—Act V, scene x, line 22
To be sure, Troilus promises revenge on the Greeks and on Achilles particularly, but that is just talk. There can be no revenge. Troy must fall.
Nor has Troilus revenge on Diomedes or Cressida. Diomedes still lives and still has Cressida.
The fifth act is an ending of sorts, but it is not the ending toward which the first four acts were heading.
5. The Life of Timon Of Athens
Shakespeare wrote a narrative poem and three plays set in the legendary days of Greek history. He wrote only one play that was based- in a very tenuous way-in the days of Greece's greatest glory, the fifth century b.c.
This century was the Golden Age of Athens, when she beat off giant Persia and built a naval empire, when she had great leaders like Themis-tocles, Aristides, and Pericles; great dramatists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; great sculptors like Phidias; great scientists like Anaxagoras; great philosophers like Socrates and Plato.
But Shakespeare chose to mark the time by writing a play, Timon of Athens, that is generally considered one of his least satisfactory. Many critics consider it to be an unfinished play, one that Shakespeare returned to on and off, never patching it to his liking, and eventually abandoning it.
The play opens in the house of a rich man. A Poet, a Painter, a Jeweler, and a Merchant all enter. They are given no names but are identified only by their professions. The Jeweler has a jewel and the Merchant says:
—Act I, scene i, line 13
The Lord Timon is the owner of the house; the center toward which all these and others are tending.
Timon is, apparently, a historical character who lived in Athens during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.-eight centuries after the Trojan War), so that we may set the opening of the play in the last quarter of the fifth century b.c.
Timon's fame to his contemporaries and near successors, such as Aristophanes and Plato, lay entirely in the fact that he was a misanthrope. In fact, he was referred to as "Timon Misanthropes" ("Timon the ManHater"). He lived by himself, professed to hate mankind and to detest human society. To the sociable Greeks, to whom conversation and social intercourse were the breath of life, there was something monstrous in this. Plutarch, in his "Life of Mark Antony," describes how, at a low point in his career, Antony decided for a while to imitate Timon and withdraw from human society. Shakespeare may have come across this while working on his play Antony and Cleopatra (see page I-370) and conceived the idea of writing a play centered on the condition of misanthropy. And, indeed, Timon of Athens seems to have been written immediately after Antony and Cleopatra, in 1606 or 1607.
Additional men enter and the Poet identifies them, saying:
—Act I, scene i, line 40
Throughout the play Shakespeare treats Athens, with whose social and political life he is unacquainted, as though it were Rome, a city with which he was much more at home. Athens had no senators or anything quite equivalent to the well-known legislators of Rome. Yet Shakespeare, throughout the play, has the rulers of Athens act like the stern, irascible, grasping Roman aristocrats, rather than like the gay, impulsive, weathercock democrats they really were.
Indeed, so anxious does Shakespeare appear to be to deal with Rome rather than with Athens, that almost every character in the play has a Roman name. This is quite out of the question in reality, of course. No Roman name was ever heard of in Athens of Timon's time. Rome itself had never been heard of. If Rome had forced itself on the attention of any Athenian of the time, it would have seemed only a barbarian Italian village of utterly no account.
But Timon is not yet Misanthropes. He is, at the beginning of the play, an extremely wealthy man of almost unbelievable benevolence. He seeks for excuses to give money away and every man there is trying to get his share.
Yet the Poet, at least, is not entirely fooled by the superficial appearance of wealth and happiness that surrounds Timon. He speaks of his poetry to the Painter, and describes its content by saying:
—Act I, scene i, lines 63-64
The goddess of fortune (Fortuna to the Romans and Tyche to the Greeks) became popular in the period that followed Greece's Golden Age. Alexander the Great had come and gone like lightning across the skies, bringing Greece vast conquests and vast derangements. The individual Greek cities came to be helpless in the grip of generals and armies; culture decayed as materialism grew and the rich grew richer while the poor grew poorer.
Fortune was a deity of chance and was just right for the age following Alexander the Great; an age which saw the passing of youth and confidence, and in which good and evil seemed to be handed out at random and without any consideration of desert.
The Poet explains that Fortune beckons benignly and Timon mounts the hill, carrying with him all those he befriends. But Fortune is fickle and Timon may be kicked down the hill by her. In that case, none of the friends he took up the hill with him will follow him down.
Shakespeare is, in this way, preparing the audience for the consideration of what it was that made Timon a misanthrope.
Plutarch says only that "… for the unthankfulness of those he had done good unto and whom he took to be his friends, he was angry with all men and would trust no man."
Another similar treatment of Timon at much greater length was by a Greek writer, Lucian, born in Syria about a.d. 120. He had written twenty-six Dialogues of the Gods, in which he poked satirical fun at conventional religion, but so pleasantly that even the pious must have found it difficult to take offense.
His best essay is considered to be "Timon," in which he uses the theme of a man who has become misanthropic through the ingratitude of others to poke fun at Jupiter and at Wealth. He expands on the hint in Plutarch and makes Timon out to have been, originally, a fantastically generous man who beggared himself for his friends and then found none who would help him.
Shakespeare adopted this notion, but removed all the fun and humor in Lucian's dialogue and replaced it with savagery.
Timon himself now enters, and moves among all those present with affability and generosity, giving to all who ask, denying no one. He accepts their rather sickening sycophancy with good humor, but accepts it.
There is only one sour note and that is when the philosopher Apemantus enters. He is churlish and his every speech is a curt insult The Painter strikes back with: