Having decided that I'd like to 'do' Pyrrhus versus Rome, I thought that, just perhaps, I ought to learn a little bit about the period - what came before, what happened during, and how that affected what happened after. So I bought a book: "Roman Conquests: Italy" by Ross Cowan (published by Pen and Sword, I got my copy from Amazon here). I also bought a copy of "Pyrrhus of Epirus" by Jeff Champion (Pen and Sword again, available here). I haven't read all of the first one yet - in fact I'm only up to about 320BC - and have barely even looked at the plates in the second. So far, the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula seem to have fought like the proverbial rats in a sack - after fifty pages there seem to have been about a hundred different scraps - and that's only the ones involving the Romans. I must admit to being thoroughly confused by it all. I think the Romans are beginning to get the upper hand at this point... But that might just be because I know they won in the end!
One thing is for certain - they got plenty of practice at fighting during those early years! And they also seem to be demonstrating that 'we will win - our destiny is to rule the world' attitude which just seemed to make them keep raising bigger, better armies each time they got defeated.
There's another chapter or so of 'mopping up' operations and after that I guess the Italian peninsula will be theirs, and then we're on to the main event - the reason I'm reading the book in the first place - the Pyrrhic War! But I will have to re-read all this early stuff again sometime, I can't leave it as it is - with me understanding so little of it.