Chapter 5 - Messenia from the Dark Ages to the Peloponnesian War

Summary

From the scrutiny of the literary evidence on Messenia from the return of the Heraclids to the Spartan conquest conducted in the previous two chapters, two broad conclusions should result in a reasonably uncontroversial way. The first and positive one is that such evidence sheds interesting light on the struggles for the Messenian past – in fact, for the Messenian present – that took place from the moment when, in the second quarter of the fifth century, Spartan domination of the land west of the Taygetos started being called into question. The second and negative one is that it will never be possible to reconstruct the history of Messenia from the eighth century to the sixth in any detail and with any degree of confidence based on the literary evidence. No matter how many details of Pausanias' early history of Messenia derive ultimately from oral traditions handed down for centuries among the inhabitants of Messenia, the amount of observable deformation is such that it is simply impossible, in the absence of contemporary evidence, to isolate supposedly genuine bits from the flow of the story.

A different but related question is what sort of ethnic identity and collective memory we should expect among the inhabitants of Messenia under Spartan rule – a legitimate and extremely interesting question, but one that has often been approached from a rather unhelpful angle.