A traveller, making for Pylos on his way to Messene-in-Sicily, arrives at Ithome, and is surprised to find a new Messene being built near the old site, to the music of flute-players.
The Old Reciter resumes, telling of the deaths in battle of Leon and King Euphaes,[9] the hopes raised, then dashed, by the Pythia's second prophecy (the hundred tripods episode[10]), the appearance of Laodice to her father in a dream, Aristodemus' suicide on her tomb,[11] and the defeat and enslavement of the Messenians (c.724 BC).
A Young Reciter enters and, in swifter metre, takes up the story of Aristomenes' revolt at Andania fifty years later in the Second War of independence (c.685 BC).
He sings of Aristomenes' guerrilla raids into Laconia, his placing one night of a Spartan shield (defiantly inscribed) on the temple of Athena in Lacedaemon,[12] his subsequent capture with comrades, wounded.
[13] He finds his way out by following a scavenging fox, returns "from the dead", gains revenge,[14] and leads the Messenians to the stronghold of Eira (c.679 BC).
Theoclus the Seer tells him that the Pythia's third prophecy, the riddle – – is now fulfilled, despite precautions: for he has seen a goat-fig dragging branches in the swollen stream.
The Old Reciter's "epic" narrative is in rhyming hexameters, with varying caesura: The two dramatized acts are mainly in blank verse: There are also four lyrical choruses, in a range of metres.
Lucas equates the second envoy returned from Delphi with the young man Pausanias said was in love with Aristodemus' daughter, and who tried to save her.
[22] Here he stated that he found the story of Messenian heroism more moving than that of Thermopylae, and likened Messene to Poland, which "kept its individuality till it rose again centuries after from the tomb".
[23] The poem was written in the summer of 1938[3] "as the encroaching shadows of Nazi Germany darkened over Europe", and revised in the winter of 1939-40 "when the shame of the Peace of Munich had been redeemed by the courage of September 1939".
[24] Dedicated "To the sorrows and hopes of Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Finland, Norway, Holland and Belgium" (France fell as the book went to press) and published during the Battle of Britain, it had clear contemporary relevance.
[21][26] Joan Bennett in The Cambridge Review, remarking that Lucas had made himself "master of the old poetic techniques", described the poem as "written always with scholarly competence, often with lyrical grace, and, here and there, with dramatic power".
[27] Andrew Wordsworth in Time and Tide saw it primarily as drama, calling it "a moving play" that "aroused bravery and hope in the reader", and one that "could well be performed by intelligent amateurs".
By going back to the account in Pausanias, it observed, "[Lucas] has hit upon some singularly lively materials for a drama", and "a noble hero in Aristomenes".