Messenian Wars (c. 743 BC): Sparta's Conquest and the Helots

The Messenian Wars were the conflicts in which Sparta conquered Messenia, the fertile land west of the Taygetus mountains in the southern Peloponnese. The First Messenian War is traditionally dated to about 743–724 BC, and a Second War followed in the 7th century BC. Their outcome, the reduction of the Messenians to helots, unfree farmers working for Spartan masters, shaped Spartan society for more than three centuries.

Background

In the 8th century BC Sparta controlled Laconia, the valley of the Eurotas river. Across the Taygetus range lay Messenia, with broad plains far richer than Sparta’s own. Ancient writers explained the war through border incidents and cattle raids, but the underlying prize was land.

The First Messenian War

Our only contemporary voice is the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, writing a few generations later. He says that the Messenian land was won by the Spartan king Theopompus, after the warriors of his own grandfathers’ generation fought for nineteen years and the Messenians fled their rich fields in the twentieth.

Later tradition, preserved by Pausanias in the 2nd century AD, says the Messenians made their stand on Mount Ithome, a steep peak in the centre of the region. Their king Euphaes was killed, and his successor Aristodemus is said to have sacrificed his own daughter on the advice of an oracle, before taking his life in despair. These stories are dramatic but cannot be verified.

The Second Messenian War

Some decades later the Messenians revolted. Pausanias dates this war to 685–668 BC, but many historians place it later in the 7th century BC. Tyrtaeus wrote marching songs and elegies urging the Spartans to fight bravely in the front line, and his poems are our main evidence for the period.

Legend centres on the Messenian hero Aristomenes, who is said to have held out for eleven years on Mount Eira in northern Messenia. Pausanias also reports that Argos and the Arcadians supported the rebels, and that the Arcadian king Aristocrates betrayed them at the Battle of the Great Trench. After the fall of Eira, some Messenians fled abroad; tradition links them with Rhegion in southern Italy and, much later, with the renaming of Zancle in Sicily as Messana, modern Messina.

Life under Sparta: the helots

After the conquest, most Messenians became helots. They stayed on their land and lived in their own families and villages, but they belonged to the Spartan state and had to hand over a large share of their produce. Tyrtaeus compares them to donkeys worn down by heavy loads, bringing their masters half of all their harvest.

The helots greatly outnumbered the Spartans. At the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC, according to Herodotus, each of the 5,000 Spartiates was accompanied by seven helots. Fear of revolt made Sparta a military camp. Every year, according to Aristotle as reported by Plutarch, the ephors declared war on the helots so that killing them would not bring religious pollution, and young Spartans in the secret service called the krypteia hunted down helots seen as dangerous. The system attributed to Lycurgus depended on this unfree labour.

Revolt and liberation

A great earthquake struck Sparta around 464 BC, and the helots, especially in Messenia, rose in what is often called the Third Messenian War. The rebels held out on Mount Ithome for several years. Sparta asked Athens for help, but then sent the Athenian force under Cimon home, an insult that worsened relations between the two powers. The rebels finally surrendered on terms, and Athens settled them at Naupactus on the Gulf of Corinth.

Messenia was freed only in 369 BC. After the Thebans crushed the Spartan army at Leuctra in 371 BC, the Theban general Epaminondas invaded the Peloponnese and helped the Messenians found a new capital, Messene, on the slopes of Ithome. Its walls, among the finest Greek fortifications to survive, still stand.

Sources and debate

The detailed story of the wars comes from Pausanias, who drew on the Hellenistic poet Rhianus of Bene and the historian Myron of Priene. Both wrote long after Messenia’s liberation, when the newly free Messenians were building a heroic past. Historians such as Nino Luraghi have shown how much of this tradition reflects later identity rather than 8th- and 7th-century events.

Archaeology also complicates the picture. It suggests that the Spartan takeover may have been more gradual than the ancient war narratives imply, and that not all of Messenia was reduced to helotage: some communities, the perioikoi, remained free but subject to Sparta.

Timeline

• c. 743–724 BC: traditional dates of the First Messenian War under King Theopompus.
• 7th century BC: Second Messenian War; Tyrtaeus writes his poems.
• c. 706 BC: Spartans of disputed status, the Partheniai, found Taras in Italy, according to tradition after the First War.
• 479 BC: Herodotus reports seven helots per Spartiate at Plataea.
• c. 464 BC: earthquake at Sparta and helot revolt on Mount Ithome.
• 371 BC: Thebes defeats Sparta at Leuctra.
• 369 BC: Epaminondas helps found the free city of Messene.

Why it matters

The conquest of Messenia gave Sparta the land and labour that made its unique military society possible, but also bound it to a permanent fear of revolt. Sparta’s decline after 369 BC, a century after the Battle of Thermopylae made it famous, followed directly from the loss of Messenia.