Pyrrhus had spent the last seven years on a campaign of his own design across Italy and Sicily, fighting Romans on behalf of the Greek city of Tarentum, then Carthaginians on behalf of Greek Sicily, then Romans again. He won most of the battles. He gained little. By 275 BC his treasury was empty and he was back in Epirus, looking for a new war. He found one in Macedonia, where he defeated King Antigonus Gonatas at the Battle of the Aous in 274 and took most of the kingdom - although Antigonus held on to the coastal cities, because Antigonus had a navy and Pyrrhus did not. Then Pyrrhus made one of his characteristic mistakes. He installed Gallic mercenaries as a garrison at Aegae, the ancient Macedonian royal capital. The Gauls dug up the tombs of the old Macedonian kings looking for gold and scattered the bones. The Macedonians, who had forgiven Pyrrhus other things, did not forgive that.

In 272 BC, Pyrrhus was approached by Cleonymus, a Spartan prince of the Agiad royal house who had been passed over for the throne. Cleonymus wanted Pyrrhus's help to take Sparta and rule it. Pyrrhus saw an opportunity to win the entire Peloponnese. He marched south with 25,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and 24 war elephants - a force large enough to look like an invasion, which it was. Sparta in 272 BC was no longer the Sparta of Leonidas, but most of its army was campaigning in Crete, leaving the city to be defended by old men, the prince Acrotatus, and most extraordinarily by the Spartan women, who according to Plutarch dug a defensive trench around the city overnight while their fathers and sons slept. Pyrrhus failed to break through. King Areus I returned from Crete with the main army, Antigonus Gonatas sent reinforcements from Corinth, and Pyrrhus turned away. Then his rearguard was harassed all the way north. His son Ptolemy was killed in one of the ambushes. Pyrrhus, hearing the news, summoned his Molossian cavalry, charged the pursuing Spartans, killed a Spartan named Evaclus with his own hand, and broke their pursuit.

While he was still in the field, an offer came from Argos. Aristeas, leader of the democratic faction in the city, asked Pyrrhus for help against the pro-Macedonian aristocrat Aristippus. The proposal suited Pyrrhus's mood: he could intervene in a civic dispute, install a friendly government, and pivot to Macedonia from a new base. He marched on Argos. When he arrived, Antigonus Gonatas was already there, camped to the city's north. Pyrrhus pitched his own camp at Nauplion, on the coast south of Argos. Areus I and a thousand Spartans and Cretans were nearby. Pyrrhus had walked into a converging force of three armies, in unfamiliar streets, with the political faction he was supposedly helping no longer holding the city it had promised.

Aristeas's faction opened a side gate at night. Pyrrhus's Gallic mercenaries got into the agora, but the gate was too small for war elephants - the handlers had to remove the towers from the elephants' backs to fit them through, then put them back on inside the city. The delay was long enough for the Argives to wake, sound the alarm, and send messengers to Antigonus and Areus, who were both close enough to send relief forces. Areus's Spartans entered the city. The streets filled with troops on three sides. Pyrrhus's largest war elephant collapsed and blocked the gateway he had come through. Another elephant lost its mahout and ran amok. The army that was supposed to take a city quietly was now trapped inside one, in the dark, with elephants panicking in the narrow streets.

Pyrrhus was riding through the chaos when he was wounded by a spear thrown by an Argive footsoldier. He turned in his saddle to strike the man down. From a rooftop above, the soldier's mother saw her son about to be killed. She picked up a roof tile from her own house and threw it. It struck Pyrrhus on the head. He fell from his horse, dazed. According to Plutarch, the impact itself may have been fatal. According to other accounts, he was decapitated where he lay by Zopyrus, one of Antigonus's Macedonian soldiers. Halcyoneus, a son of Antigonus, brought the head to his father. Antigonus was disgusted. He upbraided his son for behaving 'in such a barbarous manner' and accepted the formal surrender of Pyrrhus's army from Helenus, returning Pyrrhus's body for proper burial. Pyrrhus had died at fifty, killed by a defending mother and a clay tile that probably weighed less than two pounds.

The aftermath unrolled rapidly. Antigonus emerged as the unchallenged king of Macedonia and the leading power in Greece. He installed Aristippus - the Macedonian-friendly aristocrat the original conspiracy had been against - as tyrant of Argos, and replicated the arrangement in other Greek cities. The Spartan-Macedonian alliance was already cooling; within seven years it would be destroyed in the Chremonidean War, when Areus I joined Athens against Macedonia and was killed in 265 BC by his former ally Antigonus on the Isthmus of Corinth. Sparta would not recover for thirty years, until the reign of the reformer Cleomenes III. As for the woman with the tile - her name is not recorded. Plutarch tells the story carefully and gives her credit; he was a careful writer about women in war. Whoever she was, she stood on her own roof in Argos one night in 272 BC and saw her son fighting for his life below her, and she did what she could with what she had. The Hellenistic world is full of such moments, but most of them did not change who ruled the eastern Mediterranean.