Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/344

 328 HISTORY OF GREECE. support of a powerful section of Arcadia. His settlement ai Stenyklerus was a considerable distance from the sea, at the north-east corner of Messenia, 1 close to the Arcadian frontier ; and it will be seen hereafter that this Arcadian alliance is a con- stant and material element in the disputes of the Messenian Dorians with Sparta. We may thus trace a reasonable sequence of events, showing how two bodies of Dorians, having first assisted the jEtolo- Eleians to conquer the Pisatid, and thus finding themselves on the banks of the Alpheius, followed the upward course of that river, the one to settle at Sparta, the other at Stenyklerus. The historian Ephorus, from whom our scanty fragments of informa tion respecting these early settlements are derived, it is im- portant to note that he lived in the age immediately succeeding the first foundation of Messene as a city, the restitution of the long-exiled Messenians, and the amputation of the fertile western half of Laconia, for their benefit, by Epameinondas, imparts to these proceedings an immediate decisiveness of effect which does not properly belong to them : ^ if the Spartans had become at once possessed of all Laconia, and the Messenians of all Mes- senia : Pausanias, too, speaks as if the Arcadians collectively had assisted and allied themselves with Kresphontes. This is the general spirit which pervades his account, though the particular facts in so far as we find any such, do not always harmonize with it. Now we are ignorant of the preexisting divisions of the country, either east .or west of Mount Taygetus, at the time when the Dorians invaded it. But to treat the one and the other as integral kingdoms, handed over at once to two Dorian leaders, is an illusion borrowed from the old legend, from the his- toricizing fancies of Ephorus, and from the fact that, in the well- known times, this whole territory came to be really united under the Spartan power. At what date the Dorian settlements at Sparta and Stenyk- lerus were effected, we have no means of determining. Yet, that there existed between them in the earliest times a degree of fra- ternity which did not prevail between Lacedasmon and Argos, 1 Strabo (viii. p. 366) blames Euripides for calling Messene an inland country ; but the poet seems to have been quite correct in doing so.