The Samnites and the Sabellian tribes now declared openly for Pyrrhus, as did a number of Italiote cities that had been waiting on events before deciding whom to back. However, the king seems to have been unsure of his next military move. One of his rivals for the throne of Macedonia once said of him, “He is like a player with dice, who makes many fine throws, but does not know how to exploit them when they are made.”
What appears to have been a weakness may in part have been a certain reasonableness of disposition. His war aim was not Rome’s unconditional surrender, something he must have known he could not achieve with the army at his disposal. Instead, he wanted to force the Republic to withdraw from Greater Greece and revert to its status as a middling power in central Italy. This could be done, he hoped, by demonstrating his military superiority so convincingly that the Republic would be persuaded to accept a negotiated peace.
ONE FURTHER THROW of the dice was worth risking. Pyrrhus tested the loyalty of Rome’s Latin allies by marching his army north through Campania and along the Via Latina toward Rome. He may also have hoped to entice Etruria into revolt. But central Italy was unimpressed, and if the king expected defections he was disappointed. The cities of Naples and Capua refused to capitulate. He advanced to within a few miles of Rome, but the threat to the city, with its high walls and garrison, was not serious.
Laevinus, having gathered together his scattered forces and added to them the reinforcements sent by the Senate, chased after Pyrrhus, harassing his army. The king was astonished and compared the Roman army to the Hydra, a poisonous water serpent with many heads; if one was chopped off, others grew in its place. “After being cut to pieces the legions grow whole again!” he remarked admiringly. The consular army that had been keeping watch over the Etruscans began to move south, and the king, fearful of being trapped in a pincer, turned around and went back to Tarentum, where he spent the winter of 280.
The time had come for diplomacy, and the Romans delivered another shock. A delegation of three senior politicians, headed by Gaius Fabricius Luscinus, arrived to treat with Pyrrhus. Much to his surprise, the only topic they wished to raise was the ransoming of Roman prisoners of war. He had assumed that, as was customary in the Hellenistic world, they would accept the fact that they had been defeated and seek terms. Uncertain what to do, he consulted his advisers. He followed Cineas’s recommendation that he free the captives without price and send envoys and money to Rome.
Before the embassy left Tarentum, he took Fabricius on one side, offered him generous gifts, and asked for his cooperation in securing peace. The Roman declined the gifts on the grounds that he already had enough possessions, and said coolly, “I commend you, Pyrrhus, for wanting peace and I will secure it for you, always providing that it proves to be to our advantage.”
Fabricius was not offended by these advances, for sometime later he very decently passed intelligence to Pyrrhus that his personal physician was planning to assassinate him. The king was not put off by the Roman’s rebuff, either, and commissioned Cineas to go to Rome and induce the Senate to come to an agreement. Reputed to be the most eloquent public speaker of his day, Cineas reminded his hearers of the famous fourth-century orator Demosthenes. Pyrrhus rated his persuasive powers so highly that he used to say, “His words have won me more cities than my own military campaigns.”
Just in case words were not enough, Cineas brought with him a large amount of gold and, we are informed, every kind of fashionable women’s dress. If the men could not be won over, he thought, then their wives, corrupted by the allure of classical haute couture, would charm them into changing their minds. Hellenistic monarchs were expected to be magnificently openhanded, but to Romans this was bribery, even if many pocketed what was on offer.
Although he did not quite understand this cultural difference, Pyrrhus’s adviser was no fool. Once he had arrived in Rome, he delayed seeking an audience with the Senate. Alleging one reason or another, he hung around the city, getting the feel of the place and making the acquaintance of all the best people. A charming conversationalist and a generous giver, Cineas was soon a popular figure on the social scene. By the time he met the Senate, many of its members knew him well and had been persuaded to back his peace plan.
The terms he proposed were tough. Tarentum and the other Greek cities in southern Italy were to be fully independent. All lands taken from the Samnites and other Sabellian tribes were to be returned to their original owners. Finally, an alliance would be offered with Pyrrhus (not, interestingly enough, with Tarentum or Epirus). The total effect of this pact would have been to reduce Rome’s sphere of influence to Latium only. It is evidence either of Cineas’s golden tongue (and gold specie) or of the Republic’s exhaustion and demoralization, or something of both, that it appeared that the Senate would accept the proposals.
This was to reckon without Appius Claudius Caecus. Old, ill, and completely blind, he had retired from public life. When he learned that a vote for a cessation of hostilities was about to be passed, he could not hold himself back. He ordered his servants to lift him up and had himself carried in a litter to the Senate House. At the door, his sons and sons-in-law took him in their arms and helped him inside.
He addressed the Senate in the strongest terms. According to Plutarch, he said, “Up to this time, I have regarded the misfortune to my eyes as an affliction. But when I hear your shameful resolutions and decrees, I am only sorry I am not deaf as well as blind.”
He insisted that Pyrrhus must first leave Italy before there was any talk of friendship and alliance. The Senate performed a rapid volte-face and voted unanimously to accept his opinion. Cineas was sent back to his master empty-handed, except for a greater understanding of the Roman character. He told Pyrrhus ruefully that the Senate was a “council of many kings.”
Claudius’s speech must have been a powerful and persuasive composition. It was still read in the first century and, although now lost, was believed to be the oldest text of its kind to have been preserved. Cicero judged the aged radical to have been a “ready speaker.”
IN PYRRHUS’S OPINION, the Romans had been defeated and the war should have been over, but only now did the monarch from Epirus understand the depth of Rome’s resources and its stamina. To keep his army fed and paid in a foreign land was prohibitively expensive, even more so now that he had recruited new mercenaries, mainly from southern Italy. Large sums of money had to be raised if he was to stay in the game. The Italiote cities on whose behalf the campaign was being fought were requested (in a tone of voice that signified “required”) to finance operations.
The wealth of these cities and the extent of the demands made of them was startingly revealed in the late 1950s, when archaeologists unearthed a stone box containing thirty-eight bronze tablets with writing incised on them from the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Locri, a port on the toe of Italy. Seven can be dated to between 281 and 275, the years of Pyrrhus’s Italian adventure. During that time, no less than 11,240 silver talents (about six hundred and forty thousand modern pounds of silver) were paid to the king from the temple income as a “contribution to the common cause.” With this huge sum, a force of between twenty thousand and twenty-four thousand mercenaries could be paid their customary salary of one drachma a day each for six years. The revenue of temples derived from taxes, collections, and gifts, from the sale of wheat, barley, and olive oil grown on temple lands, the sale of homemade tiles and bricks and, last but not least, from temple prostitution, a custom at Locri in times of crisis. One of the city’s largest payments was made after the Battle of Heraclea. We can safely assume that its neighbors in the region made similar contributions.