The Dorians in Messenia controlled the Plain of Stenyclarus and its surrounding heights; the Dorian Spartans of Laconia, the peninsula of Taenarus up to Dentheliatis and also the region in the north-east angle of the Gulf of Messenia. The borders between the Dorians of Messenia and Laconia were defined by the allocation of winter and summer pasturage on the slopes of mount Taygetus. The two groups celebrated a joint festival and sacrifice at the tribal shrine of Artemis at Limnae in north Dentheliatis, not far from the borders of Messenia. The rest of Messenia was inhabited by Achaeans.

War started with each side invoking acts of sacrilege by the other at the shrine of Artemis which we have just mentioned. One tradition made Teleclus plot the murder of leading Messenians at the shrine, only to be hoist with his own petard. The Messenians, for their part, were said to have raped Spartan virgins who had come over to the shrine to do sacrifice. Alcamenes, Teleclus' successor, attacked Messenia, whose kings at the time (shortly after the middle of the 7th century B.C.) were Antiochus and Androcles. There were those Messenians who were for an accommodation with the Spartans. They did not prevail, however, and were forced to quit the Peloponnese and found Rhegium. Some Spartans, too, questioned the rightness of attacking fellow-Dorian Messenians. But king Polydorus was expressing the will of the majority when he asserted: "we are attacking a land that is not divided into allotments". Sparta was, as we know, plagued at this time by internal conflict, the chief reason for this being the demands of the landless for a redistribution of land. Consequently, the Spartans wanted to acquire the Stenyclarus plain so as to provide for the landless. Pausanias' account of the events of the war is drawn from later works, whose reliability is suspect. At any rate, uit seems to have needed twenty years to put down resistance among the Messenians, who in the end quit their stronghold of Ithome.