THE MESSENIAN WARS. kings by their orders, could fine them for slight | heard of their heroic deeds. The Messenians offences at their discretion, and could throw who had been exempted, by the policy or the them into prison to await a trial on graver generosity of Sparta, from the servile condition charges, so they alone, among all the Spartans, to which their countrymen were reduced, felt kept their seats while the kings were passing, the exception to be ignominious, as the price of whereas it was not thought beneath the majes- slavish submission. Many born in exile were ty of the kings to rise in honour of the ephors; eager to recover their patrimonies. When all and it was their acknowledged duty to attend, hearts were full, all spirits roused to expect the at least on the third summons, before the signal for revolt, the destined champion appearIt will, however, be seened a second Aristodemus arose in Aristomeephoral tribunal. that, even when the power of the ephors was at its greatest height, the kingly station continued to confer important prerogatives and means of extensive influence; and Agesilaus, who went beyond all his predecessors in the respect which he showed to the ephors, was the most powerful prince of his house. nes. His birth was noble, like that of the elder hero, for he also sprang from the race of Æpytus: it was even thought to have been half divine, like that of Hercules and Theseus. In and no fearful remembrance weighed upon his strength and courage he surpassed Aristodemus, soul. From Andania, his birthplace, he cheered the hopes of the exiles, fanned the indignation of the oppressed people, and drew promises of aid from foreign cities. Argos and Arcadia were more than ever hostile to Sparta, and Elis, too, was ready to assist in the deliverance of Messenia. In the thirty-ninth year after the capture of Ithomé, the fourth of the twentythird Olympiad (B.C. 685), the second Messenian war began.* It has probably been owing to the poetical form in which the events of the first Messenian war have been transmitted to us, that we hear so little of the part which Argos took in it. But it appears from some facts which have been accidentally preserved, that, as might have been expected, she was far from remaining inactive while her enemy was engaged in the struggle with Messenia, but that she seized this opporThe first battle was fought before any suctunity of recovering Cynuria. And there is even reason to believe that it was at this period she made herself mistress of the whole east-cours had come from abroad; the victory was ern coast of Laconia as far as Cape Malea, and not clear on either side; yet the valour of Arisof the island of Cythera, which, as we learn tomenes struck fear into his enemies, and inΤο from Herodotus, once formed part of her terri-spired his countrymen with confidence. They tory. These conquests may probably be attrib- offered him the crown, but he declined the reuted to Pheidon, who is usually called tyrant of gal title, and contented himself with the labours Argos, but was, in fact, a hereditary ruler, the and dangers of the supreme command. tenth from Temenus, though he had broken prove himself worthy of it, and to open the war through the restraints which limited the kingly with a happy omen, he crossed the mountains, power at Argos.* It seems to have been Thei- came down at night on the plain of Sparta, and don's aim to assert the supremacy of his house fixed a shield which he had taken in the battle over the other branches of the Heracleid race, against the temple of Athene, surnamed Chaland to enforce all the titles which he derived ciœcus (of the brazen house); an inscription from his mythical descent. On this ground, in declared that Aristomenes had dedicated it from the eighth Olympiad, he deprived the Eleans Spartan spoils. of their presidency at the Olympic games, which, as legends told, had been founded by his divine progenitor, and conferred it on the Pisans. It may have been in prosecution of this vast plan that he furnished his brother Caranus with the means of founding a little kingdom, which became the core of the Macedonian monarchy. This powerful and active prince introduced a new system of weights and measures, which bore his name, and replaced the old rude money by a more convenient coinage, called the Æginetan, because it was in Ægina, which formed a part of his territories, that he established his mint. He may also have extended his dominions along the western coast of the Argolic Gulf as far as Malea; a rocky, barren tract of little value, except as it affords a passage into the heart of Laconia. The Spartans saw that they had no common enemy to contend with, and they sent to Delphi for advice. The god bade them seek an Athenian counsellor. No dealings, friendly or hostile, had passed between Attica and Laconia from the ancient times, when the twin sons of Jupiter were said to have carried back their sister Helen, after storming the Attic town of Aphidna. From the same place an ally and a counsellor now came to the aid of Sparta; for, according to the most credible accounts, this was the birthplace of Tyrtæus. The legendary character of Tyrtæus is almost as marvellous as that of Aristomenes. It is, however, perfectly certain, both that the hero fought, and that the poet sang; for a few fragments of his warmed his hearers. But the popular tradition poetry remain, full of the spirit with which he in later ages was that the Athenians, divided between their reverence for the Delphic god and their reluctance to further the cause of Sparta, thought they could not better effect their At the death of Pheidon his genius and fortune seem to have deserted the Argives; and these conquests, whatever may have been their extent, fell back to Sparta. Her territory had thus reached its utmost limits: but power found-purpose than by selecting a lame man, who ed on wrong, and used without mercy, is never secure. A new generation sprang up in Messenia, which, while it groaned under a degrading yoke, remembered nothing of the evils of the war which their fathers had waged, but ↑ Strabo, vili., p. 358. • Arist, Pol., v., 8. VOL. L-T taught letters in the village of Aphidnæ, for the counsellor whom they were requested to send. The truth has evidently been distorted, though it is impossible to restore its genuine.features with certainty. The only fact in the story But see Clinton, Fast., i., p. 256. which there is no reason to doubt, is that Tyr- | king Anaxander when he came to its relief, and tæus came from Aphidna to Sparta. But the was only stopped in the pursuit by an accidental oracle may have grown, as usual, out of the wound. When this was healed, he meditated event; and Tyrtæus was probably neither lame an attack on Sparta itself; but Helen and the nor a schoolmaster. He taught, indeed, but tutelary Twins interposed, and in a dream adverses, like Pindar or Simonides; and perhaps monished him to drop his design. He, howevthe unequal lines of the couplets to which he er, laid a successful ambush for the Spartan married his fiery thoughts may have suggested virgins, who were celebrating the worship of the thought of a personal defect, or it may Diana with festive dances at Caryæ, a town have been simply the form in which tradition among the hills near the sources of the Euroexpressed the fact that he served the Spartans tas, and carried them over the border. Generwith his mind more than with his body. The ous as brave, he protected them from the viomotive that led him to devote his muse to their lence of his young followers, and restored them, cause is still more doubtful: we can only sus- though not without a heavy ransom, to their pect that it was connected with the above-men- kinsmen. At Ægila he made a similar attempt tioned mythical legend concerning the invasion with different fortune; for the first time he fell of the Laconian twins. We know that in the into the hands of an enemy; he was surroundlater times of Greece, political relations were ed by the women, who were celebrating the sometimes contracted on grounds not more sol- rites of Demeter, stunned by their blazing torchid: Aphidnus, the hero who was thought to es, and fettered; but in the night he snapped the have given his name to the birthplace of Tyr-cords that bound him, or they were loosened by tæus, had, it was said, adopted the brothers of the compassion of the priestess, and he returnHelen as his sons: Aphidna may have regard-ed safe to Messenia. ed their country with feelings of kindred, and may have sent Tyrtæus, whether as warrior or as bard, to raise his arm or his voice in behalf of the Spartans. voice. In the third year of the war Sparta again prepared for battle; but now, distrustful of her own strength, she stooped to seek victory from unworthy arts. The Messenians were joined on this occasion by no allies but the Arcadians, who were commanded by Aristocrates, son of Hicatas, king, some say, of Arcadia, but more probably of Orchomenus. He was seduced by Spartan bribes, drew off his men in the heat o the battle, and, after throwing the Messeniar ranks into disorder by his retreat, left them exposed on all sides to superior numbers. Even the valour of Aristomenes and his little band could not save the day. After a great slaughter, in which many of the noblest Messenians perished, he collected the fugitives, a feeble and disheartened remnant, in Andania. All looked to him for counsel: he advised them to do as their ancestors had done-to collect all the remaining strength of Messenia in a mountain citadel, where they could defy the attacks of a Spartan army; not, however, in Ithomé (which was, perhaps, in the enemy's power), but in They were also joined by auxiliaries from Corinth and from Lepreum, which gladly assisted the enemies of Elis. The Messenians, on the other hand, were re-enforced by their exiled countrymen, who brought with them the ministers of the Eleusinian rites, and by their allies from Sicyon and Argos, Arcadia and Elis; for the issue of the contest was to determine which state should have the mastery in Peloponnesus. A great battle was fought in the plain of Stenyclerus, at a place called, from an ancient legend, the Boar's Pillar. The Messenian priests and Tyrtæus kept aloof from the fight, and only animated the combatants by their But Aristomenes, at the head of a little band of the bravest Messenian youths, successively broke each division of the Spartan forces till all were scattered in disorderly flight. He pursued the routed foe with impetuous ardour, and forgot the warning of the soothsayer, The-Mount Eira, at the foot of which the Neda sepoclus, who had enjoined him not to pass a tree which he pointed out to him in the plain, where the Twins, as he said, were sitting, doubtless to protect the retreat of their countrymen. The hero passed the limit, and dropped his shield: it was carried away by an invisible hand, and while he searched for it the fugitives escaped. While they were reckoning on a speedy surBut Messenia was freed for a time from the render, Aristomenes was planning new attacks. presence of her enemy; and when Aristomenes He increased his band to the number of three returned to Andania, the women, as they strew-hundred, forced or turned the Spartan lines, ed fillets and flowers on his head, sang, in strains that were remembered and repeated for a thousand years, how he had chased the Lacedæmonians over the Stenyclerian plain, and up to the top of the mountains. The lost shield, too, adorned with the device of a spread eagle, he recovered shortly after, when, by the direction of Apollo, he descended into the cavern of Tro-citizens to till their lands in all this region until phonius at Lebadea.. On his return from this journey he took a threatening instead of a defensive posture, and hanging like a dark cloud over the trembling Spartans, fell with the suddenness of lightning on their towns and villages. With his chosen companions he surprised and plundered Pharæ, put to flight the Spartan arates Messenia from Triphylia. Here, therefore, they fortified themselves, while the Spartans, masters of the whole country except Pylus and Methoné, and the adjacent coast, lay at the foot of Eira, hoping soon to reduce it by force or famine. and swept the vales of Messenia and Laconia without distinction-for, except a few little nooks, both alike were Sparta's—and returned, laden with spoil, to Eira. The Spartans, thus compelled to feed the enemy whom they wished to starve, resolved to turn Messenia and the Laconian border into a desert, and forbade their the war should be ended. But this ordinance, when enforced, produced a general scarcity, and the owners of the land murmured at their loss. Civil broils would have ensued, but Tyrtæus, who, after the disaster of the Boar's Pillar, had roused the sinking courage of the Spartans by his stirring strains, now touched a dif THE MESSENIAN WARS. ferent chord, and allayed their angry passions by | He fed them on the banks of the Neda, which But he caught the eye of a Messenian woman as were still open to the garrison of Eira. Here Imboldened by his success, Aristomenes she came to draw water; she admitted him aimed at a higher mark. He sallied forth late into her house while her husband was guarding in the evening, and by a wonderfully rapid the citadel. On a rainy night the Messenian march reached Amycle before the next sun-suddenly returned home, and related the cause rise; ere succour arrived from Sparta he had that had drawn him off his post to his wife, But in a while her paramour overheard him from a higathered his booty and was gone. second inroad he found the Spartans better pre-ding-place. Aristomenes was prevented by a His absence the discipline of the garrison had repared; half of their whole force, with both the wound from making his usual rounds; in his kings at their head, opposed his retreat. little army was surrounded; he himself long laxed; in foul weather the sentinels left their kept his enemies at bay: at length, weakened by stations to seek shelter, and abandoned the loss of blood, he was stunned by a stone, and walls to the protection of the elements. The made prisoner with fifty of his companions. herdsman resolved to turn this discovery to acAll were condemned, as the vilest malefactors, count, by carrying it, as the price of forgiveness to be thrown down a high rock into a pit called and favour, to his master Emperamus, who, in the Ceadas. The rest were dashed to pieces the absence of the kings, had the command of by the fall; he alone came to the ground un- the Spartan army at Eira. Under his guidance harmed; saw the sky above, the naked sides the Spartans scaled the walls of the citadel, and of the precipice that enclosed him, and a cav-before the alarm was given were already withern dark as night at its foot, and wrapped him- in. The besieged, however, were still deterself in his field-cloak to wait for death.. But mined to dispute every inch of ground that refierce on the third day a sound of life caught his ear:mained, and Aristomenes, in spite of his wound, uncovering his face, he perceived that a fox and though he had lost all hope, urged them to had found its way into the cave, through a pas- the conflict. As soon as the returning light ensage, therefore, which he might thread. Mo-abled the assailants to push forward, tionless he awaited its approach, caught hold and obstinate combat arose in the streets and of its tail, and guided by it as it struggled to open places. Even the women took a share in escape, crept on till he saw a glimpse of light it; and as the violence of the tempest prevented in the bowels of the rock, enlarged the opening them from mounting on the roofs, to hurl stones themselves and fought among the men. with his hands, and the next day was again in and tiles on the enemy below, they armed Eira. It would be long to relate all the other ex- the fury of despair was fain to yield to fate : ploits and adventures of the invincible hero: the rain poured down in torrents; the lightning how he cut to pieces a Corinthian army which seemed to flash in the eyes of the Messenians; was marching to join the Spartans; afterward, the thunder sounded like the voice of an angry in time of truce, fell into an ambush of Cretan god in their ears. Still, for three days and bowmen, and was taken, but again burst his nights they maintained the hopeless struggle; bonds, through the pity of a maid, whom he while the Spartans were relieved by fresh rewarded with the hand of his son Gorgus. troops, their little band, fighting continually Thrice Aristomenes offered to Jupiter of Ithoné without rest, food, or shelter, dwindled and the extraordinary sacrifice called Hecatompho- flagged from wounds and weakness. At length nia, because it was reserved for the warrior Theoclus, after exhorting Aristomenes to abanwho had slain a hecatomb of foes. But he was don the useless strife with destiny, and to save said to have provoked the anger of the twin the last hopes of Messenia, and warning the Protectors of Sparta by impiously counterfeit- Spartans that their triumph would not be pering their appearance, and disturbing a festival petual, rushed into the thickest of the fight, and which the Spartans were celebrating in their fell amid heaps of slain enemies. Then ArisThe gods turned tomenes checked the ardour of the foremost honour with bloodshed.* their faces away from Messenia. The eleventh among his warriors, bade them form themselves year of the siege of Eira brought with it a sure into a hollow square, enclosing their wives and sign that the end of the contest was approach- children, and himself advanced towards the ening. "When a goat shall drink the water of the emy, and by his gestures demanded a free pasNeda," so the oracle had spoken, "the destruc- sage. The Spartans, fearing to drive him to tion of Messenia is at hand." But in the dia- the last extremity, opened a road through their lect of Messenia, the same word signified a ranks for the fugitives, who, retreating in good Here they were received with hospitable goat and a wild fig-tree. One of these trees order, safely gained the borders of Arcadia. overhung the stream, and at length stretched When Theo-kindness: their generous allies would even its boughs down into the water. elus the seer saw this, he knew that the oracle have shared their own lands with them; but was accomplished, and that the fated term of the thoughts of Aristomenes were bent, not on resistance had arrived, and he warned Aristom-rest and ease, but on a new enterprise: while enes to resign himself to the loss of his country. The will of the gods was accomplished through treachery and female weakness. The herdsman of a Spartan high in rank had gone Tover to the enemy with his master's cattle. ⚫ Polymnus, xi, 31, 3. of their recent victory, he meditated an expethe Spartans were securely gathering the fruits dition to surprise Sparta itself, and thus to take hostages for the moderation of the conquerors. But the plan was betrayed by the faithless Arisproved by an intercepted answer, in which the tocrates, whose repeated treachery was now Spartan king Anaxander thanked him for his ancient and his present services. When the assembly of the Arcadian people heard this, they stoned the traitor to death, and raised a monument inscribed with a record of his crime and of his punishment. After this disappointment fifty of the exiles, with a kinsman of Aristomenes at their head, secretly crossed the border, fell upon the Spartans, who were still plundering Eira, and died, sword in hand, in the land of their fathers. not ever since the return of the Heracleids, between Elis and Pisa. The latter state had more than once successfully asserted, not only its independence, but its claim to the right of presiding at the sacred games which were celebrated on its territory; first, as we have seen, with the aid of Pheidon in the eighth Olympiad, and again in the 34th, when it was governed by a native prince named Pantaleon. Pantaleon had also led succours to the Messenians in the second war; and it is probable that, by so do abandon the Messenian cause and to ally themselves with Sparta. She requited their services by reducing the whole country that separated the Hollow Elis from Messenia, under subjection to them. Pisa was still ruled by her native kings, but they were now vassals of Elis; and Demophon, son of Pantaleon, was compelled to soothe the jealousy of the sovereign state by the most abject submission. His successor, Pyrrhus, excited some of the Triphylian and other towns to revolt; but the struggle ended in the complete subjugation of all the insurgents. The old contest with Tegea, from which Sparta had hitherto reaped only shame and loss, was at length terminated in her favour. Towards the middle of the sixth century before our era, in the reigns of Ariston and Anaxandridas, an oracle bade the Spartans, if they would prevail in the war, bring the bones of Orestes, son of Agamemnon, to Sparta. Another mysterious answer directed them to search for the relics at Tegca. Some gigantic remains were accordingly dug up there and carried away. Tegea had now lost her palladium; the arms of her enemy prospered, and she sank into the rank of a dependant ally of Sparta, distinguished only by the privilege of occupying one of the wings in the armies of her confederate. The rivalry of Argos was not so easily subdued: she still could not brook the loss of Cynuria; the growth of the Spartan power rendered this little tract valuable as a barrier against its inroads. But, about the same time that Tegea yielded, Sparta accom Thus, in the first year of the twenty-eighth Olympiad (B.C. 668), ended the second Messe-ing, he determined his enemies, the Eleans, to nian war. As many of the Messenians as remained in the country became Helots, but probably few freemen submitted to this lot. Those of Pylus and Methone, seeing no hope of retaining their independence after the fall of Eira, betook themselves to their ships and sailed to Cyllene, the Elean port. Methone was given by the Spartans to the Nauplians, whom Argos had expelled from their own town: arrived in Elis, the Messenians sent to Aristomenes, and desired him to lead them to a new country. He, however, could not yet abandon the task he had chosen for his life-to wage ceaseless war with Sparta - but he appointed his two sons, Gorgus and Manticlus, to be the founders of the intended colony. The question was to what land they should steer their course. One of their leaders proposed that they should seize Zacynthus, and from its ports infest the coasts of their conquerors. Manticlus bade them drop the thoughts of revenge and continual war, and sail to the great island of Sardinia, a rich and easy conquest. Neither advice prevailed: one band, however, under the two sons of Aristomenes, sought the city of Rhegium, on the straits that separate Italy from Sicily. There they found some of their kinsmen, who had settled there at the end of the former war. At a later period, in the 71st Olympiad, one of their countrymen, named Anaxilaus, raised himself to the supreme power in Rhegium: with his aid they made themselves masters of the town of Zancle, on the opposite side of the straits, which a hand of Samian exiles had already wrested from its rightful owners. They named it Messene it is still called Messina-and flour-plished this conquest by an effort which made ished there till many were induced to leave it for a new Messene in their ancient land. Many, however, of the exiles remained in Greece, waiting for an opportunity of vengeance, which came, though long delayed. Aristomenes himself died in peace, at Rhodes, in the house of his son-in-law, Damagetus, who had been directed by the Delphic oracle to ally himself to the best of the Greeks. The Rhodians honoured him with a noble monument, and with the sacred rites due to a hero: his posterity were long the most illustrious family in the island. This tradition, at least, seems less fabulous than one which, founded, perhaps, on a poetical epithet, related that the Spartans had opened his body and found in it a hairy heart. The yoke appeared now to be fixed on Messenia forever; and henceforward Sparta continued to rise towards undisputed pre-eminence in Peloponnesus and in all Greece. She rewarded her friends, humbled her rivals, and punished her enemies. Soon after the close of the war she stepped in to decide a quarrel that had subsisted for more than a century, if the name of Othryades immortal. He was celebrated in the songs of the Spartan youth as the hero who alone, of three hundred Spartans, survived the battle which they fought with as many Argives, to decide the dispute about Cynuria, and, while the two remaining champions of Argos hastened home with the tidings of victory, raised a trophy which he inscribed with his blood, and then fell on his sword, that he might share the fate of his comrades. The fame of Sparta spread so far, that Cræsus, the great king of Lydia, when he was directed by the Delphic oracle to make the most powerful of the Greeks his friends, sent his ambassadors with gifts to court her alliance. And Sparta was not slow to accept the Lydian gold, and willingly entered into a strict league with Crosus; she would, perhaps, even have assisted him with her arms when he was threatened by Cyrus, but his sudden ruin frustrated her intentions, and the conflict in which she seemed on the eve of engaging with Persia was put off to another season. NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS. CHAPTER X. THE series of migrations and conquests by pact. The only exception that seems to have been admitted to this supposed law of nature was where the division by which two tribes of the same race were separated into distinct communities had either not lasted long enough to efface the consciousness of their original connexion, or had taken place under circumstances which, notwithstanding their political independence, kept them united as members of the same kindred. Where this tie subsisted, it undoubtedly excluded ordinary incentives to discord, and restrained wanton sallies of unprovoked hostility; so that though, between two tribes so linked together, occasional quarrels might break out into war, peace was the habitual and regular condition of their mutual intercourse. Such appears to have been the degree of union which once subsisted among the inhabitants of Attica, and in Megaris and Euboa; and in the two latter instances the mode and terms of civil warfare were prescribed by ancient custom. A similar effect to that which in these cases was produced by the feeling of Perpetual warfare, pushed to the affinity, arose in others out of accidental neighlast extremity of hostile rage, would in no long bourhood. We have hitherto made scarcely any mention time have consumed or ruined the little tribes of institutions tending to imbody the Greeks in whose territories occupied only a few adjacent one nation. In the Trojan expedition, indeed, valleys, always open to invasion: the necesas it is described by Homer, we see them uni- sity of mutual forbearance for general safety ted by a common language, a common religion, would naturally suggest the prudence of enterThe former two ing into friendly associations, without any ulteSuch an and a common enterprise. were permanent bonds of union, but the latter rior views, either of aggrandizement or of prowas an accidental and transitory one; nor does tection against a common enemy. the poet indicate any which could supply its association, formed among independent neighplace. The causes which kept the Greeks bouring tribes for the regulation of their mutual asunder, notwithstanding their community of intercourse, and thus distinguished on the one language and religion, have been already point-hand from confederations for purposes offensive ed out in the natural features of the country and or defensive, and on the other from the conthe equable distribution of strength by which tinued friendly relations subsisting among indethe neighbouring tribes were enabled to balance pendent members of the same race, is the one each other, and to preserve mutual independ-properly described by the Greek term amphicWe have also alluded to partial associations formed among neighbouring states, partly for religious, partly for political purposes. Of these associations in general, and particularly of one among them, which widened its original range so as to assume the aspect of a national confederacy, we shall now speak, principally to explain the causes which prevented it from becoming, in reality, what it appeared to be. ence. From the earliest times, the divided and unsettled state of Greece afforded abundant occasions of hostility among neighbouring tribes: there were always temptations to rapine, disputed claims, public or private encroachments, injuries unredressed, or too violently retaliated. The transition from the earlier period to that new order of things which is represented by the diffusion of the sons of Hellen, most probably tended to multiply these feuds, and the consequent alternation of wrongs and revenge. This actual relation, in which most communities were placed to each other, naturally suggested the notion that enmity and war were the necessary state of mankind, unless where there was some express agreement to restrain or temper it, and that the right of each state to overpower its neighbours, and to exercise the superiority thus acquired in whatever manner it might see fit, could only be limited by com tyony. This Greek word, which we shall be obliged to borrow, has been supposed by some ancient and modern writers to have been derived from the name of Amphictyon, the son of Deucalion, who is said to have founded the most celebrated There can, howof the Amphictyonic associations-that which is always to be understood under the title of the ever, be scarcely any reasonable doubt that this Amphictyonic Confederacy. Amphictyon is a merely fictitious person, invented to account for the institution attributed to him, the author of which, if it was the work of any individual, was probably no better known than those of the other Amphictyonies, which did not happen to become so famous. It would be a coincidence too marvellous to be ascribed to chance, that his name, with the change of a single letter, should be significant of the institution itself, which is not only his sole title to celebrity, but the whole groundwork and essence of his mythical being. The term amphictyony, which has probably been adapted to the legend, and would be more properly written amphictiony, denotes a body referred to a local centre of union, and in itself does not imply any national affinity; and, in fact, the associations were but very remotely connected together by bearing this name include several tribes which descent. But the local centre of union atears |