I. PYRRHUS
“WHO is so worthless or indolent,” Polybius demands to know, “as not to wish to understand by what means and under what system of polity the Romans in less than fifty-three years have succeeded in subjecting the whole inhabited world to their sole government—a thing unique in history? Who is so passionately devoted to other studies as to regard anything of greater moment than the acquisition of this knowledge?”1 It is a permissible inquiry, which may engage us later; but there have been so many conquests since Polybius wrote that we cannot spend much time on any of them. We have tried to show that the essential cause of the Roman conquest of Greece was the disintegration of Greek civilization from within. No great nation is ever conquered until it has destroyed itself. Deforestation and the abuse of the soil, the depletion of precious metals, the migration of trade routes, the disturbance of economic life by political disorder, the corruption of democracy and the degeneration of dynasties, the decay of morals and patriotism, the decline or deterioration of the population, the replacement of citizen armies by mercenary troops, the human and physical wastage of fratricidal war, the guillotining of ability by murderous revolutions and counterrevolutions—all these had exhausted the resources of Hellas at the very time when the little state on the Tiber, ruled by a ruthless and farseeing aristocracy, was training hardy legions of landowners, conquering its neighbors and competitors, capturing the food and minerals of the western Mediterranean, and advancing year by year upon the Greek settlements in Italy. These ancient communities, once proud of their wealth, their sages, and their arts, had been impoverished by war, by the depredations of Dionysius I, and by the growth of Rome as a rival center of trade. The native tribes that, centuries before, had been enslaved by the Greeks or pushed back into the hinterland, increased and multiplied while their masters cultivated comfort through infanticide and abortion. Soon the native stocks were contesting the control of southern Italy. The Greek cities turned to Rome for help; they were helped, and absorbed.
Taras, frightened by the growth of Rome, called to its aid the dashing young king of Epirus. In that picturesque and mountainous country, known to us as southern Albania, Greek culture had kept a precarious footing ever since the Dorians had raised a shrine to Zeus at Dodona.* In 295 Pyrrhus, who traced his ancestry to Achilles, became king of the Molossians, the dominant Epirote tribe. He was handsome and brave, a despotic but popular ruler. His subjects thought that he could cure the spleen by pressing his right foot upon their prostrate backs; nor was anyone so poor as to be refused his ministrations.2 When the Tarentines appealed to him he saw an alluring opportunity: he would conquer Rome, the danger in the West, as Alexander had conquered Persia, the danger in the East; and he would prove his genealogy by his courage. In 281 he crossed the Ionian (Adriatic) Sea with 25,000 infantry, three thousand horse, and twenty elephants; the Greeks had taken elephants as well as mysticism from India. He met the Romans at Heracleia, and won a “Pyrrhic victory”: his losses were so great, and his resources in men and materials were now so small, that when an aide complimented him on his success he created an historic phrase by replying that another such triumph would ruin him.3The Romans sent Caius Fabricius to treat with him for an exchange of prisoners. At supper, says Plutarch,
amongst all sorts of things that were discoursed of, but more particularly Greece and its philosophers, Cineas [the Epirote diplomat] spoke of Epicurus, and explained the opinions his followers hold about the gods and the commonwealth, and the objects of life, placing the chief happiness of man in pleasure, and declining public affairs as an injury and disturbance of a happy life, removing the gods afar off both from kindness or anger, or any concern for us at all, to a life wholly without business and flowing in pleasures. Before he had done speaking, “O Hercules!” Fabricius cried out to Pyrrhus, “may Pyrrhus and the Samnites† entertain themselves with opinions as long as they are at war with us.”4
Impressed by the Romans, and despairing of adequate aid from the Greeks of Italy, Pyrrhus dispatched Cineas to Rome to negotiate peace. The Senate was about to agree when Appius Claudius, blind and dying, had himself carried into the senate house and protested against making peace with a foreign army on Italian soil. Frustrated, Pyrrhus fought again, won another suicidal victory at Asculum, and then, hopeless of success against Rome, sailed to Sicily with the generous resolve to free it from the Carthaginians. There he drove the Carthaginians back with reckless heroism; but whether it was that the Sicilian Greeks were too timid to rally to him, or that he governed them as willfully as any tyrant, he received so little support that he had to abandon the island after a three years’ campaign, making the prophetic remark, “What a battlefield I am leaving to Carthage and Rome!” Arriving with depleted forces in Italy, he was defeated at Beneventum (275), where for the first time the light-armed and mobile cohorts proved their superiority to the unwieldy phalanxes, and thereby wrote a chapter in military history.5 Pyrrhus returned to Epirus, says the philosophical Plutarch,
after he had consumed six years in these wars; and though unsuccessful in his affairs, yet preserved his courage unconquerable among all these misfortunes, and was held, for military experience and personal valor and enterprise, above all the other princes of his time; but what he got by brave actions he lost again by vain hopes, and by new desires of what he had not, kept nothing of what he had.6
Pyrrhus went out now to fresh wars, and was killed with a tile by an old woman in Argos. In that same year (272) Taras yielded to Rome.
Eight years later Rome began her century-long struggle against Carthage for the mastery of the western Mediterranean. After a generation of fighting Carthage ceded to Rome Sardinia, Corsica, and the Carthaginian portions of Sicily. In the Second Punic War Syracuse made the mistake of siding with Carthage, whereupon Marcellus starved it into surrender. The victors plundered the city so thoroughly that it never recovered. Marcellus “removed to Rome,” says Livy, “the ornaments of Syracuse—the statues and pictures in which it abounded. . . . The spoils were almost greater than if Carthage itself had been taken.”7 By 210 all Sicily had fallen forfeit to Rome. The island was transformed into a granary for Italy, and relapsed into an agricultural economy in which nearly all the work was done by hopeless slaves. Industries were discouraged, trade was limited, wealth was sluiced off to Rome, and the free population withered away. Sicily disappeared from the history of civilization for a thousand years.