johnbyronkuhner.com

Chance led me, as it sometimes leads the prepared mind, to Plutarch’s Life of Marc Antony not long ago, and I was struck by the following incident. After the collapse of Marc Antony’s fortunes and his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Actium, knowing that the assassins of Augustus were on their way and that little life was left him,

Antony, leaving the city [Alexandria] and the conversation of his friends, built himself a dwelling-place in the water, near Pharos, upon a little mole which he cast up in the sea, and there, secluding himself from the company of mankind, said he desired nothing more than to live the life of Timon: as indeed, his case was the same, and the ingratitude and injuries which he suffered from those he had esteemed his friends made him hate and distrust all mankind.

Now Plutarch, God bless him and gifted writers everywhere, takes this opportunity to leave the life of Marc Antony, and digresses for four hundred words on this same Timon. Luckily he did not presume that his audience would know all about Timon, or could look him up on Vicipaedia: he wrote a summa of the man himself, which ended up being much more interesting than his Wikipedia page anyway. This timely digression is now virtually all we know of him. Since I imagine you will be as interested as I was what Antony might have meant by “desiring to live the life of Timon,” I will provide the digression:

This Timon was a citizen of Athens, and lived much about the Peloponnesian War, as may be seen by the comedies of Aristophanes and Plato [now lost], in which he is ridiculed as hater and enemy of mankind. He avoided and repelled the approaches of every one, but embraced with kisses and the greatest show of affection Alcibiades, then in his hot youth. And when Apemantus was astonished, and demanded the reason, he replied that he knew this young man would one day do infinite mischief to the Athenians [later Alcibiades, about to face charges of sacrilege for destroying Athenian sacred objects during a drunken orgy, fled and gave assistance to Sparta during the Peloponnesian War]. He never admitted any one into his company, except at times this Apemantus, who was of the same sort of temper, and was an imitator of his way of life. At the celebration of the festival of flagons, these two kept the feast together, and Apemantus, saying to him, “What a pleasant party, Timon!” “It would be,” he answered, “if you were not here.” One day he got up in a full assembly in the speaker’s place, and when there was a dead silence and a great wonder at so unusual a sight, he said, “Ye men of Athens, I have a little plot of ground, and in it grows a fig-tree, on which many citizens have been pleased to hang themselves; and now, having resolved to build in that place, I wish to announce it publicly, that any of you who may be desirous may go and hang yourselves before I cut it down.” He died and was buried at Halae, near the sea, where it so happened that, after his burial, a land-slip took place on the point of the shore, and the sea, flowing in, surrounded his tomb, and made it inaccessible to the foot of man. It bore this inscription:

Here am I laid, my life of misery done.
Ask not my name, I curse you every one.

And this epitaph was made by himself while yet alive; another more generally known is actually by Callimachus:

Timon, the misanthrope, am I below.
Go, and revile me, traveller – but please go.

Thus much of Timon, of whom much more might be said.

True to his nature, Shakespeare, reading in Plutarch (which was his source for almost all his ancient history) determined that it was his place to say much more of Timon, and so he did. He managed to use every detail in the Plutarch passage, though like Shakespeare some of it is oddly used and there is a great deal of historical inaccuracy. (Shakespeare apparently had difficulty distinguishing Greek and Roman names: he uses the Greek names such as Apemantus and Alcibiades given him by Plutarch, but in filling out his cast of characters he uses Roman names such as Lucullus and Ventidius and Sempronius.) He appears to have conjoined the story of the great misanthrope with a Poor-Richard-esque fable of a rich man who feasts his friends liberally, helps all who ask him, never inquires into his accounts, falls into debt, and finds that when he seeks to borrow of others he has no friends anymore (apparently from Lucian). This becomes the cause of Timon’s misanthropy.

Timon bears the distinction of being the least-performed of all of Shakespeare’s plays. There are some obvious reasons: the language is not beautiful, and all the quotable bits are harangues against the fundamentally whoring nature of mankind; there are no female characters; it is somewhat monotonously misanthropic. There are no scenes into which you can imagine yourself ever falling, because the plot is not news to anyone: we know that money cannot get us loyal friends, but since poverty cannot get us any friends at all, we must be resigned to making do with what friends and lovers success will bring us. (For those who want more from life, I know of no reliable recourse but God, and even He, to believe the preachers and priests, has a fondness for riches in a man.) Besides its moralistic simplicity, the play does not begin prepossessingly at all: its narrative technique, to begin in utter happiness, with endless scenes of feasting, is the simplest imaginable. No “in medias res” here. I began reading it, but found myself soon distracted. Reading these plays is not the way to experience them anyway.

And yet it chanced that just a week or so after reading Plutarch’s digression to a friend, who shared my interest in the man Timon – “there’s something in it,” she said – my mother told me that we should go see the simulcast from the National Theater in London – and sure enough, it was Timon of Athens. “Do you know anything about the play?” she asked. “I’ve never seen it, but I figured you might know about it because I know you’ve read a lot of that Greek and Roman stuff.” This seemed like Providence to me, so I made sure not to leave New York without seeing the play.

These simulcasts are an interesting new art form; I saw one, some years ago, of the Metropolitan Opera, broadcast in Virginia. This was the first time I had seen a play thus treated, and it was just as excellent – if not more so – than the opera. They are superbly photographed, from seemingly innumerable cameras and angles, many of the shots themselves beautifully artistic and all of them thoughtfully deployed. The London actors are of course like no others in our language, and it was a great pleasure to have the London theater beamed over to New York for a few Hamiltons. The show I saw was in the large (and very nice) NYU theater on Washington Square South – the regrettably named Skirball Center. I had never been there before, and I was charmed to see that it obviously had its own New York following – the (again, very large) theater was packed full of nice old Jewish people.

The play was set in modern times, with the modern corporate elite playing Timon and his friends, and the Occupy Wall Street people playing Alcibiades and the mob he brings to the walls of Athens. It was easy to see this as forced – the Occupy Wall Street people are a bit toothless compared to a Shakespearean mob – but I was entranced. The play opened in “the Timon Room” of a fine art museum – they used the font the Met uses – where Timon was giving a fabulous party in front of the massive, and extraordinary, El Greco of Christ driving the moneychangers from the temple. There artists and poets come to osculate the posterior of the rich and generous philanthropist. It was the very image of a society unhinged from its religious and artistic wisdom, worshipping, like the Egyptians of old, the moment’s possessor as Creator. Later when Timon praises a band of thieves, as living according to the rule of nature, I thought of Republican “maker-taker” ideology, which makes the rich man the maker and the creator, when Shakespeare knew he was just a thief after the pattern of nature:

The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea. The moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun….
The Earth’s a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing’s a thief.
The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power
Are unchecked theft. Love not yourselves, away,
Rob one another, there’s more gold, cut throats,
All that you meet are thieves: to Athens go,
Break open shops, nothing can you steal
But thieves do lose it.

Timon’s pattern was to give and give and give, to borrow to create more, and thus he was lionized as a generator of life and wealth, the author of the banquet. But of course to live this way led to literal bankruptcy. But the anxiety of our age, which the play tapped into, is a more general fear of bankruptcy: that our leaders and wealthy are morally bankrupt (as they are portrayed in Timon), that our social order is bankrupt, that our entire system of economics may be bankrupt. Wendell Berry says that the root of all economy is ecology; and if an ecological system cannot sustain the economy built upon it, that economy must collapse. No one who has at all studied the problem believes that our ecological system can sustain the economy built on it; and so the bankruptcy we fear in Timon is the bankruptcy of everything modern.

After Timon’s creditors come to settle accounts, he flees Athens:

Timon will to the Woods, where he shall finde
Th’unkindest Beast, more kinder than Mankinde.

There he lives on roots, but while digging for them, he discovers a hoard of gold, which makes him once more an object of interest to the Athenians. After he has given some of it away – for he does not want it for himself, as its value can only come through dealing with other men – thieves come to steal it from him. His exchange with them shows how a sick society cannot bear being returned to a state of simplicity:

Thieves. We are not thieves, but men that much do want.
Tim. Your greatest want is, you want much:
Why should you want? Behold, the Earth has roots:
Within this mile break forth a hundred springs:
The oaks bear mast, the briars scarlet hips,
The bounteous housewife nature, on each bush,
Lays her full mess before you. Want? Why want?
Thieves. We cannot live on grass, on berries, water,
As beasts, birds, and fishes.
Tim. Nor on the beasts themselves, the birds and fishes –
You must eat men.

In our case the even graver danger is that we cannot live on what the whole earth can now produce – we must like Timon eat the future as well, and bankrupt the entirety. But there is something about advanced society which simply cannot endure that we in all our glory do actually live on grass, berries, water, beasts, birds, and fishes. The awareness of this is somehow hostile to human pride, or to put it in Shakespeare’s archetypal language – for the beasts are the gods in disguise – “Feasts are too proud to give thanks to the Gods.”
Much of Timon’s life in the woods is an extended meditation on the whore archetype, our human willingness to sell ourselves for money. Once it is known that Timon has gold in the woods, the artists and senators return to him, where he gives them an earful.

Go on, here’s gold, go on:
Be as a planetary plague, when Jove
Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison
In the sick air: let not thy sword skip one:
Pity not honored age for his white beard,
He is a usurer. Strike me the counterfeit matron –
It is her habit only that is honest,
Herself’s a bawd. Let not the virgin cheek
Make soft thy trenchant sword: for those milk paps
That through the window bore at men’s eyes,
Are not within the leaf of pity writ,
But set them down horrible traitors. Spare not the babe
Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy:
Think it a bastard, whom the oracle
Hath doubtfully pronounced: the throat cut
And mince it sans remorse.

On gold:

This much of this will make
Black white; foul, fair; wrong, right;
Base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.
Ha you gods! Why this? What this, you gods? Why this
Will lug your priest and servants from your sides:
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads.
This yellow slave,
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed,
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves,
And give them Title, Knee, and Approbation
With senators on the bench; this is it
That makes the wappened widow wed again;
She, whom the spittle-house, and ulcerous sores,
Would cast the gorge at.

My dictionary says that “wappened” “probably” means “outworn”; it is not otherwise known. And I have no idea what “casting the gorge” could mean, though the general sense is clear. Money is the elixir of love after all. This is specifically mentioned:

O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
Twixt natural sun and fire: thou bright defiler
Of Hymen’s purest bed, thou valiant Mars,
Thou ever-young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian’s lap: thou Visible God.

There is something at least somewhat assuring in this, that greed is not a new problem. Looking at plays such as Timon and painters such as El Greco, we might assume that greed has become much worse in our age. In truth probably only our thinking about greed has gotten worse – we have rationalized it.

An excellent review in the Guardian notes that Timon has long been considered a “problem play,” meaning one whose purport is really quite unclear; but it seems that our age, by being a problem age, has made its meaning fairly clear. Moral, physical, religious, and economic bankruptcy is something we can all understand. Timon even clearly notes the problem of celebrity, which like the sirens’ song never fails to draw people and as often destroys them:

Oh the fierce wretchedness that Glory brings us!
Who would not wish to be from wealth exempt,
Since riches point to misery and contempt?
Who would be so mocked with glory, or to live
But in a dream of friendship,
To have his pomp, and all that state compounds,
But only painted like his varnished friends.

But Shakespeare is at his best when he notes that the problems appear to be insoluble. Even the life of the beasts – the life in the woods – ends up being no better. Apemantus comes to visit him in the woods, and in between some monotonous but occasionally ridiculously inexhaustible mutual hatred –

Ape. Beast.
Tim. Slave.
Ape. Toad.
Tim. Rogue.

– the two men have a discussion about what to do about it all:

Ape. What things in the world canst thou nearest compare to thy flatterers?
Tim. Women nearest; but men, mean are the things themselves. What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?
Ape. Give it to the beasts, to be rid of the men?
Tim. Wouldst thou have thy self fall in the confusion of men, and remain a beast with the beasts?
Ape. Aye, Timon.
Tim. A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee to attain to. If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee; if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee; if thou were the ass, thy dulness would torment thee; and still thou livedst but as a breakfast to the wolf. If thou were the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner. Wert thou a bear, thou wouldst be killed by the horse; wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seized by the leopard. What beast could thou be, that were not subject to a beast?

And this is the horror that must make us worshippers of the unknown God or of nothing at all, that the evil in us is the evil that surrounds us.

I know I have an inner Timon in me – as when I pay some ridiculous bill or other, like the four hundred dollars I paid to an Arizona court for a cracked tail light. And it comes out at other times as well. Well now I know what to say the next time this happens:

There’s more gold.
Do you damn others, and let this damn you.
And ditches grave you all.