'Surely ye are proving that this was boasting and empty bluster, since ye are afraid of Chaonians and Molossians, who were ever the prey of the Macedonians, and ye tremble before Pyrrhus, who has ever been a minister and servitor to one at least of Alexander's bodyguards, and now comes wandering over Italy, not so much to help the Greeks who dwell here, as to escape his enemies at home, promising to win for us the supremacy here with that army which could not avail to preserve for him a small portion of Macedonia.'
Edition :
Plutarch Lives IX: Demetrius and Antony, Pyrrhus and Caius Marius, Ed. Jeffrey Henderson, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (The Loeb Classical Library 101), Harvard University Press: Cambridge/MA - London 1968 (first ed. 1920).
Notes :
The violence here is narrated by Appius Claudius Caecus during a senate meeting around 280 B.C.
