The Hellenistic King Who Was Killed at the Siege of Argos in 272 BCE by a Roof Tile Thrown by an Old Woman From Her Window

Pyrrhus (319-272 BCE) was king of Epirus — the small Hellenistic kingdom on the western Greek coast — and one of the senior military commanders of the early 3rd century BCE Mediterranean. He had spent his career fighting the larger Hellenistic monarchies, the early Roman Republic in southern Italy, and Carthage in Sicily. He had been defeated only at the long strategic level: his tactical battlefield record was undefeated.

He is best known for the 280 BCE campaign in southern Italy in support of the Greek colony at Tarentum against Roman expansion. The Battle of Heraclea (July 280 BCE) and the Battle of Asculum (279 BCE) were both Pyrrhic battlefield victories — but each cost approximately a third of his available army. After Asculum he reportedly said the phrase that has been the source of the English idiom for two thousand years:

If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.

The phrase, recorded by Plutarch in his Life of Pyrrhus approximately 400 years later, produces the term Pyrrhic victory — a victory whose cost is so high that it amounts to defeat.

Argos

By 272 BCE Pyrrhus had returned from his unsuccessful Italian and Sicilian campaigns to the Peloponnese, where he was attempting to take advantage of a succession dispute at Argos. The Argive faction led by Aristippus had invited Pyrrhus’s intervention; the competing faction led by Aristeas had invited the Macedonian king Antigonus II Gonatas.

Both armies arrived at Argos in summer 272 BCE. Pyrrhus’s army entered the city through a postern gate left open at night by his Argive allies. Antigonus’s army was waiting outside the walls.

Pyrrhus’s column became disorganised in the narrow streets of the Argive interior. The elephants accompanying his force — Indian war elephants brought from Egypt — could not manoeuvre in the confined urban environment. One of the elephants died in a gatehouse passage and blocked the street.

The street fighting that followed across the morning was confused. Pyrrhus, on horseback, attempted to direct his troops from a central crossroads.

The tile

The encounter is described in Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus (chapter 34). An Argive soldier had attacked Pyrrhus with a spear. Pyrrhus had wounded the soldier slightly. The soldier’s elderly mother — watching from the flat roof of her house, where she had taken refuge — picked up a heavy roof tile and threw it down at Pyrrhus to defend her son.

The tile struck Pyrrhus at the base of the neck, between the helmet and the cuirass. He was stunned. He slumped over his horse’s neck and fell.

A Macedonian soldier named Zopyrus (in some sources; Plutarch leaves him unnamed) recognised the fallen rider as the king. He approached and attempted to behead Pyrrhus with his sword. Pyrrhus reportedly fixed Zopyrus with such a menacing stare — even semi-conscious from the tile — that the soldier hesitated for moments before completing the decapitation.

Pyrrhus was 47.

What happened next

Antigonus had Pyrrhus’s body brought to him and reportedly received it with expressions of regret — Pyrrhus and Antigonus had respect for each other as fellow Hellenistic commanders, and Antigonus is recorded as criticising Zopyrus for the undignified killing. The body was returned to Epirus with honours and was buried at the royal tombs at Ambracia.

The Kingdom of Epirus survived Pyrrhus’s death by approximately one century before being absorbed into the Roman provincial system after the Third Macedonian War (171-168 BCE).

The elderly Argive woman is not named in the surviving sources. The Plutarchan narrative does not record her name. She is one of the more consequential anonymous figures in the surviving Hellenistic historical record — her roof tile ended a military career that had threatened both the Roman Republic and the Carthaginian-controlled Sicilian system.

What “Pyrrhic victory” means now

The English-language phrase Pyrrhic victory — for a victory so costly that it amounts to defeat — has been in continuous English usage since at least the 17th century. The Plutarchan source line (“if we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined”) is the most-quoted ancient military aphorism in English-language political and journalistic writing.

Pyrrhus himself lost most of his battlefield victories’ strategic value through the same pattern. He was an unmatched tactical commander whose strategic judgement was less consistent. The historical irony is that the Roman military system that defeated him at the strategic level eventually absorbed and adopted many of the tactical innovations he had used against it.

The actual proximate cause of his death — a roof tile thrown by an unnamed elderly woman defending her son — is a reminder that Hellenistic urban combat was less controllable than Hellenistic military theory had assumed. Pyrrhus had survived approximately a dozen pitched battles in his career. He had been killed in the first street fight he attempted to direct.