294 Alexander Thein
loyal Messenians at Pylos in their “ancestral homeland,” but his arguments fell on deaf
ears and his plan came to fruition only because adverse weather kept the fleet at Pylos and
boredom led the soldiers to build fortifications of their own accord (Thuc. 4.3.3–4.4.1,
cf. Lewis 1992b: 413). Athens eventually recognized the strategic potential of Pylos as a
refuge for deserters from Spartan Messenia, and this led to the brief occupation of Cape
Malea as a refuge for Laconian helots from 413 to 412 (Thuc. 7.26.2, 8.4). However,
there is no evidence to support Figueira’s contention that Athens viewed all helot desert-
ers as “ipso factocitizens of a Messenian polity” (1999: 217); their official designation as
helots is attested in the negotiations with Sparta and Argos in 421 and 419, and it may
be that their helot status retained a special symbolic value to Athens at this time. Sparta
had objected to the presence of the Messenians of Naupactus at Pylos in 421, and they
surely took far greater offence from the presence of helot deserters at Pylos after 419 (cf.
Isoc.Archid. 28, 87–8). When the “helots” of Pylos next appear in the historical record,
in 413, they are an organized military force serving as Athenian allies in Sicily, and it is
then that they are first called Messenians, in a passage in which Thucydides highlights
the ethnic affiliations of the Syracusan and Athenian allies. The addition of the phrase
“as they are now called” to the Pylos and Naupactus Messenians (Thuc. 7.57.8) has
been taken as an indication of authorial skepticism to their ethnic claims (Luraghi 2008:
201, 2009: 114; cf. Figueira 1999: 213). In my view, it is simply a statement of the fact
that Messenian ethnogenesis at Pylos was, for the Athenians, a recent phenomenon.
It is not clear when the helots of Pylos began to call themselves Messenians. It is prob-
able that they were encouraged to do so by the Messenians of Naupactus, first in the
Pylos years of 425–21, then on Cephallenia before their return to Pylos in 419. It is
also probable that local helots and other deserters found asylum and assimilated with the
ex-helot Messenians in Pylos after 419. At the time of its fall to the Spartans in 409, there
were even Laconian helots in Pylos who had originally fled to the Athenian fort at Cape
Malea (Xen.Hell. 1.2.18), and it is probable that they too were able to assume a Messe-
nian identity (cf. Figueira 1999: 215–6). By 409, Pylos was home to a diverse group of
refugees and deserters, but there was potential cohesion in the form of Messenian eth-
nicity, and Diodorus may reflect ethnic self-ascription in his reference to the expulsion
of “the Messenians in Pylos” (13.64.5–7). In 401, there was a mass exodus of Messeni-
ans from Naupactus, Cephallenia, and Zacynthus to Italy, Sicily, and North Africa (Diod.
14.34.2–5, 14.78.5, 15.66.5, Paus. 4.26.2–3). Not all of them could trace their descent
from the Ithome rebels expelled to Naupactus, and only a few, it seems, survived to take
part in thepolis-foundation of Epaminondas (Luraghi 2008: 221–2).
Conclusion
The Athenian garrison at Pylos provided a refuge for helots and other deserters, and it
played a key role in a continuing process of Messenian ethnogenesis, but it sparked no
general uprising of the dependent populations of the western portion of theLakonike.
It has been assumed that Athens made no attempt to foment a general uprising (Lewis
1992b: 386; Raaflaub 2003: 185–7). However, perhaps one should rather assume that
the necessary conditions for a mass uprising did not exist in the late fifth century, even
with Athenian bases on Spartan soil (Talbert 1989: 29, 38; cf. Ducat 1990: 136–7).