First Messenian War
Sparta conquered Messenia in a war traditionally dated to around 740 to 720 BC, and the settlement it imposed determined everything Sparta became. Messenia lay across Mount Taygetus to the west, and was the most fertile land in the Peloponnese. Sparta took it and did not do what Greek states usually did with a conquest — extract tribute and go home. It kept the population and turned it into helots: a subject people bound to the land, working it for Spartan masters, who were not private slaves but the property of the state and could not be freed or sold by the individuals who held them. The arithmetic that followed is the whole of Spartan history. Helots outnumbered Spartiates by something like seven to one, and a citizen body that small holding a population that large had to be permanently mobilised. The agoge — the state upbringing that took boys at seven and put them through communal barracks, systematic hunger and endurance to twenty — followed from that necessity, as did the common messes, the prohibition on trade and agriculture for citizens, and the annual declaration of war on the helots that made killing one a legal act. The krypteia sent young Spartiates out at night to murder helots judged dangerous. Messenia revolted in the seventh century and again in 464 BC after an earthquake, and the second revolt lasted years. Thebes freed it in 369 BC after Leuctra, and Sparta ceased to matter almost immediately. The helot system gave Sparta the only full-time army in Greece and made it incapable of using it far from home for long.
- Year: 740 BCE
- Category: Military
