fleet and pull down their walls. Tears in plenty rather than laughter now. Eventually, all the Greek cities in southern Italy came under Roman control.
As for Pyrrhus himself, his career went from good to worse. He defeated the existing king of Macedon, Antigonus Gonatas, and, to great applause, won back his throne. However, he had learned nothing from past experience and almost immediately alienated the Macedonians by occupying their towns with his troops and allowing some Celtic mercenaries to plunder the royal tombs at Aegae (archaeologists rediscovered them in 1976).
Unable to keep still, he suddenly turned up at the head of an army in the Peloponnese, with a mission to restore the ancestral rights of a Spartan general in his employ. Bogged down by a fierce Spartan defense, he then announced his intention to expel Antigonus from Greece and marched to Argos to do battle with him. Maddened by the killing of one of his sons, he challenged the Macedonian ruler to come down from the hills where he was encamped and fight for his kingdom. “Many roads to death lie open to Pyrrhus if he is tired of life,” came the dismissive response.
Argos begged the king to go away and leave them to their neutrality, but Pyrrhus was having none of it. An Argive friend of his let him and his soldiers into the city at dead of night. The alarm was raised, and Antigonus sent in some troops to help repel the Epirotes. Pyrrhus was in the marketplace and saw he was in trouble, so sounded a retreat. He sent a message to troops outside the walls, asking them to create a diversion. Due to a mishearing, reinforcements were sent into Argos through the same gate by which Pyrrhus was trying to leave. The result was that he was immobilized in a traffic jam. He attacked a local man, whose mother happened to be looking down from a rooftop. Seeing that her son was in danger, she flung a roof tile at Pyrrhus, which struck him in the base of the neck. His sight blurred and he fell off his horse. The man pulled him into a doorway. He decided to chop Pyrrhus’s head off but, made nervous by the recovering king’s glare, slashed him across the mouth and chin. It was some time before he finished the job.
PYRRHUS ACHIEVED NOTHING that lasted. Achilles and Alexander were his evil angels, but in his case the pursuit of glory was not accompanied by the necessary unswerving obsessiveness. Unlike his cousin, the conqueror of the Persian Empire, Pyrrhus’s cult of himself was not conducted within a broader framework of policy but was undiluted egoism.
He certainly had good qualities. He had a charismatic personality, a generous nature, and, on the battlefield, he led from the front. He enthusiastically flung himself into hand-to-hand combat, taking wounds and risking death. Famous for his chivalry, he was a courteous paladin of the ancient world. He was much admired for his genius as a field commander. Contemporaries said that other successor kings resembled Alexander,
with their purple costumes, their bodyguards, the way they copied the poise of his neck which was tilted slightly to the left, and their loud voices in conversation, but Pyrrhus, and Pyrrhus alone, in arms and action.
From our perspective thousands of years later, it is hard to understand his military reputation. This may not be his fault so much as that of our literary sources, whose accounts of his battles are confused and maddeningly vague just when precision is most needed.
For all the brilliance, energy, and charm, a cloud of pointlessness hangs over Pyrrhus’s career. He was an opportunist who failed to make anything of his opportunities. The danger the Molossian king posed to Rome was serious but never life-threatening. One senses that he failed to research his projects sufficiently. He did not understand until it was too late the extent of the Republic’s human reserves. The rapid Hydra-like rebirth of Laevinus’s mangled army came as a severe shock, but by then he was committed to Tarentum and war.
However, the failure of his Italian expedition had one major consequence. The Greeks now recognized that a new player had joined the international table. They were hypnotized by the steely stare of this warlike state that now dominated the Italian peninsula. For their part, having bloodied Pyrrhus’s nose, the Romans hoped they had persuaded the quarrelsome Hellenic world to mind its own business and leave them free to conduct theirs without interruption.
Now that they had won responsibility for the city-states of southern Italy, they wondered whether they might have to keep an eye open for trouble in Sicily, just across the narrow strip of water between Rhegium and Messana (today’s Messina). Instability there would act like an airborne infection capable of blowing across seas to an exhausted peninsula, which more than anything needed a period of peace and quiet.
After all, Pyrrhus had warned them. On his final departure from Tarentum, he discussed with his entourage the consequences of his failure in Sicily: “My friends, what a wrestling ring we are leaving behind for the Carthaginians and the Romans.”
11
All at Sea
ON ITS MISSION OF EXPLORATION, THE FLEET sailed out of the Mediterranean, through the Pillars of Hercules, and into the unnerving swell of the Atlantic Ocean. It turned south and set its course along the generous bulge of western Africa.
The Pillars are on either side of the narrow stretch of water we call the Strait of Gibraltar, and for most well- informed people of the fifth century they marked the western limits of the known world. The name was a reminder that the demigod once passed this way while undertaking his labors. So, too, did Greek explorers and traders, but their heyday was over. Massilia and some settlements in northern Spain were the only Hellenic outposts left. These Occidental waters had become the monopoly of Phoenician merchants, especially those from the great North African city of Carthage.
Sixty galleys with fifty oars apiece were commanded by Hanno, a member of a leading Carthaginian family. His orders, issued sometime about or after the year 500, were to found trading outposts on the African coast. Two days from Gibraltar, the explorers set up their first mini-colony and then arrived at an inland lagoon that was covered with reeds. Elephants and other animals were feeding there. They continued sailing and established some more settlements along the way, which in due course probably became the source of pickled and salted fish that Carthage exported to Greece; perhaps also Tyrian purple dye was extracted from sea snails harvested on this coast.
Carthage was interested in what is called “dumb barter” with African tribes south of the Sahara, as Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” explained in the fifth century:
They unload their goods, lay them out neatly on the beach and return to their boats, whereupon they send up a smoke signal. As soon as they see the smoke, the natives come down to the beach and place on the ground a certain amount of gold in exchange for the goods. They then withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians come ashore again and examine the gold. If they believe it represents a fair price for the articles on offer, they pick them up and sail off. If not, they go on board once more and wait. The natives come and add more gold until the Carthaginians are satisfied. There is complete honesty on both sides: The Carthaginians never touch the gold until it equals the value of the goods and the natives never touch the goods until the gold has been removed.
In the dispatch he wrote about his expedition, which was displayed as an inscription in the Temple of Baal Hammon, in Carthage, Hanno made no mention of the gold trade, doubtless to avoid alerting competition.
The basic purpose of the enterprise had now been achieved and, despite the fact that they suffered from a lack of water and blazingly hot weather, the flotilla sailed on, presumably motivated now by curiosity and a taste for excitement. At one point, the ships tried to make landfall, but savages clothed in animal skins made it clear they were unwelcome by throwing stones at the visitors. On another occasion, some black men ran away from them.
A number of days later, they arrived at the Niger Delta, where they encamped on an island. Hanno wrote:
