286 Alexander Thein
The emergence or at least the expression of Messenian ethnicity in the fifth and fourth
centuries was contingent on external factors: the Spartan earthquake that led to the
Ithome revolt, Athenian patronage in the Peloponnesian War, and the Theban victory
at Leuctra. Ethnicity is not fixed or immutable, but it cannot be invented in a vacuum,
and scholars have thus focused on the content, contexts, and origins of the Messenian
ethnic narrative. Ethnicity can be defined by language and religion, by shared history and
culture, and above all by an association with a specific territory and by a myth of common
descent. The minimum criterion is the use of a name to define the ethnic group (Hall
1997: 25, cf. 32–3), and with the Messenians the evidence for ethnicity is often limited
to the use of the ethnic label. Isolated references in Homer and Tyrtaeus do no more
than attest the existence of the early Messenians. The name reappears in fifth-century
sources, and in Thucydides it is used in opposition to the label “helot.” Thus, the rejec-
tion of servile status in the Spartan system found its expression in an ethnic discourse.
Thucydides is our best source for the resurgence of a Messenian identity after centuries
of Spartan rule, and this chapter examines how his narrative traces its activation and
reception in the half century following the Ithome revolt.
Old and New Messenians
Messenia is the name given by Classical and later authors to the southwest corner of the
Peloponnese, south of the river Neda and west of the Taygetus Mountains. It came under
Spartan control from the eighth century, and it remained part of the Spartan state until
the early fourth century. During this period, it was culturally indistinguishable from Laco-
nia, the region to the east of the Taygetus Mountains that formed the core of the Spartan
state. Archaeological evidence from a series of sanctuary sites indicates that, in the sixth
and fifth centuries, the inhabitants of Messenia spoke the same dialect and used the same
alphabet as their neighbors in Laconia. They also used and produced the same kinds of
pottery and bronzes, worshipped the same gods, and dedicated the same sorts of votives
(Luraghi 2002a: 50–7, 2008: 134–6, 246). Messenia had no distinct cultural identity
under Spartan rule, and before the conquest it was a heterogeneous geographical space
(Luraghi 2002a: 48–50; Alcock 2002: 138; cf. Pearson 1962: 402–3; Cartledge 2001:
148). Indeed, it has been argued that “Messene” or “Messenia” first became the name
of the region as a whole in an early-fifth-century Argive myth that described the division
of the Peloponnese among the Heraclids in the distant mythological past (Luraghi 2008:
48–61, although Hans van Wees [lecture at Trinity College Dublin, February 23, 2012]
proposes a much earlier chronology, arguing that the myth reflects an Argive alliance
with Messenia during the Spartan wars of conquest). It is certain, however, that there
had been a Messene and Messenians before Spartan rule.
Messene and the Messenians are attested in Homer in a series of passages (Od.
3.488–89, 21.15–16, 21.18) used by Pausanias to argue that there was no city called
Messene in Messenia before 369; he concludes that the Messenians were anethnos
(4.1.3) and states that these “old Messenians” shared their land with the Dorians of
Cresphontes (4.3.6). The seventh-century poet Tyrtaeus attests the Spartan conquest of
“spacious Messene, good to plough and good to plant” in the times of his ancestors after
a 20-year war that ended with the flight of the inhabitants from their fields and “from