Demosthenes

Thou canst not be too soon now, said he, in playing the part of Creon in the tragedy and casting this body out without burial.[*](An allusion to the Creon in the Antigone of Sophocles, by whose edict the body of Polyneices was to be left unburied (vv. 26 ff. 191 ff.).) But I, O beloved Poseidon, will depart from thy sanctuary while I am still alive; whereas Antipater and the Macedonians would not have left even thy temple undefiled. So speaking, and bidding someone support him, since he was now trembling and tottering, he had no sooner gone forth and passed by the altar than he fell, and with a groan gave up the ghost.

As for the poison, Ariston says he took it from the pen, as I have said; but a certain Pappus, from whom Hermippus took his story, says that when he had fallen by the side of the altar, there was found written in the scroll the beginning of a letter, Demosthenes to Antipater, and nothing more;

and that when men were amazed at the suddenness of his death the Thracians who had stood at the door told the story that he took the poison into his hand from a cloth and put it to his mouth and swallowed it; and that they themselves, strange to say, had supposed that what he swallowed was gold; and that the little maid who served him, when inquiries were made by Archias, said that Demosthenes had long worn that cloth girdle as a safeguard against his enemies.

And even Eratosthenes himself says that Demosthenes kept the poison in a hollow bracelet, and that he wore this bracelet as an ornament upon his arm. But the divergent stories of all the others who have written about the matter, and they are very many, need not be recounted;