Second Year of the War

Thus ended the campaign of 474.  The separate peace which at the decisive moment Etruria had concluded with Rome, and the king’s unexpected retreat which entirely disappointed the high-strung hopes of the Italian confederates, counterbalanced in great measure the impression of the victory of Heraclea.  The Italians complained of the burdens of the war, particularly of the bad discipline of the mercenaries quartered among them, and the king, weary of the petty quarrelling and of the impolitic as well as unmilitary conduct of his allies, began to have a presentiment that the problem which had fallen to him might be, despite all tactical successes, politically insoluble.  The arrival of a Roman embassy of three consulars, including Gaius Fabricius the conqueror of Thurii, again revived in him for a moment the hopes of peace; but it soon appeared that they had only power to treat for the ransom or exchange of prisoners.  Pyrrhus rejected their demand, but at the festival of the Saturnalia he released all the prisoners on their word of honour.  Their keeping of that word, and the repulse by the Roman ambassador of an attempt at bribery, were celebrated by posterity in a manner most unbecoming and betokening rather the dishonourable character of the later, than the honourable feeling of that earlier, epoch.

Battle of Ausculum

In the spring of 475 Pyrrhus resumed the offensive, and advanced into Apulia, whither the Roman army marched to meet him.  In the hope of shaking the Roman symmachy in these regions by a decisive victory, the king offered battle a second time, and the Romans did not refuse it.  The two armies encountered each other near Ausculum (Ascoli di Puglia).  Under the banners of Pyrrhus there fought, besides his Epirot and Macedonian troops, the Italian mercenaries, the burgess-force—­the white shields as they were called—­of Tarentum, and the allied Lucanians, Bruttians, and Samnites—­altogether 70,000 infantry, of whom 16,000 were Greeks and Epirots, more than 8000 cavalry, and nineteen elephants.  The Romans were supported on that day by the Latins, Campanians, Volscians, Sabines, Umbrians, Marrucinians, Paelignians, Frentanians, and Arpanians.  They too numbered above 70,000 infantry, of whom 20,000 were Roman citizens, and 8000 cavalry.  Both parties had made alterations in their military system.  Pyrrhus, perceiving with the sharp eye of a soldier the advantages of the Roman manipular organization, had on the wings substituted for the long front of his phalanxes an arrangement by companies with intervals between them in imitation of the cohorts, and—­ perhaps for political no less than for military reasons—­had placed the Tarentine and Samnite cohorts between the subdivisions of his own men.  In the centre alone the Epirot phalanx stood in close order.  For the purpose of keeping off the elephants the Romans produced a species of war-chariot, from which projected iron poles furnished with chafing-dishes, and on which were fastened moveable masts adjusted with a view to being lowered, and ending in an iron spike—­in some degree the model of the boarding-bridges which were to play so great a part in the first Punic war.