Victoria Pyrrhica.—"A ", in which the conqueror comes off worse than the conquered. Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, in his Tarentine campaign against Rome (280 BC), defeated the enemy at Ascoli with such severe losses to his own side, that, according to Plutarch, he made the remark above. Such an equivocal success is also called Καδμείη νίκη (Herodotus, Histories, 1, 166), or Cadmæa victoria, with allusion to the internecine strife of the Sparti, the armed men who sprang from the dragon’s teeth sown byhttps://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Parallel_Lives