A Pyrrhic Victory signifies a victory that was won with great losses, that could almost be seen as a defeat, and that it was not worth it. The origin of the term is Pyrrhus (Pyrrhus), King of Epirus. Pyrrhus is an important name who learned this lesson the hard way when he went to war with the elephants.
The Romans had never seen an elephant before the battle in 280 BC, when Pyrrhus transported 20 war elephants to Italy. While you are standing in the battle lines with the spear in your hand, it will probably not be difficult for you to imagine how you will feel when a giant, armored creature with its fifth limb begins to charge towards you, and how you will feel pessimistic that everything is in vain.
The king, who attacked Southern Italy with his army, defeated the Romans at the battles of Heraclea and Asculum, but suffered great losses. In other words, this success was literally just a short distance away. The amount of casualties was so great that the historian Plutarch quotes Pyrrhus saying, “If we are victorious in one more war with the Romans, we will be utterly ruined.” And with these wars, the term Pyrrhic Victory was born.
The incredible death of King Pyrus
After his withdrawal from Italy in 272 BC, Spartan Cleonymus asked Pyrrhus to attack Sparta and bring him to power. This time Pyrrhus went on an expedition to Sparta, but faced unexpected resistance. He was forced to retreat to Argos soon after. Of course, his elephants were still with him.
A bust of Pyrrhus found in NaplesWikipediaWhat would cause the end of Pyrus was an attempt to attack again. According to the story, the corpse of one of the deceased war elephants blocked the road, and this development drove the remaining cavalry elephants crazy. Pyrrhus and his army seemed to be trapped. After this incident, Pyrus was wounded by an enemy soldier and in return stabbed him to death. If this soldier’s mother hadn’t been watching from a nearby roof, the problem would have been solved here.
In her dejected rage, Anne picked up a tile from the roof and threw it at Pyrrh’s head, and she managed to hit her target. “He was filled with anger and fear … and he took a tile with both hands and threw it at Pyrrhus,” Plutarch relates, as The Collective tells us.
Whether Pyrus died directly from being hit by the tile, or whether he died due to being stunned long enough to succumb to further enemy attacks is a hotly debated topic on the internet. Whatever the reason, it is among the interesting events of history that after a series of chaotic victories that he narrowly won, a man who went to war with elephants was knocked down by the weight of a tile and that somehow elephants played a role.
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