Messenia in 218 B.C.

Messenia — Spring 218 BC · The Spark of the War.

Messenia — the rich, well-watered south-western corner of the Peloponnese, and Sparta’s oldest grievance. For some three centuries the Messenians were helots, tilling their own land for Spartan masters, until Epaminondas of Thebes freed them after Leuctra and raised the fortress-city of Messene on the slopes of Mount Ithome. A free people barely a century old, they remember every year of their bondage and look to the enemies of Sparta as their guarantors. In 218 BC Messenia is the very spark of the Social War: it was the Aetolian plundering of these farms that began the conflict, and now the Messenians, admitted to the Hellenic League, find their fertile land a coveted prize and a hesitant battleground.

No quarrel in Greece runs deeper than the one between Sparta and Messenia. In the dim past the Spartans conquered this fairest of Peloponnesian lands and bound its people to the soil as helots, and for three hundred years the Messenians were slaves in their own country, their freedom a memory kept alive in songs of the hero Aristomenes. Leuctra changed everything: in 369 BC Epaminondas summoned the exiles home, walled Mount Ithome into the mighty city of Messene, and a free Messenia rose again as a standing rebuke to Lacedaemon. Now, only a century later, that freedom drags Messenia into a wider war. When Aetolian freebooters out of Phigaleia began driving off Messenian cattle, the outrage swelled until all Greece took sides, and the Messenians — rich, exposed and slow to commit — found their green Pamisos valley the cockpit of the Social War.