Plutarch, a Greek writer around 100 AD, wrote Parallel Lives, paired biographies of Greeks and Romans. This is the life of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus — on the Adriatic, now northwestern Greece and southern Albania. He pairs Pyrrhus with the Roman Marius: two men who could win a field and not a peace.

Pyrrhus had Alexander the Great's hunger and not quite his luck. Hired by Tarentum, a Greek city in southern Italy (Taranto), he beat the Romans at Heraclea and Asculum with elephants and a butcher's bill. Another such victory, he said, would undo him — hence Pyrrhic. Sicily glittered and slipped; Italy again; then a night fight in the streets of Argos, in southern Greece. A woman threw a tile from a roof and broke his spine; Zopyrus finished him on the ground. A king who collected crowns the way other men collect wounds.