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October 4, 2008
Imagine That
by Victor Davis Hanson
Times Literary Supplement

Review of The Ancient Messenians by Nino Luraghi (Cambridge University Press, pp.389)

One of the mysteries of Greek history surrounds the status and nature of the indentured serfs, or helots (“those taken”) of Messenia, in the south-western quadrant of the Peloponnese. Until their liberation by the Theban general Epaminondas in the winter of 369 B.C., an entire people, of some sort, had been coerced en masse to produce food for the Spartan military state — or at least that is the scenario that modern classical scholarship had usually assumed.

While Messenia is not often at the centre of narratives of Ancient Greece, the helots nevertheless may explain a great deal of the peculiar history both of the Peloponnese and Greece in general. During the rise of the Greek polis in the middle of the eighth century B.C., most communities met increased population pressures by sending out overseas colonists, or by turning to intensification of agriculture and the incorporation of once marginal land at home — or by all three. But Sparta seems to have responded in atypical fashion, and its eighth-century decision made all the difference. The Spartan state, whether or not under the mythical lawgiver Lycurgus, expanded to the west beyond Mount Taygetos into the neighbouring region of Messenia, subjugated its Greek-speaking population, and introduced a system of serfdom.

That aberrant way of feeding its growing population explained in turn the later peculiar nature of Sparta itself. Freed through helotage from the burdens of yeoman agriculture, its male citizen population evolved into a military caste, achieving singular martial excellence through constant training — which, in circular fashion, was critical if such a small population were to maintain control over tens of thousands of restless serfs across the mountains.

But who were these Ancient Messenians, and how and why were they enslaved? Were they indigenous people of Messenia, disaffected Spartans, or some sort of kindred Laconians? And how, if at all, did they maintain a distinct identity when subjugated by the Spartans for some three-and-a-half centuries?

In the past there have appeared excellent regional histories of Messenia, but few historians have explored the language, culture and sense of self of the Messenians themselves, mysteries that hinge on interpretation of much later narratives in the Roman-era geographical writer Pausanias, and on numerous archaeological finds and surveys of the modern Messenian countryside. Now Nino Luraghi — the author of several studies of Ancient Greek identity, ethnic history and politics — attempts to offer a cultural history of the Messenians, emphasizing the manner in which they constructed an identifiable and continuous cultural history.

Luraghi argues that there need not have been a separate notion of Messenia before the eighth-century Spartan conquest, and that no pre-existing idea of nationhood is necessary to explain later extreme Messenian nationalism and the frequent revolt of the helots — especially the famous rebellions of the 460s and the unrest inspired by Athenian intrigue during the Peloponnesian War. Instead, their collective subservient status, and resentment over economic and cultural exploitation by the Spartans from the eighth century on, may just as believably explain the solidarity of the helots, who were always incrementally fabricating a mythic nationalist history. The later claims of an autochthonous Messenian people, dating from the Heroic Age, with distinct gods, shrines and heroes (whether an Aristomenes or Kresphontes) were mostly due to the myth-making of the fourth century B.C., following the liberation by Epaminondas. Even greater elaboration and invention came during the region’s prosperity in the Hellenistic Age.

In any case, archaeological remains and the data from surveys are at odds with the later literary narrative, and Luraghi skillfully uses the material record as evidence that Messenians were not all that different from those who lived nearby in other areas of Laconia. Even the so-called exiled Western Messenians of Sicily had, in fact, very little connection at all with the settlements of the western Peloponnese.

Luraghi argues that, despite the mythmaking, “Messenia” was neither a distinct culture before the Spartan conquest, nor completely invented after its liberation, but in fact may have just been an outland of Laconia, and its people, in custom and habit, may originally not have been all that distinct from those Lacedaemonians who inhabited other parts of the southern Peloponnese. Instead, the condition of helotage in the western Peloponnese, and distance from Sparta, seem to have gradually created the notion of “Messenians”, an effort over centuries to reflect some sort of solidarity among indentured Peloponnesians who increasingly became disenfranchised, exploited and reduced to helots by kindred Spartans. Indeed, Luraghi’s meticulous review of the archaeological evidence of Messenia makes it hard to believe that distinct peoples were ever enslaved abruptly en masse by foreign Spartan conquerors.

He has assembled a great deal of literary and archaeological evidence, and in lieu of the paucity of extended narrative history, draws heavily on contemporary anthropological theory, especially the work of Fredrik Barth and Reinhard Wenskus. And while Luraghi succeeds in showing that most of what we know about the Messenians was constructed in the Hellenistic period, and was not a result of an ongoing Messenian identity, readers will find his argument slow going.

The prose can devolve at times into dated, late twentieth-century postmodernese. It is no caricature to encounter on nearly every page unreadable sentences such as this: “Apart from the centrality of ascription for the constitution of an ethnic group, which in mutated form is still crucial to current definitions of the ethnic group, both Barth and Wenskus agreed that ethnicity is often an instrument employed by leaders or elites to mobilize larger groups of people towards specific goals”, or “Such dialectic of conservation and construction cannot obviously be subsumed under the seductive but imprecise heading ‘invention of tradition’.”

While Luraghi offers a continuous history from mythical to late Roman times, many historians would have preferred far more discussion of the two central events in Messenian history: the creation of the original helot system in the eighth century, and its destruction by Epaminondas in 369 — the latter surely one of the landmark events of classical antiquity.

Unfortunately, Luraghi offers little reflection about the effect of the helots’ plight on the pulse of Greek history. In this regard, the fourth-century rhetorician Alcidamas, who stated that “nature made no man a slave”, is mostly relegated to footnotes, while Epaminondas merits only the same attention as later discussions of Messenia in Roman times. Likewise, I would have appreciated Luraghi’s own thoughts on why it mattered whether hundreds of thousands of serfs did or did not have verifiable claims to a distinct historical identity, when their overseers at least saw them as an inferior collective caste. Yet, beneath Nino Luraghi’s dense prose, anthropological theorizing and long footnotes, there is buried a remarkable thesis that is well worth the pain of its extraction.