Greece -- Biography -- Early works to 1800; Rome -- Biography -- Early works to 1800
XXXI. A short time before my own first visit to Athens, the following
incident is said to have taken place. A soldier, being summoned by his
commanding officer to be tried for some offence, placed all his money in
the hands of the statue of Demosthenes, which are represented as clasped
together. Beside the statue grew a small plane-tree, and several leaves
of this tree, either blown there by chance, or placed there on purpose
by the soldier, concealed and covered up the money, so that it remained
there a long while. At last the soldier returned and found it, and as
the circumstance became widely known, many literary men seized the
opportunity of making epigrams on this striking proof of the
incorruptible honesty of Demosthenes.
Demades did not long enjoy the honour which he had won, for the gods, in
order to avenge Demosthenes, led him to Macedonia, where he perished
miserably by the hands of those whose favour he had so basely courted.
He had long been disliked by the Macedonian court, and at last a clear
proof of his treasonable practices was discovered in an intercepted
letter of his to Perdikkas, in which he urged him to seize the throne of
Macedonia and save the Greeks, who were now hanging by an old and rotten
thread (meaning Antipater). On the evidence of this letter, Deinarchus
of Corinth charged him with treason, and Kassander was so infuriated at
his perfidy that he first stabbed Demades's own son while in his
father's arms, and then ordered him to be put to death. Thus, by
inflicting on him the greatest misery which a man could suffer, he
proved to him the truth of that saying of Demosthenes which he had never
before believed, that traitors first of all betray themselves. You now,
my friend Sossius, know all that I have either read or heard concerning
the life of Demosthenes.
LIFE OF CICERO.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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