Reader question:

What does this sentence – Most historians agree that the battle was an Egyptian defeat or a draw or at best a Pyrrhic victory – mean, and in particular what is "pyrrhic victory"?

My comments:

It means the Egyptians probably lost the battle. It was perhaps a draw. At the very best, if the Egyptians won, their own loss was so great that they could hardly find any satisfaction in the victory.

Pyrrhic victory? You could have more or less guessed it, I think. It refers to a victory that has come at a great cost, such a great cost, in fact, that it's perhaps not worth fighting for. Pyrrhic, with a capitalized "P", is after Greek king Pyrrhus (318-272), who gained such a victory against the Romans. Pyrrhus had lost so many men in the battle that when people came to congratulate him for the victory, Pyrrhus said to them: "One more such victory and Pyrrhus is undone¹."

Hence, Pyrrhic victory.

Having grasped its origin, I hope you'll find this phrase easy to remember. And having learned its story, you'll be able to put Pyrrhic victory into use in the right situations. While we're at it, talking about victory, we might as well touch upon two other kinds of victories for the sake of comparison. One is Cadmean victory, the other moral victory. Cadmean is also Greek in origin. A Cadmean victory is one that has come at ruinous costs to both sides. A moral victory, on the other hand, refers to a situation in which you feel you do the right things and your beliefs are right even though you do not win the game, battle or argument.

Well, in short, all three of these victories we'd probably do better without.

Here are two media examples of Pyrrhic victory.

1. In short, the Hong Kong government might have won this particular battle against the speculators, just as the Malaysians reckon they have done. But with both administrations' credibility hugely damaged as a result, these are Pyrrhic victories that they may come to rue².

- "Market intervention³: Fashionable", The Economist⁴, September 5, 1998.

2. After intense and wearying discussions that came close to breakdown⁵ on more than one occasion, European leaders, thanks mainly to the efforts of German Chancellor⁶ Angela Merkel and Luxemburg's Jean-Claude Juncker, snatched victory from the jaws⁷ of defeat to reach agreement over a reform treaty in the early hours of June 23.

But it was a pyrrhic victory. The document that emerged from Brussels appeared to reject the ideals of a strong and unified⁸ European Union as envisioned by statesmen like Francois Mitterrand or Helmut Kohl and was instead a watered down, dismembered, and completely illegible⁹ version of the defunct¹⁰ EU constitutional project.

- Pyrrhic victory for EU at Brussels summit, The Hindu, July 12, 2007.