The only relations established were of a mercantile kind; as in the instance of the free state of Rhodes, the leading representative of the policy of commercial neutrality in Greece and in consequence the universal medium of intercourse in an age of perpetual wars, which about 448 concluded a treaty with Rome -- a commercial convention of course, such as was natural between a mercantile people and the masters of the Caerite and Campanian coasts.

Even in the supply of mercenaries from Hellas, the universal recruiting field of those times, to Italy, and to Tarentum in particular, political relations--such as subsisted, for instance, between Tarentum and Sparta its mother-city--exercised but a very subordinate influence.

In general the raising of mercenaries was simply a matter of traffic, and Sparta, although it regularly supplied the Tarentines with captains for their Italian wars, was by that course as little involved in hostilities with the Italians, as in the North American war of independence the German states were involved in hostilities with the Union, to whose opponents they sold the services of their subjects.
The Historical Position of Pyrrhus Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, was himself simply a military adventurer.
He was none the less a soldier of fortune that he traced back his pedigree to Aeacus and Achilles, and that, had he been more peacefully disposed, he might have lived and died as "king" of a small mountain tribe under the supremacy of Macedonia or perhaps in isolated independence.

He has been compared to Alexander of Macedonia; and certainly the idea of founding a Hellenic empire of the west--which would have had as its core Epirus, Magna Graecia, and Sicily, would have commanded both the Italian seas, and would have reduced Rome and Carthage to the rank of barbarian peoples bordering on the Hellenistic state-system, like the Celts and the Indians--was analogous in greatness and boldness to the idea which led the Macedonian king over the Hellespont.

But it was not the mere difference of issue that formed the distinction between the expedition to the east and that to the west.