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CHAP.
IX.

tival at this temple, and Teleclus went with them. Some Messenians who were present offered violence to B. C. 776. 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.

Story of

Polychares.

Before this grudge was healed, a fresh quarrel 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 1 named Euæphnus, to feed them on the latter's land. Euæphnus sold both the cattle and the herdsmen to some traders who had touched at one of the Laconian ports, and went to Polychares with a plausible tale of pirates that had landed and carried all off. While the lie was in his mouth, one of the herdsmen, who had escaped from his confinement, came back to his master and related the truth. Euæphnus, overwhelmed with fear and shame, intreated Polychares to be satisfied with the price of the oxen, and to send his son along with him to receive it. Suspecting no further trea

1 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.

CHAP.

IX.

chery, the Messenian consented: the youth went with Euæphnus; but when they were on Laconian ground, the Spartan, instead of making restitution, killed his B.C.776. companion. The injured father first sought redress at Sparta; but when the kings and ephors were deaf to his complaints, he took his revenge into his own hands, waylaid passengers on the border, and spared no Lacedæmonian that fell into his power.

The Spartans now, in their turn, sent to demand that Polychares should be given up to them. The Messenian kings held an assembly to deliberate on their answer: opinions were divided, and the two kings took opposite sides. Androcles was willing to surrender Polychares to justice: Antiochus thought it hard that a man so grievously injured should suffer, while the aggressor remained unpunished. The passions of the contending parties grew warm; force took the place of argument; and a bloody conflict ensued, in which Androcles and some of the chief men on his side lost their lives: his children fled to Sparta. Antiochus, now sole king, sent proposals to Sparta for settling the dispute by the decision of some impartial tribunal, such as the Argive Amphictiony, or the Athenian Areopagus. Sparta made no reply, but silently resolved to cut the knot. In the course of a few months, Antiochus died, and was succeeded by his son Euphaes. In the beginning of his reign, in the second year of the ninth olympiad (B. c. 743), the Spartans first bound themselves by an oath, never to cease from warring against Messenia, let the struggle be long or short, fortune fair or foul, till they had made the land their own by the right of conquest. After Beginning this, without declaring war by a herald, they crossed of the first the border, under the command of Alcamenes, in the dead of night, and marched against Amphea, a fortified town in the adjacent part of Messenia. Its gates were open, as in time of peace; and the invaders, en

Messenian

war.

CHAP.
IX.

tering without resistance, massacred the defenceless inhabitants in their beds, or at their altars. As B. C. 743. Amphea stood on a high hill, supplied with copious

Authorities

for the history of

the Messe

nian wars.

springs of water, the Spartans determined to make it their place of arms, from which to carry the war at all seasons into the heart of the enemy's country. This was the beginning of the first Messenian war.

Before we proceed, a word must be said as to the evidence on which the following narrative rests. Almost every thing we know of the two first Messenian wars is drawn from Pausanias; who, beside the general histories of Ephorus and others, had before him the works of two writers who selected the Messenian wars as their peculiar subject, and to them he appears to have been chiefly indebted for the details he communicates. Both of them flourished late, probably after Alexander. One, Rhianus, of Bené in Crete, related the principal events of the second war in an epic poem; the other, Myron of Priené, wrote a prose history of the first war, beginning from the surprise of Amphea. From the poet it would be unreasonable to expect historical accuracy, and Pausanias charges him with a gross anachronism. But he gives a still more unfavourable notion of the prose writer, and expressly accuses him of generally neglecting truth and probability. It need not be observed, that a narrative drawn from such sources cannot be entitled to full confidence; it may rather be questioned whether it deserves a place in history; for the importance of the Messenian wars would not justify a historian in admitting a fictitious description, though he might have no other way of filling up a large blank. But though little reliance can be placed on the circumstances related by Pausanias, there seems to be enough of truth in the whole history to claim room for it here. Its general outlines may be safely depended on; and of the rest, it cannot be doubted that many, perhaps most, touches

CHAP.

IX.

belong to a very ancient popular tradition, which, notwithstanding its poetical colouring, faithfully transmitted the genuine spirit of the men and the times. B. c. 743. This the essence probably of heroic songs, which cheered the outcast nation in its exile, and kept alive

the hope of better days till they came - it would be unwisely fastidious to reject because it is mixed up with much that is false and worthless; and this neither Rhianus nor Myron can be supposed to have entirely perverted or corrupted. The latter has probably injured it most by arbitrary and tasteless interpolations: he seems to have been a rhetorical historian, who selected this half-mythical subject, which, after the restoration of Messenian independence, excited a general interest in Greece, as an exercise for his pen; and, like Dionysius of Halicarnassus, filled up the intervals of a long period, in which he found only a few insulated poetical incidents, with wordy harangues, and elaborate descriptions of great battles that produce no consequences. Yet, careless as he may have been about any higher object than this display, neither he nor Rhianus can have spun their materials wholly out of their own brains; and therefore we may still listen to them, in the hope of catching many sounds that breathe the life of ancient days.

When the Messenians heard of the surprise of Amphea, they knew that they must prepare for a long and hard struggle; and they turned their thoughts more than before to warlike arts and exercises: but seeing themselves unequal to their enemy in the field, they avoided battle, and sheltered themselves behind the walls of their towns. These the Spartans were unable to force: but they made inroads into the heart of the country from Amphea, and began already to look upon Messenia as their own; for they spared the farmhouses, and the vines, and olive trees, and only carried away the fruit, and corn, and cattle, and slaves. The

CHAP.
IX.

B. C. 739.

The Messenians fortify Ithomé.

Messenians, on their part, were not inactive, but made incursions into Laconia, and infested its coasts.

In the fourth year of the war, the Messenians are said to have gathered courage so far as to take the field; but their king, Euphaes, still did not venture to face the Spartans on even ground. He intrenched himself in a strong position, where they could not attack him without great risk; and after a few skir mishes of the light troops, the two armies parted as they met. The next year, a great battle is said to 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.

Thus the war crept on, and every year Messenia suffered more and more from the enemy's presence. It was necessary to keep garrisons in all the towns at great cost; the husbandmen had scarcely heart to till the ground, and the slaves ran away to the Spartans. Diseases, such as commonly attend upon war and scarcity, began to spread their ravages through the unhappy land. The Messenians now resolved to try a new plan; not to scatter their forces over the country, but to collect them in an impregnable hold, where they might keep the enemy 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. The southern hill is mount Evan; the northern, mount Ithomé. The latter towers high above all in its immediate neighbourhood, and commands a view over all Messenia from the southern to the western coast. It descends steeply to the south and the west; but on the side of the river, and toward the north, its summit is guarded by precipitous cliffs. On this summit, a little town had been built in early times, probably

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