The sap, drunk in the amount of two obols’ weight with honey-water, brings up phlegm and bile like hellebore; but drunk in a larger amount it takes a person out of life.

Exagei tou zēn, "it leads out of living," is Dioscorides’ plain way of saying it kills. An obol was a small coin and also a small weight, so the gap between purge and death is a matter of a few grams. Hellebore, his comparison, was the ancient purge for madness and was itself a poison. The digital text prints the word for obols as ἀβόλων; the usual spelling is ὀβολῶν.