The first Messenian war had lasted twenty years, with varying success and failure; but at that point the Delphic oracle told the Messenians that the party which first dedicated a hundred tripods in the sanctuary of Ithomian Zeus would surely win. The Messenians were elated, thinking that surely nobody could do this but themselves, since they held that sanctuary; but to make sure of it, since bronze was scarce, they at once set about making the tripods of wood. But the oracle leaked out in Sparta; and "an insignificant fellow, but with brains," made a hundred little clay tripods, and, slinging them over his shoulder in a bag, went up to Ithome as a hunter, escaping notice by his "mere insignificance"; and after dark crept into the sanctuary and set up his little tripods around the altar of Zeus. When the Messenians saw them in the morning they had not a doubt that all was lost. The king, Aristodemos, incontinently committed suicide. But others fought on hopelessly to the bitter end, losing all their generals and men of prominence. The second war, of little less duration, came to an end with another Delphic oracle. The great fortress Eira on the northern border had been stoutly defended for years, when the Pythian priestess said: "When a he-goat drinks Neda's eddying water I will save Messene no longer, for destruction is near." For a time there was great hustling to keep the he-goats away from the River Neda. But one day a seer noticed a wild fig-tree, which in Messenian parlance was called _tragos_, a he-goat, growing crooked, and bending over the Neda so as to brush the water with the tips of its leaves. He showed this to the general, Aristomenes, who agreed with him that all was lost; but instead of committing suicide like the leader in the former war, he fought on like a real hero, and even after the cause was lost became a terror to the Spartans on their own side of Taygetos. One wonders whether a people ever really believed that the issue of great wars turned on such portents. Such yarns may have been spun several centuries after the events, by the more or less mendacious historians, to whom Pausanias, in his character of historian, refers as his sources from which he drew his pure history of Messenia.