Pyrrhus & Marius

Why we love it

• •Pyrrhus won battle after battle against Rome and lost so many of his own men doing it that he said one more victory like that would destroy him completely. That is where the phrase "a Pyrrhic victory" comes from.
• •Hannibal, the general who nearly destroyed Rome, called this Greek king the greatest soldier who ever lived, ahead of everyone, even himself.
• •Marius was a farm boy who never bothered to learn Greek, saved Rome from an invasion that had wiped out army after army, and was elected consul seven times, more than any Roman before him.
• •Plutarch gave nearly every pair he wrote a closing verdict, a short essay weighing the two men. For Pyrrhus and Marius, no such verdict survives, so the last word is the reader's.

Why it matters

Pyrrhus and Marius belong in a child's education because together they carry one lesson: being able to win is not the same as knowing what winning is for. Each was among the most gifted soldiers the ancient world ever produced. Pyrrhus, a Greek king, was ranked by Hannibal himself as the finest soldier who ever lived, beat Rome in the open field, and ended with nothing to show for a lifetime of victories. Marius, born a poor farm boy who never learned the polished Greek of the Roman elite, clawed his way up to save his country from destruction and was thanked like a god at family tables, then spent his last years so hungry for more that he had his enemies hunted through Rome and helped push the Republic toward the civil wars that eventually destroyed it. Plutarch paired them because the two lives run in parallel: two men who could win almost anything and never learned when to stop, one whose ruin fell mostly on himself and one whose ruin fell on everyone around him. One of them is still in everyday speech, in the phrase "a Pyrrhic victory," a win that costs more than it is worth. And this is one of the rare pairs with no closing verdict from Plutarch at all, so a child who meets them early is handed not a moral to memorize but a real argument to finish: whether a gift for winning is worth anything, if the person who has it never learns what to want.