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. CHAPTER XV.