Messing About in Messene

Yesterday’s post suggesting the games at Olympia brought peace and unity to the Greek world is not entirely true.

The games brought as much peace as the modern Olympic Games. The situation in Greece bore a remarkable similarity to the world order today. The two main protagonists were the Athenians and the Spartans; the former espoused democracy while the Spartan regime relied on a under-class of heliots (slaves) to make their regime function. To a large extent the Spartan repressive and cruel system was successful against the Athenians although both sides were weakened by their wars.

Their exhaustion provided an opportunity for Epaminondas, a Theban general. The Thebans at first were enemies of Athens and took the side of the Persians when Xerxes invaded in 480 BC. A hundred years later Sparta held the balance of power and Epaminondas moved against them. The result was a crushing defeat for Sparta at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC. This is when Epaminondas showed himself as a statesman as well as a warrior. He freed the Spartan heliots in Laconia and Messenia. The heliots adopted a democratic system of government – a similar transition made by some Eastern European countries formerly part of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

Yesterday we went to see Messene a city built by the heliots after they gained autonomy from Sparta. It was a city with some 50,000 citizens defended by a wall nine kilometres long. Not much of the wall survives but the bit I saw is impressive.

The city had a grid pattern of pretty much identical houses – promoting equality and democracy – around a central area where there were facilities for sport (running and wrestling primarily), education, theatre, law courts and so on. This is the bit that has been partly excavated with work ongoing. It is an impressive site and will only increase in importance as more is uncovered. The photograph at the head of this page does not show the whole site but even so gives some idea of its scale; much bigger than Olympia.