Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/438

 422 HISTORY OF GREECE. ence or sufficiency : and O. Miiller has justly observed, that " absolutaly no reason is given in. them for the subjection of Mes- senia." 1 They are accounts unworthy of being transcribed in detail into the pages of genuine history, nor can we pretend to do anything more than verify a few leading facts of the war. The poet Tyrtaeus was himself engaged on the side of the Spartans in the second war, and it is from him that we learn the few indisputable facts respecting both the first and the second. If the Messenians had never been reestablished in Peloponnesus, we should probably never have heard any farther details respect- ing these early contests. That reestablishment, together with the first foundation of the city called Messene on Mount Ithome, was among the capital wounds inflicted on Sparta by Epamei- nondas, in the year B. c. 369, between three hundred and two hundred and fifty years after the conclusion of the second Messe- nian war. The descendants of the old Messenians, who had remained for so long a period without any fixed position in Greece, were incorporated in the new city, together with various Helots and miscellaneous settlers who had no claim to a similar geneal ogy. The gods and heroes of the Messenian race were reveren- tially invoked at this great ceremony, especially the great Hero Aristomenes ; 2 and the site of Mount Ithome, the ardor of the newly established citizens, the hatred and apprehension of Sparta, operating as a powerful stimulus to the creation and multiplica- tion of what are called traditions, sufficed to expand the few facts known respecting the struggles of the old Messenians into a varie- ty of details. In almost all these stories we discover a coloring unfavorable to Sparta, contrasting forcibly with the account given by Isokrates, in his Discourse called Archidamus, wherein we 1 History of the Dorians, i. 7, 10 (note). It seems that Diodorns had given a history of the Messenian wars in considerable detail, if we may judge from a fragment of the last seventh hook, containing the debate be- tween Kleonnis and Aristomenes. Very probably it was taken from Ephorus, though this we do not know. For the statements of Pausanias respecting Myron and Rhianus, see iv. G. Besides Myron and Rhianus, however, he seems to have received oral state- ments from contemporary Messenians and Lacedaemonians ; at least on soma occasions he states and contrasts the two contradictory stories (iv. 4, 4; if, 5,1). f Pausan. iv. 27, 2-3 : Diodor. xv. 77.