Timon of Athens Act Five – “Here lie I, Timon; who, alive, all living men did hate…”

Timon of Athens Act Five – “Here lie I, Timon; who, alive, all living men did hate…”

We start Act Five with the Poet and the Painter making their way to Timon’s cave in the wilderness as they have heard that he has gold. Timon approaches them and asks if they are honest. They claim they are. Timon says he'll give them gold as soon as they find search out some villains and he sends them on a wild goose chase.

Flavius brings a couple of Senators to see Timon since they want him to return to Athens because the people have changed their minds and they want Timon to return so he can help them defend Athens against Alcibiades’ invasion. Timon dismisses them and sayst that Alcibiades can ransack Athens and kill everyone from children to old men.

Timon tells them that he is creating his epitaph. He tells them of a tree near his cave that he will cut down and hang himself. Timon dismisses them and asks them to tell all in Athens that he, Timon, has already died. Timon curses all humanity and goes back to his cave as the senators exit.

As a couple more senators think on the fate that awaits Athens, the senators see that getting Timon back to Athens is vital. The senators who visted Timon enter and say all is lost. A soldier in the woods seeking Timon finds his tombstone and takes a rubbing from it.

Then Alcibiades and his forces enter Athens and the senators say they wish they could placate Alcibiades and that they have tried to entice Timon back but to no avail. The senators plea that the men who banished Alcibiades are dead and they ask that he does not kill everyone but saves some people in the city. Alcibiades agrees to only kill a token number who are chosen by lot and he then demands that the senators bring out the people who drove Timon out and to poverty are punished and he decides that after they are punished that he will bring peace. The soldier enters with the rubbing from Timon's grave and Alcibiades reads Timon’s epitaph, before entering Athens:

‘Here lies a

wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft:

Seek not my name: a plague consume you wicked

caitiffs left!

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.'

These well express in thee thy latter spirits:

Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs,

Scorn'dst our brain's flow and those our

droplets which

From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit

Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye

On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead

Is noble Timon: of whose memory

Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,

And I will use the olive with my sword,

Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each

Prescribe to other as each other's leech.

Let our drums strike.

Shakespeare returns in 'Macbeth'...