[43] [The Tarentines were not of course so bad as the Roman historians represent. Though imprudent, they had good ground for indignation.]
Roman Trophies
CHAPTER IX. THE COMPLETION OF THE ITALIAN CONQUEST
Through a long series of struggles, Rome had now become mistress of central Italy, with growing power in the north, and almost complete subjugation of the Greek cities of the south. There were a few of the latter, however, that still held out against the Roman influence. Pre-eminent among these was Tarentum, and it was through a conflict with this city that the Romans were threatened by the first important invasion of an armed force from the east. This force came under the guidance of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, a relative of Alexander the Great, who sought to emulate the deeds of that great hero.
Pyrrhus was not precisely another Alexander, but he was quite the foremost warrior of his time. Doubtless he had the aspiration to make Epirus the centre, and himself the master, of the world. His ambition was not to be realised; but he was able, for a time, to challenge the power of Rome, and more cogently to threaten its overthrow than any one before him had done, since the invasion of the Gauls, or than any one after him was able to do, with the single exception of Hannibal, until a late period of imperial history. The invasion of Pyrrhus, quite aside from the personal ambitions of the invader, had the widest and most world-historic importance, for it was a struggle of the old East against the new West—a repetition in some sense of that earlier struggle in which the Persians had sought to overthrow the growing power of Greece. Pyrrhus brought with him the famed Macedonian phalanx. He was met by the Roman legion, which, in its time, was to become even more famous, and with even better reason. Whether for the moment phalanx or legion would have proved the more formidable it is difficult to say, but in addition Pyrrhus brought with him a troop of war elephants, and it was this factor, largely, which turned the scale at first in his favour. Up to this time no elephant, probably, had ever been landed on the peninsula of Italy, and the sight of these beasts advancing in line of battle was enough to bring terror to the heart of the most hardened veterans.
It is true that fifty years earlier the Macedonians had met an oriental enemy aided by this, to them, new arm of warfare, and had easily found a means of overcoming their adversary, and nullifying the advantage which these great beasts were supposed to give them. Whether it was the lack of an Alexander, or that the Romans were of less staunch fibre than the Macedonians, or that the soldiers of Pyrrhus were more competent to meet the Romans hand to hand than were the Persians to oppose the hosts of Alexander—whatever the explanation, the fact remains that the elephants of Pyrrhus turned the scale clearly in his favour in the first two great battles in which he met the Romans on their soil. But the Romans, if defeated, were by no means dishonoured. The classical saying of Pyrrhus that another such victory would mean his ruin, shows that the battles of Heraclea and Asculum were very different affairs from most of the battles of an earlier day, in which Greek had met Persian, or even those in which Greek met Greek. In those Grecian battles, as we have seen, the courageous front of the one side, and the timidity of the other, often decided the day with scarcely more than the clashing of arms, or the chance wounding of here and there a fugitive. But here, the arbitrament of arms in its sternest phase was necessary to decide the victory. The Macedonians, with the fame of Alexander fresh in their minds, might scorn at first, but soon learned to respect these new foemen of the West, finding them, indeed, foemen worthy of their steel, and the conqueror who remained on the field after the battle had almost as much cause for regret over his losses as for rejoicing over his victory.