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.
But however flimsy the history of those past centuries, the walls of the new city are solid reality. Pausanias records that "the first day was devoted to prayer and sacrifice; but on the following days they proceeded to rear the circuit wall, and to build houses and sanctuaries within." Why did he not say "the following _years_"? These walls are so extensive, as well as so massive, that one wonders whether they could have been built in less than five years. But there was every reason that the wall should be built at once, to secure the new city against the attacks of Sparta; and we have so many cases of rapid wall-building on the part of the Greeks that we can believe almost any feat ascribed to them in this line. Pausanias recognizes these walls as something extraordinary, saying: "I have not seen the walls of Babylon, nor the Memnonian walls at Susa in Persia, nor have I heard of them from persons who have seen them; but Ambrosos in Phokis, Byzantium, and Rhodes are fortified in the best style; and yet the walls of Messene are stronger than theirs." A great deal of this circuit wall, over five miles in extent, has now disappeared; but, on the north side the Arcadian gate, with adjacent towers and lines of wall, not only justifies Pausanias's admiration, but makes the visitor of to-day stand long in mute astonishment. The walls of Tiryns are of more gigantic blocks; but they made simply an enclosure of a palace.