Pyrrhic victory

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.In both Epirote victories, the Romans suffered greater casualties, but they had a much larger pool of replacements, so the casualties had less impact on the Roman war effort than the losses had on the campaign of King Pyrrhus.

The report is often quoted as: Ne ego si iterum eodem modo vicero, sine ullo milite Epirum revertar.

The term is used as an analogy in business, politics and sport to describe struggles that end up ruining the victor.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr commented on the necessity of coercion in preserving the course of justice by warning, 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.In Beauharnais v. Illinois, a 1952 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving a charge proscribing group libel, Associate Justice Black alluded to Pyrrhus in his dissent, 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".