Pyrrhic Victory
Categories: Financial Theory
It’s 280 BC and King Pyrrhus of Epirus is having one heck of a day. He’s just led his troops into the fray against the Romans at the Battle of Heraclea (Heraclea was the area we now know as Basilicata, Italy), and it did not go well. King Pyrrhus didn’t lose the battle—in fact, his side won—but it was not an easy victory. His troops were not only outnumbered, but they’d been cobbled together from various towns and cities throughout the region, so there wasn’t a lot of solidarity. He had scouts, archers, pike-wielding infantry soldiers, and—get this—almost two dozen war elephants. Yep, you read that right—war elephants. As it turns out, it was the war elephants that won the day: the Romans had never seen such a sight before, nor had their horses, so as soon as those prodigious pachyderms rolled up, the Romans (and their horses) said “nope” and rolled right back out again.
But despite the elephants and the archers and whatnot, Pyrrhus’s victory came at a huge cost. Many of his troops were dead, and he was pretty much out of supplies and money. Besides that, he knew that the Romans could just go home and get a bazillion new soldiers to replace the ones they’d lost, but he didn’t have that option. He was running out of brave young men to recruit. “One more victory like that is gonna completely destroy us,” he said to one of his few remaining buddies over beers later that night. Okay, we’re paraphrasing there, but that’s the gist of what he said. And we don’t know for sure that there was beer. But what we do know is that this battle is what gave us the phrase we all know and love today: “Pyrrhic victory.”
A “Pyrrhic victory” is a battle we win, but at an immense cost. Here in the 21st century, Pyrrhic victories are less war elephants and phalanxes and more legal battles and corporate takeovers, but the sentiment is the same: we put everything we had into winning, and now that we’ve won, we don’t have anything left. It’s like if King Pyrrhus had decided to sue the Romans instead of fight them, and there he is in the courtroom with his one measly attorney and a bunch of hand-drawn charts while the Romans have some huge, high-priced legal team that uses fancy CGI on retainer. Pyrrhus could sink every cent he has into this lawsuit, and he might even win, but he’ll decimate his own finances, and spend a whole heck of a lot of his own time in the process.
And if the Romans lose, so what? It’s no skin off their back. They can take the legal hit and get back up like it ain’t no thing. Kind of like they did after Pyrrhus’s Pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Heraclea.
