The difference between the descriptions of the battle of Ausculum by Plutarch and Dionysius are due to the radically different literary purposes each narrative is meant to support. For Plutarch, the battle is merely one more tale meant to elucidate the characteristic of Pyrrhus as a brilliant commander. As such, it needs little elaboration and plays only a minor role in the Life as a whole, meaning that the story is likely little altered from the form in which Plutarch found it. For Dionysius the battle of Ausculum serves as the climax of his Roman Antiquities, signifying the mature power of Rome that would go on to defeat Carthage and conquer the Mediterranean. As such, it serves a much more important literary role that dictates the need for the spectacular. It is a grand set-piece between two great powers. The allies of each side are recounted in detail, calling to mind Homer’s Catalogue of Ships, Herodotus’ descriptions of Xerxes’ Persian army and the opposing Greek coalition, and the Persian and Macedonian armies of Alexander’s campaign. The listing of peoples and their numbers, 140,000 men in total according to Dionysius, drives home the power that was arrayed across the battlefield. This was not a mere regional battle, but one that takes on profound historical importance as the greatest general of the Hellenistic world was brought to a standstill by the Romans. Dionysius’ narrative fits into a continuum of bias meant to glorify Rome. It is the version in Plutarch that is to be preferred.
The fighting on the first day went decidedly in favor of the Romans. The two sides had camped on either side of the Cerbalus River, the Romans on the left/northern bank and Pyrrhus on the opposite. Unlike at Heraclea, it was Pyrrhus who endeavored to go on the offensive and cross first. The Romans had seized the high ground and prevented the king from making any effective use of his cavalry or elephants. Their superior position would have allowed the Romans to press Pyrrhus’ somewhat disorganized phalanx with their main battle line, while attacking and retreating from the high ground as opportunities presented themselves. The result was a long engagement that lasted much of the day, at the end of which Pyrrhus withdrew his forces from the fighting. The king had made a severe tactical mistake: he engaged a prepared force of equal size on unfavorable terrain that prevented him from using his elephants and cavalry effectively. Pyrrhus would make up for his error on the second day of the battle, but it is surprising that he was willing to attack at all on the first given his vaunted reputation.
The second day of the fighting ended in a Roman defeat. The precise means Pyrrhus used to turn the battle in his favor is once again unclear, as Plutarch unhelpfully says he employed a stratagem without elaborating on what it was. The king may have seized the high ground the Romans had occupied the previous day, sending some of his men to cross the river somewhere out of sight in an attempt to outflank them, or lured the Romans across the river with a feigned retreat.64 By whatever means, Pyrrhus was able to induce the Romans into fighting on more open ground. Pyrrhus’ poorly conceived attack the day before would have created a sense of confidence in Sulpicius and Decius that encouraged their own ill-advised offensive. Plutarch says that the Romans launched a furious assault on Pyrrhus’ phalanx in an attempt to defeat it before the elephants could be brought to bear. But the king personally reinforced the line. On the open ground he was able to make better use of his cavalry and elephants, supported by light infantry, to outflank the Roman army. The battle wagons, if real, were apparently of little use. As at Heraclea, the Roman line broke and fled. Despite his mistakes on the first day of the fighting, Pyrrhus outmaneuvered the Romans on the second and won the field.
After the battle, we are told that the Romans lost 6,000 men while Pyrrhus lost 3,505, prompting the king to say famously that one more such victory and he would be ruined.65 These numbers are perhaps reliable as they are said to have come from Pyrrhus’ own memoirs, although in that case some reservation about Roman losses is needed. There can be little doubt that Pyrrhus won the battle of Ausculum, but he took losses that he could not afford. His soldiers were far less replaceable than those of Rome. Nevertheless, the king had secured his control of southern Italy, twice defeating Roman incursions at a high cost.
Remembering the early campaigns of the Pyrrhic War
There is a great deal of disagreement in the ancient literature as to which battles were won by whom. Heraclea was said to have been a loss for the Romans by Plutarch, Dio/Zonaras, Livy, Justin, Florus, and Eutropius. Meanwhile, Dionysius (via Plutarch) counted it a draw in terms of men lost, while Orosius claims the Romans won. Here most of the ancient writers acknowledged a Roman loss, but not all. The battle of Ausculum, on the other hand, skews heavily the other way. Only Plutarch and Justin say that the Romans lost at Ausculum. Dionysius, Livy, and Florus call it indecisive. Zonaras, Frontinus, Eutropius, and Orosius say the Romans won outright.66 Regardless of Pyrrhus’ supposed victories or defeats, he is said to have taken severe losses in both battles ranging from several thousand to a preposterous hundreds of thousands. Plutarch says that even though he lost far fewer at Heraclea, they were his best.
In many of the battle narratives it was the elephants, monsters which the Romans had never seen before, that proved decisive. Orosius, the only ancient source to claim a Roman victory at Heraclea, says it was the panicking elephants that broke Pyrrhus’ army.67 This eastern monarch relied on monsters to give him a decisive edge, but at best they only barely secured him victory and at worst were the source of his defeat. By emphasizing these fearsome beasts, the Roman narrative lessens the sting of their own defeat. They battled the beasts bravely, both singularly and as a body, despite their unfamiliarity. The Romans could hardly have been expected to do any better against such an unfamiliar foe than they did.
Most of our surviving sources exhibit a clear pro-Roman bias that sought to minimize Roman defeats or turn them into victories. However, there is also clear evidence that historians like Hieronymus and Timaeus, neither of whom had any reason to promote a Pyrrhus-friendly narrative, asserted that the king was victorious in the campaigns of 280 and 279. These writers served as a major source for Plutarch, who was not interested enough in the battle narratives to alter them beyond condensing. To a significant degree, the Roman tradition of the war stems from Ennius and ultimately created a narrative that later Romans felt more palatable. This trend was aided by the lack of a Roman historical tradition in the early third century that could have contradicted their preferred version of events. The Pyrrhic War occurred at the end of what can be considered a semi-heroic age of Roman history on the edge of living memory. As such, we get incredible events such as the attempted personal combat of Oblacus Volsinius, the attempt to unleash the divine with the self-sacrifice of Decius, and the various acts to counter the ferocious beasts that Pyrrhus unleashed.
Throughout the battle narratives, the Romans are again and again portrayed as having spectacular bravery. Those elephants that rampaged across the battlefield were confronted by brave Roman legionaries. In Dionysius’ account of Ausculum the Romans display their superiority to their fellow Italians by putting the Lucanians and Bruttians to flight. The allied men in the Roman army are virtually ignored after being mentioned in the deployment; the achievements here were by Roman citizens. Oblacus could be given some glory at Heraclea, but for Dionysius the supposed victory at the more important battle of Ausculum was thanks to the Romans alone. Zonaras claims that Pyrrhus’ men were actually afraid to confront the Roman troops.68 Pyrrhus is even said to have found the Roman dead all facing their enemy; none had died with wounds on their backs.69 They had all fought bravely to the end.
The gallantry of the Romans is nowhere more spectacularly on display than with Decius’ attempted devotio. This story displays the importance of the community over the individual, fitting the pattern set by such heroes as Cincinnatus and serving as an exemplar for those of the Late Republic when Cicero recounts the story. Pyrrhus’ spoiling of Decius’ plan is irrelevant; the intention was the key. Pyrrhus may have been the superior general, but the soldiers of his army were nowhere n
ear the match to the Roman people. The king constantly outmaneuvered the Romans, but could not overcome their tenacity. Whether or not the Romans are said to have won these battles, virtue and divine might were on their side. Pyrrhus himself is said to have remarked that he could conquer the world if he was but king of the Romans.70 Throughout his campaigns against the Romans, Pyrrhus is constantly portrayed as praising his opponents. He was awestruck when he saw the Roman dead all still facing their enemies. He calls the Romans a hydra, impressed that no matter how many he killed, many more would appear to fight him.71 Before he had even fought a battle Pyrrhus remarked at the layout of the Roman camp, saying that “these barbarians are not so barbarous.”72 In their version of events, even Rome’s enemies cannot help but be impressed by them.
The Roman narrative of the early campaigns of the war is, at its heart, a fiction built upon a sparsely detailed framework of history. In the first two years of the war the Romans faced a great general who was victorious on the battlefield, invaded Latium, and brought the peoples of southern Italy into alliances with him. But, the narrative insists, the Romans persevered and answered every challenge. This storyline is a stark parallel to the trials the Romans had faced earlier in their history such as the war with Veii, the Gallic sack, and the Samnite Wars. More importantly this portrayal corresponds to the first two years of the Second Punic War, when Hannibal dealt the Romans harsh defeats, threatened to invade Latium, and peeled off many of their Italian allies. Pyrrhus thus becomes a danger to Rome on par with Hannibal, and the Pyrrhic War serves as a prototype for the later challenges the Romans would face.
It is the kernels of truth that underlie the constructed narrative of the war that must be the basis of evaluation. Pyrrhus had a far more limited goal in mind in Italy that did not include the conquest of Rome. He was not seeking to master the entire peninsula, but to secure control of the Italiote Greeks and establish alliances with the Italian peoples of the southern Apennines that bordered them. He engaged the Romans at Heraclea to drive them out of southern Italy. He campaigned into central Italy to try, perhaps, to take the Greek cities of Campania and more importantly force Roman recognition of his control of the south. And at Ausculum he damaged Roman control of Apulia to strengthen his Samnite and Tarentine allies. All of his actions were aimed not at conquering Rome, but at hegemony in southern Italy in the face of Roman aggression. By the end of the campaigning season in 279 Pyrrhus had, in fact, achieved most of his immediate goals. While his diplomatic efforts did not bear fruit, Pyrrhus was nonetheless in a strong position.
Later Romans took solace in their assertions that they fought to a standstill one of the greatest generals of his era; a man they claimed had skills nearly on par with Alexander and meant to conquer Rome. But in reality the Romans suffered severe military setbacks in 280 and 279. Prior Roman gains in southern Italy had been effectively rolled back.
Notes
1 Serv. A. 9.52; Lévêque (1957) 312.
2 MRR 1:90–91.
3 Zon. 8.3.
4 Zon. 8.2. Zonaras says that this imprisonment fulfilled a prophecy that the people of Praeneste would occupy the Roman treasury, and then says they died without giving any further information. The story is not found elsewhere.
5 See Chapter 6.
6 Zon. 8.3.
7 Plut. Pyrr. 17; Justin 18.1.5; cf. Zon. 8.3.
8 Plut. Pyrr. 15.
9 De Sanctis (1956–1964) 2:392 argues that Laevinius’ army comprised two legions plus allies. Franke (CAH) vii.2:467 gives a number of 30,000. Lévêque (1957) 322, Wuilleumier (1939) 115–116, and Mommsen (1854–1856) 2:153 argue that there were four legions plus allies.
10 DS 20.104.
11 Lévêque (1957) 321–322. The figure of 28,500, broken down into specific contingents (Plut. Pyrr. 15.1), may derive from Pyrrhus’ own memoirs.
12 Spies before Heraclea: DH 19.11; Zon. 8.3; Eutrop. 2.11. Xerxes: Hdt. 7.146.7. Scipio before Zama: Plb. 15.5.
13 Plut. Pyrr. 16.
14 Contra Delbrück (1920) 4:307–309, who argues that Pyrrhus did not attempt to use the Siris defensively as it would have offered little to slow the Romans down. This line of thought is followed by Lévêque (1957) 325.
15 Zon. 8.3; Judeich (1926) 5.
16 Plut. Pyrr. 16; DH 19.12; Zon. 8.3; Florus 1.19.7. Oblacus Volsinius’ name indicates that his family may have originated in the Etruscan city of Volsinii. The story of Oblacus is rejected by Lévêque (1957) 326–327 and Beloch (1922–1927) 4.2:475; contra Schubert (1894) 67.
17 Livy 44.40–41; Plut. Aem. 20; Front. Strat. 2.8.5.
18 Florus 1.13.7.
19 Zon. 8.3. Judeich (1926) 5, n. 1, believes that this cavalry movement may be a reduplication of the earlier hidden crossing of the river by the Roman cavalry.
20 Plut. Pyrr. 17.
21 Plut. Pyrr. 17.4; cf. Oros. Hist. 4.1.11; Lévêque (1957) 327–328. Plutarch lists Dionysius and Hieronymus as his sources. In his description of Cannae, Appian (Hann. 26) says that both Pyrrhus and Hannibal wept at the sight of their best troops lying dead on the battlefield.
22 Zon. 8.3.
23 Front. Strat. 2.6.10.
24 Venusia was well situated for the retreating Roman army and provided a good regional base from which to operate, Lévêque (1957) 329, n. 3; contra Wuilleumier (1939) 118, n. 1.
25 Zon. 8.3; Plut. Pyrr. 17.
26 Livy 8.11.2; cf. 10.7; Oakley (1997–2005) 2:506.
27 SIG 392; Marchetii in Hackens, et al., eds. (1992) 54.
28 Livy 10.18–31; Plb. 2.19.5–6; Zon 8.1; Front. Strat. 2.5.9; Vir. Ill. 27.3–5; Oakley (1997–2005) 4:210–345; Walbank (1957–1971) 1:187–188; Salmon (1967) 263–269.
29 Zon. 8.4.
30 In northern Campania Latin colonies were established at Cales (in 334), Saticula (313), and Suessa Aurunca (313), while the colonies at Fregellae (328) and Interamna (312) lay just to the north in the Liris River valley, Salmon (1970) 55–69. The Campanians had been granted civitas sine suffragio a few decades prior. For an overview of this status, see Oakley (1997–2005) 2:544–559.
31 Plut. Pyrr. 18; Dio fr. 40.39.
32 Lévêque (1957) 336. The city of Capua did later rebel and support Hannibal’s invasion of Italy in 216, but whether there was any anti-Roman sentiment during Pyrrhus’ campaign is unclear, Beloch (1926) 384; De Sanctis (1956–1964) 2:282.
33 Zon. 8.4. Neapolis had been besieged and taken by the Romans 40 years prior thanks to pro-Roman factions in the city, DH 15.5–10; Livy 8.22–23; Oakley (1997–2005), 2:657–658; Kent (2013).
34 Plut. Pyrr. 18.
35 Dio fr. 40.39.
36 See Talbert (2000) 44.
37 The Samnites were well aware of the dangers of the area, having defeated a Roman army nearby at the battle of Lautulae in 315, Livy 9.23; DS 19.72.7–8; Oakley (1997–2005) 2:330–31.
38 Florus 1.13.24; Beloch (1922–1927) 4.1:549, n. 4. Samnite resentment of the colony at Fregellae, DH 15.8.4; cf. Livy 8.23.4–7; Salmon (1967), 216–217; Oakley (1997–2005) 2:623–624.
39 Florus (1.13.24) says Pyrrhus could see the dust of Rome from the citadel of Praeneste, supported by Eutropius (2.12). Appian (Samn. 10.3) says Pyrrhus reached Anagnia on the Via Latina, which is supported by Plutarch (Pyrr. 17) who says that he came within 38 miles of the city, the distance of Anagnia. Wuilleumier (1939) 118, accepts that Pyrrhus made it to Praeneste, while Lévêque (1957) 338, argues that he only made it to Anagnia. It is possible that Pyrrhus reached Anagnia first and then moved on to Praeneste, Garoufalias (1979) 356, n. 147.
40 Zon. 8.4; cf. App. Samn. 10.3.
41 Dio Cassius (fr. 40.28; cf. Zon. 8.4) says that Laevinius attempted to engage Pyrrhus in battle, but that the king feared the larger forces of the consul and did not do so. This is a Roman fiction as neither side would have felt confident in a second battle, Lévêque (1957) 356, Wuilleumier (1939) 118.
42 Zonaras (8.4) says Pyrrhus wintered in Taras, while Appian (Samn. 10.3) says Campania. It is unlikely that P
yrrhus, who saw little success in his previous march through Campania, would have chosen to quarter his troops so close to the heart of Roman territory, Wuilleumier (1939) 118; contra Lévêque (1957) 357. Appian’s assertion may reflect the first leg of Pyrrhus’ march south rather than his final destination.
43 Front. Strat. 4.1.18.
44 Degrassi (1954) 98.
45 DS 19.72.9; Vell. 1.14.4, 6.
46 Zon. 8.5; Beloch (1922–1927) 4.2:489; Lévêque (1957) 377. Salmon (1932) suggests that Venusia was too heavily defended to have been realistically taken by siege.
47 Beloch (1922–1927) 4.2: 465–470 argues that the battle took place on the Aufidus River nearer to Venusia, which would have more naturally lent its name to the battle. But he fails to demonstrate the topographic accuracy of the Aufidus over the Cerbalus nearer to Ausculum, Salmon (1932). The location of this battle should not be confused with Asculum, which was further north in Picenum.
48 MRR 1:192.
49 Dionysius (20.1.4–8) describes the Roman side with four legions and 50,000 allies. Frontinus (Strat. 2.3.21) gives a much more reasonable total of 40,000 men in the armies of Rome and Pyrrhus respectively, which is followed by Wuilleumier (1939) 120; De Sanctis (1956–1964) 2:379; and Lévêque (1957) 377.
50 DH 20.1.1–4; Front. loc. cit.
51 Zon. 8.5; Dio fr. 40.43; Ennius fr. Ann. 191–194.
52 Dio and Zonaras (op. cit.) say that he lived; Cicero (Tusc. 1.89, Fin. 2.61) and Ammianus Marcellinus (16.10.3; 23.5.19) that he died.
53 Skutsch (1985) 353–357; Oakley (1997–2005) 2:477–486, with bibliography.
A History of the Pyrrhic War Page 10