The child’s final destination was a tribe in Illyria, to the north. This was a lawless land, and the Illyrians had a deserved reputation for sea piracy. The tribe’s ruler, a certain Glaucias, gave him asylum and resisted large bribes to hand him over to his enemies. This was where Pyrrhus grew up—in a wild world of heroic bandits who set a premium on physical bravery and personal honor.
He was only thirteen when he was restored to the Molossian throne under a regency, but a few years later he was ousted once again, this time by the ruthless and ambitious king of Macedonia, Cassander, who was one of the Diadochoi and had cast a covetous eye on northwestern Greece.
Now adult, Pyrrhus dreamed of winning or creating an empire somewhere in the world, but he had no choice but to lead the life of an adventurer. He served in the army of one of the Successors and received his first taste of large-scale warfare at the Battle of Ipsus, where his patron lost his life at the hands of a grand coalition. One more athlete in Alexander’s funeral games was removed from competition.
The only Successor to die comfortably in his bed after many years in power and to found a long-lived dynasty was Ptolemy, who had known Alexander as a boy and had been one of his most trusted companions. He seized Egypt and made himself pharaoh. Less ambitious than his rivals, he contented himself with this corner of the empire and aimed for no more than dominance of the Aegean. Pyrrhus spent some time in Egypt and so impressed Ptolemy that he married the young man to his stepdaughter (a political polygamist, he collected five wives during his career). The pharaoh also gave him substantial military and financial support, which enabled Pyrrhus once more to regain the Molossian throne.
The charms of his small kingdom soon palled. Pyrrhus devoted time and energy to expanding the territory he controlled, but he was a marginal player in the great game of international politics. He nursed his hopes. A second cousin of Alexander the Great through Olympias, who had been a Molossian princess, he went so far as to claim a special relationship with the dead conqueror. He once reported that Alexander called to him in a dream. He answered the summons and found the king lying on a couch. Alexander promised him his help. “But your majesty,” said Pyrrhus, never backward in coming forward, “how will you be able to help me, seeing that you are unwell?” The king replied, “My name will be enough,” and, mounting a pedigree horse, led the way into the future.
And so it was. Pyrrhus did not hesitate to use Alexander’s name, and he made the most of the family connection when, in 287, he persuaded the Macedonian army to proclaim him king of Macedon. However, a rival pretender soon drove him out, and back into his Molossian backwater.
Pyrrhus was a chivalrous and charismatic figure, although Plutarch writes that his appearance “conveyed terror rather than majesty.” As with the King’s Evil, practiced by medieval and early modern European monarchs, sufferers from depression believed the king could cure their condition by pressing his right foot against their spleen. No beauty, Pyrrhus had few teeth and, oddly, it is said that his upper jaw was a continuous line of bone on which the usual intervals between the teeth were indicated by slight depressions. (There is no plausible condition known to modern dentists that matches this description; the most likely explanation is that the king wore a bone or ivory denture.) He was discreet and polite in his personal life, but tended to be aloof with social inferiors. He was widely acknowledged to be naturally brilliant, well-educated, and experienced in public affairs—an opinion of himself that he shared.
As the years passed, though, Pyrrhus remained a man of promise rather than of accomplishment. Like his ancestor Achilles, he could not stand idleness, and, as Homer writes,
He was in his late thirties when, not a moment too soon, the opportunity of his lifetime finally presented itself. An embassy from the city of Tarentum (today’s Taranto), a Greek foundation on the heel of Italy, traveled to Epirus and laid before the king an extremely interesting proposition.
TARENTUM WAS ONE of the wealthiest cities of the Greek world. Founded in 706 in Apulia, on the instep of the Italian boot, it stood on an island between a large inland lagoon and a bay, which was itself protected from the open sea by another island and a spit of land. The city was “leafy” and the climate delightful, with “mild winters and long lingering springs.” To the poet Horace, the surrounding countryside was:
Tarentum enjoyed a thriving cultural life; it was a center for the philosophy of Pythagoras and manufactured high-quality decorated pottery and a beautiful silver coinage. The city was especially famous for the purple dye it made from the murex, a marine mollusk. It also had a thriving wool industry and sold figs and salt. Politically, it was a democracy and was dominated for thirty years in the middle of the fourth century by a certain Archytas, whom we would call today a Renaissance man. He is believed to have been the founder of mathematical mechanics, and designed a bird-shaped flying machine, probably propelled by steam power. Archytas had known Plato personally and attempted to rescue him from his difficulties with the tyrant of Syracuse Dionysius II. The Athenian philosopher may have seen in him a model of the philosopher king he recommended in his Republic as the ideal ruler of a state.
Archytas was also a successful field commander against continual incursions by the Sabellian tribes that ringed the city from their mountain fastnesses. The Tarentines could field an army of more than thirty thousand men and deployed a powerful fleet. However, in more recent times they seemed to have lost their edge. According to the geographer Strabo:
Later, because of their prosperity, luxury prevailed to such an extent that the public festivals celebrated every year were more in number than the days of the year; and in consequence of this they were poorly governed. One evidence of their bad policies is the fact that they employed foreign generals … to lead them in their war[s].
The Sabellians were not the only threat. For a long time, the Tarentines watched the growth of Roman power with concern, and then alarm. They had no locus in the Second Samnite War and at one point offered their services as neutral mediators between the warring parties, but in truth they were pro-Samnite non-belligerents. They could see that sooner rather than later the expanding Republic would interest itself in the affairs of southern Italy. This was particularly worrying for the democratic government of Tarentum, for Roman practice with its defeated “allies” was to support the local aristocrats, who tended to welcome external support in order to maintain their rule.
It was not that the Romans were actively looking for trouble. As already noted, they believed in the principle of a just war, at least in theory, and wished to avoid the displeasure of the gods brought on by acting aggressively without due cause. However, a due cause duly presented itself in 285, when Thurii, another port in the Gulf of Tarentum, appealed to Rome for protection against Sabellian attacks, and some help was apparently provided. One might have thought Thurii would apply to its bigger neighbor Tarentum, but Thurii was an oligarchy and there was little love lost between the two of them. A curse of the political culture on the Greek mainland was the inability of small city-states, such as Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, to get on with one another. Those colonists who migrated to Italy brought the bad habit with them.