Despite its great age, Dodona was not as well known as the sanctuary at Delphi and was used mainly by ordinary people to help them solve the difficulties of daily life, rather as today we seek the advice of a lawyer or a doctor. Anyone who consulted the oracle was required to submit his or her questions to the two gods in writing, scratched onto lead tablets. These were then put into a pot and studied by one of the priestesses. Archaeologists have discovered some of the tablets (ranging from throughout the oracle’s long history): suppliants included not only local peasants but travelers from across the Mediterranean world.
Among them are Eubandros and his wife, who ask to what god, hero, or spirit (daimon) they must pray and sacrifice if they and their household are to be prosperous “for all time.” A man named Socrates wants to know how he can trade most profitably for himself and his family. Agis inquires about his mattresses and pillows, which have been lost: Has some foreigner stolen them?
From time to time, celebrities consulted the divinities of Dodona. Homer has Achilles pray to “Lord Zeus, Dodonean, Pelasgian Zeus, you that live far away and rule over wintry Dodona” that his lover, Patroclus, come back victorious and alive from battle with the Greeks on the plain of Troy. Typically, the god gives with one hand and takes with the other. Homer adds, “Zeus the Counselor heard Achilles’ prayer and granted him half of it but not the rest.” Patroclus drives back the Trojans but is killed.
The oracle was perfectly capable of unscrupulous subterfuge. During the great war between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century, the Athenians were advised to colonize Sicily. Without considering what the oracle really meant, they felt encouraged to mount their disastrous Sicilian invasion. In fact, what the doves were referring to was a hillock of that name near Athens.
As the Molossian king, Pyrrhus was ex officio the patron of the oracle at Dodona. He was an enthusiastic supporter and made it the religious center of his kingdom. At considerable expense, he upgraded its facilities. The Temple of Zeus was rebuilt on a grand scale, and an arts and athletics festival launched, with plays performed in a new open-air theater.
When the king was planning his Italian expedition, he consulted the oracle about his prospects of success. With his close connection to the oracle, he would be forgiven for expecting the king of the gods and his queen to allow him an auspicious outcome. However, the doves listened to the rustling leaves and offered an ambiguous interpretation. In the Greek, their words could be read two ways—either “If you cross into Italy, you will be victorious over the Romans” or “The Romans will be victorious over you.”
Pyrrhus was no fool and must have recognized the double meaning, but, as Cassius Dio put it, he chose to “construe the advice according to his wishes, for desire is very apt to deceive.” He refused to countenance the slightest delay and would not even wait for the arrival of spring before setting off on his grand enterprise.
BEING ONLY A constitutional monarch in Epirus, Pyrrhus could not simply do as he pleased. His first step was to win the federation’s backing and, more particularly, an agreement to supply troops. He made full use of his descent from Achilles: if the Romans claimed to be inheritors of the Trojan name, an invasion led by the Molossian king should be seen as a return match. Troy redivivus had to be cast down for a second time. Inheritor of the mantle of Alexander, Pyrrhus presented himself as the leader of a Hellenic crusade against barbarians. He was also the avenger of his uncle Alexander the Molossian.
Coins had a wide distribution throughout the Mediterranean, and for rulers with an instinct for public relations they were an invaluable means of communicating their message. Those issued under Pyrrhus’s aegis at Tarentum could hardly have been more explicit. On some of them, the image of Zeus and Dione of Dodona appear, guaranteeing Pyrrhus’s optimistic expectation of their divine blessing. Others imitated the gold staters of Alexander the Great, and showed Athena Promachos, champion against the barbarians, and a personified Nike, or Victory, bearing a trophy. On one coin we see Achilles, possibly with Pyrrhus’s features. On another, Achilles’ mother, Thetis, is depicted, as Homer described in the Iliad, bringing a shield and new weapons to rearm her son after the death of Patroclus.
Pyrrhus got his way, winning the support not only of his Epirote tribes but also of other Hellenistic monarchs, Diadochoi, or their heirs, who were delighted to see this military and militant nuisance sail away and annoy other people elsewhere. The king recruited an army of up to 22,500 infantry, including 2,000 archers and 500 men with slings (both of them little used by the Romans but lethal at a distance). He also disposed of 2,000 cavalry and 20 elephants.
Elephants were something of a novelty. The Greeks first came across them when Darius III, the Persian King of Kings, fielded them, unsuccessfully, against Alexander the Great at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331. Alexander never used elephants himself, but they became a favorite weapon of his successors. They were imported from India and, unlike African bush elephants, were large enough to carry a howdah, with a mahout and a few soldiers armed with missiles.
Their main advantage was that they terrified the enemy; horses would not face them, especially if they had not encountered them before. On the debit side, they could do serious damage to their own forces if they were wounded or for some other reason panicked and ran amok.
Arrian gives a vivid account of what can happen in those circumstances, when describing another of Alexander’s battles, on this occasion against an Indian king:
By this time the elephants were boxed up, with no room to maneuver, by troops all around them, and as they blundered about, wheeling and shoving this way and that, they trampled to death as many of their friends as of their enemies. The result was that the Indian cavalry, jammed in around the elephants and with no more space to maneuver than they had, suffered severely; most of the elephant-drivers had been shot; many of the animals had themselves been wounded, while others, riderless and bewildered, ceased altogether to play their expected part, and, maddened by pain and fear, set indiscriminately upon friend and foe, thrusting, trampling, and spreading death before them.
In early 280, Pyrrhus wisely sent Cineas ahead with an advance guard of three thousand troops. Only when they had arrived safely at Tarentum and received their expected welcome did he follow with the main body of his army. They traveled in a fleet of transport ships that the Tarentines had sent across the Adriatic to Epirus. The king soon had cause to rue his insistence on sailing before the winter was over. His fleet was scattered far and wide by a storm. Some ships, including the flagship, which carried Pyrrhus, were unable to round the Iapygian promontory (the heel of the Italian boot) into the Bay of Tarentum. Night fell and a heavy sea drove them onto a bare and harborless coast, where many ships broke up on the rocks. An exception was the royal galley, which was saved because of its great size and sturdy build.
Saved only for the moment, though. The wind unexpectedly veered round and began to blow from the shore. The ship was likely to founder if it met the wind head-on, but to sail out to sea and allow it to bounce about in the boiling swell was equally dangerous. The king took a bold decision, as Plutarch reports:
Pyrrhus jumped up and threw himself into the sea, and his friends and bodyguards, eager to help him, immediately followed suit. But night and the waves with their heavy crashing and violent recoil made assistance difficult. It was not until day had already come and the wind was dying away that he managed to reach the shore. He had lost all his physical strength, but with boldness and a refusal to give in he mastered his distress.