menes; but in the pages of Myron this Messenian champion is no very extraordinary personage, whereas in the poem of Rhianos his glory is surpassed only by that of Achilleus. Myron, again, assigns the hero to the first war, Rhianos to the second; and as according to Tyrtaios1 the second war was waged by the grandchildren of those who had fought in the first, it follows that either Myron or Rhianos is wrong. The elegies of Tyrtaios throw indeed a gleam of light on the interval which separates the first war from the second. It was, the poet assures us, a time of intolerable oppres sion for the Messenians, who were constrained to stoop like asses beneath heavy burdens, to yield to their conquerors a full half of all the produce of their land, and to appear in mourning garb at the funerals of Spartan kings. At length the Messenians resolved to strike a blow for freedom, and the war thus begun ended after nineteen years, so Tyrtaios said, in the final subjugation of the country. The story of the struggle is the glorification of Aristomenes whose final defeat, inexplicable otherwise, is accounted for by a series of treasons from his friends and his allies. Throughout this narrative we are carried away into the world of the Argonautic or the Trojan heroes. Like Kekrops, he is the dragon's son; and no sooner is he made dictator after the drawn battle of Derai, (king he would not be), than he achieves a series of exploits which rival those of Herakles or Samson. Entering Sparta by night, he went straight to the temple of Athana of the Brazen House, and in the morning a shield was seen nailed up on the wall with an inscription which declared it to be an offering by Aristomenes from Spartan spoil. When in the next year his enemies met him by the Boar's Grave (Kaprou Sema) in the plain of Stenyklaros, they were saved from utter destruction only because Aristomenes sitting down under a wild pear-tree was robbed of his shield by the Dioskouroi. Still so splendid was his victory that the Messenian maidens crowned him with garlands and gave utterance to their joy in songs which told how into the midst of the Stenyklarian plain and up to the summit of the hill Aristomenes chased the flying Lakedaimonians. Open force, it was clear, could avail nothing against him, and the Spartans found it easier to work their way by corruption. Ample bribes secured the treachery of Aristokrates the Arkadian ally of the Messenians, who in the battle of the Great Trench (Megalê Taphros) played the part of Mettus Fuffetius in the Roman legend.* Thus defeated, Aristomenes gathered his routed forces, and taking refuge on mount Eira, as Aristodemos had maintained himself on Ithômê, held his ground 1 See the fragment of Tyrtaios quoted by Pausanias, iv. 15, 1. 3 Paus. iv. 16, 4. 4 Liv. i. 27. for eleven years longer. Far from reaping any benefit from the victory, the Spartans saw their lands ravaged, their people worn down by famine or by seditions more fatal than famine, and learnt at length that Aristomenes had surpassed his former exploit in the Brazen House by the capture of Amyklai not three miles distant from Sparta. He had plundered the city and was retreating with the spoil when the enemy overtook him in overwhelming numbers, and made him prisoner with fifty of his fellows. With these he was thrown into the Keadas, a pit used like the Barathron at Athens for the execution of criminals. The fifty were at once killed. Aristomenes alone reached the bottom alive, borne, as some said, on the outstretched wings of an eagle.1 Rescued from this dismal cavern, like Sindbad in the Arabian tale, by following a fox which came to prey upon the dead, the hero appeared once more at Eira and offered up for the second time the Hekatomphonia or sacrifice for the slaughter of a hundred enemies. But he must again lose by the craft of his foes what he had gained by his own prowess. In a time of truce he is seized by some Kretan bowmen; but a maiden had dreamed the night before that wolves had brought into the city a chained and clawless lion, and that she had given him claws and set him free. The sight of Aristomenes amongst his captors revealed the meaning of her vision, and having made the archers drunk, she placed a dagger in his hands and cut his bonds. Seizing the weapon, the hero slew his enemies; and the maiden was rewarded by becoming the wife of his son Gorgos. But the fated time was now drawing near. The Pythian priestess had warned him that the god could no longer defend Messênê if the he-goat (Tragos) should drink the waters of the Neda. The Messenians thought of beasts and felt no fear; but a fig-tree sprang up, and, instead of spreading its branches in the air, let them droop into the stream, and the seer Theoklos, as he looked upon it, knew that this was the deadly sign, for in the Messenian dialect the fig-tree was called Tragos. Warned by the prophet, Aristomenes buried in Ithômê the pledge of the restoration of his country and hastened away to Eira. Here again treachery accomplished what strength could not achieve. Yet so terrible was Aristomenes, as he stood at bay with his men formed in square round the women and the children, that his enemies readily suffered him to pass free with those whom he still guarded. Retreating into Arkadia, he planned another attack upon Sparta, and was again foiled by the treachery of Aristokrates, who was now stoned to death by his countrymen. But the spirit of the 1 Paus. iv. 18, 4. The Euemerists maintained that his fall was broken by a shield bearing an outstretched eagle as its device." Messenians was broken. Many of them had been made Helots; some had taken refuge in Kyllênê, a port of the Eleians; others turned their thoughts to Sicily and besought the hero to become their leader. This he refused to be. There was still a hope that he might yet be able to do some hurt to the Spartans; and with this hope he went to take counsel at Delphoi. Here he met Damagetos the king of the Rhodian Ialysos, who had been bidden to marry the daughter of the bravest of the Hellenes. Damagetos, knowing that none could challenge the right of Aristomenes to this title, besought of him his child and offered him a home in the beautiful island which rose up from the sea to be the bride of Helios. To Rhodes therefore he went, and thus became the progenitor of the illustrious family of the Diagoridai. A peaceful end in the happy island of the sun was the fittest close of a career in which, as in a stormy day, the blackness of darkness is from time to time broken by outbursts of dazzling light. aggressions against Far older than the comparatively modern romances of the Messenian wars were the legends which told the story of Spartan aggressions or conquests in the direction of Arkadia Spartan and Argolis. If we are to believe Pausanias, Tegea was attacked by Charilaos, the king whose rights Arkadia. were maintained by Lykourgos; but the invader was taken prisoner by the Tegeatan women who had placed themselves in ambush near the scene of battle. According to Herodotos,3 the unity and discipline of the Lykourgean system so materially added to the strength of Sparta that nothing less than the conquest of all Arkadia could satisfy her ambition. But when the Spartans asked Phoibos at Delphoi, how this ambition could best be gratified, the answer was that the larger scheme must be given up, although they might dance on the plain of Tegea and measure it out with ropes. If the expedition undertaken in the faith of this response was that in which Charilaos failed, we must suppose further that the Spartans carried with them fetters to be worn by the conquered Tegeatans, and learnt by bitter experience that the chains were to be worn not by their enemies but by themselves. The long series of defeats which the Spartans underwent at the hands of the Tegeatans was at length brought to an end in the reigns of Anaxandridas and Ariston. The Pythian priestess had told them that they would win the day if they could bring back to Sparta the bones of Orestes, which lay on a level spot in Tegea where two winds were made to blow by main force, and where stroke followed stroke and woe was laid on woe. The riddle set the wit of the Spartans to work, and at length it was solved by 1 Pind. Olymp. vii. 127. 2 iii. 7, 3 3 i 66. Lichas, one of their roving police, who, happening to visit a blacksmith's forge, gazed in wonder as the hammer fell with mighty power on the anvil. The smith told him that he would have had better cause for wonder if he had seen the coffin, seven cubits long, and the body as gigantic as the coffin, which he had found beneath his forge. Hastening home, Lichas said that the blows of the blacksmith's hammer must represent the stroke on stroke and. woe on woe of the Delphian enigma; and bidding them pass on him a sentence of banishment, he departed, like Zopyros or Sextus Tarquinius, to work the ruin of an unsuspecting enemy. Obtaining after some difficulty a lease of the forge, he dug up the gigantic bier and departed with a treasure as precious as the bones of Oidipous or the purple locks of Nisos. Henceforth the success of the Spartans was as great as their disasters had been; but what may have been the result of their victories it is not easy to see. If Tegea was conquered, it still remained independent. In the Persian wars we shall find the Tegeatans serving as the equal allies of Sparta, and claiming as their right the post of honour on the left wing, which in the battle of Plataiai was for the first time yielded to the Athenians. Rivalry of Not more, and perhaps not less, likely, and certainly not better attested, is the tradition which asserted that before the last Lydian king Kroisos sought alliance with the chief state of Western Hellas, Sparta had gained possession of that long strip of Argive territory which, lying between the range of Mount Thornax and the sea, stretched from Thyrea to the Malean cape. The dispute about the Thyreatis was settled, it is said, by a duel, in which three hundred Spartans fought with three hundred Argives on a field from which all but the combatants were rigidly shut out. The combat was as fierce and fatal as that of the Clans Chattan and Key on the Inch of Perth before Robert III. of Scotland, and at sundown the only survivors were the Spartan Othryades and the Argives Chromios and Alkenor. The latter hastened home, claiming the victory; the Spartan plundered the bodies of the dead, and kept his post until on the next day the Spartan and Argive armies came to see the result. The Argives declared that by the terms of the agreement Thyrea must remain with them as two of their champions had returned home. The Spartans argued that the victory must be adjudged to the side which held the ground, and the controversy ended in a battie which rendered the previous duel superfluous. The countrymen of Othryades were again conquerors; but Othryades, ashamed to return to Sparta as the sole survivor of the three hundred, slew himself on the field. However it may have been acquired, the conquest of Thyrea. Early supre macy of Sparta. marked the utmost extension of Spartan territory within the limits of the Peloponnesos. Over two-fifths of the peninsula the Spartans were now supreme; and if their state had its weak side in the discontent of the Helots or the Perioikoi, it had its strength in a geographical position which made it practically secure against all attacks from foreign enemies. With these conditions there is nothing to surprise us, if, as we approach the age of genuine history, we find Sparta not merely supreme in the Peloponnesos, but tacitly or openly recognised as the head of the ill-cemented communities which claimed the Hellenic name. The true narrative of the events which brought about this result may be lost irretrievably; but the result itself stands out as the most important fact in the early history of the Greeks. CHAPTER VI. THE GREEK DESPOTS. of early Aryan civilisation. ALTHOUGH the foundations of Aryan society were laid, as we have seen, in an intense selfishness which regarded all persons not actual members of the family as beyond the pale Tendencies of law, yet from the first it was possible that two or more of the heads of such families might enter into a league either for mutual protection or to advance their own interests—a task which in these primitive ages would mean simply interference with and opposition to the interests of others. These heads of families thus combined would naturally form a close and exclusive order-in other words, an oligarchy. They would also be sole owners of the land on which their families lived; and as soon as all the houses within a given district were combined in this league, the name of Landholder, Gamoros or Geomoros, would become a general designation for the ruling class, as contrasted with the main body of people whom they may have been able to subjugate. Thus the members of the dominant houses would be called Gamoroi and Eupatridai indifferently. But the growth of population would, by increasing the number of younger sons and their families, multiply the number of so-called Gamoroi who would not be owners of land, but who, by virtue of their common descent from the same sacred stock, would belong to the great patrician order. Thus far the natural tendency of Hellenic as of other Aryan society would be towards |