rable number of vessels.
The departure of the king and the accounts of this first misfortune
sufficed for the fall of the Sicilian kingdom. On the arrival of the
news all the cities refused to the absent king money and troops; and
the brilliant state collapsed even more rapidly than it had arisen,
partly because the king had himself undermined in the hearts of
his subjects the loyalty and affection on which every commonwealth
depends, partly because the people lacked the devotedness to
renounce freedom for perhaps but a short term in order to save
their nationality. Thus the enterprise of Pyrrhus was wrecked, and
the plan of his life was ruined irretrievably; he was thenceforth an
adventurer, who felt that he had been great and was so no longer, and
who now waged war no longer as a means to an end, but in order to
drown thought amidst the reckless excitement of the game and to find,
if possible, in the tumult of battle a soldier's death. Arrived on
the Italian coast, the king began by an attempt to get possession of
Rhegium; but the Campanians repulsed the attack with the aid of the
Mamertines, and in the heat of the conflict before the town the king
himself was wounded in the act of striking down an officer of the
enemy. On the other hand he surprised Locri, whose inhabitants
suffered severely for their slaughter of the Epirot garrison, and he
plundered the rich treasury of the temple of Persephone there, to
replenish his empty exchequer. Thus he arrived at Tarentum, it is
said with 20,000 infantry and 3000 cavalry. But these were no longer
the experienced veterans of former days, and the Italians no longer
hailed them as deliverers; the confidence and hope with which they
had received the king five years before were gone; the allies were
destitute of money and of men.

Battle near Beneventum--
Pyrrhus Leaves Italy--
Death of Pyrrhus

The king took the field in the spring of 479 with the view of aiding
the hard-pressed Samnites, in whose territory the Romans had passed
the previous winter; and he forced the consul Manius Curius to give
battle near Beneventum on the -campus Arusinus-, before he could
form a junction with his colleague advancing from Lucania. But the
division of the army, which was intended to take the Romans in flank,
lost its way during its night march in the woods, and failed to appear
at the decisive moment; and after a hot conflict the elephants again
decided the battle, but decided it th