After Ithome’s truce, Athens granted Naupactus to the departing Messenians. Oars dipped in the Corinthian Gulf as exiles founded a new base under Athenian protection. Pausanias records the gift; Thucydides charts the fallout.
What Happened
Naupactus sits on the north shore of the Corinthian Gulf, a harbor that looks south toward Achaea and west toward the open Ionian Sea. When the Messenians filed out of Ithome under truce, they did not vanish. They reappeared here. Pausanias notes it simply: “The Athenians… gave Naupactus to the Messenians besieged in Ithome” [2]. The politics were anything but simple.
Athens gained a garrison of motivated allies in a strategic port within a day’s sail of the Peloponnese. The creak of oarlocks in Naupactus’ roadstead signaled more than livelihoods; it signaled leverage. From here, Messenians could raid Peloponnesian coasts, ferry messages, and tie Athenian sea power to a community with grievances against Sparta as old as Eira [2][9].
The settlement’s human texture was vivid. Families who had lived on Eira’s terraces and Ithome’s walls now lashed their belongings into bundles and learned to read tides instead of goat paths. Children who had fallen asleep to the clank of siege tools now heard gulls and the slap of wavelets on hulls. The azure water, framed by the mountains of Aetolia and the Peloponnese, became their moat and their road.
In Sparta, the news stung. A rebel population that had defied a siege was now in a harbor guarded by Athens, within sight across the gulf from Corinthian shipping lanes and not far from the approaches to Patrae and Dyme. Thucydides would later assemble these details into a narrative of polarization: the Athenians’ willingness to host enemies of Sparta was both symptom and cause of a breach that widened into armed conflict [9][20].
Naupactus rapidly knit into Athenian strategy. As the First Peloponnesian War took shape in the 460s–440s, having a Messenian outpost in the gulf meant Athenian triremes had friends in a place that pinches Peloponnesian communications. The settlement turned a truce clause into a strategic thorn.
Pausanias’ brief sentence thus stands as a pivot. The path from Andania and Stenyclerus to Ithome turned seaward, and the creak of Spartan siege engines gave way to the creak of Athenian hulls. A people who had learned to make time their ally on a mountain now learned to make distance their ally on the water.
Why This Matters
Granting Naupactus to Messenians converted Sparta’s internal revolt into Athens’ external asset. It gave Athens a loyal community in a harbor from which to project power into the Peloponnese, complicating Spartan maritime security and adding a human symbol to the ideological split between the two cities [2][9].
The chapter is pure “Fear as Foreign Policy.” Sparta’s fear-driven truce opened a door that Athens walked through, reshaping the map. The resettled Messenians became instruments of deterrence and harassment, a floating Ithome lodged at the gulf’s throat [2][9][20].
In the larger arc, Naupactus feeds directly into the alignments of the First Peloponnesian War. The city appears again and again in operations and diplomacy—proof that a decision taken to end a siege can reverberate along sea lanes for a generation [9][12].
Historians rely on Pausanias for the factual kernel and on Thucydides for its strategic interpretation. Together, they show how displacement becomes policy and how policy becomes geography [2][9].
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People Involved
Key figures who played a role in Athenians Settle the Messenians at Naupactus
Cimon
Cimon, son of Marathon’s victor Miltiades, rose as Athens’ leading commander of the 470s and 460s BCE, taking Eion and Scyros and winning the great victory at the Eurymedon. A conservative, he championed alliance with Sparta. When a devastating earthquake in 464 BCE triggered a helot and Messenian rising at Mount Ithome, Cimon led thousands of Athenian hoplites to aid Sparta—only to be dismissed for suspected “innovations.” The humiliation cracked the alliance and doomed his policy. In the Messenian Wars’ long arc, Cimon is the hinge: his failed mediation turned Spartan fear of helots into Athenian suspicion of Sparta.
Pausanias
Pausanias, the 2nd‑century CE traveler, wrote Description of Greece, a ten‑book tour of landscapes, sanctuaries, and stories. Wandering through refounded Messene and the shadow of Mount Ithome, he stitched local lore to monumental remains, preserving the saga of Aristomenes, the siege of Mount Eira, and the long Spartan domination. His pages are the principal thread connecting modern readers to the Messenian Wars’ human texture. In a conflict where Spartan fear and Messenian memory wrestled for centuries, Pausanias made memory legible.
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