Three years later, another request came from Thurii. From the Republic’s point of view, the timing was extremely inconvenient. The Romans had recently been defeated by a Celtic force from the north, and the Samnites had risen once more against their overlords. However, it was decided to respond favorably and a consular army was sent south to beat back the Sabellians and to garrison Thurii. Some other Greco-Italian, or Italiote, cities came into alliance with Rome. The Senate was coming to understand that, as Italy’s dominant power, it would be unwise not to develop a rational policy for Magna Graecia.
The Tarentines were furious, and a chance opportunity of displaying their displeasure soon arose. In breach of an old treaty agreement not to sail in the Gulf of Tarentum, a squadron of ten Roman warships unexpectedly appeared in the harbor, hoping to anchor there. One tradition suggests that it was merely on a sightseeing expedition, but not surprisingly, the Tarentines guessed at a more sinister intention. They feared a plot to overthrow their democracy or, at least, some kind of hostile naval reconnaissance.
As luck would have it, a festival in honor of the god Dionysus was being held that day and a large, inebriated audience sat in the city’s open-air theater watching a show. Soon there was news of the squadron’s arrival, tempers rose, and an enraged mob rushed out to the quayside. An attack was launched on the intruders. Four Roman vessels were sunk, the commander was killed, and a fifth was captured with its crew; the others were hard put to make their escape.
As far as Thurii was concerned, Tarentum acted quickly and decisively. Its army marched on the city and expelled not only the ruling élite but also the Roman garrison. In its view, Thurii was doubly to be damned: it had preferred Rome to fellow Greeks, and an oligarchic form of government to a democracy.
These were serious provocations, but the Senate responded with a cool head and merely dispatched an embassy led by a former consul, Lucius Postumius Megellus, to seek an explanation. It probably calculated that Rome did not need another declared enemy at this point and could turn a blind eye if Tarentum agreed to maintain its ostensible neutrality. However, if the delegation expected anything approaching an apology it was to be disappointed.
Tarentum being a Greek-style direct democracy, all important decisions were taken by its citizens in full assembly. Postumius was invited to attend a meeting in the theater. The Tarentines happened to be celebrating another festival and, doubtless fueled by alcohol again, were in high good humor. They looked on the envoys as figures of fun, ridiculing their heavy and elaborate togas and slips Postumius made when speaking Greek. The Romans were unamused, which only made the Tarentines laugh the louder.
Postumius demanded the release of their sailors and ship, and required the Tarentines to surrender Thurii, pay compensation, and hand over for punishment those who had ordered the attack on the Roman fleet. When their presentation was over, the former consul and his colleagues made their way out of the theater, pursued by catcalls. At the exit, a well-known local drunk planted himself in Postumius’s way, turned his back on him, bent over, lifted his tunic, and evacuated his bowels over the Roman’s toga. This feat was greeted with laughter and applause.
“Laugh while you can,” shouted Postumius. “You will soon be weeping for a very long while.” Noticing that his threat infuriated some in the crowd, he went on, “Just to make you even angrier, let me say this. This toga will be washed clean with much blood.”
Romans regarded ambassadors as sacrosanct and did not expect this kind of treatment. Taken by surprise, Postumius had handled the incident maladroitly, but he understood how to exploit the humiliation and inflame opinion in Rome. He kept the soiled toga just as it was and, once he was back home, put it on display as evidence of the insults he had endured. Although Rome’s armies were fully stretched elsewhere, the Senate voted for war at once, and the Assembly ratified the decision.
This incident may have been somewhat enhanced in the telling, but it exposed an important truth. At this stage in its history, Rome was regarded by civilized opinion in the Greek world as a provincial semi-barbarous backwater; its representatives were good for a laugh and hardly to be taken seriously.
THE SMILES WERE wiped from their faces when the Tarentines witnessed the rapid arrival of a Roman army outside their walls, which proceeded methodically to ravage their delightful countryside, before withdrawing for the winter of 281/80 to a colonia at Venusia, where it could keep an eye on the Samnites and on the southern Sabellian tribes. They cautiously appointed a pro-Roman general who might be able to negotiate an early peace.
The commanding consul offered the Tarentines the same terms as Postumius had, or all-out war if they were rejected. As the historian Appian puts it, “This time they did not laugh.” At a rowdy public meeting, the debate on what to do next was evenly balanced, but eventually it was agreed to send for the Molossian king to come over from Epirus with an expeditionary force and make war on the Romans. The idea of recruiting a foreign general was not a new one. In the past, feeling themselves too weak to fight on their own, the Tarentines had invited a succession of condottieri to provide military support against Sabellian incursions, albeit without great success: one of them had been Pyrrhus’s uncle Alexander the Molossian, Olympias’s brother and a previous occupant of the Molossian throne. He had died campaigning for the city. The present crisis provoked a surprising entente with Tarentum’s aggressive neighbors, who found that they disliked Rome even more than they did Italiotes.
When the embassy arrived at Pyrrhus’s court, it presented the king with gifts and assured him of a military coalition of the Sabellians, the Tarentines, and—a great prize, this—the Samnites. The envoys gave him a ludicrously inflated estimate of the number of troops that would be awaiting his arrival, but they were good judges of their man. A potential opportunity was opening up for Pyrrhus to regain the Macedonian throne, but he took the bait without hesitation, although his senior adviser, a Thessalian intellectual named Cineas, tried to dissuade him.
According to a famous anecdote of Plutarch’s, Cineas asked the king, “What will you do when you have beaten the Romans?” We would take Italy was the reply. “What then?” Sicily would be a rich prize, the king opined, not seeing the trap. “And then?” Carthage and Libya would be too tempting to resist. Cineas concluded his interrogation: “After that, it’s obvious that we will have no trouble taking back Macedonia and Greece.”
Pyrrhus said, smiling, “Why then, we will be able to live a life of leisure and spend our days drinking and in private conversation.” “What is stopping us from doing that now?” Cineas inquired.
The king was somewhat cast down, for he could see that he was inviting a world of trouble, but he was unable to renounce his high hopes. The Elysian shades of Alexander and Achilles expected nothing less of him.
THE VALLEY WAS remote, cold, and barren, with a craggy backdrop of snow-capped mountains. At the foot of a hill stood an oak tree inside a walled enclosure. There was a small, very basic stone temple. This was Dodona, the most ancient of Hellenic oracles and sacred to the king of the gods, Zeus, and his consort, Dione, usually called Hera (Rome’s Jupiter and Juno). Three priestesses, known as “doves,” interpreted the rustlings of the oak tree’s leaves in the breeze for those with questions about their future.