Pyrrhic victory

A Pyrrhic victory (/ˈpɪrɪk/) is a victory with such a devastating cost to the victor that it carries the implication that another such victory will ultimately cause defeat.

Origin

The phrase is named after King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC during the Pyrrhic War. After the latter battle, Plutarch relates in a report by Dionysius:

The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.

—Plutarch, ^[1]

In both of Pyrrhus's victories, the Romans suffered greater casualties than Pyrrhus did. However, the Romans had a much larger supply of men from which to draw soldiers, so their casualties did less damage to their war effort than Pyrrhus's casualties did to his.

The report is often quoted as "Another such victory and I come back to Epirus alone,"^[2] or "If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined."^[3]

Although it is most closely associated with a military battle, the term is used by analogy in fields such as business, politics, law, literature, and sports to describe any similar struggle which is ruinous for the victor. For example, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, writing of the need for coercion in the course of justice, warned, "Moral reason must learn how to make coercion its ally without running the risk of a Pyrrhic victory in which the ally exploits and negates the triumph."^[4]

Also, in Beauharnais v. Illinois, a United States Supreme Court decision involving a charge under an Illinois statute proscribing group libel, Justice Black, in his dissent, warned, "If minority groups hail this holding as their victory, they might consider the possible relevancy of this ancient remark: 'Another such victory and I am undone.'"

Examples

• Battle of Heraclea (280 BC) – Pyrrhus of Epirus + Italian allies against the Romans
• Battle of Asculum (279 BC) – Pyrrhus of Epirus + Italian allies against the Romans
• Battle of Karbala (10 Muharram 61, October 10, 680 AD) – Ahl ul-Bayt against Umayyads.
• Deluge (history) (1655-1660) - premises to fall of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth - Partitions of Poland
• Battle of Malplaquet (A.D. 1709) – War of the Spanish Succession
• Battle of Bunker Hill (1775) - American Revolutionary War
• Battle of Guilford Court House (1781)  - American Revolutionary War
• Battle of the Alamo (1836)  - Texas Revolution
• Battle of Crete (1941) – World War II
• Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands (1942) – World War II Pacific theatre, Solomon Islands Campaign
• Battle of Monte Cassino  - World War II Europe Theatre
• Unternehmen Bodenplatte (1945) – World War II, Battle of the Bulge
• Battle of Chosin Reservoir (1950) – Korean War
• Battle of Vukovar (1991) – Croatian War of Independence

See also

References

• Denson, John, The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories. Transaction Publishers (1997). ISBN 1-560-00319-7.