Pyrrhus of Epirus and the eponymous Pyrrhic War occupy a rather odd position in modern scholarship. They are universally recognised as important, as the war was the first major military contest between Rome's emerging empire and a significant power from the Hellenistic east and Pyrrhus was often lauded as one of the great military leaders of antiquity. However, due to the vagaries of the source tradition, they have rarely been studied in any depth. The events of the war fall in Livy's now lost books 12–14, although the outline is preserved in the Periochae, and are discussed in extremely fragmentary form in the works of Appian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cassius Dio and Diodorus Siculus amongst others. Although clearly a well-documented period in antiquity, our only complete, extant narrative of events today is the problematic Life of Pyrrhus by Plutarch, which offers a lively retelling but one that is difficult to integrate into more developed models of the period due to its anecdotal and highly personal character. This source situation is not helped by the fact that the period of the Pyrrhic War is also understood to be the dawn of the ‘historical period’ in Rome. Appius Claudius Caecus’ speech against Pyrrhus was supposedly one of the first pieces of Latin prose to be written down and preserved, and the events of the war are often thought to have been within (admittedly distant) living memory for Rome's first native writers on historical matters – men like Ennius and Fabius Pictor. Thus, this war, alongside the First Punic War, often forms the hazy end of many studies focusing on the early Republic, and the murky beginning of studies exploring the more historical middle Republic; a transitional period referenced by both but not properly claimed by either. This has resulted in Pyrrhus and the Pyrrhic War being subjected to a somewhat benign neglect. The king was the focus of a couple of biographies in the 1940s and 1950s (esp. P. Lévêque, Pyrrhos [1957]), and more recently of J. Champion's study (Pyrrhus of Epirus [2009]), all of which follow Plutarch closely; but the vast majority of scholarship touching on Pyrrhus over the past 50 years has either been only indirectly relevant or focused more on historiography than history. The Pyrrhic War was thus in dire need of a modern, critical treatment, which K. has endeavoured to provide.
K. begins the study with a discussion of the sources (Chapter 1 ‘Remembering the War’) and lays many of his cards on the table there. He suggests that the basic outline of events within the preserved literary tradition is reliable, falling as it does (albeit barely) within the Roman ‘historical period’ and supported by various Greek traditions. However, the Roman account of the war was also ‘filtered through centuries of retellings, exaggerations, and interpretation. The conflict is wonderfully malleable, taking place generations before the development of historical literature in Rome’ (p. 2). Thus, many of the nuances and details of the preserved narrative may be more historiographical creation than historical reality, and ‘must be evaluated individually’ (p. 6). What K. does in this volume is provide what amounts to a historical commentary on the Pyrrhic War, which follows the extant narrative in a largely chronological fashion, critiquing and discussing various details and offering suggestions for what might be historical and what might be a product of the later source tradition. He does this in a very readable fashion, spinning his own convincing version of events and presenting us with far more rational and relatable versions of Pyrrhus and the war than those offered by Plutarch.
The study begins in earnest in Chapter 2, which discusses the situation before the Pyrrhic War. This chapter is a welcome addition that highlights the long-running nature of the conflict between Rome and the peoples of southern Italy that Pyrrhus became involved in. It also offers a succinct account of the situation in Sicily, usefully linking the island to southern Italy and making sense of Pyrrhus’ later involvement there (beyond the king's notoriously fickle personality). The discussion in this chapter is based almost entirely on the extant literature, sadly missing out on the growing corpus of archaeological material available for the region and period, but it allows K. to build the complicated web of politics and conflict within which the war took place. Chapter 3 discusses Pyrrhus’ military campaigns in Italy during 280 and 279 bce. In this section K.'s account represents a detailed, chronological synthesis of the available literature, although it includes a useful discussion of which aspects may be accurate and which are more dubious. Chapter 4, somewhat awkwardly, breaks the chronological structure and re-examines the period from 280 to 279 bce through a diplomatic lens. This leads to a certain sense of redundancy, as it reintroduces events, and is also a place where K.'s lack of engagement with more recent approaches to Rome's early empire and Italian society in the fourth and third centuries bce (e.g. R. Scopacasa, Ancient Samnium [2015]; N. Terrenato, The Early Roman Expansion Into Italy [2019]) makes it less effective. Chapter 5 returns to the chronological narrative and discusses Pyrrhus in Sicily. Here, the deeply problematic and fragmentary nature of the literary tradition leads K. to be a bit more speculative than elsewhere, although the broad argument is convincing. Chapter 6 discusses the battle at Benevetum and the end of the war in Italy, while a brief but useful epilogue serves as the conclusion.
Although relatively short (142 pages), in this book K. has provided an important and valuable study, and I would suggest that it has likely taken over the crown as the default scholarly work on the Pyrrhic War – especially in English. His clear, sober and logical account of events and rationales offers new insights into the problematic period. However, this reader was often struck by what felt like lost opportunities throughout, where it seemed as if K. was unable to shake off some of the shackles that have held back the study of Pyrrhus and the Pyrrhic War to date. Most notably, and despite K.'s work to contextualise events in Chapter 2, both Pyrrhus and the war still seem to sit somewhat aloof from the rest of the period – particularly as they exist in modern scholarship. Fourth- and third-century bce Italy has been a burgeoning field of study in recent years, and our understanding of both ‘Italic’ and ‘Roman’ society has grown by leaps and bounds – largely informed by the archaeology. We now know this to be a vibrant, dynamic and quite fluid period, where identity and empire were being constantly negotiated. However, K.'s Romans, Italians, Greeks and Carthaginians still seem to be those from scholarship several decades ago and therefore appear as the more monolithic groups presented in the literature. It is hard to connect these idealised entities with the more complex communities we see in the archaeology. Part of this disconnect is likely the result of K.'s more historiographical focus and his desire to interrogate the narrative from that perspective – seeking especially the shadow of the Second Punic War on accounts of this earlier conflict. However, even there, the rather light use of modern scholarship is somewhat limiting. For instance, it was surprising not to see T. Cornell et al.'s 2013 The Fragments of the Roman Historians, D. Feeney's 2016 Beyond Greek: the Beginnings of Latin Literature or similar works cited. While many of K.'s specific suggestions about events in the narrative may be correct, the lack of engagement with the wider scholarly discussion concerning third-century bce Italy and Rome's early historiographical tradition mutes their impact. Somewhat frustratingly then, although K. has offered up a logical and internally coherent model of both Pyrrhus and the Pyrrhic War, both the king and his war still seem to reside in the awkward limbo they did before – discrete and disconnected from the third-century bce world around them.
