But before I write the history of this war, and the actions and sufferings entailed by it upon both parties by Providence, I wish to relate in their order the exploits of Aristomenes the Messenian hero. For this war between the Lacedæmonians and their allies and the Messenians and their mercenaries did not get its name from the attacking force, as the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, but was called the Messenian war from the disasters which befell the Messenians, just as the war at Ilium got called Trojan and not Grecian, so it was in this war, which Rhianus of Bene and Myron of Priene have celebrated, the former in poetry, the latter in prose. Neither of them however have narrated fully the events of the war from beginning to end, but Myron has described the capture of Amphea and its consequences up to the death of Aristodemus, and Rhianus has not touched at all the commencement of the war, but only what eventually happened to the Messenians in consequence of their quarrel with the Lacedæmonians, and he has not described even the whole of this, but only what took place after the battle which they fought at what was called _the great trench_; and the hero Aristomenes on whose account only I mentioned Rhianus and Myron, and who was the first and foremost in bringing the name of Messene to honour, this hero (I say) has been introduced by Myron into his history, and by Rhianus into his poem, in which Aristomenes is as much lauded as Achilles by Homer in the Iliad. As these two have given such different accounts, I am obliged to accept one of them and not both together. Rhianus appears to me to speak more probably about the age of Aristomenes. But Myron, as one can learn in other particulars and not least in the history of this Messenian war, does not with sufficient accuracy test the truth or at least probability of what he relates. For he states that Aristomenes slew Theopompus, the king of the Lacedæmonians, a little before the death of Aristodemus, whereas we know that Theopompus did not die in battle or in any other way before the end of the war. And in fact Theopompus concluded the war, as the elegiac lines of Tyrtæus bear me out, ‘To our king Theopompus god-beloved, Through whom we took Messene spacious town.’ Aristomenes therefore in my opinion was in the second Messenian war, and I shall relate in detail all about him when I come to that part of my subject.