Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/437

 FIRST AND SECOND MKSSOIAN WARS. 49] progress, a farther manifestation is found, besides the conquest of the Achseans in the south by Teleklus and AlkamenOs, in- their successful opposition to the great power of Pheidon the Argeian, related in a previous chapter. We now approach the long and arduous efforts by which they accomplished the sub- jugation of their brethren the Messenian Dorians. CHAPTER VII. FIRST AND SECOND MESSENIAN WARS. THAT there were two long contests between the Lacedaemo- nians and Messenians, and that in both the former were com- pletely victorious, is a fact sufficiently attested. And if we could trust the statements in Pausanias, our chief and almost only authority on the subject, we should be in a situation to recount the history of both these wars in considerable detail. But unfor- tunately, the incidents narrated in that writer have been gathered from sources which are, even by his own admission, undeserving of credit, from Rhianus, the poet of Bene in Krete, who had composed an epic poem on Aristomenes and the second Messe- nian war, about u. c. 220, and from Myron of Priene, a prose author whose date is not exactly known, but belonging to the Alexandrine age, and not earlier than the third century before the Christian era. From Rhianus, we have no right to expect trustworthy information, while the accuracy of Myron is much depreciated by Pausanias himself, on some points even too much, as will presently be shown. But apart from the mental habits either of the prose writer or the poet, it does not seem that any good means of knowledge were open to either of them, ex- cept the poems of Tyrtasus, which we are by no means sure that they ever consulted. The account of the two wars, extracted from these two authors by Pausanias, is a string of tableaux, several of them, indeed, highly poetical, but destitute of historical cohen