That there were two long contests between the Lacedæmonians and Messenians, and that in both the former were completely victorious, is a fact sufficiently attested; and if we could trust the statements in Pausanias—our chief and almost only authority on the subject—we should be in a situation to recount the history of both these wars in considerable detail. But unfortunately, the incidents narrated in that writer have been gathered from sources which are, even by his own admission, undeserving of credit—from Rhianus, the poet of Bênê in Crete, who had composed an epic poem on Aristomenês and the second Messenian war, about B.C. 220-and from Myrên of Priênê, a prose author whose date is not exactly known, but belonging to the Alexandrine age, and not earlier than the third century before the Christian æra. From Rhianus we have no right to expect trustworthy information, and the accuracy of Myrôn is much depreciated by Pausanias himself—on some points even too much, as will presently be shown; but apart from the mental habits either of the prose writer or the poet, it does not seem that any good means of knowledge were open to either of them, except the poems of Tyrtæus, which we are by no means sure that they ever consulted. The account of the two wars, extracted from these two authors by Pausa-nias, is a string of tableaux, several of them indeed highly poetical, but destitute of historical coherence or sufficiency; and O. Möller has justly observed, that “absolutely no reason is given in them for the subjection of Messenia.”