Rich and Strange Aeons

I grew up knowing of “Pyrrhic victories”, some idea of winning so badly that you were losing anyway. But I never wondered what that really meant for, say, Pyrrhus. I might have guessed something like winning the battle but losing more men.

Well, yesterday I read Bret’s post on Pyrrhus and I’ve learned otherwise. When he beat Roman armies, he in fact lost fewer men – 4000 vs. 7000, say. The problem is that losing 4000 out of 25,000 soldiers was commonly what the loser would do; a winning army of the period might hope to lose 150.

And Pyrrhus was doing an overseas expedition from a small kingdom, he didn’t have reserves. There were local allies of sorts, but the core soldiers of his system were Macedonian-style pikemen, who need actual training and weren’t easily replaceable.

Whereas Rome was on its home ground, and the Middle Republic looks nearly optimally designed for maximizing the number of enthusiastic heavy infantry it could call up. All the landed farmers could be conscripted, land was reasonably evenly distributed to support lots of farmers who could obtain metal armor, the same people were the main voting power so had a say in their own wars. And the subjects/“allies” were ‘taxed’ in soldiers, not food or money, with a share in any loot, so basically brought into the system. “You have to join our gang, but in return you get to join our gang and get a cut.”

Pyrrhus had trouble losing 4000 men. Rome could not only replace 7000, it could raise a whole new consular army of 20,000 people to support the army that had gotten mauled. And if the new army got mauled too, Rome could do it again. And you can’t peel off their allies easily because those have decided they like the system, both for a share in winning battles and for protection from their traditional enemies, their neighbors.

(Time to quote Good Omens: “Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots,” – this would apply just as well to the various peoples of Italy. The Pax Romana starts as “don’t fight each other, help us fight those people over there.”)

So yeah. Pyrrhus was winning, even if we compared numbers of casualties – but they were still losses he couldn’t afford to keep losing. And Rome didn’t like accepting a draw, let alone a loss; like a rabid bulldog, it would keep raising armies until it achieved something that could be called victory.

(This stuff on the Roman system draws on many of Bret’s posts, not just that one.)