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Pyrrhus's alarm. He resolves to retreat from the city. Pyrrhus finds the streets blocked up. Dreadful confusion. The fallen elephant in the gateway. Pyrrhus is greatly alarmed. He lays aside his plume. He is struck by a tile thrown down upon him. His dreadful death. The head borne away. Summary of Pyrrhus's character. Conclusion.
These however, were the very flower of Pyrrhus's army; for he lost all his most trusty officers, and his most intimate personal friends. After the battle many of the Lucanians and Samnites came up; these allies he reproached for their dilatory movements, but was evidently well pleased at having conquered the great Roman army with no other forces but his own Epirotes and the Tarentines.
Anxiety for her would surely have bound me to this house and the city when the time came to make the escape, for without her my life would now be valueless. But when I think that she might follow me to Pyrrhus's cliff " "Don't flatter yourself with this hope," pleaded Gorgias. "Serious obstacles may interpose. I am to have another talk with the Nubian later.
For when he advanced and pitched his camp near, the old admiration for Pyrrhus's gallantry in arms revived again; and as they had been used from time immemorial to suppose that the best king was he that was the bravest soldier, so now they were also told of his generous usage of his prisoners, and, in short, they were eager to have anyone in the place of Demetrius, and well pleased that the man should be Pyrrhus.
Near it, towards the north, in the open sea, was the anchorage of the larger sea-going ships and the various skiffs and boats of the fisher folk. Dionikos, Pyrrhus's youngest son, who was still unmarried, built new boats and repaired the old ones.
Hieronymus says, there fell six thousand of the Romans, and of Pyrrhus's men, the king's own commentaries reported three thousand five hundred and fifty lost in this action.
The reader will recollect that Areus, the king of Sparta, was absent in Crete at the time of Pyrrhus's arrival, and that the command of the army devolved, during his absence, on Acrotatus, his son; for the kings of the other line, for some reason or other, took a very small part in the public affairs of the city at this time, and are seldom mentioned in history.
When the period for this celebration recurred, after Pyrrhus's restoration to the throne, both Pyrrhus and Neoptolemus, each attended by his own particular followers and friends, repaired to the city where the celebration was to be held, and commenced the festivities.
While things were in this condition the troops on each side waiting for an opportunity of attacking their enemies, and probably without any fear whatever of the physical dangers which they were to encounter in the conflict the feeling of composure and confidence among the men in Pyrrhus's army was greatly disturbed by a singular superstition.
Just at that time the circumstances of Italy were such, that the project which had been meditated forty years before by Pyrrhus's kinsman, his father's cousin, Alexander of Epirus, and quite recently by his father-in-law Agathocles, once more seemed feasible; and so Pyrrhus resolved to abandon his Macedonian schemes and to found for himself and for the Hellenic nation a new empire in the west.
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