The name εἵλωτες denotes captives taken in war[64]. It was believed by the Greeks that the Spartans, when first they made their conquest of Laconia, reduced some of those whom they conquered to the condition of Helots as above described: and the account given by them of the institutions of Lycurgus implies that the lawgiver foresaw some danger such as would arise from a large servile population. But if the Helots were dangerous in the age of Lycurgus, they became far more dangerous after the Spartans had conquered the Messenian country that lay to the west of Laconia and of the range of Taygetus. The Messenians were Dorians like the Spartans, and like them had conquered a large district of the Peloponnesus. Against these neighbours and kinsmen the Spartans waged two long wars, one probably in the eighth century B.C. and the other probably in the seventh[65]. In the second war they were completely successful, and at the end of it they reduced the Messenians, who had for some two or three centuries been a free and independent Dorian people, to the condition of Helots[66]. But to hold the territory was almost as hard as to win it: and to keep the Messenians enslaved was almost as hard as to enslave them. The territory is separated from Laconia by a chain of mountains, and the new serfs were more dangerous than the original Helots because they remembered their freedom. From the time of the conquest of Messenia the little Spartan nation stood in perpetual danger of a great servile revolt. When, in 464 B.C., a rebellion of the Helots actually occurred, it imperilled the existence of the state. The Spartans at one time despaired of putting it down without external aid, and, when the Athenians offered them the services of an armed force, accepted the offer. Subsequently, when their jealousy of Athens revived and they resolved to rely on their own unaided efforts, they had to spend all their strength for nine years before they compelled the Helots in their stronghold on Mount Ithomê to capitulate on condition that they should depart from the Peloponnesus and never return[67]. Even after these brave men had gone into exile, there were plenty of Helots left to keep the Spartans in anxiety: and Thucydides in telling of the treacherous murder of the two thousand Helots in 424 B.C. remarks incidentally that "at all times most of the institutions of the Lacedæmonians were framed with a view to the Helots, to guard against their insurrections[68]." [64] See Smith's _Dict. Antiq._, third edition, article Helotes. [65] The dates of the Messenian wars cannot be determined with certainty. See the note at the end of this chapter. [66] Pausanias (III. 20. 6) expressly says that those serfs who were acquired by the Spartans not in their original conquest of Laconia but subsequently (that is to say at the conquest of Messenia) were Messenian Dorians.