Description of Greece

These then are the reasons for the war which the two sides allege. An embassy then came from the Lacedaemonians to demand the surrender of Polychares. The Messenian kings replied to the ambassadors that after deliberation with the people they would send the findings to Sparta and after their departure they themselves summoned the citizens to a meeting. The views put forward differed widely, Androcles urging the surrender of Polychares as guilty of an impious and abominable crime. Antiochus among other arguments urged against him that it would be the most piteous thing that Polychares should suffer before the eyes of Euaephnus, and enumerated in detail all that he would have to undergo.

Finally the supporters of Androcles and of Antiochus were so carried away that they took up arms. But the battle did not last long, for the party of Antiochus, far outnumbering the other, killed Androcles and his principal supporters, Antiochus, now sole king, sent to Sparta that he was ready to submit the matter to the courts which I have already mentioned. But the Lacedaemonians are said to have made no reply to the bearers of the letter.

Not many months later Antiochus died and his son Euphaes succeeded to the kingdom. The Lacedaemonians, without sending a herald to declare war on the Messenians or renouncing their friendship beforehand, had made their preparations secretly and with all the concealment possible; they first took an oath that neither the length of the war, should it not be decided soon, nor their disasters, however great they might be, would deter them until they won the land of Messenia by the sword.

After taking this oath, they attacked Ampheia by night, appointing Alcamenes the son of Teleclus leader of the force. Ampheia is a small town in Messenia near the Laconian border, of no great size, but situated on a high hill and possessing copious springs of water. It seemed generally a suitable base for the whole war. The gates being open and the town not garrisoned, they took it and killed the Messenians captured there, some still in their beds and others who had taken refuge at the sanctuaries and altars of the gods when they realized what had happened. Those who escaped were few.

This was the first attack which the Lacedaemonians made on the Messenians, in the second year of the ninth Olympiad,[*](B.C. 743.) when Xenodocus of Messenia won the short foot-race. In Athens there were not as yet the archons appointed annually by lot for at first the people deprived the descendants of Melanthus, called Medontidae, of most of their power, transforming the kingship into a constitutional office; afterwards they limited their tenure of office to ten years. At the time of the seizure of Ampheia, Aesimides the son of Aeschylus was holding his fifth year office at Athens.

Before I wrote the history of the war and all the sufferings and actions that heaven prepared in it for both sides, I wished to reach a decision regarding the age of a certain Messenian. This war was fought between the Lacedaemonians with their allies and the Messenians with their supporters, but received its name not from the invaders like the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, but was called Messenian from their disasters, just as the name Trojan war, rather than Greek, came to be universally applied to the war at Troy. An account of this war of the Messenians has been given by Rhianus of Bene in his epic, and by Myron of Priene.[*](Myron of Priene is of unknown date. Rhianus of Bene in Crete was of the third century B.C., a Homeric scholar and the author of various works of a mythological and quasi-historical character. Besides his Messeniaca, largely used by the author in the present account, we hear of his Heracleia, Achaica, Eliaca, and Thessalica.) Myron's history is in prose.

Neither writer achieved a complete and continuous account of the whole war from its beginning to the end, but only of the part which each selected: Myron narrated the capture of Ampheia and subsequent events down to the death of Aristodemus; Rhianus did not touch this first war at all. He described the events that in time befell the Messenians after their revolt from the Lacedaemonians, not indeed the whole of them, but those subsequent to the battle which they fought at the Great Trench, as it is called.

The Messenian, Aristomenes, on whose account I have made my whole mention of Rhianus and Myron, was the man who first and foremost raised the name of Messene to renown. He was introduced by Myron into his history, while to Rhianus in his epic Aristomenes is as great a man as is the Achilles of the Iliad to Homer. As their statements differ so widely, it remained for me to adopt one or other of the accounts, but not both together, and Rhianus appeared to me to have given the more probable account as to the age of Aristomenes.

One may realize in others of his works that Myron gives no heed to the question of his statements seeming to lack truth and credibility, and particularly in this Messenian history. For he has made Aristomenes kill Theopompus, the king of the Lacedaemonians, shortly before the death of Aristodemus but we know that Theopompus was not killed either in battle or in any other way before the war was concluded.

It was this Theopompus who put an end to the war, and my evidence is the lines of Tyrtaeus, which say:—

1. To our king beloved of the gods, Theopompus, through whom we took Messene with wide dancing-grounds.

The Messenians, when they heard of the events at Ampheia from the actual survivors from the captured town, mustered in Stenyclerus from their cities. When the people had gathered in the assembly, first the leading men and finally the king exhorted them not to be panic-stricken at the sack of Ampheia, or to suppose that the issue of the whole war had already been decided thereby, or to be afraid of the power of the Lacedaemonians as superior to their own. For the Lacedaemonians had longer practice in warfare, but they themselves had a stronger necessity to show themselves brave men, and greater goodwill would be shown by the gods to men defending their country, who were not the authors of injustice.