But it was a province capable at any time of revolt. The two early “Messenian Wars,” of the eighth and seventh centuries, were the stepping stones by which Sparta rose to a place of power in the Peloponnesus. Beset by agrarian difficulties, she needed more land, and the most fertile land of Greece was to be had for a little blood. Of the second war we have a few fragmentary memorials in the contemporaneous martial verses of Tyrtæus. But in general both wars would be almost obliterated from history were it not for the fact that Pausanias, having access to some late prose and poetry which repeated the native legends, in an unwonted mood of imaginative sympathy gave himself up to recounting the pathetic efforts of Messenia toward freedom. There is the usual material: heroes and fortresses, Aristodemus and Ithome in the first war, Aristomenes and Eira in the second; oracles and portents; fair maidens and faithless wives; kings and cowherd lovers; storms and marvellous escapes; courage and despair. Aristomenes, as Pausanias says, shines out like Achilles in the Iliad, “the first and greatest glory of the Messenian name.” But in spite of his heroic and prolonged defence of Eira, the Messenians by the sixth century were serfs of the Spartans, paying to their masters a half of all the produce raised by their own hands from their own farms,—asses, Tyrtæus called them, worn by intolerable loads. In the fifth century they took advantage of an earthquake and an insurrection of slaves at Sparta to rise once more and encamp on Ithome. They were defeated and obliged to choose between serfdom and exile. But by this time their petty rebellions had become important in the affairs of the greater powers of Greece. Ithome was the rock on which the political life of Cimon of Athens suffered shipwreck. During the next ninety years the nationalism of Messenia was a homeless and restless force, seeking, wherever it might, to harm Sparta and to glorify itself. During the Peloponnesian War the Messenians by their knowledge of the country materially aided the Athenians in the dramatic battle of Sphacteria off the Messenian Pylos, and the surrender of the Spartans, Thucydides says, amazed all Hellas.