1 Pyrrhic Wars | The Sandy Cove Atlas

1 Pyrrhic Wars

The Marks

At the very beginning of the second episode of Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus is taking a class of boys through a lesson about the Pyrrhic Wars, waged in Southern Italy from about 280BC.

The two towns mentioned in the text are both marked in pencil in the Sandycove Atlas. Eight other marks mostly relate to battles and sieges of the Pyrrhic Wars, as if the boys had been given ten places to learn for homework.

The Texts

2 Nestor

You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?
Tarentum, sir.
Very good. Well?
There was a battle, sir.
Very good. Where?

The boy’s blank face asked the blank window.

Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?

I forget the place, sir. 279 B. C.
Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the gorescarred book.
Yes, sir. And he said: Another victory like that and we are done for.

Place names: Tarentum, Asculum.

Discussion

Lessons in Ancient History were a keystone of the classical education which dominated middle-class schooling well into the twentieth century. Even today, many privately educated children can expect to encounter the Pyrrhic Wars at some point in their schooldays. Their teachers would have good reason to mark key locations in the Wars if they had access to a map of ancient Italy. It is likely that these marks were made by a full-time teacher at Clifton School, or even by Francis Irwin, its real-life headmaster. It is usually suggested that Joyce was a classroom assistant there rather than a teacher. As such he could have observed the class, and recall one covering the same ground when he was at Belvedere. He was to fictionalise another episode from that era, of playing truant with his brother Stanislaus, in the Dubliners story ‘An Encounter’.