Pausanias Analysis

When the Messenians first returned, they faced no serious threat from the Spartans. For the Spartans, gripped by fear of the Thebans, tolerated both the restoration of Messene and the gathering of the Arcadians into a single city. However, when the Phocian war—also called the Sacred War—drew the Thebans away from the Peloponnese, the Spartans regained their courage and could no longer restrain themselves from acting against the Messenians.

The Messenians themselves, along with the Argives and Arcadians, held out in the war and sought assistance from the Athenians. The Athenians replied that they would never invade Laconia with them; however, they promised to stand beside them if the Lacedaemonians began hostilities and attacked Messenia. Eventually, the Messenians became allies of Philip, son of Amyntas, and of the Macedonians, and this alliance, they say, prevented them from participating in the battle at Chaeronea between the Greeks. Yet, they refused utterly to bear arms against their fellow Greeks.

After Alexander's death, when the Greeks undertook a second war against the Macedonians, the Messenians also participated, as I previously indicated in my account of Attica. They did not, however, join the Greeks in fighting the Gauls, since Cleonymus and the Spartans refused to conclude an alliance with them.

Not long afterwards, the Messenians gained Elis through a combination of cleverness and daring. For previously, the Eleans had been the most orderly of the Peloponnesians. But when Philip son of Amyntas, among other acts of wrongdoing inflicted upon Greece, corrupted the influential men of Elis with money, civil strife broke out for the first time among the Eleans, and, as they say, they came to open warfare.

From this point on, their hatred for each other was destined to grow even more intense, since their policies were divided precisely because of the Lacedaemonians, and thus they proceeded into civil war. When the Lacedaemonians learned of these events, they made ready to support those among the Eleans who favored their interests. They accordingly formed up by military units and arranged themselves into companies. Meanwhile, a thousand elite Messenians swiftly arrived at Elis, bearing Lacedaemonian insignia upon their shields.

When those of the Eleans who favored the Spartans saw the shields, they hoped allies had come to assist them and welcomed the men into the stronghold. But the Messenians, having entered in the manner described, drove out those whose sympathies lay with the Lacedaemonians, and handed the city over to their own partisan allies.

Indeed, the stratagem is Homer's, but the Messenians also appear to have appropriately imitated it when the occasion demanded. For Homer, in the Iliad, made Patroclus put on Achilles' armor, declaring that then the barbarians became convinced Achilles himself was advancing against them, and their foremost ranks were thrown into confusion. Homer devised other stratagems as well, sending two Greek spies instead of a single man by night among the Trojans, and later having another man enter Troy, who pretended to desert but whose true purpose was to uncover their secret plans.

And moreover, those among the Trojans who, due to youthfulness or old age, were unfit to fight, Homer arranged to guard the wall while those of military age were encamped against the Greeks. Likewise among the Greeks, those who had wounds were tasked with preparing arms for the combatants, lest even these men should be altogether idle. Indeed, Homer's works have in every respect proved beneficial to mankind.