[730] Isokratês (Archidamus), Or. vi. pp. 121-122.
[731] Strabo (vi. p. 257) gives a similar account of the sacrilege and murderous conduct of the Messenian youth at the temple of Artemis Limnatis. His version, substantially agreeing with that of the Lacedæmonians, seems to be borrowed from Antiochus, the contemporary of Thucydidês, and is therefore earlier than the foundation of Messênê by Epameinondas, from which event the philo-Messenian statements take their rise. Antiochus, writing during the plenitude of Lacedæmonian power, would naturally look upon the Messenians as irretrievably prostrate, and the impiety here narrated would in his mind be the natural cause why the divine judgments overtook them. Ephorus gives a similar account (ap. Strabo. vi. p. 280).
Compare Herakleidês Ponticus (ad calcem Cragii De Rep. Laced. p. 528) and Justin, iii. 4.
The possession of this temple of Artemis Limnatis,—and of the Ager Dentheliates, the district in which it was situated,—was a subject of constant dispute between the Lacedæmonians and Messenians after the foundation of the city of Messênê, even down to the time of the Roman emperor Tiberius (Tacit. Annal. iv. 43). See Stephan. Byz. v. Δελθάνιοι; Pausan. iii. 2, 6; iv. 4, 2; iv. 31, 3. Strabo, viii. p. 362.
From the situation of the temple of Artemis Limnatis, and the description of the Ager Dentheliates, see Professor Ross, Reisen im Peloponnes, i. pp. 5-11. He discovered two boundary-stones with inscriptions, dating from the time of the early Roman emperors, marking the confines of Lacedæmon and Messênê; both on the line of the highest ridge of Taygetus, where the waters separate east and west, and considerably to the eastward of the temple of Artemis Limnatis, so that at that time the Ager Dentheliates was considered a part of Messenia.
I now find that Colonel Leake (Peloponnesiaca, p. 181) regards these Inscriptions, discovered by Professor Ross, as not proving that the temple of Artemis Limnatis was situated near the spot where they were found. His authority weighs much with me on such a point, though the arguments which he here employs do not seem to me conclusive.
[732] It is, perhaps, to this occasion that the story of the Epeunakti, in Theopompus, referred (ap. Athenæ. vi. p. 271),—Helots adopted into the sleeping-place of their masters, who had been slain in the war, and who were subsequently enfranchised.
The story of the Partheniæ, obscure and unintelligible as it is, belongs to the foundation of the colony of Taras, or Tarentum (Strabo, vi. p. 279).
[733] See Plutarch, De Superstitione, p. 168.
[734] See Pausan. iv. 6-14.