The Spartans really did beat up the Messenians. One hopes that during the three-month truces (Ekeheiria) during the games at Olympia, that the Messenians got a break from their laconic and brutish neighbours. (See “Stop the war, and have a wrestle”).
The Spartans were so hard, in fact, that their own city didn’t have a need for defensive walls. The city walls of ancient Messene by contrast are nearly 6 miles long. And formidable in stature, as you can see from one of the gatehouses.
The Spartans coveted Messene, sitting as it does below sacred Mount Ithóme, and with distant views south to the sea. The Spartans were so nasty to the Messenians that many Messenians were forced into exile across the Ionian, where they established new Greek polis, such as Messina on Sicily (which they obviously named after their home).
As well as being quite aggressive and monosyllabic (i.e., laconic - they came from Laconia further east in the Peloponnese), I learned two fascinating facts about the early Spartans.
Firstly, their warriors were paired into buddies who were also lovers!
Secondly, they were actually quite clever. They applied their brainpower at least twice in the three Messinian wars (8th, 7th and 5th centuries BC) to great effect. First, during the first war and according to our Cadogan guide, the Spartans:
“…came up with one of the kinkiest provocations of all time to justify a war. A group of armed young Spartans in drag went into a room where a group of Messenian worthies were gathered, at first pretending to entertain them, then pulling out the daggers hidden under their skirts. Only the Messenians were quicker and killed the phoney girls, which was enough for Sparta to self-righteously declare [war].”
Perhaps one of each buddy-pair liked wearing a skirt in any event? Who knows? Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction, and this event would have made an excellent Monty Python sketch. I had assumed that the members had all studied Classics, but in fact none had and only Michael Palin studied history. And that might not have been ancient history.
So, the Spartans besieged Messene. The Messenians, in desperation, asked the oracle in Delphi for some advice. The oracle said that the victor would be whichever side was first to dedicate a hundred tripods (three legged bronze stands used for offerings and other rituals) to Zeus on Ithóme. The Messenians set to work, making great bronze tripods. This was the Spartans’ second moment of genius. As the Cadogan guide relates:
“…word leaked out to the Spartans, who defied their reputation for stupidity by quickly whipping up a hundred toy tripods and sending them up to the sanctuary in the bag of one of their spies. When the Messenians saw them, they simply gave up and abandoned the citadel, except for Aristódemos…” [the chief, who killed himself on the same spot where he had previously sacrificed his daughter, just in case that would have helped].
Sparta took many Messenians as slaves (helots). All seemed hopeless for our exiles, but, in 465 BC, Sparta was devastated by an earthquake and the helots saw their chance, revolted and escaped back to Mount Ithóme. Sparta eventually reconquered Ithóme, but the Spartan’s arch-enemy, the Athenians, saved our helots and resettled them north of the gulf of Corinth.
It was not until 369 BC that a Greek general from Thebes called Epaminondas beat the Spartans and ended their long occupation of Messene. The exiled Messenians could return home. It was Epaminondas who founded the Messenian capital that we wanted to now explore. Legend has it that it was built in 85 days, which seems unlikely. But the Messenians must have been very enthusiastic workers after their 400-year exile!
So, there you have a story of how homosexual warriors, dressed in women’s clothes terrorised and enslaved a city. And how the exiled people, who had fled to the ends of the known Greek-speaking world, were saved by a Greek from Thebes, who also had some nice loos built for them when they arrived back home (see later). Who knew?
Our visit
And so it was to this ancient site that the crew of Missy Bear headed in another of Sotiris’ hire cars. Today, we haggled down to 40 euros. Cash, of course. First Mate wanted to know if I was going to drag her up another big hill. I changed the subject.
As we left the modern sprawl of Kalamata and modern Messene, we eventually turned off the main road and the landscape became hillier and more rural. We stopped to watch a Little Owl perched on a telegraph line, with its newly-caught breakfast still clamped in its beak. The road became ever more winding as it climbed, but there was no visible sign of an approaching site in the hills ahead.
We eventually arrived at the small village of Mavromatis perched on the hillside, and suddenly we were able to glimpse views, between the small houses, of the ancient site below us on our left. It lay in a natural geological bowl with distant, hazy views to the Mediterranean beyond. We passed the village fountain, which is fed by an ancient aqueduct from Mount Ithóme, which towered above us on our right. I believe this spring served the entire city below us (as drinking water on the way in, and as covered sewer on the way out.)
As we entered the site, a large, brown, buzzard-like bird wheeled above us on the thermals. It had distinctive single white patches on its underwings, and Twitcher Titley identified it as a European Golden Eagle. Well, that was a first and we felt very privileged to have seen it. We saw the same bird (probably), much later over our lunch of heavenly moussaka. It was being harassed relentlessly by a corvid of some type. I often wonder why the bigger raptors don’t just turn on the crows and see them off once and for all.
Epaminondas designed the capital to a Hippodamian grid-pattern (a regular grid system invented by Hippodamus of Miletus). Rhodes and Piraeus are earlier examples. These cities were zoned with spaces allocated to either religious, public or private use. As someone who had studied urban design at college (and practised it briefly), I was keen to see the plan appear before my eyes. But to be frank I couldn’t really sense it from the archaeology spread out before us. I probably needed an archaeologist from my old company, EDP, to help me see.
The crew took a leisurely ramble downhill, through the open theatre, fountain-house, stoas (columned walkways) agora (central public space), temples, formal council or senate house, covered auditorium and bathhouses, meandering slowly towards the stadium and gymnasium at the bottom of the site. Our pace was timed to allow time for most of the coachloads of children to leave the scene before we arrived (the Festival of International Youth Drama was taking place, and lots of youngsters were being filmed wearing ancient costumes).
I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow guide of the buildings, founders, deities and cults. But one interesting feature was the culverted stream that passed through the gymnasium. It has slabs of rock carved into toilet seats and positioned over the running water below. Even Messenian wrestlers and trainee warriors need to do their ablutions!
