning around 270. The prospect of building on this movement was attractive enough to cause Pyrrhus to neglect finishing off the remnant of his enemies holding out in the tidewater communities.
Anyway, Pyrrhus was never a man to play things safe or be limited by the boundaries of his own backyard, so now he determined on making an impact in Greece, hoping that under threat of attack his enemy’s friends and allies would disintegrate into discord. Yet it was a different man who influenced the details of strategy, the course of events being distorted by an individual whose baleful impact we have had cause to note before. The Epirot ruler was approached by that man of wrath Cleonymus of Sparta who, if far from one of the great power-players of the age, still had influence on events which was out of all proportion to his talents. Early in his life he had significantly impacted in the peninsula of Italy, causing a tourbillion that had been instrumental in sparking a Roman Samnite war, while in the late 90s it had been his arrival at Thebes that had brought down the vengeance of Demetrius on that unfortunate city. Now he arrived at the camp of the triumphant king of Epirus claiming considerable support back home for raising him to the Spartan throne and all that he needed was a powerful sponsor to see the project through. His reliability was bound to be very open to question; an exile’s desperation could lead to wishful thinking of the most extravagant order, yet at Pyrrhus’ headquarters there seemed little harm in recruiting him as an agent who might well be of use in the complexities of Peloponnesian power politics. After all, these Spartan grandees had always been backstabbers, prepared to tear each other apart since well before in the days of Demaratus, Leotychides and Cleomenes when they indulged in almost any skullduggery, even in the face of a massive and imminent Persian menace.
It had been more than thirty years since this Cleonymus had been blocked from following his father onto the Spartan throne, and on hearing news of what he was up to any survivors would have felt his squalid behaviour confirmed they had been right to deem him as something worse than just an unknown quantity. He had been considered too violent and irrational with little concern for the interest of his people back then and nothing since had given much reason for a reassessment. His record at Thebes had been poor and the current sequence of events that had led him into approaching a foreign king showed a malicious personality with few of the qualities hoped for in a national leader. As an older man he had married as his second wife a royal beauty called Chilonis from the Eurypontid line that conventionally provided one of Sparta’s two monarchs. Tribulations of age differences were compounded because the young woman became attached to a young prince called Acrotatus. Bad enough in itself, the fact that the lover was the son of Areus I who had been given the throne in his stead made it intolerable, ensuring it was an opportunity not to be missed when an adventurer with a powerful army turned out very susceptible to his urgings. So the arrival back of Pyrrhus from his foreign travels and his success against Antigonus gave opportunity to this disgruntled character and he was not slow in taking it.
Cleonymus was on hand when the spring of 272 saw his new sponsor act. Pyrrhus’ friends on the western marches of mainland Greece, particularly the Aetolians who had some maritime muscle in the Ionian Sea and the Gulf of Corinth, allowed him to choose his target in a way he simply could not on the Aegean side where the power of the Antigonid fleet was unassailable. Wherever he targeted he was coming in strength, emerging as a titan since his return from the west in a manner extraordinary for one who had so recently been turned out of first Sicily and then Italy. He now controlled country from Greater Epirus through most of Macedonia and Thessaly, and on top of this he decided to liquidate his Tarentine interests once and for all. His son Helenus, who had been sitting in the acropolis there for some time, was brought back with a garrison no longer required which allowed the accumulation of an army amounting to 25,000 infantry, 2,000 horse and 24 elephants. Nor was it just Helenus as his brother Ptolemy was also recruited, able to leave the country he had so recently defended successfully against Antigonus with reasonable confidence that that enemy’s claws had been clipped for at least a season. So, acutely conscious that the alarm instilled by both his own name and the presence of Gallic mercenaries would significantly diminish any inclination to resist, he made his move.
Thus it was a family at war that slipped into the Corinthian gulf and crossed over to the southern strand, ships crunching onto the sand to disgorge an army of a size that had not been seen in the Peloponnese for many a long year. If Pyrrhus’ enemy’s position had crumbled in the north, any dissolution here had been less dramatic, so the region was a particular draw as the Epirot king could hope his arrival would inspire plenty of locals to get on board in helping to drive the Antigonids and their clients out of the peninsula. It was no surprise when the intruders found a number of emissaries waiting for them as they disembarked: envoys from Achaea, Messenia and Athens crowded round the new arrivals, eager to get on the good side of a man whose military reputation had apparently only been enhanced by his wars against Rome and Carthage and who declared he had come to free those cities Antigonus dominated against their will, following the tradition started so long ago by the grandfather of his current enemy. With words of commitment from these new friends, they then took the road south to the centre of the peninsula to reach that key city of Megalopolis in a wide mountain-shaded valley, where the city fathers decided here was a bandwagon to join, despite previous close relations with Antigonus.
Settling down in the centre of Arcadia, more adherents arrived, travel-stained ambassadors from Elis committed themselves to the cause, even making a dedication to the Epirot ruler at Altis, the sacred grove of Zeus in Olympia.3 Yet these were not the most significant visitors received at the royal headquarters; sober men from Sparta had turned up intent on knowing his purpose in what they still considered very much their bailiwick. The king was confronted by a difficult choice and his councillors were by no means unanimous in their opinions. Should he follow the advice of the exiled Spartan Cleonymus and turn against that perennially troublesome people or continue, where so many had failed before, to try to properly establish control in the rest of the Peloponnesus, extracting Antigonid partisans from Messene to the isthmus. After all, Sparta was no friend of Antigonus and on top of that they were close to the Ptolemies and if his old mentor the first Ptolemy was long dead, his successor had proved solid recently, helping to fund the army with which he had achieved so much. It was here in the heart of Arcadia that Pyrrhus first tried flattery on his latest guests, telling them that he greatly admired the ways of the great Spartan legislator Lycurgus and wanted to send his sons to be educated in the Agoge that for centuries had produced iron-hard Spartan warriors. There is a tradition that these honeyed words had their effect, and when later these same men discovered the king’s army on their doorstep, recalling his words they accused him of duplicity, to which he replied with a smile: ‘When you Spartans have decided on a war, it is your habit not to inform your enemy of it. Therefore do not complain of unfair treatment, if I have used a Spartan stratagem against the Spartans.’4 Such a crack rings true from a commander who, despite a bellicose reputation, when it suited him would try to weaken any opponent’s martial resolve by persuading them of the awful penalties of war, pushing arguments that showed their best interest lay in the path of peaceful subservience.
From the start, what Pyrrhus hoped for as return on his Peloponnesian investment was not obvious. There is no insight into his thinking to determine if he was planning to attack Sparta from the off, or had he arrived in the peninsula in a flexible mood, intending to judge what was the best strategy on the ground. We certainly know within his entourage that bad man Cleonymus’ voice had remained loud as the invaders pushed through coastal Achaea and into the highlands of Arcadia, ensuring that by the time they reached Megalopolis the king had decided the time was right to play his hand by revealing his pretender to the Laconian throne. Hoping that, with this scion of a royal family at the head of his army, resistance in the Eurotas valley would be, if not absent, at least splintered and confused. So with this expectation in his heart he turned away from threatening the rump of Antigonid partisans in Arcadia to deal with the legendary city of extraordinary warriors and beautiful, independent women that had perhaps been his main target from the start.
These famous people whose peerless heroes had sacrificed themselves at Thermopylae had for centuries been the very home of contradictions, somehow contriving a sort of potpourri of respect for age combined with adoration of the military qualities of youth and an esteem for freedom and the imposition of the worst sort of helotage on much of their population. The latter double standard was common to some degree to most ancients, but the Spartan behaviour in enslaving a whole Greek people, the Messenians, to labour for them was seen even by contemporaries as odious. Their paradoxical attitudes showed particularly in respect of their women, some of which would show clearly in the days to come. In a society where the manly warrior virtues were the benchmark, still the female population was freighted with honour and respect not at all typical of the rest of Greece. Open sexuality was allowed as the handmaiden of procreation, while childbearing was the touchstone, where unlike in so many other places this was not just a burden to bear but a source of such prestige that potential mothers, from nubile youngster onwards, had a sort of emancipation that most of their Hellenic sisters could not dream of. They were expected, unlike most of their peers, particularly Athenians who would have been taunted as harlots if they appeared on the street, to show themselves as skilled athletes and dancers in the public eye and if the names of women were hardly mentioned in Athens, at Sparta the likes of the chariot-racing Euryleonis or Gorgo, courageous spouse of Leonidas, were lauded.
It was only a few days’ march from Megalopolis for a force that found itself welcomed with provisions supplied from the depots of people who would have supported anybody on the way to have a thrash at their reviled neighbours. Pyrrhus pushed on over the Alpheus River first and then around the top of the Taygetus Mountains before descending the rugged hills and tramping onwards, pushing inexorably towards a city that while it had never been a place of great monuments to awe the senses, had still been so much in its time. Predatory Cleonymus, having finally arrived on the border of his homeland, was bullish at his sponsor’s elbow as they passed down by the spur near Sellasia where, in a couple of generations’ time, a Sparta of revolutionary kings would make its last stand in a world that had passed it by. There is an assertion5 that while the king and the traitor pondered their strategy, out from the city precincts came the menacing sound of booted Spartan warriors emerging in their choreographed formations backed by regiments of Messenian and Argive allies to confront and be defeated by the invaders in open battle. To put it mildly, this is difficult to believe, with their main Spartan army in Crete and any likelihood of timely support from these usually deeply antagonistic neighbours being barely credible. More possible is that the invaders actually circumvented the town, coming up from the south where a place called Pyrrhus’ camp is located6 and it may well be that their approach to Sparta was from this direction.
From whichever point of the compass and whether bloodied or not, it was near evening when the outskirts were sighted and the returning exile was impatient and urged the king to attack at once, assuring him that, taken by surprise, his compatriots would fold at first contact, even telling everyone who would listen that he had ordered his servants to deck out his own town house for a party to celebrate their entering the city. However, if Pyrrhus had high hopes that a combination of flattery and his sponsoring of a home-town candidate would destabilize the defenders and might mean he would not have to fight his way in, he now knew differently and though a risk-taker, even for him an immediate assault smacked of imprudence. It was surely knowing the dangers of a night attack rather than the suggested concern that his men would get out of control and sack the place that counted. Any fight in darkness was fraught with danger, with men becoming hopelessly disordered, even ending up fighting each other and becoming easy prey for defenders who knew the streets and byways of the town far better than they.
As it turned out, it looks as if Cleonymus had done his homework and that an immediate assault might have been worth the risk as the Spartan king Areus was away campaigning on behalf of allies in Gortyn in Crete and the leadership left behind were a distracted and dithering pack of old men. The Gerousia (council of elders) gathered in an emergency nighttime session were discussing evacuating the non-combatants to Crete for protection with the main army when it became clear that the Spartan women were having none of this. They were led by Archidamia, a queen who had been spouse to Eudamidas I until 305 and was mother of many more kings and queens. A hugely wealthy woman in her own right, in three decades’ time, while in her 90s and finally at the cost of her life, she would support her grandson Agis IV in attempting to reclaim the city’s Lycurgan past, being at the forefront in donating her wealth to subsidize a radical egalitarian reform programme intended to revitalize a Spartiate warrior class whose numbers had massively declined over the centuries. Possessed of a real sense of the dramatic, she stepped into the assembly, sword in hand, condemning those who were ‘proposing that their wives and daughters should survive while Sparta itself perished’7 and end up in the hands of the criminal lunatic Cleonymus.
The old gents of the Gerousia could not weather this verbal onslaught and, now convinced that there were plenty of people committed to defending the town, agreed to resist the coming attack with all their might and main. A plan had to be hatched because bone-deep xenophobia and contempt for the martial qualities of any who might threaten the city had ensured efforts at home defence had been deeply unfocused for many years. They determined to construct ad hoc protection that might stand in for the city walls the Spartans had always been so reluctant to construct, to dig a trench parallel with the enemy’s camp ‘and to strengthen at its ends by waggons buried up to their axles’ to act as impediments to any assault by Pyrrhus’ elephants. As soon as the work was begun, the women arrived dressed for labour, joining the older men in digging while the combatants were directed to get what rest they could to prepare them for battle the next day. This extemporized engineering corps with hardly any digging tools improvised almost 300ft of the whole 800ft long, 9ft wide and 6ft deep trench and leading the way was Chilonis, declaring she had already made arrangements to hang herself if it looked like the defences would be penetrated and she would fall into the hands of her husband, inspiring the rest to bring the young warriors food, drink and arms before urging them to conquer or die against an enemy who were beginning to stir and deploy for the assault.
With sun-up Pyrrhus was in no mood for prevarication after surveying the work that his decision not to attack straight away had allowed the enemy to construct in the night to thwart him. After taking an early breakfast and advancing through the earliest radiance of dawn towards this considerable entrenchment, the Epirot army found the Spartan defenders had taken up their place in the battle line, drawn up beside mess mates who had perhaps experienced some semblance of the exacting programme of the old Agoge, formed behind a shield wall in considerable depth on the lip of the recently-dug ditch. The attackers pushing forward found that even in the comparative cool of the morning, the exertions of advancing in heavy equipment combined with pre-battle tension meant their brows were soon beaded with sweat, while with their sarissas levelled they found purchase difficult: ‘the freshly-turned earth gave his soldiers no firm footing’. While some stabbed across the breadth of the ditch with their long pikes, others stumbled down into the trench and once there even these veterans found it almost impossible to climb out again, to strike at the enemy line deployed above them who were hurling missiles down among vulnerable men, many of whom soon found themselves struck in unprotected thighs, arms and throats. With the first assault failing, Ptolemy, the king’s son, tried a different approach: gathering together a couple of thousand Gauls and a picked force of Chaonians, he determined on an outflanking move by attacking the waggons that secured the end of the defensive line. We know the Gauls generally fought with short spear and sword and can assume the others, an Epirot people living north of the Molossians, would not have been phalanxites as such soldiers were not suitable for clambering over wagon barriers. They were probably peltasts who fought in loose formations and, encouraged by Ptolemy, they started digging out and dragging off the waggons towards the river to allow a passage for the rest of their comrades.
All this took time, and allowed a man with a point to prove to make a difference. It had been Acrotatus’ behaviour that had lit the fuse that led to the presence of the invaders on Laconian soil. It was his affair with Cleonymus’ young wife that had been the final straw, driving that poisonous prince to appeal to Pyrrhus to invade his homeland. This man, who would come to the throne in 265 but die in battle soon after, determined to make his mark. A lover and a fighter, he gathered 300 defenders to respond to the threat posed by the latest attack; moving in the cover given by the folds in the ground, this latest iteration of 300 heroes managed to get behind Ptolemy’s men, taking them in the rear. It was a crunching assault and, despite the disparity in numbers, forced them to turn about and eventually drove the perplexed assailants in a disorderly crowd into the trench. The Spartans, from the edge, with the advantage of height now slaughtered their foes in numbers and eventually, despite being matched many times over, managed to drive them off. Bettering these valiant and numerous attackers had been an extraordinary achievement and as the young warriors, covered in the blood of their enemies, returned to the main Spartan line they received generous plaudits, while coarser spirits pressed Acrotatus to lose no time in begetting as many brave sons on Chilonis as he was able.
While this epic was unfolding fighting along the trench had also been fierce, with Pyrrhus desperate to lead his troops across this formidable obstacle. Easy to identify in his fine armour and sporting the distinctive wreath-girt helmet that can be seen represented on the wonderful head in the Naples Archaeological Museum, the king dismounted to try to force his way out of the fosse and into the ranks of the defenders lining the rim. Yet the hard-pressed men above would not concede an inch; one named Phyllius is particularly remarked dispatching a number of attackers who could not budge him from his position in the fighting line. Even if this hero fell at last, it was beside his companions and these loyal comrades fought like demons to stop the enemy despoiling his corpse, gallantry that so encouraged the rest that they were able to hold out until night covered the carnage and the attackers withdrew to lick their wounds. The Epirot king and his soldiers, dog-tired from their exertions, immediately took to their bedrolls to get some rest to be ready to continue the fight next day, but once stretched out on his camp bed the king had a vision, so that after awakening with a shock, he spread the word that the previous night he had dreamed of a Sparta levelled by thunderbolts from his own hands, enthusing his officers with reports of this omen before he strapped on his armour to lead the men drawn up in the dusty plain in a second day’s assault on the stubborn city. This was another encounter so desperate that the Spartan women even joined the fighting line to bring food, drink and missile weapons to the men defending the ditch. Determined attempts were made to fill in the fosse: hurling in piles of wood chopped in the night and throwing earth over the corpses of the men who had fallen at the bottom, exertions they found countered by the defenders driving off those who were carrying the earth and stone needed to level out the pathways the Epirot attackers intended to follow. Eyeing up the situation, Pyrrhus himself led out some cavalry to defend these workers to discourage protagonists who were frustrating his efforts at every turn. For a moment the hero king, deciding there would be no crossing the trench, decided they must go round and, putting himself at the head of his household cavaliers, tried to press past the waggons until it seemed he might make a breakthrough and enter into the city itself, but it was not to be. Just as it looked like a path through the waggons had been won, a Cretan archer loosed a missile that drove into the belly of the king’s warhorse and with morale badly affected by seeing their leader thrown into the ditch, a shower of missiles from the Spartans turned the attackers back.
There was a pause all along the trench with the defenders covered in the gore of both themselves and the men they were fighting. They had kept the enemy out, but the cost had been high with almost every man holding the line suffering from wounds inflicted by the spears, swords and missiles of their adversaries. Pyrrhus for one considered the sagging line of defenders could not possibly hold out much longer and, sure that they would soon be forced to send out emissaries with offers of surrender, he called off further onslaughts, but this turned out to be a decisive miscalculation; far from tightening the screw on a depleted foe, the defenders had won themselves crucial time. Exertions by Sparta’s friends now made the difference as Ameinias the Phocian, the pirate famous for his capture of Cassandreia, who was now one of Antigonus’ officers at Corinth, rode to the rescue. This active man had drawn a significant force of mercenaries from the garrison of the Acrocorinth and force-marched them down through the Argolid, past Mantinea and Tegea, reaching Sparta just after the second day’s assault. Slipping into the town, these timely arrivals gave an extraordinary fillip to a garrison on its last legs, though this turned out not the best of it for the flagging veterans, youths and women who had held out so far. Hot on the heels of the first relief column came King Areus himself at the head of 2,000 soldiers from the army with which he had been campaigning in Crete. For Ameinias to arrive in so opportune a fashion is believable, answering the call after receiving news of the attack on Sparta, but for these men to get back from Crete surely must have meant the urgent petitions for recall were sent by prescient heads much earlier, when the threat from Pyrrhus was imminent rather than immediate. Honeyed words at Megalopolis had clearly failed to completely convince, as it must have been as early as this that word was sent to recall Areus, but it had been enough and he had acted directly; knowing his home would soon be a target, he aborted his Cretan project and gathered his warriors and ships for the voyage home. This journey must have taken some days to prepare transports, load up his men and cover the 150-odd sea miles from the island to disembark at the port of Gythium before double-timing up the Eurotas valley.
However they had heard that they were needed, these reinforcements were extraordinarily welcome to a people who surely could not have stood alone for another day. Now the wounded and the older men were relieved and a defensive perimeter organized of fresh and eager men, many the very best of Areus’ Spartans. So now Pyrrhus found himself confronted not by a battered and broken remnant of resistance as he had expected but by steady veterans lining the defensive trench supported by many of those who had already given his men such a hard time. Yet this tenacious fighter did not blanch but threw his formations back into the attack, trying again to fill the trench so his phalanx could roll across and take the town, but it was to no avail; casualties multiplied and still no real progress was made until the attackers decided that it no longer made tactical sense to just keep on upping the ante. There is something strange here that a makeshift defence in front of an unwalled city could keep at bay the kind of army that had come against it, and a couple of incidents should warn us that we are not getting the full picture. There is clearly an inclination to laud the Spartans’ ability to protect their city from a terrible danger even with so many of the army away and what is certain is that it was not just old men and youths who held the line; we know that there were Cretan archers present, professional soldiers, one of whom brought down the Epirot king’s horse. More than this, there is a suggestion8 that it was just bravado that no one had ever bothered to construct defences for their valley home; that in fact there was already some protection in place that had been constructed in the face of Demetrius’ invasion a few years earlier and it is more than probable that there were some in the city with engineering experience able to improve these ramparts with those earthworks that proved so effective against the assaulting troops.
It must have been a frustrated group that gathered in Pyrrhus’ command tent after he had called his senior officers together now that another attack had failed to break the defenders’ will. While their leader had never been a man for a cautious approach, just as pertinently he had never been known for constancy and staying power either. He had ducked out before in his life when things became too difficult, but perhaps more mature now, he showed he had learned and, having the resources to keep at his task, decided that if he could not batter his way in he would put the town under siege. To prepare the ground, his predation included the ripe lands of the Eurotas valley, gathering in whatever was growing to supply an army that was intent on seeing the business through. However, as it turned out, events in other parts of the Peloponnesian peninsula ensured that the acclaimed city of Sparta was to be spared any further destruction.
It was Argos, almost 70 miles by road to the north from Sparta, that drew him away; a community that claims itself as the oldest in Europe and certainly existed since Neolithic times, showing a potent triplet with Tiryns and Mycenae in the age of Diomedes, the local hero and ‘winter torrent’ who scattered the hosts of Troy, grazed the pretty skin of Aphrodite and skewered the war god Ares with his ashen spear.9 Bitter rivals of Sparta, they had supported the Messenians in attempting to throw off the yoke of helotry at a time when the infantry phalanx was coming into fashion in the seventh century and contested the battle of 300 champions against them over the plain of Thyrea in 546. Now it turned out that a people whose feelings of detestation for the Laconians had been bleeding through the years should be instrumental in lifting the pressure on their hated enemy. This city was currently being torn in two between a couple of local strongmen called Aristeas and Aristippus, the unanticipated annoyance being that the latter supported by Antigonus was looking set to win out. This place was one of the great cities of the peninsula, important enough to ensure that Pyrrhus, when messengers arrived pleading for aid, was persuaded to intervene.
To decide was one thing; getting to Argos was another as the king of Sparta was determined to make the exit of the enemy who was trashing his country as problematic as possible. The retreating regiments set out on the road to cross the 30-odd miles of rough terrain to reach the flat country around Tegea with a rearguard made up of trustworthy Molossians and Gauls. However, the trailing column of soldiers, horses and elephants soon found themselves assailed along the road by Spartan troops who, knowing the country, had found paths to beset them at difficult sites along the route. Coming at them from above, they even cut off some of those rearguard units posted to protect the departing army’s vulnerable marching ranks. Indeed, the threat was sufficient for Pyrrhus to dispatch his son Ptolemy with some squadrons of the royal horse guard to relieve the pressure, while he himself led the main body, urging them out of the hilly defiles and into the plain of Tripoli, level country where they would be far less menaced by their opponents’ harassing tactics.
This dispatch of his eldest son, a warrior prince only in his mid-20s and named for his honoured friend and sponsor Ptolemy of Egypt, had been ordered, despite the portentous warnings of diviners that sacrifices had foretold the death of one of the king’s kindred. Now he, like so many others of his impulsive ilk, reaped the consequences of flouting such warnings. As the prince rode to the rescue at the head of his father’s gorgeously-accoutred retainers, driving forward to break through to the men cut off in the rear, he came face to face with an elite force led by a captain called Eualcus. A ‘fierce battle developed’ and among the Spartans were a number of Cretan warriors, one of whom was called Oryssus from the town of Aptera in the west of the island who was well-known for both his bodily strength and his fleetness of foot. It was this man who was able to get around Ptolemy, high on his mettlesome horse, and while approaching from the flank assail his unshielded side. He hurled a javelin that downed the prince with a fatal strike, horrifying his followers who saw him collapse from his mount. Morale was badly dented, with many losing heart and falling back with Spartans pressing on after them. The whole mixed bundle of combatants – the rearguard, the dead Ptolemy’s guardsmen and their Spartan foes – descended almost together out of the hills where they had been fighting and found themselves on a level plain where the main Epirot army could be seen through the dust drawn up in serried ranks. So before they had time to reorganize themselves, the Spartans were themselves threatened with being cut off by a much larger force. The man in charge of the army facing them was in ‘an agony of grief’ and desperate for revenge, having just heard from the returning men that his eldest son had fallen.
Never loath to lead from the front and infuriated now, Pyrrhus took his place at the head of his Molossian cavalry in preparation to ride down those men who had killed Ptolemy. ‘His daring and fury surpassed everything’ as the bereaved father bore down on the Spartan commander and Eualcus only managed to avoid the king hurtling his way by cutting his horse’s reins with his sword as he passed him by. However, this adept swordplay failed to save him as the assailant pierced his body with a lance, although if his burnished armour did not provide protection, the impact unseated his attacker who found himself on foot in wild combat with the men defending the Spartan leader’s corpse. Yet desperate rage gave the king’s arm superhuman strength with his followers making short work of the defending crowd and causing the enemy, after having suffered considerable losses, to recede back into the hills. This had been a bloody and frantic affray and the intruders were desperately glad to be out of the rugged hills of the Parnonas where they had been at such a disadvantage and at last rid of their gadfly enemies, able to reorganize for the remainder of the march to Argos.
The rationale for this move to the Argolid had not been just the apparent ascendency of Aristippus; it was an understanding of the real danger of Antigonus Gonatus being on the move. This great rival was not just sending his generals to make life difficult; he had come himself with his main army and had occupied the heights above the town not far from the sanctuaries of Apollo and Athena and menacingly commanding the plain. The capacity of Antigonus to raise another significant army after two defeats is the most convincing evidence that the realm based around the Fetters of Greece that he had nurtured for decades was economically robust, allowing him to continue to fund expensive wars that since his exclusion from most of Macedonia had to be fought almost exclusively by his own mercenaries. Even if it is accepted that there was some truth in the contention that he had reconquered parts of Macedonia,10 it is improbable that he could have been sufficiently in control to call out any of the levy for a foreign war. That he was prepared to again risk his limited military resources against a man who so recently crushed him in battle shows how important he considered it was to defend his place in the Peloponnese. Aristippus was far from his only powerful protégé in the region and he knew to retain their loyalty he must be on hand to defend their interests. Getting there was easy, commanding as he did the Aegean seaways and the isthmus crossing, and becoming aware of his rival’s travails in Sparta, he had been able to chose the most convenient time and place to intervene.
Pyrrhus, having completed his forced march to the Argolid, was frustrated on realizing he had been beaten to the best ground and had little option but to march onwards to set up camp on well-defended terrain above Nauplia 3 miles to the east, past the historic mound that covered the Mycenaean fortress palace of Tiryns. That place, great between the years 1400 to 1200, stood where humans had lived for more than 5,000 years with incredible Cyclopean walls and rock tunnels that also claimed with a few others the honour of being the birthplace of the demigod Heracles. It was alternately menace then action as his men settled down in camp and, exasperated in his desire to reach his foe, he sent a herald to challenge Antigonus to come out and fight, only to receive the reply: ‘When he was conducting a campaign, he chose his own moment to fight, and that if Pyrrhus was weary of life, he could find many ways to die.’11 If Antigonus was not biting, exchanges in Argos itself soon ensured that the stalemate would not go on forever. The faction troubles that had brought both dynasts to the area took centre stage again. If the Argive hard men had first welcomed the appearance of their sponsors in force, now they were not so sure, becoming concerned at the presence of two large armies devastating the countryside where they and their supporters had their estates. This was not what they had bargained for; a more discreet involvement to give a local edge had been what each had hoped, but with it looking like their country would become a battlefield, they joined forces, mobilizing their adherents to make representations to the kings that if they removed themselves, the citizens would remain neutral in the struggle and be on good terms with both sides. This approach was received with some sympathy by the contenders, with Antigonus even handing over a son as hostage; after all, he had everything to gain by this proposal as with Pyrrhus’ army gone, he would endure to dominate the region from his base at Acrocorinth. Yet if he had good reason to be sincere, his rival had double-dealing in mind: rather than preparing to leave, he had persuaded his man Aristeas to open the gates and allow him to bring his men in to take control of the city.
If residents had informed Pyrrhus about another local demigod who, incensed by Zeus’ lustful intentions towards his daughter Io,12 had hurled curses at the father of the gods and ended so tormented by him he drowned himself in the river that drained the western Argive plain, then perhaps he should have had pause, as it seems the loss of his own offspring was encouraging his own rashness. His enemy Antigonus described him as a dice-player who threw many good throws but did not know how ‘to exploit them when they are made’13 and now he prepared his last toss. The coup was hatched in nocturnal obscurity with the Epirot army descending from the hills above Nauplia, making as little noise and showing as few lights as possible as they crossed the Argive plain in the face of awful omens registered by the augers at the commencement.14 In contravention of this haruspication, they covered the dark miles to the walls with the Gauls in the lead, reaching ‘the gate known as Diemperes’ in the city’s southern walls before any guards on the battlements noticed. The order was given to enter, and in fact these nimble warriors had penetrated down the night-black streets to the market place before the town watch glimpsed spectral figures entering and raised the alarm. Pyrrhus was elated; success seemed imminent, so that when the inevitable ‘friction of war’ intervened to wipe the smile off his face it was even more galling. The Gauls were already inside and other troops too, but when the elephants approached the entrance it was discovered that the howdahs on their backs made them too tall to get through. The animals were also fractious after travelling so far in darkness, so the process of removing their burdens was even more time-consuming than usual, particularly as they needed to be put back in place after they had passed through the gates.
Once the alarm was raised, the local response was emphatic with obdurate Argives arming themselves and rushing to key strongpoints, particularly the hill of Aspida, 250ft high and once functioning as joint acropolis with Larissa, site of the old king’s palace and named by the citizenry from being shaped like an Aspis shield, while word was rushed to Antigonus’ camp begging for aid so the city would not fall to the intruders. This king’s response was not only unequivocal, with his son and other officers leading the men immediately available to help, but king Areus, still eager for payback, had also arrived leading a strike force of 1,000 lightly-armed Spartans and Cretans. These doughty fighters, displaying murderous steel, entered from the other side of the town and encountered Pyrrhus’ Gauls in the unlit streets who, not expecting such severe resistance, were thrown into confusion. Milling around in the agora, some had even turned to looting, stripping the houses for trophies as the newcomers struck them hard. While his men suffered, the Epirot king was trying to reach the scene of fighting, leading his horsemen from the gymnasium outside the walls where they had concentrated, then through the gate, all shouting their war cries to alert their friends of their coming. The response from the Gauls was not encouraging, but disregarding this, these cavaliers pushed on as hard as they could, although the presence of drainage channels crisscrossing the town slowed them down. It soon became clear that horsemen were far from the ideal troops for a nighttime urban conflict and the effect of those who reached the fighting was to confuse even more an utterly chaotic combat.
Soon that was not the limit of Pyrrhus’ anxieties. There was no sense and no order, ‘men about and lost their direction in the narrow alleyways, and amid the darkness, the confused noise and confined spaces’,15 and generalship was entirely negated in the chaos. So both sides at full stretch now paused to wait for the break of dawn when the Epirot king was shocked to see so many enemy troops drawn up in the market place around a bronze statue of a bull and wolf attacking each other. A proper sight of his foe, on top of a memory of a prophecy that foretold his death when he saw just such a combat of animals, apparently for the first time gave him pause. We need not believe this usual bizarre oracular foreboding that attends the death of so many great men; much more likely with his night-time coup having failed, he realized any decision to remain to fight in the unfamiliar streets of Argos was ripe with peril and likely to rebound against him. Recalculating, the Epirot leadership decided to back out as best they could. Orders were sent to prince Helenus waiting outside with the bulk of the army to break down the walls and defend the breach so those men in the city could withdraw safely. However, in a moment ominous and inauspicious the message was garbled and instead the young general tried to enter the city with his best men and the rest of the elephants to buttress the combatants already inside.
Some of these newcomers managed to reach the main square where the conflict had become increasingly hot, but once there, their presence only managed to increase the pandemonium. Pyrrhus had been holding his own in the cut and thrust of the fight, but as the new arrivals approached the Gauls and others still with him began to fail and were withdrawing from the open space back into the narrow streets already choked with men. The king rode into their ranks yelling orders to keep this retreat orderly, but with little success; his men were barely able to hear the orders and, in jostling each other and attempting to retire towards the gates and extract themselves, they were halted by new units pressing in the opposite direction along the same road they were taking out of town. Then to compound matters an elephant called Nicon, careening through the city streets in an effort to find his wounded mahout, began crashing into the escaping men and, as many of these fell crushed under his massive feet, another lumbering monster, the largest of them all, in trying either to enter or exit the gate fell over, blocking the road to everyone else. It was a nightmare with Pyrrhus’ men borne along, hardly able to turn to fight an enemy who was infiltrating their ranks and attacking them from the rear. Indeed, the confusion with friend and foe packed in a solid mass of grappling humanity was such that many died from friendly fire, with comrades pressed against each other’s unsheathed swords or spears. It was during this bedlam that the animal called Nicon intervened again:
Having found the body of his master, he took it up with his proboscis, laid it across his two tusks, and turned back as if crazed, overthrowing and killing those who came in his way. Thus crushed and matted together not a man of them could act at all for himself, but the whole multitude, bolted together, as it were, into one body, kept rolling and swaying this way and that.16
Extraordinary accounts were subsequently told of this milling affray. The king, we learn, in an effort to bring order out of anarchy and with no inkling that he was riding to his doom, ‘seeing the stormy sea that surged about him’ removed the gold crown that wreathed his helmet and handed it to an aide before charging into the pursuing enemy in a last attempt to get his men to turn and fight. Depending on his horse to keep him safe from the enemy around him, initially he was only grazed by a spear thrust through his breastplate and was also able to deal a blow with his own weapon against his assailant. This Argive hero was a desperate guardian of hearth and home whose bravery was fostered by the presence of his mother observing the action from the roof of a nearby house. Yet this vigorous matron was not satisfied with just encouraging from afar and when she saw the terrible enemy on his magnificent warhorse threatening her offspring, she tore off a tile from the roof and with both hands threw it down at the king. It seems she may not have been the lone Amazon there and that many of the local women threw whatever they could find at the intruders, but hers was certainly a lucky shot. Striking below his helmet, the heavy slate crushed one of the vertebrae in Pyrrhus’ neck ‘so that his sight was blurred and his hands dropped the reins. Then he sank down from his horse and fell near the tomb of Licymnius’,17 a place that is mentioned by Pausanias as being on the straight road to the gymnasium commemorating the offspring of a legendary king of Tiryns who was killed by Heracles’ son Tlepolemus.18
A number of Antigonus’ soldiers, seeing the enemy officer fall, dragged him dazed and defenceless into a nearby doorway. Their intention had initially been to capture this potentially valuable prisoner, but when he began to come round and struggle against his captors, one named Zopyrus decided that in the middle of battle the safer plan would be to kill him. He sliced at the head with an Illyrian short sword, but it seems just the stare of the belligerent king terrified his assassin and an ill-aimed blow failed to strike off the head, only wounded him so severely around ‘the mouth and chin’ that he suffered a long-drawn-out and painful death before the head was finally separated from his torso. The news of his demise could not but travel swiftly from mouth to mouth until Antigonus’ illegitimate son Halcyoneus, the fruit of his dalliance with a courtesan during a lengthy youthful residence at Athens,19 who was commanding men in the street-fighting heard and arrived to collect the bloody trophy Zopyrus and his comrades were still safeguarding. This young man, looking to his reputation, left the fight to find his father sitting with his staff behind the battle line and triumphantly flung the remains of the Antigonids’ terrible enemy on the ground at his feet. The prince did not, however, get the reception he expected: his father hit him with a staff and kicked him out without ceremony, with charges of barbarism and impiety ringing in his ears. It had been too much for the king, who burst into tears from the memories that were brought back of his own family’s misfortunes, with his grandfather Antigonus dying in battle and Demetrius rotting in captivity. He wanted no taint of failing to respect his fallen foe, although we can perhaps question the sincerity of his feeling that the remains of this man who had given him so much anxiety really deserved a better fate, so collecting the head and body he had the proper rites observed, dressing him in royal accoutrements for burial and dispatching him back to Epirus.
Now the earlier mockery of the humbled Antigonid was flung back in the teeth of its originator with the Epirot king just a dust-strewn corpse while Gonatus was well on the way to regaining his throne. It was a complete turnaround from the earlier outcome on the Aous River with Pyrrhus’ followers rudderless without their charismatic leader, surrendering themselves and their camp to Antigonus. The victor was magnanimous, ‘he dealt mildly with the friends of Pyrrhus’ and indeed was unable to stay angry with his son when he found Halcyoneus had discovered prince Helenus ‘in an abject state and wearing a paltry cloak’, and treated him well before bringing him to Antigonus’ tent. The rehabilitation of the young man was shown to be incomplete when the king declared that his conduct, although better, was still a disgrace as he had not provided his royal captive with a proper wardrobe.
A far-off campaign had ended as tragedy for the whole Epirot royal family with the father and one son dead in bloody battle, but the tremors felt from these events would be wide-reaching for the whole Balkan world order. Helenus was returned to his homeland after an agreement was reached to relinquish Epirot control of all Thessaly and any of Macedonia still in their hands. Antigonus must have hoped that in returning the prince, it might put his family under obligation, a solid win as opposed to some other candidate who might prove troublesome in a world that remained confused and dangerous. If so, his calculation did not immediately prove correct as another son of Pyrrhus, by Agathocles’ daughter Lanassa, called Alexander who had been left in charge when his father marched south, in less than a decade became involved in fighting against Antigonus until the latter’s own son Demetrius defeated him and drove him into exile. Beyond this brief time of troubles, in the long run the sweet, short years of distinction for Greater Epirus were comprehensively in the past, built as they had been on the back of an extraordinary monarch who had been wiped out by a lump of plain undecorated terracotta. So the Stoic monarch of Macedonia could finally contemplate a future that held little threat from over the Pindus Mountains. Antigonus had been perhaps 18 or 19 when his grandfather lost a world kingdom, then a couple of years past 30 when his father had been turned out of Pella, and now at almost 50 the times had turned full circle. A man who had learned to shrug his shoulders at the ups and downs of fortune during the era of Demetrius and during his own career could finally believe that he had come into his own in a world safe at last for a blighted people and an understated ruler.