himself to the woods, turning his back upon the hated city and upon all
mankind, wishing the walls of that detestable city might sink, and the
houses fall upon their owners, wishing all plagues which infest
humanity, war, outrage, poverty, diseases, might fasten upon its
inhabitants, praying the just gods to confound all Athenians, both
young and old, high and low; so wishing, he went to the woods, where he
said he should find the unkindest beast much kinder than mankind. He
stripped himself naked, that he might retain no fashion of a man, and
dug a cave to live in, and lived solitary in the manner of a beast,
eating the wild roots, and drinking water, flying from the face of his
kind, and choosing rather to herd with wild beasts, as more harmless
and friendly than man.

What a change from lord Timon the rich, lord Timon the delight of
mankind, to Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater! Where were his
flatterers now? Where were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak
air, that boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on
warm? Would those stiff trees that had outlived the eagle, turn young
and airy pages to him, to skip on his errands when he bade them? Would
the cool brook, when it was iced with winter, administer to him his
warm broths and caudles when sick of an overnight's surfeit? Or would
the creatures that lived in those wild woods come and lick his hand and
flatter him?

Here on a day, when he was digging for roots, his poor sustenance, his
spade struck against something heavy, which proved to be gold, a great
heap which some miser had probably buried in a time of alarm, thinking
to have come again, and taken it from its prison, but died before the
opportunity had arrived, without making any man privy to the
concealment; so it lay, doing neither good nor harm, in the bowels of
the earth, its mother, as if it had never come from thence, till the
accidental striking of Timon's spade against it once more brought it to
light.

Here was a mass of treasure which, if Timon had retained his old mind,
was enough to have purchased him friends and flatterers again; but
Timon was sick of the false world, and the sight of gold was poisonous
to his eyes; and he would have restored it to the earth, but that,
thinking of the infinite calamities which by means of gold happen to
mankind, how the lucre of it causes robberies, oppression, injustice,
briberies, violence, and murder, among men, he had a pleasure