t he was never cowardly,
underhanded, or mean. He was a man whose ideals were better than his
judgment, and whose prejudiced view of life made his character seem
much worse than it was. The lives of such men are usually tragic.

+Date+.--The play was not printed until the appearance of the First
Folio, and external evidence as to its date is almost worthless. On
the strength of internal evidence, meter, style, etc., which mark it
unquestionably as a late play, it is usually assigned to 1609.

+Sources+.--Shakespeare's source was Plutarch's _Life of Coriolanus_
(North's translation). As in _Julius Caesar_ and _Antony and
Cleopatra_, he followed Plutarch closely.

+Timon of Athens+.--As _Coriolanus_ was the tragedy of a man who is too
self-centered, so _Timon_ is the tragedy of a man who is not
self-centered enough. His good and bad traits alike, generosity and
extravagance, friendship and vanity, combine to make him live and
breathe in the attitude of other men toward him. From this comes his
unbounded prodigality by which in a few years he squanders an enormous
fortune in giving pleasure to his friends. From this lack of
self-poise, too, comes the tremendous reaction later, {194} when he
learns that his imagined world of love and friendship and popular
applause was a mirage of the desert, and finds himself poverty-stricken
and alone, the dupe of sharpers, the laughing-stock of fools.

Yet in spite of his lack of balance, he is full of noble qualities.
Apemantus has the very thing which he lacks, yet Apemantus is
contemptible beside him. The churlish philosopher is like some dingy
little scow, which rides out the tempest because the small cargo which
it has is all in its hold; Timon is like some splendid, but top-heavy,
battleship, which turns turtle in the storm through lack of ballast.
There is something lionlike and magnificent, despite its unreason, in
the way he accepts the inevitable, and later, after the discovery of
the gold, spurns away both the chance of wealth and the human jackals
whom it attracts. The same lordly scorn persists after him in the
epitaph which he leaves behind:--

"Here lie I, Timon; who alive all living men did hate.
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass, and stay not here thy gait."

Yet this very epitaph of the dead misanthrope shows the same lack of
self-sufficiency which characterized the living Timon. He despises the
opinion of men, but he must let them know that h