[290-282 B.C.]

shelter from a storm; the snake swam ashore, and remained twined round a palm-tree at the temple of Apollo while they stayed. When they reached Rome he left the ship again, and swimming to the island, disappeared in the spot where the temple of the god was afterwards built.

LUCANIAN, GALLIC, AND ETRUSCAN WARS

Rome now rested from war for some years. At length (284) the Tarentines, who had been the chief agents in exciting the last Samnite War, succeeded in inducing the Etruscans, Umbrians, and Gauls in the north, and the Lucanians, Bruttians, and Samnites in the south, to take arms simultaneously against her. The commencement was the hostility exercised by the Lucanians against the people of the Greek town of Thurii, who, despairing of aid from any other quarter, applied to the Romans.

In 282, a Roman army under C. Fabricius Luscinus came to the relief of Thurii. The spirits of the Romans sank as they viewed their own inferiority of force; when, lo! a youth of gigantic stature, wearing a double-crested helm, like those on the statues of Mars, was seen to seize a scaling-ladder, and mount the rampart of the enemies' camp. The courage of the Romans rose, that of the foes declined, and a signal victory crowned the arms of Rome. When next day the consul sought that valiant youth, to bestow on him the suitable meed, he was nowhere to be found. Fabricius then directed a thanksgiving to Father Mars (as it must have been he) to be held throughout the army. Many other victories succeeded; and no Roman general had as yet acquired so much booty as Fabricius did in this campaign.

When the Roman army retired, a garrison was left for the defence of Thurii. As it was only by sea that a communication could be conveniently kept up with it, a squadron of ten triremes, under the duumvir L. Valerius, was now in these waters. Some years before, it had been an article in a treaty with the Tarentines, that no Roman ship of war should sail to the north of the Lacinian Cape; but as they had taken no notice of it now, and there was as yet no open hostility between them and the Romans, Valerius appeared off the port of Tarentum. The people unluckily happened at that moment to be assembled in the theatre, which commanded a view of the sea; a demagogue named Philocharis, a man of the vilest character,1 pointing to the Roman ships, reminded them of the treaty; the infuriated populace rushed on shipboard, attacked and sank four, and took one of the Roman vessels. The Tarentines then sent a force against Thurii, where they plundered the town and banished the principal citizens: the Roman garrison was dismissed unmolested.

The Romans, as they had an Etruscan war on their hands, were anxious to accommodate matters amicably in the south. Their demands were therefore very moderate: they only required the release of those taken in the trireme; the restoration of the Thurians, and restitution of their property; and the surrender of the authors of the outrage. Audience was given to the envoys in the theatre. When they entered, the people laughed at the sight of their purple-bordered prætexte, and the faults of language committed by L. Postumius, the chief of the embassy, redoubled their merriment. As the envoys were leaving the theatre, a drunken buffoon came and befouled

[1 The Tarentines were not of course so bad as the Roman historians represent. Though imprudent, they had good ground for indignation.]

[282-280 B.C.] the robe of Postumius in the most abominable manner: the peals of laughter were redoubled; but Postumius, holding up his robe, cried out, "Ay, laugh, laugh while ye may; ye will weep long enough when ye have to wash this out in blood." He displayed at Rome his unwashed garment; and the senate, after anxious deliberation, declared war against Tarentum (281). The consul L. Æmilius Barbula was ordered to lead his army thither, to offer anew the former terms, and if they were refused, to carry on the war with vigour. The Tarentines, however, would listen to no terms; they resorted to their usual system of seeking aid from the mother country, and sent an embassy to invite over Pyrrhus, the renowned king of Epirus. Meantime Æmilius laid waste their country, took several strong places, and defeated them in the field.

We will now turn our view northwards. In 283 a combined army of Etruscans and Senonian Gauls having laid siege to Arretium, the prætor L. Metellus hastened to its relief; but his army was totally defeated, thirteen thousand men being slain, and nearly all the remainder made prisoners. When an embassy was sent to the Gauls to complain of breach of treaty, and to redeem the prisoners, the Gallic prince Britomaris, to avenge his father, who had fallen at Arretium, caused the fetiales to be murdered. The consul P. Cornelius Dolabella instantly marched through the Sabine and Picentian country into that of the Senonians, whom he defeated when they met him in the field: he then wasted the lands, burned the open villages, put all the men to death, and reduced the women and children to slavery. Britomaris, who was taken alive, was reserved to grace the consul's triumph.

The Boians, who dwelt between the Senonians and the Po, were filled with rage and apprehension at the fate of their brethren, and assembling all their forces they entered Etruria, where being joined by the Etruscans and the remnant of the Senonians, they pressed on for Rome; but at the Lake Vadimo the consular armies met and nearly annihilated their whole army; the Senonians, it is said, in frenzy of despair put an end to themselves when they saw the battle lost. The Gauls appeared again the next year (284) in Etruria; but a signal defeat near Populonia (282) forced them to sue for peace, which on account of the war in the south, the Romans readily granted. The war with the Etruscans continued till the year 280, when, in consequence of that with Pyrrhus, the Romans concluded a peace with them on most favourable terms. This peace terminated the conflict, which had now lasted for thirty years, and converted Etruria into Rome's steadiest and most faithful ally.c

THROUGH a long series of struggles, Rome had now become mistress of central Italy, with growing power in the north, and almost complete subjugation of the Greek cities of the south. There were a few of the latter, however, that still held out against the Roman influence. Pre-eminent among these was Tarentum, and it was through a conflict with this city that the Romans were threatened by the first important invasion of an armed force from the east. This force came under the guidance of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, a relative of Alexander the Great, who sought to emulate the deeds of that great hero.

Pyrrhus was not precisely another Alexander, but he was quite the foremost warrior of his time. Doubtless he had the aspiration to make Epirus the centre, and himself the master, of the world. His ambition was not to be realised; but he was able, for a time, to challenge the power of Rome, and more cogently to threaten its overthrow than any one before him had done, since the invasion of the Gauls, or than any one after him was able to do, with the single exception of Hannibal, until a late period of imperial history. The invasion of Pyrrhus, quite aside from the personal ambitions of the invader, had the widest and most world-historic importance, for it was a struggle of the old East against the new West-a repetition in some sense of that earlier struggle in which the Persians had sought to overthrow the growing power of Greece. Pyrrhus brought with him the famed Macedonian phalanx. He was met by the Roman legion, which, in its time, was to become even more famous, and with even better reason. Whether for the moment phalanx or legion would have proved the more formidable it is difficult to say, but in addition Pyrrhus brought with him a troop of war elephants, and it was this factor, largely, which turned the scale at first in his favour. Up to this time no elephant, probably, had ever been landed on the peninsula of Italy, and the sight of these beasts advancing in line of battle was enough to bring terror to the heart of the most hardened veterans.

It is true that fifty years earlier the Macedonians had met an oriental enemy aided by this, to them, new arm of warfare, and had easily found a means of overcoming their adversary, and nullifying the advantage which these great beasts were supposed to give them. Whether it was the lack of an Alexander, or that the Romans were of less staunch fibre than the Macedonians, or that the soldiers of Pyrrhus were more competent to

meet the Romans hand to hand than were the Persians to oppose the hosts of Alexander-whatever the explanation, the fact remains that the elephants of Pyrrhus turned the scale clearly in his favour in the first two great battles in which he met the Romans on their soil. But the Romans, if defeated, were by no means dishonoured. The classical saying of Pyrrhus that another such victory would mean his ruin, shows that the battles of Heraclea and Asculum were very different affairs from most of the battles of an earlier day, in which Greek had met Persian, or even those in which Greek met Greek. In those Grecian battles, as we have seen, the courageous front of the one side, and the timidity of the other, often decided the day with scarcely more than the clashing of arms, or the chance wounding of here and there a fugitive. But here, the arbitrament of arms in its sternest phase was necessary to decide the victory. The Macedonians, with the fame of Alexander fresh in their minds, might scorn at first, but soon learned to respect these new foemen of the West, finding them, indeed, foemen worthy of their steel, and the conqueror who remained on the field after the battle had almost as much cause for regret over his losses as for rejoicing over his victory.

But the strangest thing of all was the way in which the vanquished Romans met their fate and rallied from defeat, refusing to recognise their disasters as more than momentary checks. Herein it was that the Roman proved himself a very different person from the typical Greek, of, for example, the best day of Athens. Instead of acknowledging defeat and accepting or offering terms of surrender, the Romans indignantly rejected all overtures from Pyrrhus, and set desperately to work to rehabilitate an army and win back their laurels, declaring that they would never rest content while the enemy remained on Italian soil; and in due time they made their word good. Pyrrhus, indeed, for a period of two years left Italian soil, not to return to Greece, but to go to Sicily, there to aid the Syracusans who were beset by the Carthaginians. Recognising in Pyrrhus a common enemy, the Carthaginians and the Romans for the first and last time in their history formed an alliance, and the Carthaginians did good service for the cause in defeating the fleet of Pyrrhus when on its way back from Sicily. Beyond this, however, the land-forces of Rome-and up to this time it was solely as a land power that Rome could lay claim to great importance were left to their own resources in dealing with the Epirot enemy. This resource, however, proved in the end quite sufficient, for in the great battle of Beneventum, in the year 275 B.C., the tables were turned on Pyrrhus and his forces were unequivocally routed. Nothing remained for him but to return to Epirus, where local wars also claimed his

attention.

It is more than likely that in thus retreating from Italy, Pyrrhus intended some day to return and revenge himself for his losses, but if so the intention never became a reality, for three years later the greatest warrior of his time was killed at Argos after a victorious siege of that city. Meantime Rome had proved herself able to cope with the Epirot invasion, and she was never again to be seriously threatened from that direction.

It would probably be difficult to overestimate the value to the Roman commonwealth of this test of skill with Pyrrhus and his famed Macedonian phalanx in giving them confidence in themselves and in their own prowess which should stand them in good stead in meeting those other enemies who must needs be put down before Rome could become what she was now aspiring to be, Mistress of the World.a

[281 B.C.]

PYRRHUS IN ITALY

Pyrrhus was now in his thirty-eighth year. His whole life had been a course of adventure and peril. His father, acides, had been king of Epirus; and the young prince, being left an orphan at the age of five amid the troubles which followed the death of Alexander the Great, led a wandering and uncertain life, till, at about seventeen years of age, he sought refuge at the court of Antigonus, the Macedonian king of Syria. Here he formed a friendship with the king's son, the celebrated Demetrius Poliorcetes, and was present on the bloody field of Ipsus (301 B.C.), which deprived Antigonus of his life, and Demetrius of his succession. After this defeat, he was received at the magnificent court of Ptolemy Soter, the first Macedonian king of Egypt, as a hostage for his friend Demetrius. Here Pyrrhus found favour with Queen Berenice, who gave him in marriage Antigone, her daughter by a former marriage, and persuaded Ptolemy to assist him in recovering his Epirot sovereignty, where he established himself so firmly that on the death of Cassander, he disputed with his former friend Demetrius the succession to the throne of Macedon. For a time he was master of the eastern provinces; but, after a seven months' reign, Pyrrhus was again driven across the mountains into Epirus (287 B.C.). For the next few years he lived at peace; built Ambracia as a new capital of his dominions, and reigned there in security and magnificence. He was in the prime of life, handsome in person, happy in temper, popular from his frankness and generosity, and reputed to be a skilful soldier. But neither his nature nor his restless youth had fitted him for the enjoyment of happy tranquillity. He had married as his second wife the daughter of Agathocles of Syracuse; the exploits of that remarkable man fired his soul; he remembered that Alcibiades, that Alexander, that every Greek conqueror had looked to the West as a new scene for enterprise and triumph; and he lent a ready ear to the solicitations of the Italian envoys. After defeating the Romans and Carthaginians, he might return as king of southern Italy and Sicily, and dictate terms to the exhausted monarchs of Macedon and Asia. These had been the dreams of less romantic persons than himself.1

It was at the end of the year 281 B.C. that he left Epirus with a force of about twenty thousand foot, and four thousand or five thousand horse, together with a squadron of twenty elephants, held by the Greeks at that time to be a necessary part of a complete armament. On the passage his ships were scattered by a storm, but eventually they all reached Tarentum in safety. His infantry was in part supplied by Ptolemy Ceraunus, now king of Macedon. His cavalry were Thessalian, the best in Greece. It was a small army for the execution of designs so vast. But he trusted to the promises of the Lucanians and Samnites; and he also intended to make the Tarentines into soldiers. No sooner had he landed, than this people found how true were the words of their fellow-citizen. They had meant Pyrrhus to fight their battles, like his kinsman, Alexander of Molossus;

[1 Mommsen thinks of Pyrrhus as "simply a military adventurer." He finds his dream of western empire, "analogous in greatness and boldness to the idea which led Alexander over the Hellespont. But he finds a vast difference between the chances of success, seeing in the disorganised and independent Italian states "poor material for a united realm." In all points the plan of the Macedonian appears as a feasible, that of the Epirot as an impracticable, enterprise; the former as the completion of a great historical task, the latter as a remarkable blunder. And yet we must not forget that we look at these attempts from the viewpoint of result not of purpose, and to his contemporaries the conquest of Italy would have seemed easier, if less worth while, than the then apparently impossible dream of Alexander.]