[146] Demosthenes and Tully both died for their oratory; Demosthenes gave himself poison, to avoid being carried to Antipater, one of Alexander's captains, who had then made himself master of Athens. Tully was murdered by M. Antony's order, in return for those invectives he made against him. [147] The Latin of this couplet is a famous verse of Tully's, in which he sets out the happiness of his own consulship, famous for the vanity and the ill poetry of it; for Tully, as he had a good deal of the one, so he had no great share of the other. [148] The orations of Tully against M. Antony were styled by him "Philippics," in imitation of Demosthenes; who had given that name before to those he made against Philip of Macedon. [149] This is a mock account of a Roman triumph. [150] Babylon, where Alexander died. [151] Xerxes is represented in history after a very romantic manner: affecting fame beyond measure, and doing the most extravagant things to compass it. Mount Athos made a prodigious promontory in the Ægean Sea; he is said to have cut a channel through it, and to have sailed round it. He made a bridge of boats over the Hellespont, where it was three miles broad; and ordered a whipping for the winds and seas, because they had once crossed his designs; as we have a very solemn account of it in Herodotus. But, after all these vain boasts, he was shamefully beaten by Themistocles at Salamis; and returned home, leaving most of his fleet behind him. [152] Mercury, who was a god of the lowest size, and employed always in errands between heaven and hell, and mortals used him accordingly; for his statues were anciently placed where roads met, with directions on the fingers of them, pointing out the several ways to travellers. [153] Nestor, king of Pylus; who was three hundred years old, according to Homer's account; at least as he is understood by his expositors. [154] The ancients counted by their fingers; their left hands served them till they came up to an hundred; after that they used their right, to express all greater numbers. [155] The Fates were three sisters, who had all some peculiar business assigned them by the poets, in relation to the lives of men. The first held the distaff, the second spun the thread, and the third cut it. [156] Whilst Troy was sacked by the Greeks, old king Priam is said to have buckled on his armour to oppose them; which he had no sooner done, but he was met by Pyrrhus, and slain before the altar of Jupiter, in his own palace; as we have the story finely told in Virgil's second Æneid. [157] Hecuba, his queen, escaped the swords of the Grecians, and outlived him. It seems, she behaved herself so fiercely and uneasily to her husband's murderers, while she lived, that the poets thought fit to turn her into a bitch when she died. [158] Mithridates, after he had disputed the empire of the world for forty years together, with the Romans, was at last deprived of life and empire by Pompey the Great.