Messene Redeemed

About the show

An Old and a Young Reciter frame two episodes in Messenia’s wars against Sparta. The first dramatizes Aristodemus’s sacrifice of his daughter Laodice and the eventual defeat and enslavement of the Messenians. The second follows Aristomenes’s resistance, the doomed defense of Eira, and the people’s exile. The reciters bring the history forward to the 369 BC return of the exiles and founding of a new Messene.