Seeing that the Senate refused to make peace, Pyrrhus had no option but to resume hostilities. In the spring of 279, he marched his army, forty thousand strong, slowly north through Apulia and encamped near the town of Asculum beside a bridge over the river Aufidus, then in full flood. The Romans faced them across the river. In the days before the battle, Pyrrhus’s troops became obsessed with the fact that one of the Roman consuls was Publius Decius Mus, whose father and grandfather had both “devoted” their lives to the gods of the underworld and fought suicidally to the death in the field. This had won Rome divine favor and victory.
The rumor (inaccurate, as it turned out) spread that this latest Decius Mus was planning the same religious act. The king was obliged to encourage his superstitious soldiers by saying that incantations and magic could not defeat arms and men. He added that if anyone saw a man wearing a toga pulled over his head, the prescribed costume for a devotio, they should make sure not to kill him but to take him alive. A message was sent to the consul forbidding him to try to devote himself.
Yet again, the surviving accounts of an ancient battle are confused and contradictory. It appears that the fighting took place over two days. To enable an engagement, the Romans were allowed to cross the river, but Pyrrhus found himself on rough ground unsuitable for both his cavalry and his phalanx. Inconclusive and scrappy fighting lasted until nightfall. At first light, the king sent skirmishers to occupy the battlefield and so deny it to the Romans. He then drew up his main forces for battle on a level plain where they would be able to operate with greater ease. His cavalry was placed on the wings, with the elephants once again held in reserve. The Greek army faced four Roman legions with roughly the same number of auxiliary troops.
Since Heraclea, the Romans had thought hard about how to deal with the elephant problem. This time they fielded wagons equipped with movable poles tipped with scythes, three-pronged spikes, grappling irons, or flaming devices wrapped in tow and pitch. These were swung into the elephants’ faces and had some success in disturbing the animals, at least to start with.
The Greek cavalry on the left wing retreated, and Pyrrhus extended his center to fill the gap they left behind them. Meanwhile, some Roman allies arriving late for the battle saw that the enemy camp was poorly defended and seized the opportunity to capture and loot it. Eventually, Pyrrhus, with his cavalry and elephants, succeeded in breaking up the front lines of two Roman legions. The fighting was fierce, and the king was seriously wounded in the arm by a javelin, but the day was his.
However, the consuls managed to extricate their forces and withdrew to their camp across the river. They had lost six thousand men, but, as had happened at Heraclea, the winners also suffered losses. According to the king’s war commentaries (no longer extant), three and a half thousand of his soldiers were killed. Because his camp had been fired and destroyed, he had lost all his tents, pack animals, and slaves. His army was compelled to sleep under the open sky. Many of the wounded died from lack of food and medical supplies.
The Battle of Asculum was as disastrous a victory as could be imagined. Plutarch summed up the king’s predicament:
He had lost a great part of the forces with which he came, and most of his friends and generals. He had run out of reinforcements he could summon from home, and he could see that his allies in Italy were losing their keenness. Meanwhile the Roman army was like a gushing fountain, easily and speedily refilled when emptied.
LUCK STRUCK again for the restless monarch. Just when his Italian campaign was losing steam, two new and enticing opportunities presented themselves. The inexperienced young king of Macedonia had gone down to defeat and death in a great battle with an invading Celtic horde. Pyrrhus had always yearned for the Macedonian throne and Alexander’s realm. If he could only find a way out of his obligations to Tarentum, he could cross back into Greece and drive the barbarians away. Epirus would certainly support the move, for it worried that the Celts might turn their gaze in its direction. Pyrrhus could hardly imagine a more glorious goal than to be the acknowledged savior of the Hellenes.
Then messengers arrived at Tarentum from the rich Sicilian city-state of Syracuse. Once more than capable of looking after itself, Syracuse was now riven by internal disputes. The numerous other Greek communities on the island were also politically unstable, veering wildly between rule by a despot and a rowdy democracy. For many years, the Carthaginians had controlled western Sicily. Always fearful that the Greeks would, if left to themselves, threaten their trade routes in the Western Mediterranean, they saw in their present confusion a chance to take control of the entire island. Hence the desperate Syracusan appeal to Pyrrhus to cross over from Tarentum, become the city’s supreme commander, and combat Carthaginian aggression.
There is no evidence, but we can safely guess that the king had long meditated as a career option not to stop at Italy but to press on westward to the invasion of Carthage, a sail of only 130 miles from Sicily. Indeed, his late father-in-law, Agathocles, who had been the ruler of Syracuse until his death in 289 (surprisingly, in his bed, despite the most colorful of careers), had anticipated him by leading an expedition against the North African merchant-state. Admittedly it had failed, but it was not in Pyrrhus’s nature to be disheartened by the difficulty of an enterprise, rather the opposite. The future was always bright.
The king’s weakness was not uncertainty or excessive caution but, rather, a short attention span for the matter at hand. Rome, a tougher prey to engorge than he had expected, was already beginning to recede from the front of his mind. He decided to accept the invitation from Syracuse, rather than the Celtic challenge. He never explained his choice, but we may suppose that the West offered new, untrodden lands and an Alexandrine vista of unending conquest, whereas the East was tediously familiar and crowded with powerful competitors and fellow claimants.
Not unnaturally, the Tarentines were extremely upset by Pyrrhus’s demarche, but he promised to return in due course and resume his campaign. He also took the precaution of installing garrisons in all the Italiote cities, although this augmented his already rising unpopularity in Greater Greece.
Carthage was also angered. Just when its dream of taking all Sicily under its control was about to be realized, the last thing it wanted was for a general of Pyrrhus’s ability to champion the Sicilian Greeks. It immediately sought an alliance with Rome against the king. This would keep the Republic in the war and so make it unsafe for Pyrrhus to leave Italy.
After a brief demurral, the Senate agreed to a third treaty with Carthage, the terms of which survive in the Greek translation of Polybius. The previous accords had in large part been designed to protect Carthage’s trading interests and had set down the parties’ respective zones of influence and exclusion, with Rome mostly as the junior partner. These restrictions were now overridden in the current emergency. The key clauses read:
Whichever party may need help, the Carthaginians shall provide the ships both for transport and for operations, but each shall provide the pay for its own men.
The Carthaginians shall also give help to the Romans by sea if the need arises, but no one shall compel the crew to disembark against their will.