i.e. "To our king Theopompus beloved of the gods, to whom we owed our conquest of the broad plains of Messenia[92]." The subjugation of Messenia must have been a very difficult task: the country like the other natural divisions of Greece is protected by mountains and it was defended by a brave and numerous race of Dorians. Tyrtæus tells us that one of the wars against Messenia was carried on continuously for nineteen years[93]. [92] Quoted by Pausanias (IV. 6). [93] Tyrtæus, Fragment 4. As the conquest of Messenia is a rare if not a unique example in Greece after the purely legendary age of a permanent conquest effected in spite of the obstacles interposed by a mountain range, it is worth while to take notice of the geography. The Spartans certainly did not cross Taygetus, whose lowest pass, now known as the Langada Pass, is about five thousand feet above the sea (Neuman und Partsch, _Physikalische Geographie von Griechenland_, p. 181 note): to the north of Taygetus they could cross without any trouble from the valley of the Eurotas to the valley of the Alpheius (see the page just referred to): but before they could reach Messenia they still had to march three or four miles up a valley with mountains on either side of it and then to cross a barren sparsely wooded ridge which unites Taygetus with Mount Lycæus. The ascent of the ridge takes an ordinary traveller half an hour, so that the height of it will be about five or six hundred feet. See Bædeker's _Greece_, p. 283. (2) We are informed by Plutarch[94] that, long after the establishment of the Lycurgean constitution, the assembly of the Spartiatæ took to a practice of distorting and perverting the resolutions laid before them by omitting or inserting clauses, and therefore the reigning kings Polydorus and Theopompus added to the constitution a new rule which enacted that "if the people chose crookedly, the elders and the kings should have the final decision[95]." Thus the general assembly was rendered incapable of insisting on measures of its own initiation: though it probably retained a right of veto on all measures which the council might propose and was consulted whenever the state had to decide whether it should undertake a great and important war[96]. [94] Plutarch, _Lycurgus_, 6. [95] Plutarch, _Lycurgus_, 6. [96] For example in 432 B.C. it was the assembly that decided on war against Athens (Thucydides I. 67 and 87). The kings however, until about 500 B.C., still had the right to engage in a foreign war, if they chose, simply on their own responsibility (Herodotus VI. 56).