Politics and Geopolitics 111
informed. Pausanias has much to say, to be sure. But it is clear that his excep-
tionally detailed narrative has been contaminated by the propaganda associ-
ated with the liberation of Messenia from Spartan control effected by the
Thebans and by the propaganda generated in the same period when the Arca-
dian League was established. It would, nonetheless, be a mistake to reject his
narrative in its entirety, for Pausanias had available to him a literary treasure
that we in large measure lack—the poetry of Tyrtaeus in its entirety—and,
as we have seen, it is highly unlikely that the stories told by the Messenians
and the Arcadians in the fourth century were invented out of whole cloth.
There was, after all, an eighth-century war of conquest, and there must have
been considerable resistance on the part of the conquered or it would not have
lasted twenty years. Moreover, we need not doubt that there was a seventh-
century rebellion followed by a long war that severely tested Sparta’s mettle,
and Tyrtaeus testifies to the involvement of the Arcadians and the Argives in
t he latter.^34 Events of such a magnitude rarely pass into oblivion.
We should probably not think of early eighth-century Messenia as a single
entity. The archaeological record suggests that, in the Mycenaean period, the
large, exceedingly fertile region governed from Pylos on Messenia’s western
shore was more densely settled and more fully integrated than any other dis-
trict in Greece. Messenia’s fate in the aftermath of the Mycenaean collapse
appears, however, to have been quite similar to that of Laconia. The region has
been surveyed with some care, and there is not much evidence for the pres-
ence of a settled population prior to the ninth and eighth centuries. Moreover,
if there was a major settlement of the sort that emerged in the vicinity of what
would later be the Spartan acropolis in Laconia, it has not yet been found.
Here, however, caution is in order. In the upper Pamisos valley and in the
Soulima valley nearby, very little systematic digging has been done; and in
such circumstances, as recent discoveries at Troy in Asia Minor should serve
to remind us, it is a mistake to base firm conclusions on the presumption that
what has not yet turned up does not exist. The literary evidence—and here
what we have of Tyrtaeus is helpful—suggests that, in the First Messenian War,
the struggle centered on the Stenyklaros plain below Ampheia and that it cul-
minated in a battle near Mount Ithome, where, at the foot of the mountain,
soundings on the part of archaeologists leave little doubt as to the presence
in this period of an archaic-period settlement of some size in need of further
exploration.^35
It is also pertinent that Sparta’s original war of conquest lasted for twenty