Aristomenes

“ These weapons were arranged so as to form what the Greeks called a trophy, and right under them Aristomenes boldly wrote his name in letters so large that all could see it.
When morning dawned, and the Spartans came as usual into the temple to offer up their morning prayer and sacrifice, they were astonished and dismayed at the sight of this trophy. Aristomenes' bravery was so great that they despaired of conquering him without divine aid, and so they sent to ask an oracle what they should do. ”

“ For eleven years the war lingered on. The Spartans often encamped at the foot of Ira to keep the enemy in check. But again and again Aristomenes broke out of the fortress, and with a band of followers crossed the border and laid waste Laconia. Twice he was taken prisoner and twice he escaped, but the third time he was captured he was carried in triumph to the city of Sparta. With fifty of his countrymen he was flung from Mount Taygetus into a great chasm in the rock below.
The fifty followers of Aristomenes were killed by the fall, but Aristomenes was saved by the gods. ”

“ As in the first war, so in this second war, no decisive victory was gained at first by either side. But legend tells that Aristomenes did many valiant deeds.
Three times he offered a strange sacrifice to the king of the gods, which one who had slain in battle a hundred of the foe was alone permitted to do. The sacrifice was named the Hekatomphonia.
The Spartans, alarmed at the daring of Aristomenes, sent to consult the oracle at Delphi. They were told to send to the famous city of Athens for a leader. Now the Spartans did not wish to do this, for they were not on good terms with the Athenians. ”

“ It was among the youth of Messenia that the hope of the national deliverance was the most intensely cherished. At length, in Andania, the revolt broke forth. A young man, pre-eminent above the rest for birth, for valour, and for genius, was the head and the soul of the enterprise (probably B. C. 679) . His name was Aristomenes. Forming secret alliances with the Argives and Arcadians, he at length ventured to raise his standard, and encountered at Dera, on their own domains, the Spartan force. ”

“ At last Eira, the chief city of Messenia, was betrayed by a foolish woman, while Aristomenes was laid aside by a wound. In spite of this, however, he fought for three days and nights against the Spartans, and at last drew up all the survivors—women as well as men—in a hollow square, with the children in the middle, and demanded a free passage. The Spartans allowed these brave Messenians to pass untouched, and they reached Arcadia. There the dauntless Aristomenes arranged another scheme for seizing Sparta itself, but it was betrayed, and failed. ”

“ Aristomenes, the Achilles of the Alexandrian poet Rhianus (Grote's History of Greece, 1869, ii. 428) , is the legendary hero of the second Messenian War (B.C. 685-668) . Thrice he slew a hundred of the Spartan foe, and thrice he offered the Hekatomphonia on Mount Ithome. ”

“ To complete his treachery, Aristocrates led the flying troops through the Messenians, and threw them into irretrievable confusion; forgetful of the battle, they betook themselves to expostulation and upbraiding of their treacherous allies; and the Lacedæmonians readily surrounded and defeated them with such slaughter, that from the hope of becoming lords of their former masters, they were reduced even to despair of safety. Aristomenes collected from all quarters the scattered remnant of his countrymen, into one new city which he founded on Mount Eira. ”

“ Many of the vanquished Messenians escaped from their country to Arcadia and Argolis. Some of them fled farther, and founded Rhegium in Lower Italy. In the second war, the Messenians revolted against the tyrannical rule of Sparta, and at first, under Aristomenes, were successful, but were afterwards defeated by the Spartans, who were inspirited for the conflict by the war-songs of the Athenian poet, Tyrtaeus. Aristomenes fled to Rhodes. Most of his people were made helots. The Arcadians, after long resistance, succumbed, and came under the Spartan hegemony (about 600 B.C.) . ”

“ And after the Thebans won their victory, they offered Aristomenes’ shield again to Trophonius as a votive offering. There is also a brazen statue of Aristomenes in the race-course at Messene. And not far from the theatre is the temple of Serapis and Isis.
CHAPTER XXXIII. And as you go towards the hill of Ithome, where the Messenians have their citadel, is the spring called Clepsydra. However willing one may be it is a matter of no small difficulty to enumerate all the people who put in the claim that Zeus was born and bred among them. The people of Messene have this tradition among others. ”

“ The answers are extant which were received from Ismenian and Ptoan Apollo, as also from Abæ and Delphi. But the response of Trophonius was in 4 hexameter verses. “Before contending with the foe erect a trophy, decking out the shield, which the ardent Aristomenes of Messene placed in my temple. I will assuredly destroy the host of hostile warriors.” And on the arrival of this oracular response they say that Epaminondas prevailed with Xenocrates to send for the shield of Aristomenes, and he decked it out as a trophy in a place where it would be visible to the Lacedæmonians. ”

“ On these charges 248 he was unanimously condemned, not only by the members of the council, but also by the envoys of foreign nations who were present. And when Aristomenes was about to commence his accusation he brought in a large number of other Greeks of rank also to support him, as well as the Aetolian ambassadors who had come to negotiate a peace, among whom was Dorimachus son of Nicostratus. ”

“ Another tradition represents him as captured and slain by the Spartans during the war (Pliny, Nat. Hist. xi. 187; Val. Maximus i. 8, 15; Steph. Byzant. s.v. Ἀνδανία) . Though there seems to be no conclusive reason for doubting the existence of Aristomenes, his history, as related by Pausanias, following mainly the Messeniaca of the Cretan epic poet Rhianus (about 230 B.C.) , is evidently largely interwoven with fictions. ”

“ And I think it was not so much wine that exasperated Alexander with Clitus, as his seeming to put him down in the presence of many people. And Aristomenes, the tutor of Ptolemy,472 because he went up to the king and woke him as he was asleep in an audience of some ambassadors, gave a handle to the king's flatterers who professed to be indignant on his behalf, and said, "If after your immense state-labours and many vigils you have been overpowered by sleep, he ought to have rebuked you privately, and not put his hands upon you before so many people." ”

“ But there was a traitor in the camp of the Messenians, and one night, soon after the return of their leader, the mountain fortress at Ira was betrayed into the hands of the Spartans.
In the battle that followed, Aristomenes was wounded,93 but gathering together the bravest of his followers, he made a desperate charge through the lines of the enemy and escaped. Some time after he died in Rome, but it is told that two hundred and fifty years later, he was seen on a battlefield fighting against the Spartans. ”

“ Aristomenes also, the master and tutor of King Ptolemæus, for that in the sight of an ambassador he awaked him out of a sleep, and willed him to give ear unto the embassage that was delivered, ministered unto his evil-willers and the flatterers about the court great vantage, who thereupon took occasion to seem discontented in the king's behalf, and thus to say: What if after so many travels that your majesty doth undergo, and your long watching for our sakes, some sleep do overtake you otherwhiles ”

“ Suicide, however, never seems to have been very common among the Greeks. Excepting Cleomenes, I cannot at present recollect any very illustrious either patriot or hero of Greece, who died by his own hand.37 The death of Aristomenes is as much beyond the period of true history as that of Ajax.38 The common story of the death of Themistocles, though within that period, bears upon its face all the marks of a most romantic fable.39 Of all the Greek heroes whose lives have been written by Plutarch, Cleomenes appears to have been the only one who perished in this manner. ”

“ At the end of that time a new race had grown up, ignorant of the evils of war, and too high–spirited to bear their degradation tamely. A gallant leader is seldom wanting to gallant men engaged in a good cause; and Aristomenes might serve as a type for all later heroes, whose exploits [41] belong to the debateable ground which lies between truth and fiction. He was a young Messenian of the royal line, according to the report of his countrymen; but other Greeks, with a more unbounded admiration, related that the hero Pyrrhus, [30] son of Achilles, was his father. ”

“ CHAPTER XXIII. And all the Messenians that were captured at Eira, or in any other part of Messenia, were incorporated by the Lacedæmonians among the Helots: and the people of Pylos and Mothone and all the maritime towns removed in ships, after the capture of Eira, to Cyllene the arsenal of Elis. And from there they sent to the Messenians in Arcadia, wishing them to join them in an expedition to seek some city to dwell in, and bade them make Aristomenes the founder of the colony. ”

“ IV. 33. 2. Aristomenes, according to Pausan. IV. 24. married his sister and daughters to persons at Phigalea, Lepreum, and Heræa. This is alluded to in a verse from the fifth book of Rhianus in Steph. Byz. in v. Φιγάλεια, τὴν μὲν ἀνήγετ ̓ ἄκοιτιν ἐπὶ κραναὴν Φιγάλειαν, viz. Tharyx.647.This circumstance was narrated by Rhianus in the sixth (probably the last) book, in which Atabyrum, a town in Rhodes, was mentioned, Steph. Byz. in v. Ἀτάβυρον.648.Aristotle Polit. II. 6. 8. speaks of wars with Argos, Arcadia, and Messenia, before the time of Lycurgus ”

“ Aristophanes was a natural conservative. His ideal was the Athens of the Persian wars. He disapproved the policy which had made Athenian empire irksome to the allies and formidable to Greece; he detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob-rule; he clave to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. ”

“ Ariston asked again.
"Only the Gods can answer that," Aristotle replied. "It is safe to say that what human ambition can accomplish, he will do. He was my pupil, and there are those who maintain that he knows more than his master!"
Although the philosopher spoke with a smile, there was a trace of irony in his tone that did not escape the alert Athenian.
"You hear that?" he cried, turning to Clearchus. "Here is a boy who begins by conquering his instructor. Where will he end?"
"They say he has ended already, up there among the savages," Chares said lazily. ”

“ The Athenian spirit in its full life and vigour could not brook the thought of a time when it was not, threw a kind of glamour over the past history of Hellas, and universalised its own ideas at the expense alike of contemporary states of Greek society less developed than its own, and of the early life of chief and clan. Thus, to select a literary example, the dramatic spectacles and forensic pleading of Athens underlie the general canons of Aristotle's poetic and rhetorical criticism, and supply the living particulars which his philosophy expands into ideal forms. ”

“ And what then, Aristodemus! Supposest thou, that when the gods give out some oracle to all the Athenians, they mean it not for thee? If, by their prodigies, they declare aloud to all Greece—to all mankind—the things which shall befall them, are they dumb to thee alone? And art thou the only person whom they have placed beyond their care? Believest thou they would have wrought into the mind of man a persuasion of their being able to make him happy or miserable, if so be they had no such power? ”

“ Aristoteles was the man that wrought the revolt, and he had no hard task to persuade the common people; for they were all angry with Cleomenes for not releasing them from their debts as they expected. Accordingly, obtaining fifteen hundred of Antigonus's soldiers, Aratus sailed to Epidaurus; but Aristoteles, not staying for his coming, drew out the citizens, and fought against the garrison of the castle; and Timoxenus, with the Achaeans from Sicyon, came to his assistance. ”

“ O blessed gods!"
But what a sea! It roared and tossed and boiled. While Ariston looked, a ship was picked up and crushed and swallowed. The sea poured up the steep shore for hundreds of feet. Then it rushed back and left its strange fish gasping on the dry land. Great rocks fell from the sky, and steam rose up as they splashed into the water. The sun was growing fainter. The black cloud was coming on. Soon it would be dark. And then what? Ariston lay down where the last huge wave had cooled the ground. "It is all over, Caius," he murmured. "I shall never see Athens again." ”

“ He shall sleep in the temple and sit in the shady porches, and walk in the sacred groves. The wise priests will give him medicines. The god will send healing dreams. Do you know of any such place, Ariston?"
The Greek thought of the temple and garden of Aesculapius on the sunny side of the Acropolis at home in Athens. But he could not speak. He gazed hungrily into Tetreius' eyes. The Roman smiled.
"Ariston, this ship is bound for Athens! All my life I have loved her—her statues, her poems, her great deeds. I have wished that my son might learn from her wise men. ”