where a remnant of the old Ionian population had preserved its independence. Having thus become neighbours, they soon became enemies of the Argives. The quarrel broke out in the reign of Prytanis, son of Eurypon; and his successors, Charilaus and Nicander, made inroads on the Argive territory; the Dryopes of Asiné were induced to aid the Spartans, whose subjects had been excited to revolt by the Argives; but the Asinæans were shortly after punished with the loss of their city, and were forced to take refuge in Laconia.* The same Charilaus who invaded Argolis carried his arms into Arcadia, deceived, it is said, by an oracle, which seemed to promise the conquest of Tegea. Herodotus saw there the fetters which the Spartans had brought with them for the Tegeans, and in which, when they were defeated, the prisoners were forced to till the enemy's land. For many generations they continued to war against Tegea, but always with like ill suc

cess.

that had separated them from the rebellious. Dorians. The successors of Epytus, who reverenced him as the founder of their dynasty, inherited his maxims; at least the principal acts ascribed to them indicate a desire to conciliate the affections of the whole people, and to soothe all hostile feelings. We find them dedicating temples and instituting rites in honour of the old Messenian gods and heroes, apparently for the purpose of effacing national distinctions by a common worship. A like motive may have led one of them to direct the attention of his subjects towards the sea, by works and buildings at the port of Mothoné. In a subsequent reign, we hear that the Messenians sent a chorus of men, with a sacrifice, across the sea to Delos: the hymn with which they approached the altar of Apollo was preserved to after ages, and was regarded as the only genuine work that remained of the Corinthian poet Eumelus. Thus the country prospered; the arts of peace flourished; but the more united the nation, the less did any one class aim at excelling in the use of arms; and hence, perhaps, in military skill and discipline, the Messenians were inferior to the people of Lycurgus.

When two neighbouring states are disposed to war, they never are long at a loss for provocations or reasons to justify it. Sparta did not draw the sword till she had injuries and insults to allege which cried aloud for vengeance. The Messenians, on the other hand, held Sparta to have been the aggressor in the quarrel, and believed that she was impelled by no motive but her restless ambition. At a place called Limna (the pools), on the western skirts of Taygetus, was a temple of Artemis Limnatis, which, standing on the confines of the two nations, was

other people even of the Dorian race. In the reign of Teleclus, the seventh from Agis, the Spartans sent a company of virgins to celebrate a festival at this temple, and Teleclus went with them.

An easier and more inviting conquest now offered itself to them on another side. They had, perhaps, long observed, with inward discontent, how much fairer the land which, by chance or fraud, had fallen to the share of Cresphontes was than their own. Under circumstances different from those by which the Spartans had been formed, the Messenians had become a different people. The Achæans of Messenia are said to have submitted without reluctance to their new sovereigns, and the Heracleid kings appear to have adopted a wise and liberal system of government. Cresphontes either did not share the prejudices of his Dorians, or he rose above them. He fixed his residence, indeed, in a new capital, which he founded in the plain of Stenyclerus-a central posi-a common sanctuary for both, and open to no tion, far from Andania and Pylus, the ancient seats of the Messenian kings; but he divided the country into five districts, and designed that their chief cities should enjoy equal rights with Stenyclerus; the Dorians, however, shrank from all intermixture with the old inhabitants, and compelled their king to collect them in the capital, and to reduce all the other towns to the rank of dependant villages. But, though thwarted in his first plan, he seems not to have abandoned his generous policy; and the favour he showed to the lower class of his subjectsby which we are probably to understand the old Messenians-is said to have provoked a conspiracy among the rich (the Dorian oligarchy), by which he was cut off with his whole family, except one son. The surviver, Æpytus, whose mother, Meropé, was the daughter of Cypselus, king of Arcadia, or of some Arcadian canton, escaped into the dominions of his grandfather. At a riper age, with the assistance of the other Heracleid kings,† he recovered his hereditary throne, and punished the murderers of his father, whose example he seems to have followed with better success; for the honours and boons with which he is said to have won the nobles and the commonalty of Messenia probably consisted in the abolition of the distinctions

Paus., iii., 2, 3, and 7, 4.

The Spartans seem to have had a legend that the sons of Cresphontes ceded the sovereignty of Messenia to them as the price of their assistance. Isocrates, Archid., p. 120.

Some Messenians who were present offered violence to the maidens; a fray arose, and the king himself was slain in attempting to protect them from dishonour. Such was the Spartan story; but, as the Messenians gave out, Teleclus had laid a stratagem for taking off some of their noblest citizens at the festival, and for this purpose had disguised a band of Spartan youths as women, and had hidden daggers under their dress; but the plot being detected, he and they fell by the hands of their intended victims, and their countrymen, conscious of their injustice, made no demand of reparation.

Before this grudge was healed, a fresh one broke out. Alcamenes had succeeded his father Teleclus; Theopompus was his colleague; and two brothers, Androcles and Antiochus, sat on the throne of Messenia, when the wrongs and the revenge of a private man kindled a fatal war between the two nations. A Messenian named Polychares, a man of great note among his countrymen, who had gained the prize at the Olympic games, possessed some cattle for which he had no pasture, and contracted with a Spartan* named Euæphnus, to feed them on

*So he is called by Pausanias; but all the incidents of the story, unless it has been entirely disfigured, show that he must have been a Laconian of the subject class.

In the fourth year of the war, the Messenians | wished him well, persuaded them that the oraare said to have gathered courage so far as to cle had been duly obeyed. So, believing that take the field; but their king, Euphaes, still did they had made their peace with the gods, they not venture to face the Spartans on even ground. celebrated the event with joy and feasting. He intrenched himself in a strong position, where they could not attack him without great risk, and, after a few skirmishes of the light troops, the two armies parted as they met. The next year a great battle is said to have been fought, in which the Spartans were assisted by Cretan archers, and by the Dryopes, whom Argos had expelled from Asiné: but neither side raised a trophy; and they buried their dead, not by leave prayed, but by mutual consent.

nation regularly invaded the other's territory before the harvest. Argos and Sicyon waited for a fit occasion.

The new ground which the Messenians had taken, and the report of their awful rites, discouraged the Spartans; and it was only in the sixth year after Ithomé had been fortified that the king Theopompus led an army against it. The Messenians gave battle; but as before, though the fight lasted till nightfall, no victory was gained. Only the chiefs came forward, like the heroes of old, and proved their prowess in single combat. Euphaes himself attacked Theopompus, and fell he was rescued by his Thus the war crept on, and every year Mes- friends, but died soon after of his wounds withsenia suffered more and more from the enemy's out an heir. The people elected Aristodemus presence. It was necessary to keep garrisons to succeed him, though the soothsayers warned in all the towns at great cost; the husbandmen them to beware of a man who would bring the had scarcely heart to till the ground, and the stain of blood upon the throne of Epytus. The slaves ran away to the Spartans. Diseases, new king, however, won the hearts of high and such as commonly attend upon war and scarci- low by his good government; and he sent to ty, began to spread their ravages through the obtain succour from his neighbours the Arcadiunhappy land. The Messenians now resolved ans, and from Argos, and Sicyon. The Arcato try a new plan: not to scatter their forces dians joined the Messenians in ravaging Lacoover the country, but to collect them in an im- nia; for besides petty inroads, which never ceaspregnable hold, where they might keep the en-ed to be made from time to time, each hostile emy in check, and cover the region that lay behind them. On the western side of the vale of the Pamisus rise two lofty hills, connected together by a narrow ridge about half a mile long. In the fifth year of the reign of Aristodemus, The southern hill is Mount Evan; the northern, the Spartans are said to have been defeated in Mount Ithomé. The latter towers high above a great battle at the foot of Ithomé. Their all in its immediate neighbourhood, and com- spirit began to sink, and they sought advice mands a view over all Messenia from the south-from Delphi. The oracle promised success to ern to the western coast. It descends steeply stratagems, and Sparta tried many in vain; but to the south and the west; but on the side of Aristodemus also was warned by the god to the river, and towards the north, its summit is beware of Spartan cunning, and it was darkguarded by precipitous cliffs. On this summit ly announced that prodigies should mark the a little town had been built in early times, prob- approaching fall of Ithomé. These warnings ably by the Eolian settlers from the north of were not understood till the year arrived in Thessaly; and now the Messenians resolved to which Messenia was overtaken by the destined enlarge the ancient circuit, or to join a new city calamity. The city was now closely besieged at the foot of the hill to the citadel on its top. by the Spartans; but Apollo declared to the But at the same time, lest any secret anger Messenians that their land should belong to of the gods should render these precautions vain, the nation which should first dedicate a hundred they sent to consult the oracle at Delphi. The tripods at the altar of Jupiter in Ithomé. While god declared that an unsullied virgin of the they were preparing the offering, for which, in blood of pytus, selected by lot, must be made lack of brass, they were forced to use wood, a the victim of a nocturnal sacrifice to the powers Spartan, who had heard of the oracle, stole into below; should the lot fall wrong, one willingly the temple by night, and placed a hundred small offered must suffer instead. The lot was drawn, earthen tripods round the altar. And now ruand fell on a daughter of Lyciscus; but a sooth-mours spread of portents, which seemed to ansayer forbade the sacrifice, for he knew by his swer to the oracular warning; and Aristodemus art that the maid was not of the lineage of py-himself was dismayed by many visible signs of tus: meanwhile, in the midst of the general amazement, Lyciscus carried her away, and fled to Sparta. Hereupon Aristodemus, an Epytid also, and renowned for valour, freely offered his own daughter, though he had already betrothed her, and the day fixed for her marriage was at hand. The disappointed lover, after many unavailing remonstrances, forged a tale to defeat the father's purpose, by showing that the maid would not be an unsullied victim, that she was about to become a mother. Aristodemus, furious or impatient, killed his daughter with his own hand; her honour was cleared, but the soothsayer pronounced that a murder was not a sacrifice, that a fresh victim must be sought. The people was enraged with the calumnious lover; but the king, Euphaes, who

impending ruin. His daughter, too, appeared to him as he slept, clad in black, and, showing her wounds, took away his arms, and adorned him, as for his obsequies, with a golden crown and a white robe. Thus certain of his own fate, and of that which he could no longer avert from his country, he slew himself at his daughter's tomb. After his death, the hopes of the Messenians sank, but not their courage. They chose a chief, though without the royal title, and, when they were hard pressed by famine, made a vigorous sally; but their scale had kicked the beam; their bravest leaders fell, and at length, in the twentieth year of the war, the first of the fourteenth Olympiad, they fled, as Tyrtæus sang, from the great mountains of Ithomé, leaving their rich fields in the posses

THE MESSENIAN WARS.

sion of the conquerors. Such was the end of | ken by the Spartans, not to return home before the first Messenian war (B.C. 723).

the war should be ended.* The colony which From the romantic history which records founded Tarentum, in the interval between the this event, we do not learn the precise circum- first and second Messenian wars, is said to have stances of the flight from Ithomé, whether the been a band of youths, the offspring of such unbesieged effected their retreat by force, or by equal marriages, who, finding themselves exBut we hear cluded from the rank of citizens, were only dicapitulation, or by sufferance. that only a few withdrew into foreign lands; verted from a dangerous conspiracy against the the men of higher rank, who were connected state, which they had concerted with the Helots, by hospitable ties with Sicyon, or Argos, or any by the proposal that they should seek a new of the Arcadian towns, took refuge there; the country, and by the promise that, if the expedipriestly families retired to Eleusis, but the main tion failed, they should, on their return, obtain a body of the besieged is said to have dispersed, fifth part of Messenia. Theopompus, however, and to have settled in those parts of Messenia had related that the Spartans supplied the lossfrom which they had been collected in Ithomé. es they sustained in the war with the MesseniThe Spartans, however, after the fall of this ans by giving the widows of the deceased to city, which they razed to the ground, soon made Helots, whom they afterward admitted to the themselves masters of all the other Messenian franchise under a peculiar name. This incitowns, except, it would seem, Mothoné and Py- dent, indeed, may properly belong to the second lus, and disposed of the country at their pleas-war, in which such a measure is said to have ure. They repaid the services of their allies, been adopted on the advice of Tyrtæus; but it the Dryopes, by giving them a portion of the may serve to illustrate the state of things in coast near the western cape of the Messenian the former period. Should we, however, believe Gulf, where they founded another Asiné, in that Polydorus increased the number of the which, to the time of Pausanias, they fondly Spartans by a considerable body of new citizens, preserved their national name and recollections. drawn from the servile or the subject class of The descendants of Androcles were restored to Laconians, or from the issue of marriages formtheir country; a district called Hyamia was as-ed between such persons and Spartan women, signed to them by the conquerors. What treatment the rest of the nation-the bulk of it, at least experienced, we know from the unsuspicious evidence of Tyrtæus, who, in the third generation after the conquest, roused the pride of the Spartans by reminding them how their ancestors had forced the vanquished to stoop like asses under wearisome burdens, and to pay to their masters one half of the fruits of the land which they were allowed to till. In a word, they were reduced to the same condition with the Laconian Helots, but on more rigorous terms; like them, they were compelled to attend, with their wives, as mourners at the obsequies of the Spartan kings.

The conquest of Messenia was the event
which, more than any other, determined the
character and the subsequent history of Sparta.
It appears to have been also connected with
some important changes in the Spartan Consti-
tution, though in a manner which it is scarcely
possible to collect with certainty from the scan-
ty and confused traditions which remain on the
subject. There can be no doubt that the great-
er part of the conquered land was divided among
Spartan citizens; but it is a question whether
these were the old citizens, or were now for the
first time admitted to the franchise. We have al-
ready seen that, according to some accounts, Pol-
ydorus, one of the kings under whom the conquest
was completed, doubled, or at least augmented
by a third, the number of the portions of land
possessed by the Spartans; and these accounts
plainly imply that the number of the citizens
was at the same time similarly increased. And
this supposition is in some degree confirmed by
the various legends concerning the foundation
of Tarentum, so far as they agree in indicating
that the emergencies of the war had induced
the Spartans to relax the rigour of their princi-
ples, by permitting marriages between Spartan
women and Laconians of inferior condition.
Some stories connect these marriages, in a
manner evidently fictitious, with the oath ta-

it would still remain to be explained how this
act of wise liberality could be connected with
that discontent, which is uniformly mentioned,
certainly not without some historical ground,
as the occasion of the migration to Tarentum.
And this seems inexplicable, unless we sup-
pose that a distinction was made between the
new and the old citizens, which provoked a part
of the former to attempt a revolution, and com-
pelled the government to adopt one of the usu-
al means of getting rid of disaffected and turbu-
lent subjects. It must be remembered that the
Lacedæmonian settlers formed only a part of
and Locri, they were blended with other Greeks.
the colony at Tarentum, where, as at Croton
We know that in later times a distinction, the
nature and origin of which has never been
clearly explained, existed at Sparta between
two classes, one termed the Equals or Peers,+
the other the Inferiors. It seems not improb-
To
able that this distinction may have arisen when
the franchise was extended in the reign of Pol-
ydorus, and it may easily be conceived that it
was not established without opposition.
the Equals, who appear to have composed a se-
lect assembly,!! the election of the senate seems
to have been exclusively reserved; but the
lower franchise must have entitled to a vote in
the general assembly which elected the Ephors.
This, too, was perhaps the occasion of an or-
dinance enacted under the sanction of Delphi
in the reigns of Theopompus and Polydorus, by
which the powers of the general assembly were
expressly limited to the simple receiving or re-
jecting of propositions presented to it, without
change or addition.

The assumption of such an enlargement and consequent graduation of the franchise would also afford the easiest way of reconciling the

Antiochus and Ephorus, in Strabo, vi., p. 278-280, tincovaкTOL. So, too, Diodorus (i., Mai, Vet. Scr., xi., ὁ ὑπομεῖονες. compared with Theopompus, in Athen., vi., 271. Plut., Lyc., 6.

Η όμοιοι.
Η ἡ μικρὰ ἐκκλησία.
10) calls the partisans of Phalanthus neuvakTai.

assembly of the people, of laying measures before it, and of acting in its name; and it was undoubtedly this representative character which afforded them the principal means of encroaching on the royal prerogatives, and of drawing the whole government of the state into their hands.

This last, the most important branch of their authority, may have arisen in the reign of Theopompus, and from the cause to which Cleomenes assigned the institution of the office itself-the temporary absence of the kings. That it was unknown in earlier times seems to follow from the two ordinances cited by Plutarch, which

are silent as to the functions of the ephors. But still it may be reasonably doubted whether that enormous increase of their power, by which it came to overshadow all others in the commonwealth, was derived solely or mainly from any such accident, and whether it was on this account that the reign of Theopompus was fixed on as the epoch of their creation. But if in this reign the franchise was extended to a body of new citizens, who nevertheless were not ad

the old ones, the ephors, as representatives of the whole people, would henceforth stand in a new position with respect to the kings and the senate, which was elected from and by the higher class. The comparison which Cicero draws between the ephoralty and the Roman

various accounts of the origin of the ephoralty. | in later times possessed that of convoking the Herodotus ascribes the institution of this office to Lycurgus, perhaps only in a sense in which we might also do so, if Lycurgus be considered as a representative of the ancient Spartan Constitution. Other writers, with as good reason, describe the ephoralty as an innovation introduced by Theopompus, the colleague of Polydorus, who is said to have been reproached by his queen with having thus parted with the best half of the royal prerogatives, and to have vindicated his prudence by alleging, that by this concession he had secured the remainder to his successors. In the latest times of Sparta, Cleomenes endeavoured to spread an opinion there that the ephors had been originally ap-regulated the assembly of the people, and which pointed by the kings, when occupied by the Messenian war, to fill their place at home in the seat of justice, but that these new magistrates made their authority first independent, and then paramount over that of the kings themselves. Asteropus is named as the ephor who contributed most to strengthen the power of the college; but he is said to have lived many generations after their first institution.* This account of the origin of the office, though not improbable in itself, is rendered very doubt-mitted to a complete equality of privileges with ful both by the example of Cyrene, by the number of the ephoral college, and by the analogy of other states, which seems to indicate that at Sparta the civil and criminal jurisdictions were originally separate from each other, and that neither was ever wholly in the hands of the kings. And as the criminal jurisdiction be-tribunate would in this case be more closely longs to the senate, it is most probable that the civil was, from the first, exercised by the ephors. And this may very early have been united with a censorial authority, such as we find was possessed by the ephors of Cyrene. The antiquity of this branch of the Spartan office seems to be proved by the obsolete symbolical language of the edict with which the ephors regularly entered upon it, in which they bade the citizens shave the upper lip, and obey the laws.t This general superintendence over the execution of the laws was an attribute of the ephoralty which might often bring it into collision with the royal authority, and, in the hands of a dexterous and enterprising man, might alone have proved an instrument of unlimited power. It may have been by virtue of this that the ephors received an oath (if we may believe Xenophon, every month) from the kings that they would govern according to law, and in return bound themselves and the nation to a conditional obedience, in terms not unlike those used on similar occasions by the Aragonese. Another prerogative of the ephors, which enabled them, at the end of every eight years-a period observed for many purposes from early times by the Dorian race to suspend the functions of the kings, would seem to have been connected with a religious rather than a political character of their office. They chose, it is said, a clear but moonless night to observe the sky, and the appearance of a meteor in a certain quarter was regarded as a token of the displeasure of the gods against the kings, who were forthwith interdicted from the discharge of their office, and could only be restored by the intervention of an oracle. But, besides these powers, the ephors *Plut., Cleom., 10. † Ibid., 9.

applicable than he himself suspected, and it will serve to throw light on a seeming contradiction which strikes us in the character of the ephors, who are all-powerful, though the class which they more especially represent enjoys only a limited franchise. But as the relations of the several classes of Spartan citizens underwent great changes in the course of their history, the causes which maintained the stability of these relations in later times will demand a different explanation in its proper place. Here we may observe that Aristotle speaks of the mode in which the ephors were elected as no less puerile than that adopted in the case of the senate; from which we must infer that there was little difference between the two, and are led to suppose that an allusion of Plato's, by which he seems to intimate that chance had some share in the creation of the ephors, does not refer to the form of the election, but to another mark of a democratical office;* for such the ephoralty appeared to the ancients when considered with respect to its origin, though it was tyrannical in the extent of its power. This seems never to have been defined, and therefore probably varied with the character of the men who held it, and the state of the times. But it is remarkable that, with the substance, the ephors assumed the outward signs of the supreme authority. The royal dignity was forced on all occasions to bow to them; and as they could control the proceedings of the

* Leg., iii., 11, ἐγγὺς τῆς κληρωτής δυνάμεως. Goettling supposes that lot decided between candidates who had been elected; bat the words may refer to the democratical character of the electors, which, according to Plato's view, rendered their choice as capricious and uncertain as if it had been determined by lot; and, indeed, Aristotle speaks of the ephors as οἱ τυχόντες.