END OF THE FIRST WAR. 427 Corinthians assist the Spartans, and the Arcadians and Sikyon- ians are on the side of Messenia ; the victory is here decisive n the side of Aristodemus, and the Lacedaemonians are driven back into their own territory.i It was now their turn to send envoys and ask advice from the Delphian oracle ; while the re- maining events of the war exhibit a series, partly of stratagems to fulfil the injunctions of the priestess, partly of prodigies in which the divine wrath is manifested against the Messenians, The king Aristodemus, agonized with the thought that he has slain his own daughter without saving his country, puts an end to his own life. 2 In the twentieth year of the war, the Messe- nians abandoned Ithome, which the Lacedaemonians razed to the ground : the rest of the country being speedily conquered, such of the inhabitants as did not flee either to Arcadia or to Eleusis, were reduced to complete submission. Such is the abridgment of what Pausanias 3 gives as the nar- rative of the first Messenian war. Most of his details bear the evident stamp of mere late romance ; and it will easily be seen that the sequence of events presents no plausible explanation of that which is really indubitable, the result. The twenty years' war, and the final abandonment of Ithome, is attested by Tyrtaeus beyond all doubt, as well as the harsh treatment of the con- quered. " Like asses, worn down by heavy burdens," 4 says the 1 It is, perhaps, to this occasion that the story of the Epeunakti, in Theopompus, referred (ap. Athense. vi. p. 271), Helots adopted into the sleeping-place of their masters, who had been slain in the war, and who were subsequently enfranchised. The story of the Partheniffi, obscure and unintelligible as it is, belongs to the foundation of the colony of Taras, or Tarentum (Strabo, vi. p. 279). 2 See Plutarch, De Superstitione, p. 168. 3 See Pausan. iv. 6-14. An elaborate discussion is to be seen in Manso's Sparta, on the authorities whom Pausanias has followed in his History of the Messenian Wars, 18< Beilage, torn. ii. p. 264. " It would evidently be folly (he observes, p. 270), to suppose that in the history of the Messenian wars, as Pausanias lays them before us, we possess the true history of these events." 4 Tyrtaeus, Fragm. 5, 6 (Schneidewin). C. F. Hsrmann conceives the treatment of the Messenians after the first rar, as mild, in comparison with what it became after the second (Lehrbuch
