21.9
Dionysius, however, makes no mention of two battles at Asculum, nor of an admitted defeat of the Romans, but says that the two armies fought once for all until sunset and then at last separated; Pyrrhus, he says, was wounded in the arm by a javelin, and also had his baggage plundered by the Daunians;Auxiliaries of the Romans from Arpinum in Apulia. and there fell, on the side of Pyrrhus and on that of the Romans, over fifteen thousand men. The two armies separated; and we are told that Pyrrhus said to one who was congratulating him on his victory, If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.
21.10
For he had lost a great part of the forces with which he came, and all his friends and generals except a few; moreover, he had no others whom he could summon from home, and he saw that his allies in Italy were becoming indifferent, while the army of the Romans, as if from a fountain gushing forth indoors, was easily and speedily filled up again, and they did not lose courage in defeat, nay, their wrath gave them all the more vigour and determination for the war.
22.1
But while he was involved in such perplexities, new hopes once more inspired him, and projects which divided his purposes. For at one and the same time there came to him from Sicily men who offered to put into his hands the cities of Agrigentum, Syracuse, and Leontini, and begged him to help them to drive out the Carthaginians and rid the island of its tyrants; and from Greece, men with tidings that Ptolemy CeraunusThe son of Ptolemy I. of Egypt. In 280 B.C. he had basely assassinated Seleucus, and made himself king of Macedonia. with his army had perished at the hands of the Gauls, and that now was the time of all times for him to be in Macedonia, where they wanted a king.
