Man, Woman and Beast in Timon’s Athens

Summary

‘From Grecia in olde time did almost all famous things come. [The Greeks] were the authors of ciuilitie vnto the Westerne nations’, George Abbot, author of A Brief Description of the Whole World, asserts in 1599. Athens, in particular, Peter Heylyn concurs, some two decades later, ‘was a famous Vniuersitie, from whose great cisterne, the conduit pipes of learning were dispersed over all Europe’ (209–10). And Roger Ascham maintains that ‘in that one Citie, in memorie of one aige, were mo learned men [. . .] than all tyme doth remember, than all place doth affourde, than all other tonges do conteine’. The contrast, however, between such glories of the past and a far from glorious present could not be more striking. As Heylyn observes:

The people were once braue men of warre sound Schollers, addicted to the loue of vertue, and ciuill of behauior, for which vertues other nations were by them scornfully tearmed Barbarians a name now most fit for the Grecians, being an inconstant people vnciuill, not regarding learning, as hauing not one Vniuersitie in it, and in a word wholy degenerate from their ancestours.

(204-5)

It seems most fitting that the one play in the Shakespearian Folio which carries Athens in its title should hinge upon a similar lapse from civility into barbarism, from metropolitan plenitude in ‘all famous things’ to a wilderness where cave-dwelling and digging for roots are the order of the day. In Shakespeare’s lifetime Athens itself had all but disappeared from Western consciousness.