[Gutenberg 52304] • Wonderful Escapes

Excerpt from Wonderful Escapes: Revised From the French of F. Bernard and Original Chapters Added

Aristomenes, the Messenian general, fighting at the head of his troops against very superior numbers of the Lacede monians, commanded by the two kings of Sparta, received a severe blow on the head from a stone, and fell insensible, and to all appearance dead. He was taken prisoner, with fifty of his soldiers, and dragged to Sparta, where the Lace demonians condemned them all to be thrown into the Coeada, a hideous gulf formed by a fissure in the earth, in whose depths already lay the bones of hundreds of criminals who had been put to death. The barbarous sentence was actually carried out and Aristomenes, with all his surviving soldiers, was hurled into the gulfl The latter perished to a man in the fall; but their general, on this as on so many other occasions, was saved - as the historian Pausanias has it, by the favour of a god. The most enthusiastic chroniclers of his exploits say that an eagle flying towards him sustained his body on its extended wings, and thus bore him unharmed to the bottom of the ravine. A happy chance revealed to him a means of egress from this dismal prison. When he reached the bottom, he lay for some time on the ground, wrapped in his mantle, and in momentary expectation of death. He scarcely stirred from this position for two B.

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