Note 218 — BOOK IV
Evelyn S. (Evelyn Shirley) Shuckburgh translation
The hero of the second Messenian war, B.C. 685-668 (Pausan. 4, 14-24). The story told by Pausanias, who also quotes these verses, is that Aristocrates, king of the Arcadians, twice played the traitor to Aristomenes, the Messenian champion: once at the battle of the Great Trench, and again when Aristomenes renewed the war after his escape from the Pits at Sparta; and that on the second occasion his own people stoned him to death, and set up this pillar in the sacred enclosure of Zeus on Mount Lycaeus.