In passing from Olympia to Sparta by sea in 1891 I had put into the harbor of Pylos at sunset; and had not fellow-travellers urged me on I could not have resisted the powerful charm of the place. A hurried visit to Ithome the next day afforded some compensation, and Sparta, approached by the magnificent Langadha Pass through Taygetos, made me forget my loss entirely. But for years that sunset and nightfall lingered in my memory, accompanied by the hope of letting the impression of Pylos deepen upon me by a second visit. Ten years and a half later I found myself again in Messenia, with the full intention of filling up the gap in my acquaintance with that corner of Greece; but it was December, and a heavy rain set in and drove our party back to Athens by rail.

In January of the present year six of us took the train at Athens for Kalamata, the modern capital of Messenia. It was immediately after a heavy fall of snow; and we hoped at least to revel in the sight of Arcadia presenting a Swiss aspect, but indulged also the larger hope of studying carefully Messene, and especially Pylos. Neither hope failed us; Arcadia was magnificent in its winter dress. In Tripolitza, which is over two thousand feet high, the snow lay several inches thick, and the train threaded its way among mountains carrying heavy masses of it. The journey paid for itself.

But a series of April days followed. The first of them we spent in the “blessed plain” adjacent to Kalamata, which far surpasses all the rest of Greece in exuberant fertility. Semi-tropical vegetation, heavily loaded orange-trees, vineyards hidden by enormous hedges of cactus, with a full flowing river, make one huge garden. But the setting is more magnificent than the jewel itself. A deep bay comes running up on the south; Taygetos towers to the east, and less magnificent mountains to the north. Only on the west is the plain bordered by a low range which looks rather tame, but which later gave us work enough to get across it on our way to Pylos. The goal of our first day’s journey lay about fifteen miles to the north, where, between two considerable peaks on the west side of the “blessed valley,” lay the Messene of the fourth century before Christ, founded by Epaminondas.

Tardy restitution given to a long-suffering people; late righting of an ancient wrong! Let us not, however, think of Epaminondas as acting out of pure benevolence. He was studying the best means of putting a check upon the power of Sparta. For some two centuries and a half Sparta’s heel had rested heavily on this people, its nearest kin, who were by no means weaklings, if we can put any trust in the tales of the first and second Messenian wars. Twice in those fierce struggles the balance was held nearly even for almost a generation, when it tipped in favor of Sparta; and the Messenian state sank in blood and slavery. At last the fulness of time had come, and with it Sparta’s doom. The Delphic oracle given to Aristodemos centuries before was fulfilled: “Do as fate directs, but ruin falls on some before others.”

The exiles were called back from far and near. So tenacious had they been of their dialect that they became a people in the most natural way in the world. That they loved their land is no wonder. The new city made by Epaminondas was laid out at the foot of Mount Ithome, perhaps on the site of an older city. At any rate, Ithome was the fortress in which Aristodemos made the last stand against Sparta in the first war. In the small Greek world the sensation caused by the reappearance of the Messenian state may be compared to that which would be felt in Europe to-day if Poland should again take her place among the nations.

So great had been the vicissitudes of the Messenian people that Pausanias for once drops his rÔle of periegete to become the historian of a gallant race that succumbed to force and fate. But what history! Besides quoting the poet TyrtÆus he gives as his principal sources of information one prose historian and one poetical historian. The prose writer, Myron of Priene, he thinks “reveals an indifference to truth.” One might think, then, that Pausanias was intent on sifting out the pure grain and throwing away the chaff. But the following is a fair sample of the kind of history that he serves up for us.

The first Messenian war had lasted twenty years, with varying success and failure; but at that point the Delphic oracle told the Messenians that the party which first dedicated a hundred tripods in the sanctuary of Ithomian Zeus would surely win. The Messenians were elated, thinking that surely nobody could do this but themselves, since they held that sanctuary; but to make sure of it, since bronze was scarce, they at once set about making the tripods of wood. But the oracle leaked out in Sparta; and “an insignificant fellow, but with brains,” made a hundred little clay tripods, and, slinging them over his shoulder in a bag, went up to Ithome as a hunter, escaping notice by his “mere insignificance”; and after dark crept into the sanctuary and set up his little tripods around the altar of Zeus. When the Messenians saw them in the morning they had not a doubt that all was lost. The king, Aristodemos, incontinently committed suicide. But others fought on hopelessly to the bitter end, losing all their generals and men of prominence. The second war, of little less duration, came to an end with another Delphic oracle. The great fortress Eira on the northern border had been stoutly defended for years, when the Pythian priestess said: “When a he-goat drinks Neda’s eddying water I will save Messene no longer, for destruction is near.”

For a time there was great hustling to keep the he-goats away from the River Neda. But one day a seer noticed a wild fig-tree, which in Messenian parlance was called tragos, a he-goat, growing crooked, and bending over the Neda so as to brush the water with the tips of its leaves. He showed this to the general, Aristomenes, who agreed with him that all was lost; but instead of committing suicide like the leader in the former war, he fought on like a real hero, and even after the cause was lost became a terror to the Spartans on their own side of Taygetos. One wonders whether a people ever really believed that the issue of great wars turned on such portents. Such yarns may have been spun several centuries after the events, by the more or less mendacious historians, to whom Pausanias, in his character of historian, refers as his sources from which he drew his pure history of Messenia.

But however flimsy the history of those past centuries, the walls of the new city are solid reality. Pausanias records that “the first day was devoted to prayer and sacrifice; but on the following days they proceeded to rear the circuit wall, and to build houses and sanctuaries within.” Why did he not say “the following years”? These walls are so extensive, as well as so massive, that one wonders whether they could have been built in less than five years. But there was every reason that the wall should be built at once, to secure the new city against the attacks of Sparta; and we have so many cases of rapid wall-building on the part of the Greeks that we can believe almost any feat ascribed to them in this line. Pausanias recognizes these walls as something extraordinary, saying: “I have not seen the walls of Babylon, nor the Memnonian walls at Susa in Persia, nor have I heard of them from persons who have seen them; but Ambrosos in Phokis, Byzantium, and Rhodes are fortified in the best style; and yet the walls of Messene are stronger than theirs.” A great deal of this circuit wall, over five miles in extent, has now disappeared; but, on the north side the Arcadian gate, with adjacent towers and lines of wall, not only justifies Pausanias’s admiration, but makes the visitor of to-day stand long in mute astonishment. The walls of Tiryns are of more gigantic blocks; but they made simply an enclosure of a palace.

The view from the top of Ithome, which towers above the city, is superb; but Pausanias must have thought it much higher than it really is when he said, “There is no higher mountain in the Peloponnesus.” Taygetos, which stared him in the face, is more than five thousand feet higher; so are Kyllene and Aroania. But it is, with the possible exception of Vlocho, the acropolis of the ThestiÆi, in Ætolia, the highest acropolis in Greece, measured, not from the sea level, but from the plain at its foot.

Pylos is about thirty miles distant from Kalamata, across the western prong of the Peloponnesus. Our maps led us to think that there was a fair road across. But more than fifty persons assured us that it was impossible for bicycles. We were convinced, however, that we knew better than they what one could accomplish with bicycles, knowing from experience that a bridle-path is often better than a poor carriage-road. We took the train, however, as far as Nisi (officially styled Messene, though ten miles distant from the Messene of classical times), thus cutting off about seven miles of our journey. In the face of loud and universal dissuasion we struck out for Pylos, and in two hours we had cut off seven miles more of the road, having dismounted perhaps fifty times when it was either too muddy or too sandy, or when the path became six inches wide and two feet deep. An occasional orange plucked from an overhanging bough was a consolation for hard work. We had not yet drawn far away from the sea, and had passed, by fairly good bridges, six rivers. But now we came to a river with no bridge. While we were hesitating, a man came out of a hut near by and offered to carry us across, wheels and all, for a drachma apiece. While he was rapidly lowering his price we had got over, boy fashion, each for himself, with the added pleasure of a very cold foot-bath.

Directly after this the road took a turn up a mountain side, over rough rock strata set on edge. For the middle third of the journey the worst that had been said was short of the horrible truth. We toiled up and down over the path of jagged stones, carrying our wheels and bags. Not until two hours before sunset did we get our first glimpse of the western sea; and darkness fell upon us before we reached the carriage-road running along the shore northward from Pylos. We even struck a bog in the dark; but by keeping straight on we staggered out upon the firm road at last, probably with something of the feeling which Ulysses had when he tumbled ashore at Scheria after his long swim. Three hours later we were sleeping on beds by no means so soft as the bog from which we had been delivered.

The Pylos, where we passed the night, is a comparatively new town, having grown up around a fort built by the Franks in the thirteenth century on the south side of a great bay. Venetians occupied it later. It received, also, the name of Navarino from some merchants of Navarre, who settled there in the fifteenth century. This new Pylos, beautifully situated, looks out upon a scene so lovely that words fail to describe it; and in this spot history has been made.

The Bay of Navarino, about three miles long from north to south, and about two miles broad, is a large natural harbor, shut off from the sea by what was in prehistoric ages a long, continuous cliff, but which in historic times had already been broken open in three places. The opening farthest north had ages ago already been silted up with sand; and the next one is in a fair way to become so before long. The northern end of the bay has also been a good deal silted up by streams flowing into it; and a long sand-bar has at last entirely shut it off from the rest, making of it a lake.

The particular feature which imparts picturesqueness to the bay is the already mentioned cliff, which rises almost perpendicularly in the greater part of its extent to a height varying from one hundred to three hundred feet, or even more. The face of these cliffs is in places very red, and when struck by the morning sun they are gorgeously colored.

In the fifth century before Christ the southern section of the hill was called Sphacteria, and was, of course, an island; the section next it on the north, which would have been an island had not the opening to the north of it been silted up, was called Pylos; after that follows a low promontory well joined to the mainland. There can be little doubt that the name Pylos is a survival of Homeric times, and that here we must look for the home of Nestor. It has become a fashion in the past few years to look for the Homeric Pylos farther north, partly to furnish a better road for Telemachos’s chariot ride from Pylos to Sparta, and partly because no MycenÆan remains have been found here. But it is about as easy to take Telemachos straight over Taygetos as it is to find any more convenient road farther north. PherÆ, where the two days’ journey was divided by a night’s rest, has been reasonably well identified with some ancient walls on the slope of Taygetos above Kalamata; and if the journey was undertaken from our Pylos it would be about evenly divided there.

Furthermore, in the great cave on the north end of Pylos, which is probably the cave where, according to legend, the baby Hermes hid the oxen of Apollo which he had stolen, there were found in 1896 vase fragments of MycenÆan and even of pre-MycenÆan times. Who knows how soon serious excavations may bring to light MycenÆan walls under the great Venetian fortress? Such a harbor as this could hardly have failed to be known and occupied in the earliest times; and surely there is sand enough here to justify Homer’s standing epithet of “Sandy Pylos.”

But if the Homeric glory should be stolen away, this bay would yet be remembered as the scene of that most picturesque of naval battles in which the allied fleet, sailing in through the broad southern entrance one afternoon in 1827, annihilated in two hours the Ottoman fleet, and brought about the independence of Greece. Some of the wrecks from this battle are still to be seen on shore and beneath the water.

But, after all, it is an episode in the Peloponnesian war that has given this region its chief renown. This episode has been described in the luminous narrative of Thucydides; and the land and the book so exactly coincide that we can trace every movement of the Athenians and Spartans in that struggle of more than two months’ duration. In one respect only is Thucydides’s topography wide of the mark, for that he makes Sphacteria a mile too short is not important; he says that the southern entrance is broad enough for eight ships to sail in abreast, whereas it is approximately a mile wide. The whole Athenian fleet of fifty ships could easily sail in in line. Arnold of Rugby felt this difficulty so strongly that in his edition of Thucydides he advanced the view that Pylos was Sphacteria, supposing that the third opening at the time of Thucydides had not been silted up. He then sought Pylos in the northern promontory of the mainland. This, however, was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire; for if one makes the middle mass Sphacteria the large island to the south, generally taken to be Sphacteria, is utterly ignored. There is no doubt that Thucydides in this one point departed from his principle of always getting information from eye-witnesses. Some have thought he got this broad opening confounded with a narrower one, which at that time, before the sand-bar reached clear up to Pylos, as it now does, led into the northern part of the bay, a sort of lagoon, affording a secure harbor, in which the Spartan fleet awaited attack, supported, morally at least, by the proximity of their land forces. In every other point the narrative fits the minutest nuances of hill and shore.

Most unexpectedly the seat of war was transferred to this quarter. In the spring of 425 B.C. an Athenian fleet was sailing past Pylos bound for Sicily, on which Athens even then had her eye, with instructions to attend first to the Spartan fleet that was hovering off Kerkyra, trying to bring the island over to the Peloponnesian alliance by the aid of their partisans then in exile near at hand. Accompanying the fleet was Demosthenes, the man of deeds, whose path through this war is marked with brightness. Ever capable and adequate to every emergency, he was at last destroyed, and Athens with him, by the incompetency of Nikias. In the previous year he had gained in Akarnania the greatest Athenian victory of the war, cutting off all the able-bodied men of Ambrakia and luring Sparta into a discreditable abandonment of her allies. In the full enjoyment of the public confidence he accompanied the fleet, with indefinite powers to use it in any way that seemed to be for the good of Athens.

When they were off Pylos he saw there, in that deserted region, a chance to strike a deadly blow at Sparta. He proposed to fortify Pylos, and establish there Messenians, who, knowing the land and loving it, would be a thorn in the side of Sparta. But the Admirals, Eurymedon and Sophokles, felt that the chief function of the fleet was to save Kerkyra, inasmuch as Athens had entered into the war depending upon the help that this great naval power could give. They refused to stop, telling Demosthenes that there were headlands enough on the shores of Peloponnesus as good as this, if he really wanted to throw away the money of Athens in fortifying them. He had no power of coercion; but he tried every form of persuasion. The men agreed with the Admirals; but he turned to the captains; and when they also refused to help him out he had to abandon his plan and move on with the rest. The relation of Demosthenes to the fleet seems droll. But by his strong personality, aided by luck, he accomplished all, and perhaps more than all, that he had hoped for.

The fleet had hardly put out to sea when, luckily for him, a storm came on, and they were all driven back into the bay for shelter. The storm continued for several days, and after awhile the men by a common impulse began to fortify Pylos. It was a regular lark. They had brought along no tools to cut stones; so they took stones which lay ready at hand and piled them up just as they happened to fit. They used their backs as hods to carry mud, clasping their hands low down behind them and letting their companions load them up. Two short stretches of wall at the north and south ends made Pylos secure from attack on the land side. Another longer one, but not so high, on the sea front at the southwest angle was a sort of lure to invite attack by sea. In front of the wall was the only level space on Pylos; but before one could reach it by sea he must run his ship in close to a belt of jagged rocks, and get across them as best he could. Demosthenes, who was the director of all this jolly activity, frankly told his men that he never meant to fight behind this wall, but in front of it; never allowing a man of the enemy to reach the shore.

In six days the work of fortification was completed; and the Admirals went on, leaving Demosthenes and five of their forty ships to carry out his plan. By good luck his men, who were marines and not very well equipped for land fighting, were immediately re-enforced by a Messenian pirate boat, with a lot of wicker shields on board, and, to crown all, forty heavy armed soldiers (hoplites).

Before a blow was struck this simple lodgment of Demosthenes brought about two great results. The Spartan fleet hastened back to the spot, slipping past the Athenian fleet; and the Spartan army, which had made the annual invasion of Attica, came hastily back to Sparta after only fifteen days of occupation. The fleet occupied the bay, and the land army butted its head in vain against the walls on that side. Then came the attempt which Demosthenes had expected. They tried to land in front of his sea-wall. But as the handful of men in possession held their ground not a Spartan reached the shore, though the gallant Brasidas, who here appears as the simple commander of a trireme, tried it with a daring that nearly cost him his life. For nearly two days this attack continued. It failed as signally as the land attack. The Spartans were at their wits’ ends. They had sent to Asine, a day’s journey distant, for big timbers to make battering-rams and break down the walls toward the mainland. They also landed a force on the island, Sphacteria, to overawe by their proximity the Athenians across the narrow channel, and to prevent any future lodgment of the Athenians on Sphacteria also.

When the Spartan fleet had first appeared Demosthenes had sent two of his five triremes to advise the Athenian Admirals that the plot was thickening; and the Athenian fleet, strengthened to fifty sail, appeared off the entrances of the bay; but seeing both entrances defended by the Spartan fleet and the shore crowded with Spartan soldiers, it put about, and, going back to an island a few miles to the north, passed the night there. This was probably a ruse to throw the Spartans off their guard; for the next day the Athenians reappeared, and with no hesitation drove in at both entrances upon the Spartans, who were evidently not thoroughly prepared. After a long and fierce struggle the victory of the Athenians was decisive. They erected a trophy, gave up the Spartan dead, took possession of the wrecks and many of the sound vessels of the enemy, and sailed at will around the bay and the entrances. The main army of the Spartans lay close at hand; but all their hope of getting materials for battering down Demosthenes’s landward walls, or of starving out his little band, was cut off.

The whole situation was changed at a single blow. The centre of interest shifts to the island, Sphacteria, where the Spartans were now imprisoned. The Athenians thought them sure game, and patrolled the island to cut off escape. The situation was so serious that the highest magistrates of Sparta appeared on the scene, and, after surveying the situation, decided that the only thing to do was to propose a truce. And a truce was immediately agreed upon, all the Spartan ships being given over to the Athenians as a pledge until Spartan envoys could be taken to Athens on an Athenian trireme and secure a permanent treaty of peace.

The envoys went and begged for peace, but the party in power at Athens made too great demands, and the envoys returned re infecta. The Athenians, claiming some slight infraction of the treaty, refused to deliver over the ships.

All interest was now centred on the fate of the Spartans shut up on Sphacteria. Instead of laying down their arms they waited for the Athenians to “come and take them.” The starving process failed, because daring Spartans on shore were found who risked their lives to carry in provisions. Helots, especially, ran every risk, securing freedom as the price of success. The Athenians themselves suffered terribly, inasmuch as they controlled only the sea, and so were forced to take their meals in cramped quarters or in imminent fear of attack by the dreaded Spartan hoplite. More painful still was the lack of good drinking water. They were obliged to scratch away the sand with their hands and drink brackish sea water. The Spartans on the island had a well which afforded much better water. When this strain had lasted nearly two months the patience of the Athenians gave out. But just at this critical time a fire was accidentally started on the island by some Athenians who were cooking their dinner there, out of sight of the Spartans. Nearly the whole island, which was uninhabited and heavily wooded, was burned over. For the first time the Athenians were able to see how few the enemy were, and to watch their movements. Demosthenes, now the soul of every movement, resolved to attack them. But in the meantime tidings of the sad plight and sufferings of the besiegers had been carried to Athens, and a stormy and somewhat amusing scene had taken place in the Athenian Assembly, in which Cleon, the leader of the majority, who had been responsible for the failure of the peace negotiations, was compelled, much against his will, to go to Pylos, as commander, “to show how easy it was to take the Spartans by force.” But he arrived in the nick of time, and, by trusting everything to Demosthenes, he went back to Athens with the captives within the few days in which he had boastfully said he would do it. It was, however, well understood at Athens that the planner and executer of the deed was Demosthenes. Aristophanes, in the Knights, makes Demosthenes say: “Out at Pylos I had kneaded up a Spartan cake, and Cleon, in a most rascally manner, snatched it away and served it up.” Demosthenes landed on the island a force of about fifteen thousand men, mostly light armed, who could skip about over the rocks and burnt trees, inflicting injuries on the Spartan hoplites without suffering much in return. There were only 420 Spartans, and no note is taken of their attendant light armed. If we allow seven such attendants to each of them, which is a usual proportion, we should have a total force of 3,360; but as Thucydides says nothing of light armed troops on the Spartan side, but makes it an affair of hoplites against light armed, there was probably not a large body of auxiliaries present to the Spartans; but allowing the maximum, the opposing forces were in a proportion of five to one. If, however, the light armed attendants were lacking, the proportion was about fifty to one. Never in all Spartan history did their splendid fighting machine better show its superiority than in the slow march from the well at the centre of the island to the “old fort” at the north end. Demosthenes had distributed his light armed, in detachments of several hundred each, all along the line of march. His small force of hoplites, every time it was confronted by the Spartans, fell back at once and gave place to the light armed, who, with arrows and javelins, inflicted severe losses, easily keeping out of reach of the Spartan spears. There was, in fact, no serious loss to chronicle on the Athenian side. But that the little company led by Epitidas should move steadily toward its goal during the whole of a long summer day, half stifled with ashes and smoke, oppressed by raging thirst, surrounded by yelling thousands and pelted by every kind of missile, without the slightest thought of surrender, is perhaps the most brilliant page in the annals of Sparta. However much we may be inclined to throw up our cap at every success of Athens, we must here assign the honors to the vanquished. The movement of the Spartans over that mile and a half reminds us of a lion worried by a pack of yelping hounds.

Epitidas, and after him the second in command, had been killed before the little band reached the fort, which is made in a semicircle around the west side of the peak to which the island rises on the northeast. When they got inside this the attack slackened. But the end came by a turn that one can hardly understand, even with all the explanation afforded by an exact knowledge of the lay of the land. A Messenian captain told the Athenian leaders that they were wasting time and men, but that he knew a way to approach the Spartans in the rear. His suggestion being accepted, he, with a few desperate men, scrambled up a precipice and appeared suddenly on the summit in the rear of the Spartans.

The mystery is how this could have been so unexpected by the Spartans; a single picket posted on the summit, only a few paces distant from the line that they were defending, could have seen the approach of the new enemy. How could they have failed to keep such a watch? But the sudden appearance of the Messenians is regarded as closing the fight. The Athenian commanders preferred to capture rather than kill, and so summoned the survivors to surrender. They then lowered their shields. Their commander at once asked permission to communicate with the Spartan army on the mainland. This was granted; and when the answer came back, “The Lacedemonians bid you act as you think best; but you are not to dishonor yourselves,” they consulted and surrendered. Of the 420 Spartan hoplites, 120 surrendered. That a hundred Spartans had surrendered on the field of battle threw Greece into wild amazement, and broke the spell of Sparta’s supposed invincibility until it was restored again by Agis on the field of Mantineia seven years later.

In modern warfare we consider it folly to throw away life after the battle is absolutely decided; and on Sphacteria we bow our heads reverently to the Spartans who, after a fight never surpassed in the world’s history, dared to surrender and save their lives for the good of Sparta. When, however, we pass over to Pylos we pass to an admiration of Demosthenes, who planting himself in the midst of dangers, outwitted and outfought the enemy in superior numbers; and, by his wise plan, brought Sparta into such a position that, had Athens possessed a statesman wise enough to use it, she might have concluded an honorable peace which would have left her victor in the struggle into which Pericles led her with his eyes wide open. But Cleon let the golden opportunity pass through his fingers. The handful of heroes that were paraded so long in Athens were only a miserable residuum of the lost opportunity.