96 Conquest
exile, and this they accomplished by keeping the memory of their fatherland
and that of the resistance to its subjugation green. There is, moreover, reason
to suppose that the Messenians who remained in their ancestral homeland
as helots regarded themselves as a nation in bondage. They had families, we
know; and, to judge by the results of a systematic field survey recently carried
out in the vicinity of Pylos by archaeologists, these families resided not in
isolation on homesteads but in villages and towns where they will have had
constant contact and interaction with their brethren.^78 Furthermore, these
Messenian helots worked land their ancestors had owned, and they shared
common cults. They surely knew who they were, and they are apt to have kept
alive a memory of the more dramatic events in their past. To dismiss in its
entirety their tradition is to underestimate the capacity of the oppressed to
treasure that in their own heritage which sustains the hope that they, as a
people, might someday once again be free.^79
It is, we must conclude, certain that there was a Messenian revolt in the
time of Tyrtaeus, and it is plausible to suppose that it erupted at about the time
suggested by the reports reviewed above and that it lasted, as Messenian tra-
dition asserts, a decade or more. If so, two possibilities present themselves.
Both turn on the revolt’s proximity in time to Sparta’s defeat at the battle of
Hysiae in 669.
One could imagine that the Messenians rose up in revolt three or more
years before that event and that the Spartans, after bribing the king of Arca-
dian Orchomenos and defeating the rebels at the Battle of the Great Trench,
turned to the northeast to deal with the rebels’ Argive allies. It is no less rea-
sonable a guess that the Messenians rose up in revolt soon after the disaster at
Hysiae. The Argives’ victory over Lacedaemon in 669 could easily have pro-
vided the necessary impetus. Subjugated populations are keenly sensitive to
the least hint of weakness on the part of their masters; and if offered what they
take to be an opportunity, they will be quick to seize it. More, in current cir-
cumstances, we cannot know. We can only hope that the papyrologists work-
ing patiently to separate, transcribe, and make sense of the remnants of scrolls
found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, at Herculaneum in Italy, and elsewhere come
up with new evidence. If we had the poetry of Tyrtaeus in its entirety, we
would certainly know more.
As things stand, however, more needs to be said. For, if we wish to under-
stand what it was that induced the Spartans to adopt the way of life they later
led; that encouraged them to establish the remarkable set of institutions which