What is a Pyrrhic victory?

The king who beat Rome twice

Pyrrhus ruled Epirus, a Greek kingdom in what is now northwestern Greece and southern Albania. He was a second cousin of Alexander the Great and one of the finest generals of his age. In 280 BC the Greek city of Tarentum, on the heel of Italy, was at war with Rome and called him in. He crossed with about 20,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry and 20 war elephants, animals no Roman army had ever faced. Pliny says the Romans, who first saw them in Lucania, called them Lucanian oxen.

Two wins, one army

At Heraclea in 280 BC the elephants panicked the Roman cavalry, and Pyrrhus won. Plutarch quotes two ancient historians who disagreed about the cost. One counted about 7,000 Roman dead, the other nearly 15,000, and they put the king’s losses at under 4,000 or as high as 13,000. Either way, he had lost veterans he could not replace from Epirus.

After the battle he sent his adviser Cineas to Rome to offer peace. The old censor Appius Claudius, long blind, had himself carried into the Senate to speak against it, and the Senate refused. Cineas went back with two famous reports. The Senate, he said, looked like a council of many kings. And fighting Rome was like fighting the Hydra, the monster that grew new heads, because the consul already had twice as many men as before.

At Asculum in 279 BC the armies fought for two days. Pyrrhus won again. Plutarch, following the king’s own memoirs, gives the dead as 6,000 Romans against 3,505 of Pyrrhus’s men. Then comes the line that gave us the phrase.

Pyrrhus said to one who was congratulating him on his victory, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

He had lost, Plutarch explains, a great part of the army he brought and nearly all his friends and generals. He could get no new men from home, and his Italian allies were losing heart. Rome simply raised new legions.

What became of Pyrrhus

He crossed to Sicily to fight Carthage, came back, and in 275 BC was beaten near a town called Maleventum. The Romans later renamed it Beneventum, swapping a name that sounded like “bad outcome” for one that meant “good outcome.” It is still Benevento. Pyrrhus sailed home with a fraction of his army. In 272 BC, fighting in the streets of Argos, in Greece, he was stunned by a roof tile an old woman threw from a rooftop, and killed.

How the phrase is used

A Pyrrhic victory is any win that wrecks the winner: a battle that bleeds an army white, a lawsuit that bankrupts the side that wins it, a takeover that sinks the company that made it. The point is not that the victory was narrow. It is that it cost too much. The phrase travels well: French says victoire à la Pyrrhus, Portuguese vitória de Pirro, German Pyrrhussieg. Plutarch’s own lesson goes deeper. Pyrrhus kept winning battles and never won the war, because he was fighting a city that could always fill its ranks again.