woollen bandage round his throat, and pretended that he could not speak, from an attack of quinsy. Some wag remarked that it must be the silver quinsy. The people laughed, but were angry. Such is the story. But, as a fact, Demosthenes did not drop his opposition to Harpalus. It was on his motion, as we have seen, that Harpalus was arrested and his treasure sequestrated.
We left the great orator in exile at Trœzen. He was recalled soon after the death of Alexander in 323 B.C. An attempt was then made once more to rid Greece of the Macedonian ascendancy. It was finally crushed by Antipater in the battle of Crannon in 322 B.C. The conqueror demanded the surrender of the leading anti-Macedonian orators—Demosthenes, of course, among them. Athens from this moment ceased to exist as a free state. A Macedonian garrison was introduced; there was a wholesale disfranchisement of citizens, and a new political constitution was imposed on the city. Demosthenes did not remain to be a witness of this degradation. He had been welcomed back to his native Athens with joyful enthusiasm; now he must leave her for ever. He took refuge in the little island of Calauria, off the coast of Argolis. It was here that he chose to die rather than fall into the hands of the "exile-hunters," as the emissaries of Antipater were called. Within the precincts of an ancient temple of Neptune, regarded of old as an inviolable sanctuary, he swallowed poison, retaining in his last moments sufficient presence of mind to expire outside the sacred enclosure, to which, in Greek belief, death would have been a pollution.
