76 Conquest
work their own land for the benefit of their Spartan overlords.^32 It is perhaps
to this Alcamenes that we should credit the pacification of the peninsula, now
called the Mani, stretching south from Gytheion to Cape Taenarum and then
north from there along the Messenian Gulf to Pherae, which was located
where Kalamata sits today.^33
It was purportedly in the wake of his consolidation of Lacedaemon’s he-
gemony within southern Laconia that Alcamenes and his Eurypontid col-
league Nikandros took the momentous step of launching the First Messenian
War, aimed at securing for Lacedaemon the Stenyklaros plain in the upper part
of the great and fertile valley created on the western side of Mount Taygetus
by the Pamisos River. Tyrtaeus, who lived in the seventh century, tells us that
this struggle lasted twenty years and that Nikandros’ successor Theopompus
was responsible for bringing it to an end.^34
We do not know the precise dates for this war, but there is suggestive
evidence. The Olympic Games were founded, we are told, in 776. If we are to
judge by the dedications at Olympia datable to the tenth, ninth, and eighth
centuries and by the list of those said to have won the foot race there, the cult
site dedicated to Zeus was at first a sanctuary of purely local interest, and the
games that grew up in its shadow were initially dominated, as is only natural,
by those who lived nearby in the western Peloponnesus—above all, the Eleans
and their neighbors to the south in Messenia. The fact that the last Messenian
to have won the foot race purportedly did so in 736, while the first Spartan to
achieve this honor reportedly did so in 716, may then be telling. At the very
least, it suggests that when Pausanias, following the Hellenistic chronogra-
phers, dated the beginning of the twenty-year war later mentioned by Tyr-
taeus to 743 and its end to 724, he was not far off the mark.^35
None of this is certain, to say the least. Some would even assert that Pau-
sanias’ chronology—rooted, as it is, in a chronographic system founded on the
list of Olympic victors—is worthless.^36 But I wonder. If the list really is a fab-
rication, why is it dominated in its early years by póleıs in the vicinity of Olym-
pia? Moreover, as a reconstruction of the past, the chronology based on this
list has three considerable virtues. It is consistent with tradition; it fits with the
smattering of archaeological evidence that we possess; and it makes sense in
the context of what we can surmise regarding what was then happening else-
where in Greece. The epoch assigned by tradition to Sparta’s consolidation of
her hold on Laconia and to her initial incursion into Messenia coincides with
a time when other Greek cities were expanding into their hinterlands or send-