Timon of Athens

Summary

Timon of Athens is a stark, almost parable-like tragedy in two halves: in the first, a rich Athenian lord gives away everything; in the second, the same man, abandoned, curses everything. It is probably a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, and it survives in a form many editors think unfinished, which helps explain its rough edges and its unusual shape. As the play opens, poets, painters, jewellers and merchants crowd Timon's hall hoping for patronage. Timon pays Ventidius's debts to free him from prison, endows his servant Lucilius so that he may marry, and hosts a lavish banquet with a masque, showering his guests with jewels and horses. Only two people refuse to be dazzled. The cynic philosopher Apemantus eats roots and drinks water at the feast and mocks the flatterers who are, in his phrase, eating Timon. The steward Flavius knows that the coffers are empty and that Timon's lands are mortgaged, but Timon will not hear him. When the creditors call in their bonds, Timon sends his servants confidently to the friends he has enriched. Lucullus offers the servant a bribe to say he was not at home; Lucius regrets that he happens to be unprovided; Sempronius takes offence at not being asked first. Meanwhile Alcibiades, a captain, pleads with the Senate for the life of a soldier who killed in hot blood, and is banished for his insistence. Timon invites his false friends to one last banquet, uncovers dishes of warm water, flings it in their faces and drives them out. The second half takes place outside the city. Timon tears off his clothes, curses Athens, and lives in a cave by the sea, digging for roots. He finds gold instead and uses it as a weapon: he funds Alcibiades's army against Athens, pays the courtesans Phrynia and Timandra to spread disease, and lectures a band of thieves that sun, moon, sea and earth are all thieves too. Apemantus visits, and the two men trade insults in a contest over who truly despises the world. Flavius alone comes to share his last money with his master, and Timon, moved against his will, admits that there is one honest man. When senators beg him to save Athens from Alcibiades, he offers them only a tree to hang themselves on, and announces that he has made his grave on the edge of the sea. His death happens offstage and unexplained. Alcibiades, receiving the senators' submission, reads Timon's bitter epitaph and promises to punish only the guilty. The play is short and schematic, but it asks pointed questions. Was Timon's generosity a virtue or a way of buying love? Is his misanthropy a clear sight of the world or a mirror of his earlier blindness, swinging, as Apemantus says, from one extreme to the other? And what does Flavius, who loves his master after his fall, show about the friendship money cannot buy? Teachers should know that the cave scenes contain coarse sexual and venereal imagery.

Plot or Argument

• Act 1: The patron's hall

  Artists and merchants flatter Timon in hope of reward. He frees Ventidius from debtors' prison, endows his servant Lucilius's marriage, and gives a banquet with a masque of Amazons and lavish gifts. Apemantus refuses the food and mocks the guests; Flavius's asides reveal that the money is gone.

• Act 2: The bills come due

  A senator sends his servant to recover his loans before Timon collapses. Creditors' servants crowd Timon's gate. Flavius finally forces Timon to hear that his lands are pledged; Timon, untroubled, sends servants to borrow from his friends and from the Senate.

• Act 3: Three refusals, a banishment and a banquet of water

  Lucullus, Lucius and Sempronius each find a different excuse to refuse. Timon's servants are besieged by creditors. Alcibiades pleads for a soldier's life and is banished from Athens. Timon gives his final banquet, uncovers dishes of warm water, and hurls water and dishes at the guests.

• Act 4: The cave by the sea

  Timon curses Athens from outside its walls; Flavius divides his remaining money among the servants. In the woods Timon digs for roots and finds gold, which he gives to Alcibiades for war and to the courtesans for spreading disease. He exchanges abuse with Apemantus, preaches universal theft to bandits, and receives Flavius, the one man he cannot hate.

• Act 5: Epitaph and settlement

  The poet and painter come back for gold; senators beg Timon to defend Athens and are offered his tree for hanging. A soldier finds his tomb and takes a wax impression of the inscription. At the walls Alcibiades accepts the city's surrender, agrees to punish only his own and Timon's enemies, and reads the epitaph.

Characters

• Timon, a rich Athenian lord

  Generous to the point of prodigality and deaf to warnings; when his friends refuse him he turns to a total hatred of mankind and dies alone by the sea.

• Apemantus, a churlish philosopher

  A cynic in the manner of Diogenes who scorns flattery and luxury; he visits Timon's cave and accuses him of misanthropy put on out of wounded pride.

• Flavius, Timon's steward

  Warns his master in vain, shares his own money with the other servants, and seeks Timon in the wilderness; the one figure whose love survives Timon's ruin.

• Alcibiades, an Athenian captain

  Banished for pleading for a comrade, he marches on Athens with Timon's gold but ends by limiting his revenge to the guilty.

• Lucullus, Lucius and Sempronius, Timon's friends

  Lords who have taken his gifts and each invent a different evasion when asked to lend.

• Ventidius, a friend freed from prison

  Timon pays his debts in the first scene; when Timon is in need, he too refuses.

• Flaminius, Servilius and Lucilius, Timon's servants

  Flaminius flings back Lucullus's bribe in disgust; the servants' loyalty contrasts with the lords' greed.

• Phrynia and Timandra, mistresses of Alcibiades

  Courtesans whom Timon pays to carry disease into Athens.

• The Poet and the Painter, artists seeking patronage

  Open and close the play's cycle of flattery, returning to the cave once they hear Timon has gold again.

• The Senators, rulers of Athens

  Harsh to Alcibiades and to Timon's need, then humble when the city is threatened.

Lessons

• Liberality is not the same as love

  Timon gives freely, but he gives without judgment and partly to be surrounded by thanks. Aristotle distinguished the liberal man, who gives to the right people in the right amount, from the prodigal who gives to anyone; Timon's servants and Apemantus see the difference before he does. The first half lets students ask whether generosity that ignores truth and stewardship is a virtue at all.

  • List three gifts Timon gives in Act 1. Which were wise, and which were not?
  • Why does Timon refuse to listen to Flavius's accounts in Act 2?
  • Apemantus says many men eat Timon. What does he mean, and is he fair to the guests?

• The extremity of both ends

  Apemantus's sharpest charge is that Timon never knew the middle of humanity: he loved all men blindly and then hated all men blindly. The misanthrope's despair is the trusting host's naivety turned inside out. The play's structure, two halves facing each other, asks whether hatred learned from betrayal is truer than the love it replaced.

  • Find a speech from each half of the play that mirrors one in the other. What has changed and what has not?
  • Is Timon's hatred more honest than his earlier generosity, or equally self-deceived?
  • What would the middle of humanity look like for Timon after Act 3?

• Flavius and the friend who stays

  Flavius warns, grieves, gives away his own savings, and follows his master into exile. In his soliloquy before the cave he recalls the command to love one's enemies. He is the play's evidence against Timon's verdict on mankind, and Timon is forced to admit it. Students can set his steady service beside the lords' polished excuses.

  • What does Flavius gain by seeking Timon in the woods?
  • Timon says he would have hated all mankind but Flavius redeems himself. Why does this exception not change Timon's course?
  • Compare Flavius with the servant Flaminius, who throws Lucullus's bribe back. What do the servants know that the lords do not?

• Gold that makes black white

  When Timon digs up gold in 4.3 he delivers a famous denunciation of money as the power that makes foul things fair and wrong things right. Yet the play does not simply blame gold: the same metal that corrupted his friends now becomes his instrument for destroying Athens. The lesson is about the human will that uses money, not only about money itself.

  • Read Timon's speech over the gold. Which of its charges are true of the friends we have seen?
  • Why does Timon give the gold away rather than bury it again?
  • How does the thieves' episode, where one bandit is almost talked out of his trade, complicate the speech?

Context

Timon is set in classical Athens at the time of Alcibiades (late fifth century BC), but its world of credit, bonds, usurers and courtly patronage reflects Jacobean London, where noblemen and King James's court were notorious for lavish gift-giving and debt. Timon himself was proverbial in the Renaissance as the type of the misanthrope.

Composition

Usually dated about 1605 to 1608. Stylistic studies have persuaded most modern editors that Thomas Middleton wrote a substantial share, including much of the first banquet and much of Act 3. The Folio text shows signs of an unfinished draft: irregular verse, inconsistent names and sums, and two incompatible epitaphs printed together. Shakespeare's sources include the digression on Timon in Plutarch's Life of Antony and the Life of Alcibiades (in Thomas North's 1579 translation) and, directly or indirectly, Lucian's dialogue Timon the Misanthrope.

Reception

First printed in the 1623 First Folio, apparently in a space intended for Troilus and Cressida. It has been staged far less than the major tragedies and was long known chiefly in adaptations, notably Thomas Shadwell's The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater (1678). Karl Marx quoted Timon's speech on gold in his early writings on money, one reason the play attracted renewed attention from twentieth-century critics.

Comparisons

• King Lear

  Written in the same years, both plays show a great man who gives away his wealth, is repaid with ingratitude, and rages in the open air; Lear's rage passes through madness to a kind of recognition and reconciliation with Cordelia, while Timon's hardens into a curse, and only his steward plays the part of Kent.

• A Christmas Carol

  Dickens's story runs the opposite way: a miser learns generosity, where Timon's generosity collapses into hatred. Both turn on whether money can buy or block love, and both use a humble dependant, Bob Cratchit or Flavius, as the measure of the rich man's heart.

• Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

  Plutarch's Life of Antony pauses to tell how Antony, after Actium, imitated Timon by withdrawing to a solitary house, and quotes Timon's epitaphs; the Life of Alcibiades supplies the banished captain. Reading the source shows how much of the plot, especially the false friends, Shakespeare and Middleton invented.

• The Nicomachean Ethics

  Aristotle's account of liberality and prodigality in Book IV fits Timon closely, including the observation that the prodigal gives to flatterers and is easier to cure than the miser; the play can be read as a test of whether Timon was ever liberal in Aristotle's sense.

• The Misanthrope and Other Plays

  Moliere's Alceste also condemns a flattering society, but in comedy and from within a salon; the contrast shows how far Timon's misanthropy goes beyond social criticism into a curse on nature itself.

• Gulliver's Travels

  Gulliver ends Book IV unable to bear human company, another portrait of misanthropy learned from experience; Swift, like Shakespeare, leaves readers to decide whether the hero has seen truly or been unhinged by what he saw.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Timon's curses in 4.3 contain one of the most detailed catalogues of syphilis in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama: bone pain, hoarse voice, baldness, the collapsed nasal bridge, and the sweating-tub and restricted diet used as treatment. They show how familiar the disease and its cure were to a London audience. Apemantus diagnoses Timon's change as melancholy sprung from loss of fortune; that is a character's reading in the period's terms, and modern labels for Timon's withdrawal are interpretive only. Physicians appear as metaphors (friends who give a patient over, a doctor whose antidotes kill), drink as the flatterers' medium, and Timon's death is left unexplained; his talk of a long sickness of living now mending and his offer of a hanging-tree to Athens give the ending a strongly self-destructive cast without showing a suicide.

• Act 1, Scene 2

  Apemantus drinks water at the banquet and warns that the guests' toasts will make Timon and his estate look ill, setting the cynic's sober regimen against the feast.

  Alcohol
• Act 3, Scene 3

  Sempronius, refusing a loan, compares Timon's friends to physicians who have given up a patient as incurable.

  Physicians Doctors
• Act 4, Scene 3

  Timon pays Phrynia and Timandra to spread disease, then lists the symptoms of the pox and the sweating-tub cure in detail.

  Syphilis Venereal
• Act 4, Scene 3

  Apemantus calls Timon's new way of life an unmanly melancholy sprung from change of fortune, a period diagnosis of his misanthropy.

  Melancholia Depression
• Act 4, Scene 3

  Timon tells the bandits to drink until fever boils their blood, and not to trust physicians, whose antidotes are poison and who kill more than thieves rob.

  Physicians Doctors Alcohol
• Act 5, Scene 2 (Gutenberg #1536 numbering; Act 5, Scene 1 in most modern editions)

  Timon calls his life a long sickness now mending, offers the senators his tree to hang themselves from, and describes his grave by the sea.

  Death Dying Suicide

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Tell the story of Lucullus's servant on the evening after his master offered Flaminius a bribe, as the servant decides whether to stay in that house.

• Dialogue

  Write a scene the play omits: Flavius and Apemantus meet on the road to Timon's cave and argue about whether Timon can be helped.

• Essay

  Using Aristotle's distinction between liberality and prodigality, argue whether Timon was ever truly generous.

• Poetry

  Write the epitaph Flavius would have carved for Timon, in no more than four lines, and explain how it differs from Timon's own.

• Classroom

  Divide the class into the four parties Timon meets in 4.3 (Alcibiades, the courtesans, Apemantus, the bandits) and have each group explain what Timon wants from them and what his gold does to them.

Further Reading

• Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Antony; Alcibiades), Plutarch (trans. Thomas North)

  The principal source for Timon's misanthropy and epitaphs.

• Timon, or The Misanthrope, Lucian of Samosata

  The Greek satirical dialogue in which Timon digs up gold and drives away returning flatterers.

• Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, Aristotle

  On liberality, prodigality and meanness.

• Shakespearean Tragedy, A. C. Bradley

• Shakespeare, Co-Author, Brian Vickers

  Surveys the evidence for Middleton's share in the play.