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Timon of Athens is a play that centers questions related to money, friendship, and the complicated relation between them. What is the ultimate value of material wealth? Does generosity guarantee genuine friendship? Can you really trust other people’s intentions when money is involved? Timon of Athens emphasizes these questions to the exclusion of almost all others. Indeed, unlike most of Shakespeare’s plays, this one is remarkable for its complete lack of a romance plot. There are no lovers in this play, which otherwise presents a world of men who are invested in building either social ties or their investment portfolios. The results are by turns troubling, satirical, and ultimately tragic.
Timon is wealthier than all his peers, and he enjoys sharing his bounty. He is a cheerful figure whose philanthropy seems to know no bounds. He serves as a patron to a host of artists and craftsmen, bails acquaintances out of jail, throws elaborate banquets, and doles out extravagant gifts. Though he stresses that his gifts needn’t be reciprocated directly, Timon’s generosity of spirit is nonetheless tied to a philosophy of friendship that entails mutual support in times of need. Yet as we in the audience can see from the very beginning, Timon faces a clear problem. His penchant for giving has attracted men who flatter him and appear to him as friends, but who primarily want to benefit from his material generosity. Not only that, but Timon is in fact so generous that his apparently unending bounty is founded on an abyss of debt: he has mortgaged his land and taken out loans in order to finance his philanthropy, and now he’s hovering near bankruptcy.
Timon’s financial insolvency soon places him in conflict with the very lords whom he believed were his friends. As he faces the loss of his estate, Timon sends servants around to ask various lords for additional credit. Each of these servants find out what Timon’s loyal steward, Flavius, has already suspected: now that his wealth is gone, no one wants anything to do with him. These lords each come up with excuses to deny Timon aid while attempting to hide their hypocrisy. But nothing can obscure the fact that these men have an exclusive understanding of the relationship between money and friendship: namely, friendship doesn’t provide sufficient security for credit.
The humiliation wrought by these denials occasions a radical transformation in Timon, one that metamorphoses him from a philanthropist into a misanthropist. No longer able to trust in the possibility of friendship, Timon renounces all human connection and leaves Athens with a deeply embittered heart. Thus, the second half of the play opens with Timon introducing himself by a new name: “Misanthropos” (4.3.54).
At the same time as Timon chooses self-exile, a parallel narrative begins to unfold in which Alcibiades, a famous military general, is subjected to banishment. Alcibiades argues strenuously with the senate to reverse their order of execution for a friend of his who has been charged with manslaughter. He tries to leverage his own status as a highly decorated soldier and leader, but to no avail. For his honorable attempt to save a friend, he’s rewarded with banishment. In his fury, he pledges to lead an attack of retribution against Athens. Although Alcibiades’s legal and political grievances differ from Timon’s ethical grievances, the two men are both victims of Athenian ingratitude. This shared victimhood positions them in a strategic alliance, such that when Alcibiades eventually marches an army to Athens and threatens to kill everyone in the city, he does so in Timon’s name as well as his own. In this way, Alcibiades demonstrates that he is one of Timon’s few true friends.
Two other figures prove themselves loyal to the downtrodden Timon, though each in slightly different ways. First is the cynic Apemantus, who since the beginning of the play has repeatedly critiqued Timon’s “friends” for being motivated by self-interest. His investment in exposing their hypocrisy is on brand for a cynic, but it also demonstrates a degree of concern for Timon’s well-being. He shows this concern further when he finds Timon in the woods and attempts to bond with him over their shared dislike of people—though he also worries that Timon has perhaps taken his misanthropy a bit too far.
The second figure who stays true to Timon is his loyal steward, Flavius. When Timon does indeed goes bankrupt and his numerous creditors descend to demand their money, Flavius defends his master nobly. He is distraught by the way Timon’s so-called friends have abandoned him, and in his distress, he takes on some of his master’s misanthropy. Yet Flavius has also learned the importance of generosity, and in one of the play’s most moving scenes, he brings his last-remaining gold to Timon in the woods and offers it along with his continued service.
But in the end, no one can convince Timon to renounce his hatred of humanity. He sends all his supporters away, chases off the sycophantic money-grubbers who assail him in the woods, and continues to curse everyone on earth. So extreme is his misanthropy that Timon eventually turns against life itself and wills himself to death, leaving behind a curiously doubled epitaph, written partly in English and partly in another language—likely Greek or Latin. The contradictory parts of the epitaph appropriately reflect the contrast between Timon the philanthropist and Timon the misanthropist.
While Timon’s anticlimactic death takes place offstage, the play ends with Alcibiades marching on Athens, ready to raze the city to the ground in retribution for its citizens’ crimes of ingratitude. In the end, the senators plead with Alcibiades to temper his rage and punish only those who directly harmed either him or Timon. Alcibiades agrees and pledges a future of peace.
Despite this apparently neat resolution, ambiguities abound at the play’s end. One of these ambiguities relates to the relationship between Alcibiades and Timon, which Shakespeare only tenuously sketches out. It’s not clear, for instance, why Alcibiades would act on Timon’s behalf after the misanthrope bitterly curses him in the woods. Nor is it clear how his consent to peace with the Athenian senate honors Timon’s totalizing hatred of all Athenians. Another key ambiguity relates to Timon’s death. Since he is the play’s protagonist, are we to understand his death as tragic? Alternatively, is it meant to be taken satirically—that is, as an absurd expression of a misanthropy so extreme that it drives itself toward death? Critics and theatergoers alike have found it difficult to interpret these incoherencies, which in turn have made it common to designate Timon of Athens a “problem play.”
