Politics and Geopolitics 109
the south—for the colonies planted along the Nedon River will have afforded
them protection on their descent into the heartland of Messenia. That Telekos
had in mind something of the sort when he established these colonies in the
first place cannot be ruled out. The Messenians said to have murdered him
at the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis may have understood what was at stake.
Rarely were the Spartans oblivious to the geostrategic implications of what
they did.
For soldiers in no great hurry, there was a much easier road, leading from
central Laconia to the Stenyklaros plain on the upper reaches of the Pamisos
River. This thoroughfare runs north by northwest from Sparta up the Eurotas
River, into the southern reaches of Arcadia via the Belminatis, around the
northernmost spur of Mount Taygetus near the settlement of Leuctron (mod-
ern Leontari), then westward across the southern reaches of a high plateau,
and finally southwest down into Messenia via the Derveni Pass followed by
the modern highway. Though long, this road was in no way arduous. Indeed,
for heavy infantry loaded with gear and for carts carrying additional provi-
sions, it must have seemed ideal.^28
We do not know when the Spartans began using the last of these paths as
their main route into Messenia. The odds are good, however, that they were
unable to do so early on, during the First Messenian War and the seventh-
century Messenian revolt, for the Arcadians—through whose territory they
would have had to march—were then allied with the Messenians; and the
people of the Arcadian town of Oresthasion, which lay not far from that route
in what would later be called the Megalopolitan plain, were at this time par-
ticularly hostile to the Lacedaemonians, as we have already had occasion to
note. It is, moreover, telling that the Agiad king Alcamenes’ first reported act
when he launched the first of these two wars in the 740s or 730s was to seize
Ampheia in northeast Messenia. For this town was located, scholars suspect,
on the western slope of Mount Taygetus above the Stenyklaros plain in the
vicinity of the Gardiki fortress, which was built in later times near the end of
the trail that now leads over the mountain from Georgitsi to Neochori and
Dyrrachi and then by way of Akobos to Tourkoleka.^29
That the carriage road through southwest Arcadia was vital in later times
to Sparta’s retention of Messenia, however, we need not doubt. For this there
can be no better testimony than that offered in deed shortly after Lacedae-
mon’s decisive defeat at the battle of Leuctra by the canny Theban statesman
Epaminondas. When he liberated the Messenians from Spartan rule in 369 and