[In the following essay, Wallace analyzes Timon of Athens from a Senecan perspective, suggesting that Shakespeare was influenced by the philosopher's De beneficiis and his ideas on gift-giving.]

For reasons which are understandable enough, Shakespeare's modern editors have decided that Timon of Athens is a "schematic" play in which, as David Bevington puts it [in Complete Works (1973)], "the dramatic situation is also unusually static for Shakespeare." Frank Kermode, in the most widely used college text [The Riverside Shakespeare (1974)], comments that Timon is "a tragedy of ideas, much more schematic than Hamlet" and adds that "the play was evidently designed to consist of two halves illustrating contrasting modes of excess." In spite of "a cunning diversification of texture … the series of interviews between Timon's servants and false friends which constitutes the bulk of Act III shows how simple the scheme of the play is; and the second half consists of a procession of visitors to a static Timon." More recently, in a chapter entitled "The Big Idea" [in his Shakespeare and Tragedy (1981)], John Bayley has been even more emphatic; claiming that "the 'big idea' does not [generally] go with Shakespearean tragedy," he considers Timon to be an exception. "There is nothing in the least elusive about Timon. He is the centre of his play and his point and function are equally unmistakable.… the idea seems so tyrannical that the construction process has to be continued all the way. Two 'states,' of generosity and misanthropy, are necessary for displaying the point and drama of Timon: he moves from one to the other, and that is the end of the matter." The language of the play is brilliantly rhetorical, but mechanical nonetheless, while Timon himself lacks inwardness, although his hurt is touching. His violence, Bayley concludes, "is never quite convincing, never rings true" and, instead of a subtle character, we are left with "a 'case'—of a special sort—but a sort that Shakespeare's sympathy can make us see and feel with."

Because Timon's dramatic structure has seemed to many as oversimplified as the character of Timon himself, the play has often been called a Morality, written possibly for an academic occasion. "Timon is [Shakespeare's] true morality play in the straight sense" said A. S. Collins [in "Timon of Athens: A Reconsideration," Review of English Studies] in 1946, and his argument has been elaborated by Anne Lancashire, Michael Tinker, Lewis Walker, and others. Yet the immediate source of Shakespeare's ideas about bounty and generosity has not been identified, although Geofàrey Bullough came close when he discussed Cicero's epistle to Laelius. More than any other play of Shakespeare's, Timon is indebted for its ideas to a book, which in my opinion Shakespeare clearly had in mind when planning and writing the play, and which contributes more to the action than North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Antony or Lucian's dialogue Timon the Misanthrope, which editors cannot decide whether Shakespeare had read or not. The book is Seneca's De beneficiis, much neglected by recent scholarship but exerting an influence over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English thought which has yet to be fully explored. Although Cicero wrote nineteen paragraphs in De offàciis (1.14.42-18.60) which were mostly concerned with kindness and generosity, Seneca offered a program for gift giving which exceeded any other in length and complexity. It will, I hope, become clear why Shakespeare must have been thinking of Seneca, but a safer argument could have been constructed on the premise that Shakespeare was testing the prevalent Senecan ethos rather than the book itself.

Gift giving was a regular feature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, and many contemporary references to benefits do not refer specifically to Seneca. Moreover, Ben Jonson in Volpone, at about the time Shakespeare is supposed to have written Timon, was investigating a satirical and subversive use of benefits which mocks the whole system in a quite different way; but Seneca remains by far the most important author for the dissemination of ideas concerning the obligations derived from gifts, and neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporaries could have thought seriously about the subject without coming to terms with him.

The first separate publication of De beneficiis in an English translation was Nicholas Haward's The Line of Liberalitie in 1569, which included only the first three books, but William Baldwin's popular Treatise of Morali Philosophie had appeared in 1547 and contained one chapter "Of benefyttes, and of unthankfulness" which Baldwin soon expanded into a longer essay in later editions entitled "Of giving and receiving." Arthur Golding's translation of De beneficiis was published in 1578 and was not replaced until Thomas Lodge issued in 1614 what was to become the standard seventeenth-century edition in English of Seneca's Works Natural and Philosophical. In this collection, reprinted and expanded in 1620, De beneficiis is printed first, immediately after Lipsius's "Life of Seneca," suggesting that to Lodge, and probably to many of his readers, De beneficiis was the most important of all Seneca's moral treatises. Allusions to it, or borrowings from it, are frequent in the first half of the seventeenth century, and in 1678 Sir Roger L'Estrange published a lengthy redaction of it which was reprinted every two years until the end of the century and enjoyed a still vigorous life in the next. L'Estrange introduced the work as if he were a modern Timon: "I have pitch'd upon the Theme of Benefits, Gratitude and Ingratitude, to begin withall, as an Earnest of the Rest [of the collection], and a Lecture expresly Calculated for the Unthankfulness of these Times: the foulest undoubtedly, and the most execrable of all others, since the very Apostacy of the Angels" [quoted in Seneca's Morals Abstracted in Three Parts (1679)].

The seven dense books of De beneficiis, full of sententiae and casuistical discussions about the giving and receiving of benefits, are too complex to be fairly summarized, but a résumé of the most prominent ideas must be attempted. Seneca defined a benefit as "the act of a well-wisher who bestows joy and derives joy from the bestowal of it, and is inclined to do what he does from the prompting of his own will" (1.6.1). Later he elaborates: "The motive that leads to the giving of a benefit is not greedy nor mean, but is humane and generous, a desire to give even when one has already given, and to add new and fresh gifts to old ones, having as its sole aim the working of as much good as it can for him upon whom it bestows" (4.14.3); furthermore, "in order to produce a benefit, there must be a combination of two conditions. The first is the importance of the service; for there are some that fall short of the dignity of the claim … The second, which is most important… is that the motive of my action must be the interest of the one for whom the benefit is destined, that I should deem him worthy of it, should bestow it willingly and derive pleasure from my gift" (4.29.2-3). The intention of the giver is of the utmost significance because benefits are "transactions performed in our minds" (2.34.1, et passim), and the material objects that may be involved in an exchange of benefits are no more than "badges of honour" (1.5.6), signs of the giver's wish to do good. The receiver, if he is a civilized person, will naturally be grateful for the service and will wait for years if necessary to repay it with interest, but in many cases he will have fulfilled his obligations if he remains permanently grateful to his benefactor, without having the means to repay him in kind (7.14.3-16.4). His gratitude is itself the payment of the first installment of his debt (2.22.1), and even after full repayment the mutual bond between the bene-factor and the beneficiary will remain (2.35.3, 18.5). "The two most beautiful things in human life," Seneca exclaims, are "a man's gratitude and a man's benefit" (3.7.3). Ordinary services become benefits when they pass "into the domain of friendly affection" (3.21.1) and, in some impressively humanitarian passages, even slaves are granted the ability to perform good turns and favors (3.18-29). The Stoics were committed in principle to "the fellowship of the whole human race" (1.15.2), and Seneca calls the system of benefits "the chief bond of human society" (1.4.2; also 4.18.4).

If generosity was the heart of the society Seneca envis-aged, then reciprocity was its pulse, and he gives innumerable rules and recommendations to keep the body politic in good health. Giving should be swift, unreluctant, and unreproachful (2.1 ff.) and yet, if possible, nicely calculated to insure grateful recipients. Reason must determine what and how much is given, and while nothing is to be said in favor of foolish squander, liberality is to be encouraged. One of the inherent difficulties in the system, which Seneca never overcomes, is the borderline between true generosity and thoughtless extravagance. More generosity is always claimed to be a virtue, but at some point, never defined, it transforms itself into a vice—and the images of similar metamorphoses are also notably apparent in Shakespeare's play. Seneca is constantly balancing, in antithetical sentences, the rights and wrongs of different courses of behavior. For example, the giver should forget the benefit he has done and the receiver should remember it for ever; one should hold his tongue and the other publish his thanks to the world, and the only proper way to remind a seemingly ungrateful receiver is not to upbraid him but to give him another gift (2.11.2). In fact, "to complain of the loss of a benefit is proof that it was not well bestowed" (7.29.1). Book 4 of De benefàciis is largely devoted to proving that benefits and gratitude are desirable ends in themselves and that generosity is its own reward. There is in nature some peculiar power that compels us to give benefits (4.15.3), bringing with it a secret inner satisfaction even in times of adversity, and in response we should "pour forth our feelings" of gratitude (2.22.1). Jupiter himself is called the Stayer because all things are stayed and stabilized by his benefits (4.7.1), and in another eloquent passage Seneca summarizes much of his argument: "Let us be grateful to the gods, grateful to mankind, grateful to those who have bestowed anything upon our dear ones" (5.17.7); and, he adds elsewhere, grateful at the hour of our deaths (4.22.1).

The principal evil castigated in De benefàciis is not parsimony (although that vice is mentioned) but ingratitude. As it is the commonest sin, and one that people tend to encourage by the ill bestowal of their gifts, so is it also the worst: "Homicides, tyrants, thieves, adulterers, robbers, sacrilegious men, and traitors there will always be; but worse than all these is the crime of ingratitude, unless it be that all these spring from ingratitude, without which hardly any sin has grown to great size" (1.10.4); "there is nothing that so effectually disrupts and destroys the harmony of the human race as this vice" (4.18.1). The ingrate is unprofitable to himself, a disgrace to the world and loathed by all men; "base" and "monstrous" were the adjectives by which he was most commonly described much later in seventeenth-century England. Of several types of ingrates, the worst was the man who entirely forgets a benefit (3.1.4 ff), but a more subtle type was the person who is unwilling to receive gifts lest he should become indebted (4.40.5). Seneca is always insistent that the readiness to bear the burden of gratitude is one of the signs of a noble recipient, and his condition may last for ever. Many countries have been ruined by ingratitude (5.16.17), but in everyday life the best response to it is indifference. It is the greatest crime a man can commit, and yet the most easily pardoned in others (1.10.4). Moreover, there are no laws against ingratitude, except in Macedonia (3.6.2), because nature has taken sufficient precautions against it (4.17.1). It is beneath our dignity to complain of ingratitude and, should we do so, we run the risk of turning our beneficiaries into deadly enemies. We had the fruit of our benefit when we gave it, and the experience of ingratitude will make us not slower in giving but more careful (7.32.1).

The various strands of the argument are epitomized in two remarkable and closely related images, the contest of benefits and the Three Graces. Is it disgraceful to be outdone in benefits? Seneca asks; and he replies that no one can be outdone so long as he wishes to make a return and matches his benefactor in spirit. The quality of each man's gratitude is measured by the fevor of his desire (5.4.1-2), not by the cash value of the gifts he may have returned. Once again, the intention counts most, and in another passage Seneca exhorts the young Romans: "To your task, young heroes! A glorious contest is set before you—the contest between parents and children to decide whether they have given, or received, the greater benefits" (3.36.2). The outcome of the struggle is immaterial because both sides can win at the same time, and the conquerors and the conquered are equally happy. Seneca introduces the Three Graces early in the first book, saying that Chrysippus had urged "this most honourable rivalry in outdoing benefits by benefits" (1.4.4) by pointing out that the Graces were the daughters of Jupiter and that if we failed in gratitude we might become guilty of sacrilege. The Graces are three in number either because they represent the giving, receiving, and returning of benefits, or because there are three classes of benefactors—"those who earn benefits [by giving them], those who return them, those who receive and return them at the same time" (1.2.3). They are cheerful as becomes the bestowers and receivers of benefits, and they are young because the memory of benefits should never grow old; their purity is a sign that benefits are undefiled "and holy in the eyes of all," and finally their loose, flowing, and transparent robes suggest the unrestrictiveness of benefits and their desire to be seen. Holding hands and often dancing, the Graces are a symbol of a delicate, human chain of affection and "the beauty of the whole is destroyed if the course is anywhere broken" (1.3.4). Seneca brought up the Graces only to dismiss them as an absurdity of the poets, but not before confessing that he also wished to learn the "secret of the rivalry that is born in the hearts of the obligers and the obliged" (1.4.5). Reciprocity extends everywhere from one's attitude toward the bounty of the gods and nature to the simple "encircling" of another person with benefits, or to a subtle internal circle which would appear to be inescapable: "Suppose that you are ungrateful—the benefit is not lost, for the one who bestowed it still has it. Suppose that you are unwilling to receive a return—it is already in your possession before it is returned. You are not able to lose anything, because what is withdrawn from you is none the less acquired by you. The operation proceeds in a circle within yourself—in receiving you give, in giving you receive" (5.8.6). Although every obligation involving two people makes an equal demand upon both (2.18.1), Seneca seems to be saying here that a person becomes obliged by a benefit even if he refuses it, and it becomes impossible to distinguish clearly between giving and receiving since each action participates in both. A man is still obliged after he has made a restitution of everything he has received, so once the system is in operation there is no way of absconding from it merely by paying off one's debt with interest. Perhaps that is why the ingrate can stand as the chief criminal within the city and yet be exempt from punishment: the system is strong enough to include him and eventually to soften his hard heart. Although Seneca realized that man is "universally ungrateful" (5.17.3) and that every individual is constantly forgetting former kindnesses, he never lost his Stoic optimism or concluded that his theory of natural obligations was unworkable in practice and made impossible demands on human nature. De beneficiis ends strongly with a reminder that "persistent goodness wins over bad men," and that men rebuild cities on the sites of old ones whose ashes are still warm. Thus we should continue giving, like the gods, even though many of our gifts are in vain, remembering that "it is no proof of a fine spirit to give a benefit and lose it; the proof of a fine spirit is to lose and still to give" (7.32.1).

So De beneficiis ends, and the barest summary of its contents should convince most readers that the "play of ideas" for which Timon is famous is immediately enhanced when we perceive their Senecan origins. The curtain rises on the poet's and the painter's apostrophe to the "Magic of bounty" which presides over Timon's house and which "all these spirits thy power / Hath conjur'd to attend" (1.1.6-7). In their greedy and sycophantic manner they praise his "untirable and continuate goodness" and his "good and gracious nature" which subdues all hearts. On Timon's entry he begins his acts of unparalleled bounty with two quite genuine benefits to which Seneca could have taken no exception: his ransoming of Ventidius from a debtor's prison and his providing an adequate marriage portion for an honest and trusted servant. Although Apemantus enters to introduce a very sour note into the proceedings, no technical fault can be found with the lords' conclusion at the end of the first scene that Timon "outgoes / The very heart of kindness" and that "the noblest mind he carries / That ever govern'd man." The remainder of act 1 contains more railing by Apemantus and the first explicit statement by the steward that Timon has "no power to make his wishes good" (1.2.194), but it also shows Timon in a state of euphoria as his spirit of uncritical generosity surges through him. The contest of benefits and the rivalry between the obligers and the obliged inspire in him a rhetoric of which Seneca could have been proud:

Why, I have often wish'd myself poorer that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? O what a precious comfort 'tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another's fortunes. [1.2.98-103]

The thought of the rivalry reduces him to tears of joy, and the next minute he is heedlessly dispensing jewels, accepting horses and greyhounds, donating a thoroughbred to a friend who has casually admired it, and generally breaking all the Senecan rules about the need for wise and cautious liberality. Athens as Timon wishes it to be is the world of De beneficiis gone wild, gushing with reciprocity, bathed in sentiment, and wholly lacking the virtuous mean based on right reason that Seneca upheld even in his more emotional moments. Timon, as G. Wilson Knight long ago observed [in his The Wheel of Fire (1930)], "would build a paradise of love on earth." He has indeed become the "very soul of bounty," but the senator at the beginning of act 2 brings the play back to mundane reality:

    It cannot hold, it will not.
If I want gold, steal but a beggar's dog
And give it Timon—why, the dog coins gold;
If I would sell my horse and buy twenty moe
Better than he—why, give my horse to Timon;
Ask nothing, give it him, it foals me straight
And able horses.
                                        [2.1.4-10]

The play's evident relation with De beneficiis, however, raises more difficulties than it potentially solves. If Timon is a "case," as Bayley has suggested, the case would appear to have been designed to test the Senecan hypothesis about the nature of a just society and to find the classical model hopelessly wanting. Natural obligations derived from mutual benefits could never be the basis for a healthy society because mankind is ineradicably greedy and hypocritical, and the effort to pretend that he is not must lead to disgust and misanthropy. Yet if the play is clearly a critique of Stoic social ethics, Seneca himself serves to criticize the actions of Timon. De benefwiis cannot be written off as social philosophy if its chief denunciator is guilty of cardinal error according to the tenets of that philosophy. The play can say to the book "your system will never work," but the book can reply "you have disregarded my main teachings which prohibit thoughtless generosity and expressly condemn misanthropy over ingratitude. The complaint of the loss of your benefit is a sign it was badly given." Book and play square off against each other, like Timon and Apemantus, and the outcome of the philosophical quarrel between them is left in doubt. What seemed at first to be a simple schematic confrontation between a benefit system and the facts of life turns into a drama with each side scoring points off the other. It is quite uncharacteristic of Shakespeare's practice to enter into such an open dialogue with his sources, but then his known sources were most commonly histories or biographies, catalogs of events and actions rather than a body of ideas already tabulated and well known. Timon is unique in the Shakespearean oeuvre in making no attempt to disguise its indebtedness to a philosopher and in calling attention from the start to the subject it proposes to engage. Readers have found many ways of saying that the play is schematic or motivated by a "big idea," and all of them can be traced to the fact that the play has a recognizable subject—recognizable, that is, not only to thematic critics who have always been too quick to identify the topics of Shakespeare's plays, but to Shakespeare's contemporaries, who were much more familiar with Seneca's ideas than we are. The dramatization of the subject, however, introduces complexities that would have baffled Seneca's casuistry, and which I believe Shakespeare found insoluble. The most ironic of them is the fate of the Three Graces, whom one would expect to find in any serious treatment of De beneficiis but who can hardly be represented by the two whores of Alcibiades, the only speaking, female parts in the play.

It is possible, and I think quite likely, that Shakespeare intended Cupid's "masque of Ladies as Amazons" to be a masque of Graces, because Timon thanks them formally in the language of benefits so suited to his character in act 1:

You have done our pleasures much grace, fair
  ladies,
Set a fair fashion on our entertainment,
Which was not half so beautiful and kind;
                                    [1.2.142-44]

He claims too that they have "entertain'd me with my own device," and if any "device" or motto were suited to Timon in act 1 it would have to be drawn from Seneca. The stage directions seem to imply more than three Amazons, however, which would invalidate this suggestion, although the three strangers who show up later, the three friends to whom Timon applies for money, the three senators who interview Alcibiades, and the three usurers' men, who would be the natural antithesis of Three Graces, suggest that Shakespeare was thinking in groups of three.

These are hints—"hints followed by guesses," to use T. S. Eliot's phrase—but nevertheless the Three Graces are firmly in the text at crucial stages of the play's design: not as beneficent maidens dancing in a circle but as three graces said over food. Eating is one of the play's preoccupations, as several critics have remarked, and two of the graces are especially notable and given dramatic emphasis. The first is "Apemantus' Grace," so described in the stage directions and uttered with smug self-satisfaction as Apemantus joins Timon's feast, sitting at a table by himself and refusing to touch Timon's meat and wine. It occurs just before Timon's most euphoric speech about his friends:

Immortal gods, I crave no pelf;
I pray for no man but myself.
Grant I may never prove so fond,
To trust man on his oath or bond;
Or a harlot for her weeping,
Or a dog that seems a-sleeping,
Or a keeper with my freedom,
Or my friends, if I should need 'em.
Amen. So fall to't:
Rich men sin, and I eat root.
                                 [1.2.62-71 … ]

The second grace is Timon's long satirical introduction to the banquet of hot water which he has prepared for his trencher friends. "Sit, sit. The gods require our thanks," and he then speaks the long prayer beginning "You great benefactors, sprinkle our society with thankfulness" and ending with his furious rejection of his guests (3.6.67-101). It is the most dramatic passage in the play but also one of the hardest to interpret, because Timon's attitude toward the gods themselves is so ambiguous that one does not know if his anger includes them also: "For your own gifts, make yourselves prais'd; but reserve still to give, lest your deities be despis'd. Lend to each man enough, that one need not lend to another; for were your godheads to borrow of men, men would forsake the gods" (3.6.70-73). Is Timon scornful of the gods for being less generous than he has been (who "reserved" nothing), or is his advice to "Make the meat be belov'd, more than the man that gives it" (a direct inversion of the Senecan rule) a criticism of them for making man incapable of gratitude? As rage, not thankfulness, is the fount from which the grace springs, Timon may be implying that the benefactions of the gods are imaginary, since they have withheld gratitude, and their only role in human affairs should be to make mankind "suitable for destruction" (3.6.79). Although Timon addresses the gods almost insolently ("your deities … your godheads"), he nonetheless appears to desire their help, and he may wish simply to incite the gods to the height of his own wrath, and to come to the aid of his imprecations. Later, outside Athens, he prays to them to send him roots and they respond, unlike the Christian God, by giving him more gold, which he cannot eat. "Ha, gods," he shouts at them, "I am no idle votarist. / Roots, you clear heavens! … Ha, you gods! Why this? What this, you gods?" (4.3.27-31). Throughout the play Timon carries on an intermittent conversation with the gods, and it is never clear that he holds them ultimately in disesteem. By sending Timon gold when he craves food, the gods perhaps are paying him back for his satirical grace or merely amusing themselves at his expense, but they soon relent by providing the food he needs, and the occasion for the third and final grace.

Timon, deserted by Alcibiades and his mistresses, begins one of the play's great solioquies with the confession that he is hungry, and a heartfelt prayer to the goddess Nature:

       Common mother, thou
Whose womb unmeasurable and infinite breast
Teems and feeds all; whose self-same mettle,
Whereof thy proud child, arrogant man, is
  puffd,
Engenders the black toad and adder blue,
The gilded newt and eyeless venom'd worm,
With all th' abhorred births below crisp heaven
Whereon Hyperion's quick'ning fire doth shine:
Yield him, who all the human sons do hate,
From forth thy plenteous bosom, one poor root.
                                   [4.3.179-88]

The prayer is a formal, even a solemn, appeal for help. If newts and "abhorred births" manage to live, then Timon, as the one man who hates Nature's proudest and most arrogant offspring, deserves to eat too, but at this point Timon's petition changes into a savage exhortation to Nature to "no more bring out ingrateful man." As he speaks, however, and scratches in the soil beside him, he finds the food he has been looking for and interrupts his diatribe against Nature's malign creativity to thank her for answering his prayer: "O, a root," he says, "dear thanks!" (4.3.194). This third grace, a brief interjection of gratitude into an angry tirade, may be one of the shortest graces on record, but it is also the only genuine grace in the play and fulfills the requirements of Seneca's third Grace, who represented the returning of gratitude for benefits received.

The transformation of Seneca's Graces into three blessings over meals, each one entirely different from the others, has a disruptive effect on our response to the play. It is so unexpected, and such an outrageous visual pun, that it defies confident interpretation. It is as if Shakespeare had read Seneca with derisive laughter, thinking "I'll show you what I can do with your Graces whom you have dismissed as a folly of the poets," but the joke takes on the mordant quality of Timon's false feast and ends, in the third grace, as a touching reminder, in the midst of his anger, of Timon's genuinely grateful nature. The play's dialogue with its source looks more aggressive and imperious as Shakespeare takes Seneca's Words about the Graces and twists them violently to his dramatic ends. No author, not even a classic, is safe from the tricks that Shakespeare's imagination can play with him. He is at the mercy of a higher power, the victim of a reviewer who can hold up his finest images to ridicule. An inherent bitterness, I think, informs the transformation or a kind of anger in keeping with Timon's, and with Shakespeare's, malevolent treatment of the Poet and Painter. If Seneca is mocked by the change, then so is the representative of Shakespeare's own profession who, we are told, whips his own faults in other men (5.1.37-38). Both philosopher and poet are belittled and put in their places so that neither of them can complain that Shakespeare has favored the other. Readers will be likely to argue about the specific effects of Shakespeare's grotesque distortion of the Graces, but on some minor consequences we might be able to agree.

One of them is to underscore neatly the distinction drawn throughout the play between Timon and Apemantus, a distinction which Timon is at such pains to maintain himself when he and Apemantus most resemble each other in their outward fortunes. Apemantus's grace and Timon's last grace are both said over a root, which is the basic particle of sustenance in this play, the quark of the benefit system upon which Timon's early luxury rises like a monstrous excrescence. "What needs these feasts, pomps, and vainglories?" as Apemantus remarks in one of his more telling shafts (1.2.244). In the course of time, when Timon is reduced to eating roots, his attitude toward them is instinctively correct, because we must read his five words of gratitude to Nature as a spontaneous effusion when his mind is otherwise clouded with hatred. Apemantus, on the contrary, says the first grace which, had it followed the pattern of De beneficiis, should have been the most bountiful grace, initiating the circle of reciprocity. It does exactly the opposite as Apemantus congratulates himself on his total isolation from the banquet that surrounds him. His grace contains not a word of thanks to the immortal gods for his root and water, and Seneca's trusting spirit (who said that men should continue giving in spite of ingratitude) is openly contradicted. "Repellent" is the word Wilson Knight applied to Apemantus, and "repulsive" would be another if Shakespeare had left no trace of sociability in the old curmudgeon, or the slight suspicion that his hanging around at feasts derives from a long-suppressed desire to participate in them like a normal person. We have no reason to disbelieve the Poet who says that "Apemantus, that few things loves better / Than to abhor himself—even he drops down / The knee before him, and returns in peace / Most rich in Timon's nod" (1.1.60-63). That is not the Apemantus we are given on the stage, but he later approaches Timon in his misery, saying "I love thee better now than e'er I did" (4.3.235), and his offer of food is a gesture which can be read either as a taunt or as a glimpse of generosity that may have surprised even Apemantus himself. Apemantus works best as a dramatic character if he is seen not only as the embodiment of a negation, a denier of the mutuality of human and Senecan society, but also as a small concession by Shakespeare to the rationale of De beneficiis. No man, not Timon and not even Apemantus, can be so locked in himself as to refuse for ever to make those outward-going movements which will restore his connection to men and to the gods. Timon's last grace is unpremediated and repairs his relation with the gods at a time when he is determined to sever his ties to mankind.

Timon's long confrontation with Apemantus immediately follows the third grace and is a hard-fought verbal battle degenerating into childish curses and stone throwing, which might suggest that neither of them is a clear-cut victor. Apemantus establishes that Timon is proud even in his misery, and suffers from "A poor unmanly melancholy sprung / From change of future" (4.3.205-6; "future" often emended to "fortune"); and his judgment on Timon that "The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends" (4.3.301-2) has been accepted by all readers of the play. Timon, for his part, detects the meanness in Apemantus's nature and attributes his willing misery to the fact that he has never had a chance to be otherwise. One brief exchange captures much of their difference, and it is a difference Timon wishes to preserve at all costs:

Timon. If thou hadst not been born the worst of
        men,
   Thou hadst been a knave and flatterer.
Apem.                     Art thou proud yet?
Timon.  Ay, that I am not thee.
Apem.                      I, that I was
 No prodigal.
Timon.           I, that I am one now.
  Were all the wealth I have shut up in thee,
  I'ld give thee leave to hang it. Get thee gone.
  That the whole life of Athens were in this!
  Thus would I eat it.        [Eating a root]
                                   [4.3.277-84]

Although Timon and Apemantus both seem satisfied with their roots, Timon claims that he is prodigal still and denounces his opponent as an unwilling beggar who would have "plung'd [himself] in general riot" if he could (4.3.257-58). He leaves us wondering if Apemantus's root could not be the radix omnium malorum identified by Saint Paul as cupiditas, which produces such luxuriant growth in Shakespeare's play. Only Timon and his few loyal friends are justly exempt from the charge of cupiditas.

Timon's tragic stature has often been in doubt, but the comparison with Apemantus, which is meant to bring it out, reveals the prodigality which governs both phases of his life. Timon is no less prodigal in his anger and misery than in his affluence, and although the arrows of Apemantus find their mark, Timon has a certain grandeur of feeling when he has lost all else. His bounteous habits continue in his misanthropy, so that he gives gold to Alcibiades and his harlots to spread war and diseases in Athens, more gold to the banditti to reward them for their open profession of thievery, and finally offers his tree as a crowning benefit to his countrymen on which they can hang themselves and thus "ease them of their griefs." The aim of these gifts in the second half of the play is to cause as much harm as possible to those who receive them, so they can never qualify as benefits according to Seneca's definition, but the forms of gift giving are retained and testify to the thwarted generosity from which they arise. Montaigne, when he described the historical Timon, might have been describing Shakespeare's: "For look what a man hateth, the same he takes to hart." Montaigne said that Timon's passionate desire for our ruin suited his humor less than Diogenes' indifference and disdain of human commerce, but Shakespeare's humor preferred Timon, although he allowed Apemantus a just hearing. By "taking to heart" the world's evil Timon acquires a nobility denied to cynics and flatterers, and Shakespeare has offered an extraordinary endorsement of Seneca's deepest belief. Although the play exposes Seneca's culpable naiveté in thinking that benefits could be made into a workable system of social behavior, it grants him the truth of his main contention that a generous nature is the sign of a noble man. Timon is wrong in many ways that Seneca defined, and Seneca is so wrong that Shakespeare could make ribald fun of his Graces, but the impulse to prodigality, which Timon never loses, has an heroic dimension which distinguishes him from his false friends and the cynical philosopher. "What hast thou given?" he can ask Apemantus, and though his own later gifts are supposed to be lethal, they derive from a temper that naturally seeks to connect itself with other men and, in so doing, sets Timon above them. It is obviously paradoxical to find a wish to connect in Timon's misanthropy, when he himself wishes to repudiate all connection and to offer dangerous gifts to anyone who will take them; but if we find any nobility at all in the ruined Timon (and some readers do not), the explanation must lie in the perverse prodigality which gives continuity to the two Timons in the play.

If Shakespeare has conceded, in a complicated and back-handed way, that generosity is—or can be—a virtue, he seems carefully to have confined its practical value to the attractive but insignificant group of loyal servants who seek out Timon after his crash. Timon's recognition of the steward as the one just man is an admission from Seneca's chief critic that exceptions exist to "universal ingratitude," although they have no bearing on the political life of Athens. Timon has not gone mad in his misanthropy, and although he ignored the steward's advice in the days of his prosperity, his dismissal of him now with a generous present is another sign that his former nature has not died within him. A much greater concession to the Senecan thesis is the ending of the play, when Alcibiades enters to take his revenge but listens instead to some sensible advice from the senators, agrees with them that not everyone is guilty of ingratitude, and promises to govern by the laws and prevent all looting by his soldiers. It is an ending Seneca would have found perfectly satisfactory but, before discussing it, I would point out that Alcibiades has the further function in the play of disqualifying the more famous aspects of Stoicism.

In act 3, scene 5, which has troubled a number of critics, Alcibiades approaches the Athenian senators as "an humble suitor to your virtues" to ask as a benefit the life of one of his soldiers, who has killed a man. The soldier deserves the favor because of his long service to the city, and Alcibiades adds much weight to the request by citing on the prisoner's behalf his own benefits to Athens. He is curtly rejected with conventional Stoic maxims: "He's truly valiant that can wisely suffer / The worst that man can breathe, / And make his wrongs his outsides, / To wear them like his raiment, carelessly" (3.5.31-34). Alcibiades replies that "If there be / Such valour in the bearing … If wisdom be in suffering," then the ass is "more captain than the lion" and the prisoner "loaden with irons [is] wiser than the judge." Alcibiades departs in "spleen and fury," cursing the senate for refusing a benefit and leaving the audience satisfied with the justice of his question: "But who is man that is not angry?" (3.5.58). Stoic resignation is as impractical and irrelevant to the business of living as the Stoic doctrine concerning benefits. Stoics assume that men are naturally patient and "born to do benefits," whereas the most cursory examination shows that they are neither. Timon's spleen and fury may be excessive, but they are not unnatural, and Alcibiades echoes his feelings on his return to chastise Athens:

     Now the time is flush,
When crouching marrow, in the bearer strong,
Cries, of itself, "No more." Now breathless
  wrong
Shall sit and pant in your great chairs of ease,
And pursy insolence shall break his wind
With fear and horrid flight.
                                       [5.4.8-13]

The scene is set for a bloodbath in which the city's guilt, admitted by the Athenians themselves, will be sluiced away. Why then does Alcibiades forget his anger so easily, consent to a few minor purges, and leave us with the strong impression that life in Athens will soon be back to normal?

      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.
                                    [5.4.81-85]

This, it seems to me, is to grant Seneca the game, set, and match as, within fifty lines, Alcibiades' Timonic fury is extinguished and the play returns full circle to the kind of commonplace with which it opened: "how goes the world? It wears, sir, as it grows" (1.1.2-3). Timon's magnificent example—the "particular rarity … which manifold record not matches" (1.1.4-5) that the Poet had called for as the play began—has spent itself, and even the memory of him is postponed for the time being as Alcibiades promises to recall him later. The concluding speech of this "ag'd interpreter, though young in days" (5.3.8) is an interpretation of Timon's epitaph which manages to imply that Athens has more important things on its mind at present than to recollect its dead hero. Concordia discors must be restored, life in the city will continue as usual, and Timon lying in his grave on the seashore will be forgotten, his point made in vain.

The question must arise why Shakespeare chose to write an ending which turns away from the very problem the play presents and seems to settle for so much less in compensation than Timon's life demanded. One possible answer is that Shakespeare could not help himself because he had no alternative scheme to offer in place of the Senecan wisdom. If Alcibiades, in justifiable rage, unleashed the dogs of war on Athens, that is the end of it, and universal misanthropy swallows all. If, alternatively, Alcibiades were to consider deeply the lessons to be learned from Timon's tragedy, he would have to conclude that Athenian society was rotten to the core and that another model of political society was needed to control its destructive appetites. Timon springs from this deep need for a better system, since it was useless to go on repeating the old Senecan myth that "the whole Business (almost) of Mankind in Society, falls under this Head [of benefiting]: The Duties of Kings and Subjects; Husbands, and Wives; Parents, and Children; Masters, and Servants; Natives, and Strangers; High, and Low; Rich, and Poor; Strong, and Weak; Friends, and Enemies" [quoted in L'Estrange's Seneca's Morals Abstracted in Three Parts]. Timon's cry to the gods for "Roots, you clear heavens!" (4.3.28) echoes the play's even deeper but implicit appeal for the true origin and source of social justice which the gods have hitherto denied. Shakespeare, in the first decade of the century, saw and felt more vividly than anyone before him that gratitude and good turns were not a glue that could be trusted to keep society stuck together, but if he followed that line of thought he produced images like King Lear howling in the storm about "filial ingratitude," or Coriolanus, that "boy of tears," breaking down as he is compelled to acknowledge obligations that he had imagined had been overthrown by Rome's immense ingratitude to him. Tragedy and death follow in Coriolanus as they do in Timon, and an anonymous Second Lord is given almost the last word: "Let's make the best of it" (Coriolanus 5.6.146), he says, and making the best of it is what both Alcibiades and Shakespeare are doing at the end of Timon.

De beneficiis was a primer of old-fashioned, unworkable nonsense, as Timon's experience conclusively proves, and its correspondence with reality can be found only in minor individuals. Timon had assumed it spoke the truth and attempted to practice it with enormous panache and not a little hubris, as he sought to imitate the bounty of the gods. The play is a great blow to cherished Elizabethan conceptions, but it concludes, for want of anything better, by leaving them still in place, and it was not until forty years later that the genius of Hobbes was to create a model of political society founded on the bedrock of human passions which had wrecked Timon's idealism; and the reception of Leviathan in England was proof enough that the country still nursed its Senecan illusions about a happy world of benefits. Shakespeare had no conception of a contractual political society because nobody conceived one until much later, so Timon is a martyr to profoundly held beliefs which Shakespeare knew were inadequate but was powerless to change and could only challenge with a vision that shirked nothing. Tragedy in Timon is not only the death of a truly generous, and therefore great, man, but an awareness that alternatives do not exist. Timon, in a sense, dies for nothing and is unrevenged. A just society could not be built with the materials to hand, so, for want of a better, the old Senecan model would have to serve. Shakespeare could see the attractiveness of the Senecan society and all its weaknesses, and tragedy is born of the tension between a wish to make it work, a wish to get out of it, and the realization that one can do neither. Shakespeare was trapped, as it were, into making the best of a system he could not believe in, and Timon is both a recognition of that fact and an eloquent record of his enquiry. Timon himself, the agent here of Shakespeare's examination of De beneficiis, is sacrificed to a lost but necessary cause, and his grave on the beach is a fitting symbol of his life as he joins the to-fro motion of the waves and the reciprocity of the tide.