CHAPTER XIV.
And the Messenians who had friends at Sicyon and at Argos and amongst the Arcadians retired to those places, and those of the family of the priests who performed the mysteries to the Great Goddesses went to Eleusis. And the multitude dispersed to their several nationalities. And the Lacedæmonians first razed Ithome to the ground, and afterwards attacked and captured the other cities. And out of the spoils they set up to Apollo of Amyclæ some brazen tripods: under the first tripod is a statue of Aphrodite, and under the second one of Artemis, and under the third one of Proserpine the daughter of Demeter. These they erected there. And of the Messenian land they gave to the Asinæi, who had been ejected by the Argives, the territory by the sea that they still have: and to the descendants of Androcles, (for Androcles had a daughter and she had sons, and after the death of Androcles they fled to Sparta), they gave what is called Hyamea. And the following conditions were imposed on the Messenians by the Lacedæmonians. First of all they bound them by oath not to revolt or to attempt any revolutionary movement. And next they appointed no stated tribute, but they were to bring to Sparta from the land half its produce. With respect too to the burials of kings and other people in authority, provision was made that the men and women in Messenia should wear black raiment, and a punishment was ordained for those who violated this rule. And as to their exactions from the Messenians they have been described by Tyrtæus: “As asses worn out by long continued toil, carrying to their masters from bitter necessity half of all the fruit the country yields.” And that necessity was laid on them of mourning for their masters’ deaths he has manifested in the following lines, “They and their wives together wailing for their masters, when baneful death seized on any one.”
The Messenians in these circumstances, and with no hope of any kinder treatment from the Lacedæmonians, and thinking death in battle or a wholesale migration from the Peloponnese preferable to their present condition, resolved upon a general rising. And they were mainly induced to this by the young men, who had had no experience of war, and were ambitious, and preferred death in a free country to happiness in all other conditions with slavery. These youths were reared in various parts of Messenia, but the bravest and most numerous were in the neighbourhood of Andania, and among them Aristomenes, who is still honoured among the Messenians as a hero: and the circumstances attending his birth they think rather remarkable. For they say that a demon or god in the form of a dragon had an intrigue with Nicotelea his mother. I have heard the Macedonians say similar things about Olympias, and the Sicyonians about Aristodama. But the difference is that the Messenians do not claim that Aristomenes was the son of Hercules or Zeus, as the Macedonians say that Alexander was the son of Ammon, and as the people of Sicyon say that Aratus was the son of Æsculapius, but most of the Greeks say that Pyrrhus was the father of Aristomenes, though I know that the Messenians call Aristomenes the son of Nicomedes at the libations. He then, being in fall vigour of age and boldness, and other influential persons tried to bring about a general rising. And this was not at first done openly, but they sent secretly to Argos and the Arcadians, to see if they would assist them as energetically as they had done in the former war, bonâ fide and not half-heartedly.