10. The first war is distinctly stated by Tyrtæus to have lasted nineteen years, and in the twentieth the enemy left their country, and fled from the mountain Ithome.(607) The same authority also gives the time which elapsed between the first and second wars, viz., that the grandfathers were engaged in the first, the grandchildren in the second.(608) The date of the first war is fixed by Polychares, who is stated to have been the author of it,(609) having been conqueror in the race at the 4th Olympiad(610) (764 B.C.); and it agrees well with this date that Eumelus, who was contemporary with Archias the founder of Syracuse (in the 5th Olympiad), composed a poem for _free_ Messenia. Pausanias places the commencement (we know not on what grounds) at Olymp. 9. 2, (743 B.C.) the termination nineteen years later, Olymp. 14. 1. (724 B.C.) The interval between the two wars he states (though on what authority we know not, and contrary to Tyrtæus) to have been thirty-nine years;(611) so that the second would have lasted from Olymp. 23. 4. to Olymp. 28. 1. (or from 685 to 668 B.C.)(612) We shall, however, find hereafter that the date of this war was probably later by several years, though not so late as Diodorus fixed it, according to whom the war began in Olymp. 35. 3.(613) We also know from Tyrtæus that the Spartan king who completed the subjugation of Messenia was Theopompus.(614) Now, with respect to the origin of this war, it may be first traced in the increase of power, which Sparta, before the beginning of the Olympiads, owed to the exertions of its king Teleclus; this prince having succeeded in subduing the neighbouring city of Amyclæ, and in reducing several other Achæan towns to a state of dependence on Sparta.(615) Indeed, if we correctly understand an insulated notice,(616) Teleclus razed the town of Nedon, on the frontiers of Messenia and Laconia,(617) and transplanted its inhabitants to the towns of Pœessa, Echeiæ, and Tragis. Hence arose border wars between the Dorians at Sparta and those at Stenyclarus. The temple of Artemis Limnatis,(618) the possession of which was disputed between the two nations (though its festival was common to both), afforded, as may be discovered from the romance of Pausanias,(619) the immediate ground for the war. For even in the reign of Tiberius the Lacedæmonians supported their claim to this temple by ancient annals and oracles;(620) while the Messenians, on the other hand, brought forward the document already quoted, according to which this temple, together with the whole territory of Dentheleatis, in which it was situated, belonged to them. Dissensions in Messenia must have hastened the breaking out of the war, since it is certain that Hyamia, one of the five provinces of Messenia, was given by the Spartans to the Androclidæ, a branch of the family of the Æpytidæ.(621) The history of the first war contains traces of a lofty and sublime poetical tradition: for