Pyrrhus

So with the Celtiberians and the Cimbrians we fought as with deadly enemies, not to determine which should be supreme, but which should survive.

But with the Latins, Sabines, Samnites, Carthaginians, and Pyrrhus we fought for supremacy.

The Carthaginians violated treaties.

Hannibal was cruel.

The others were more merciful.

From Pyrrhus we have this famous speech on the exchange of prisoners.

Gold will I none, nor price shall ye give, for I ask none.

Come, let us not be chaffers of war, but warriors embattled.

But you see, as Chris Bowen rubs his hands in glee watching what looked impossible only a year or so ago with EV sales languishing below 10% of all new car sales, can't believe his luck.

It's a pity the more security-minded members of the government who sit with him haven't managed to get into his ear and remind him of the story of King Pyrrhus of Epirus.

Now, it's the same story from which we get the term Pyrrhic victory, and it stands as a salient warning for those who can't or refuse to see the bigger picture.

Now, of course, in the case of Pyrrhus, he was asked by the Greek city of Tarentum to fight the Romans and to slow their expansion in the 3rd century BC.

But if you wish to hold it afterwards, you meet with infinite difficulties, both from those who have assisted you and from those you have crushed.

nor is it enough for you to have exterminated the family of the prince because the lords that remain make themselves the heads of fresh movements against you and as you are unable to either satisfy or exterminate them that state is lost whenever time brings the opportunity now if you will consider what was the nature of the government of darius you will find it similar to the kingdom of the turk and therefore it was only necessary for alexander first to overthrow him in the field and then to take the country from him after which victory darius being killed the state remained secure to alexander for the above reasons and if his successors had been united they would have enjoyed it securely and at their ease for there were no tumults raised in the kingdom except those who provoked themselves but it is impossible to hold with such tranquillity states constituted like that of france hence arose those frequent rebellions against the romans in spain france and greece owing to the many principalities there were in these states of which as long as the memory of them endured the romans always had an insecure possession but with the power and long continuance of the empire the memory of them passed away and the romans then became secure possessors and when fighting afterwards against themselves each one was able to attach to himself his own parts of the country according to the authority he had assumed there and the family of the former lord being exterminated none other than the romans were acknowledged When these things are remembered, no one will marvel at the ease with which Alexander held the empire of Asia, or at the difficulties which others have had to keep an acquisition, such as Pyrrhus and many more.

This is not occasioned by the little or abundance of ability in the conqueror, but by the want of uniformity in the subject state.

Chapter 5.

The critical method has so far gained ground that on the whole Niebuhr is more blamed for retaining too much of the old faith than for overturning so many vain idols.

The most advanced in this line of criticism is Sir George Cornwall Lewis, who in his able and comprehensive book On the Credibility of Early Roman History, published in 1855, discussed the question in all its bearings and came to the conclusion that a genuine and trustworthy history of Rome does not begin before the war with Pyrrhus, that is to say the second half of the fifth century after the foundation of the city.

In this conclusion, Sir G. C. Lewis seems to have gone too far.

It is, of course, difficult to draw the exact line which divides darkness from light and error from truth when one passes into the other by imperceptible gradations.

Insofar as the analysts and analystic poets related the events which happened in their own time or in the age immediately before their own, they may have been trustworthy witnesses.

But we may ask what they could possibly know of events preceding their birth by centuries.

What, for instance, were the sources from which Fabius Pictor, in the second century before Christ, derived the details of the war with Pyrrhus in the third, or of the wars with the Samnites in the fourth, of the Volscian and Aequian wars in the fifth, and the whole chronicle of the kings in the sixth, seventh, and even eighth centuries before the Christian era? Of one thing we may be quite certain.

The analysts did not simply invent the substance of their narrative, certainly not the whole of it.