SOURCE: “A Dramatic History of Misanthropes,”Comparative Drama, Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer, 1983, pp. 97-123.

[In the following essay, Konstan explores concepts of misanthropy by comparing Timon of Athens to Menander's Dyscolus and Moliére's Le Misanthrope.]

The misanthrope is not merely different from other men; he judges them, and does so on what he takes to be their own terms. He perceives himself as the representative of a social ideal which others have betrayed, and condemns his fellows for their perversity and hypocrisy. And yet society abides, and it is the misanthrope who cannot fit. He is rigid and surly, a natural target for comic deflation. Were he asocial, like the cyclops or the anchorite, the codes of communal life would not be an issue for him. But he is antisocial, and bears within him the image of the thing he opposes. This tension demands dialogue, as Cicero perhaps divined when he said of Timon, the renowned misanthrope of Athens, that even he “could not endure to be excluded from one associate, at least, before whom he might discharge the whole rancour and virulence of his heart.”¹ The misanthrope comes on as a satirist, and is kin to the stern Umbricius in Juvenal, who delivers his tirade against the corruption of Rome as he lingers by its gates, before abandoning the city forever. Juvenal had vision when he named his spokesman after shadows (umbra), for the railer shapes his critique of society according to its own occluded ideals.

The misanthrope, then, is an ambiguous figure. His complaint is in principle with the failures of society, not its existence as such. But by his isolation he relinquishes the authority of those social ideals which are the grounds of his reproach against others. The virtues which he demands lose their meaning in a society of one. For the rigor of his ideals, there is something heroic about him, but he is also the victim of his humor. He can rail but he refuses to engage—it is this which distinguishes him from the prophet. The misanthrope is a contradiction, society's own self-denial. He is, so to speak, the thing in the moment of its otherness. In this misanthrope, society presents both itself and its own negation.

It is precisely this social character of the misanthrope, however, which should warn us against taking him as an abstract type. His withdrawal is not simply a function of individual personality, but a relation to the norms and conduct of the world. The misanthrope's is a determinate otherness, which is to say: not all misanthropes are alike. They have a history, which is a reflex of the history of social forms themselves. This history is the subject of the present investigation.

I shall address this subject through a study of three dramas, each by a master: the Dyscolus or “Grouch” by Menander, which bore also the alternative title of “The Misanthrope”; Shakespeare's Timon of Athens; and Le Misanthrope of Molière. In each case, I shall examine how the double nature of the misanthrope is exhibited—his virtue and his social deficiency—and show how this functions in the plot and structure of the drama. Beyond this, I shall look to the values which inform both character and action, and to the paradoxes or problems made manifest in the social ideal itself. At this level, which we may call the meanings of the works, we shall be able to compare the different realizations of the misanthrope in classical Athens, Elizabethan London, and France under the reign of Louis XIV. The historian Christian Meier has written, in connection with the evolution of the idea of politics, that “The specificity of a foreign culture cannot be grasped without setting it off against others, or at all events, one's own.”² One needs, however, a point of comparison, and for the study of literature, a concept is less good than a character. To this end the misanthrope will oblige us.

Methodologically, then, it is clear that our project is not a simple table of influences. There is no evidence that Molière knew anything of Shakespeare, and neither could have known Menander's play, which was recovered from the sands of Egypt and published for the first time in 1959. Indirect influences, to be sure, are not to be excluded. Molière might have been acquainted with an Italian version of the Timon drama, and both Molière and Shakespeare were familiar with Plautus’ Aulularia, which features a miser and which resembles the Dyscolus in important ways. Taken together, in fact, the Aulularia and the Dyscolus suggest a basic form for a class of Greek comedies in which a character cuts himself off from society, and it is particularly instructive to observe the ways in which this pattern is modified or altered in later drama.³ Plot types, I believe, answer to social life and changing complexes of meaning. At all events, great works of literature tend to realize the order of motives, feelings, and symbols available in a culture, as the “structuration,” in Lucien Goldmann's terminology, “of new totalities,” though I would add that such totalities always bear the marks of the effort required to assert and maintain them, and are never in perfect equilibrium.⁴ While these structures are expressed in cultural products, they are functions of lived needs, and bear a relationship to the forms and contradictions of social production and reproduction. These forms changed profoundly in the evolution from the world of the ancient city-state to the European nations of the renaissance. The misanthrope in a society of peasant proprietors is not the same as his fellow-curmudgeon who reacts against the world of incipient commodity capitalism, and the play that gives him life is, I shall maintain, correspondingly specific to its social context. To substantiate, or at least to render plausible, these propositions, I turn now to the plays themselves.

Menander's misanthrope lives with his daughter and an elderly slave who keeps house for him on his rural property which he farms himself. The estate is large and fertile enough to enable him to be economically independent, and its worth is not negligible. He is exceedingly shy of company, enough to have abandoned tilling a portion of his land near the public road; and his hostility to strangers finds missiles in clods or stones should anyone trespass on his domain. He discovers the speciousness of his pretended self-sufficiency, however, when, in pursuit of a bucket that had dropped from a rotten cord, he falls down his own well and requires the kind assistance of neighbors to get him out again. It is two young men who come to his rescue: his stepson, who lives nearby in relative poverty with his mother, the estranged wife of Knemon, as the misanthrope is called; and Sostratos, a young, elegant, wealthy city-lad who has fallen in love with Knemon's daughter, and has, from the beginning, been trying to earn the confidence of the old man in order to gain his consent for marriage with her. The rescue at the well does it. Knemon submits, or rather, he turns the girl over to the authority of her stepbrother, Gorgias, who gladly gives his approval. Knemon is now prepared to withdraw into complete solitude, but is prevented from doing so by the antics of a cook and slave who earlier had suffered from his ill temper. Preparations are in process for a double wedding, since, in a kind of coda to the main romantic action, Sostratos has persuaded his father to give his daughter to the worthy, if impoverished, Gorgias. The cook and slave tease and manhandle Knemon, who is still weak and battered from his fall, oblige him to dance, and, finally, to join in the general festivities despite his protestations.

It is possible to pick out two strands or themes in this story, “the romantic love-interest (involving Sostratos and Knemon's daughter) demanded of New Comedy, and a character-study of the misanthropic Knemon.”⁵ Armin Schäfer, in an exhaustive monograph on the play, argued that “Menander comes near to a solution … but these two elements are basically irreconcilable, and the play consequently fails to achieve complete unity of action.”⁶ Schäfer's division ignores, however, the logic, implicit in the social relations of the ancient city-state, which makes a single issue of Knemon's isolation and the fate of his daughter. I do not mean the mere contingent circumstance that Knemon's fierce temperament stands in the way of Sostratos’ desire and of any conjugal union with his child. To put the matter that way is simply to posit Schäfer's distinction. It is rather that Knemon and his daughter, who is a demure but vague figure of whom we see little in the play (she has about a dozen lines in all) together constitute a household or oikos, and this is the unit which Knemon's misanthropy segregates from the social world. Such households, which were perceived as potentially autonomous, were bound together into a community of feeling by collective rituals, on the one hand, and by the bonds of marriage on the other. The social significance of Knemon's withdrawal is the disintegration of those bonds, beginning with the breach between himself and his wife, but achieving a categorical expression in his daughter's sequestration which marks a permanent lapse of kinship ties between his household and the larger community. From this point of view, the essence of Knemon's misanthropy is his abdication of responsibility for his household, and specifically for the next generation.

The theme of responsibility or authority is broached early in the play, when Sostratos indicates that he has sent his slave to seek out the girl's father or “whoever it may be who is in charge of the household” (73-74). The person in charge is in Greek the kyrios, who in Attic law had legal authority over his wife, children, and property, as well as others, such as unmarried sisters, who are subject to no other responsible adult male. At this point in the action, of course, Sostratos simply does not know who the girl's kyrios happens to be. But the hint of ambiguity is soon developed in connection with an encounter between Sostratos and Knemon's daughter, the only scene in which she appears. She has emerged from her house to fill a jug with water, since the bucket, which I mentioned earlier, has by now fallen into the well. Sostratos offers to fetch some for her, and a slave of Gorgias, who has overheard the exchange, curses Knemon for his carelessness in allowing a virtuous young girl to go out by herself, without a chaperone.⁷ He decides to report the matter to Gorgias, so that they at least can assume the care (epimeleia) of her (220-29). When Gorgias appears, he reproaches the slave for having stood by like a stranger (allotrios, 238). One may not, he says, run away from relationship, employing here a word (oikeiotēs, 240) whose normal sense, as we are told by a Byzantine lexicographer, denotes ties by marriage, although Menander used it loosely of blood-relations (see Gomme and Sandbach ad v.). Her father, Gorgias continues, wishes to be a stranger toward them, but they must not imitate his churlishness. Later, Knemon will acknowledge his failure as head-of-house-hold, accept Gorgias as his son, and place him in charge of his estate and his daughter, entrusting him to find a husband for her, since no one, he realizes, is likely to find favor with him (729-35; cf. 737-39).

At this point in the play, a kind of denouement has been achieved, because Knemon's household has been liberated from the constraints of his irascible nature and is restored to the community of families. This is exhibited at once in Gorgias’ consent to his half-sister's marriage to Sostratos; and, from this point of view, we may understand the function of Sostratos’ passion as a sentimental or personal vehicle of the objective kinship code of Athenian society, which may be described as a closed conjugal group—that is, one in which citizens married citizens, while strangers were strictly excluded from this relation. To put it another way, Sostratos’ love for Knemon's daughter is a manifestation of the city-state's claim on Knemon's oikos, which he, by his isolationism, was in effect renouncing. The theme of misanthropy and the love-interest, then, may be regarded as the obverse and reverse of the same coin.

Knemon himself, to be sure, remains aloof from the new arrangements, disclaiming any interest in the man his daughter is to marry (752) and demanding for himself and his wife simply provision for their support (739). His intransigence may seem a blemish on the spirit of comic resolution, although an easy conversion of the misanthrope would undercut the representation of his character, and neither Timon nor Molière's Alceste submits to such reform. What is more, such a transformation would compromise the essential dignity of Knemon, for he, like Timon and Alceste, has a kind of virtue or nobility about him. I have intimated that a double nature pertains to the essential idea of the misanthrope; we need to explore the way Menander brings it into play.⁸

Early in the action, when Sostratos’ slave returns breathless from his unfortunate interview with Knemon, Sostratos ventures, if not a defense, at least a generous interpretation of Knemon's conduct: “A poor farmer is a bitter sort, not only this one, but practically all of them” (120-31). Sostratos’ own courage deserts him when Knemon himself arrives, but the suggestion that Knemon represents a general type of tough, hard-working peasant is echoed and amplified throughout the drama. Gorgias later observes that Knemon's vehemence is directed against the idle lives that people lead (355-57), and Knemon himself reveals this side of his surliness when he observes of a party preparing a festive sacrifice to Pan, who shares a shrine with the Nymphs next door to Knemon's house, that such lavish piety is for their own sakes, not the gods’. The god himself would be content with some ritual cake and incense; the roasted animals serve the people's gluttony (449-53). Finally, after Knemon has been rescued from the well, largely through the efforts of Gorgias with the distracted assistance of Sostratos, he delivers, along with his confession that man needs the help of others and cannot be independent of everyone, an explanation and an apologia for his ways. Having observed, he says, the calculating greed of human beings, he had imagined that no one was really considerate of anyone else (718-21). The example of Gorgias, especially in light of Knemon's former treatment of him, upsets this judgment. But still he ventures in his own defense: “If everyone were like me, there wouldn’t be courts, they wouldn’t be taking each other off to jail, there’d be no war, and each would be content with his fair share” (743-45). The sentiment is a Greek commonplace: trouble starts when people stop minding their own business.⁹ Nevertheless, it is a fine moment. One critic observes: “It is Menander's considerable achievement that after spending three acts building Knemon into a monster (a comic monster, maybe, but one for whom the audience's sympathy is not invited for a moment), he is able to transform him into a human being whose ill-guided attempt to live without assistance from others, autos autarkēs (714), is not merely touching but has a trace of nobility about it.”¹⁰ We have seen that this side of Knemon's character had in fact already been adumbrated. There are other such indications too. The god Pan, who delivers the prologue, describes Knemon's daughter as “like her breeding, ignorant of pettiness” (35-36). The implied approval of Knemon's household has seemed anomalous enough to cause some editors to emend the text, but Sostratos himself speaks later of the somehow liberal or decent rearing (eleutheriōs, 387) she enjoyed with her boorish father, which sheltered her from the corrupting influence of nannies, and when he sees the girl he is struck at once by the liberal style of her rusticity (eleutheriōs ge pōs agroikos estin, 201-02).

One scholar suggests that faults of Knemon are patterned not only on the type of the misanthrope proper but on the rude rustic as well, the “unattractive agroikos of Theophrastos or Aristotle,” and that Menander “has used him to portray an excess of rustic harshness.”¹¹ But the image of the rustic cuts both ways, carrying connotations of sturdy independence, straight-forwardness, hard work, and honesty alongside those of taciturn or uncouth unsociability. Knemon represents an ideal as well as a vice. In the words of a scholar who adores Menander for his ethics and didacticism, “Rusticity is a fault in Theophrastus. In Menander it is coupled with noble independence and innocence.”¹²

The fact that the misanthrope in Menander may be seen as a version, however exaggerated, of the type of the Attic farmer suggests that his autarky too is not simply a personal delusion, but a real, or at least an ideologically credible, possibility. Indeed, it was both. Knemon's style was perfectly viable. A freeholder could support himself by his own labors, and such a way of life left little enough reason for an affable disposition. Menander's picture of Knemon's property and circumstances is probably a fair one. More important, the vision of a perfectly autonomous family unit was old and deep in the city-state society. Aristophanes captured it best in his play, the Acharnians, produced about a century before the Dyscolus. The hero, Dicaeopolis, whose name means “Just City,” in disgust at the corruption of his fellow citizens, who will do nothing to secure an honorable peace with Sparta, withdraws to his own farm in the country and signs a private peace treaty with the enemy. The whole fantasy that follows is based on the notion that an individual household could function like a city, autonomous and self-sufficient. There is, of course, a vast difference in spirit between the two dramatists. Where Aristophanes’ hero succeeds exuberantly in his bold enterprise and has the Athenians begging for a share in his treaty, Menander's is humbled. But not entirely: there abides a tension between autarky and community which is manifest both in the two aspects of his character and in his stubborn pride.

This tension was real for the ideology of the city-state, even while—perhaps because—accelerating class differentiation in the Hellenistic epoch, together with political changes in favor of large landowners that were supported by the Macedonians, was rendering the ancestral image of a community of citizen-farmers ever less actual. To overcome it, and at the same time to defuse the very real problems of social and class antagonisms, Menander proceeds, as I see it, on several fronts. First, on the moral level, he suggests a principle of generous regard for others, of philanthrōpia in the large sense which the Greek term possesses, to stand against the disintegrative misanthropy of Knemon. Because ethical criticism is still very much in fashion among classicists, this feature of the play has often been observed. One writer sums up his argument: “Menander, then, in the ‘Dyskolos’ has pictured very vividly for us the schism existing between city and country in Athens in the late fourth century B.C. At the same time he has shown us that the seeds of philanthropia which can solve this problem lie in the refinement of the city and the practical experience of the country. He shows us also the great binding influence that this feeling can have.”¹³ This fine sentiment, it must nevertheless be conceded, does not lighten the testy suspiciousness of Knemon.

A second strategy involves the introduction of Kallipides, Sostratos’ father. Gorgias is in awe of him: he is a wealthy man, but an honest one and an incomparable farmer (774-75). He consents graciously to Sostratos’ marriage with Knemon's daughter, but balks at his demand, raised rather abruptly at the beginning of Act V, that his own daughter be given in matrimony to Gorgias. A double wedding with paupers is too much (795-96). I believe that Kallipides’ resistance, brief as it is, is meant to balance the obstacle which Knemon represented. Both sides, rich and poor, urbane and surly, are made to yield something. Implicitly, the scene acknowledges the grounds of Knemon's wariness and thus the rational side of his behavior. At all events, his rudeness is not the only barrier to full and free ties of kinship among all citizens. Sostratos caps his plea with an elevated homily on the right use of wealth, over which one is master (kyrios, 806; cf. 800) for a brief span of years; the noble thing is to assist all, render as many as one may prosperous through one's efforts. Such generosity is immortal, and from it benefits will return in time of need (805-10). This moralizing is at a sublime level of abstraction, and my guess, which could perhaps be substantiated by a stylistic analysis, is that Kallipides hears this earnest lecture with respect and kindly amusement.¹⁴ In any case, he gives in at once, gently reminding his son: “You know me, Sostratos” (813).

Still, Knemon remains outside the charmed circle. To bring him in, Menander resorts to plain boisterousness. In a farcical finale, with new rhythms, music, and a slap-stick dance with an unwilling Knemon, the curmudgeon joins the party. Here is the spirit of the city-state at the level of festival, collective rituals of community. Knemon's continued resistance is perhaps significant; but it may also be that the identity of the group is at this level no longer a matter of individual will. One ought at least to be aware of a certain ecstatic element in Athenian civic life, not out of place, certainly, in the theater of Dionysus. The poet might dip down, so to speak, into this stratum of the ideology in order to provide a resolution to the narrative tension.¹⁵ Festival, the civic bond of marriage, and the autonomy of the individual household thus constitute the ideological matrix for the action of the play. In these terms the misanthrope is defined, with his virtues and his faults, and in these terms, specific to the culture of the ancient city-state, his secession is resolved.

Shakespeare's Timon of Athens is not strictly a comedy, although it has comic antecedents, and betrays a certain affinity with that genre.¹⁶ The earliest allusions to Timon are in Aristophanes, where he is mentioned as a recluse who reviles all mankind. Other comic poets gave him a prominent role, but these works are lost. Shakespeare knew of him as a misanthrope from Plutarch's Life of Marc Antony, and again from the Life of Alcibiades, the Athenian general and aristocrat whom Shakespeare introduced as a major personality in the Timon story. The idea that Timon was once rich and extravagantly generous and that his friends abandoned him when he had spent his resources is due to the Dialogue of Timon by Lucian, a Greek writer of the second century A.D. In Lucian's account, Timon's misanthropy is motivated by resentment and disillusionment, but this early phase of Timon's life is merely reported, not enacted as it is in Shakespeare. The emphasis in Lucian is on a later moment, in which Timon, thanks to Jupiter's intervention, discovers a buried treasure. This windfall only confirms him in his humor, and permits him to triumph over his former flatterers, who come running to him when they hear of his new wealth, and are driven off with blows and imprecations. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, a dramatic version of Lucian's dialogue was staged in Ferrara by the Italian poet, Matteo Maria Boiardo, who expanded upon the original with a parallel story about a second spendthrift, now in debtor's prison, who learns that his deceased father had prudently deposited gold in his tomb to insure against such an eventuality. As it happens, Timon, seeking a place to bury his own treasure, discovers the other, and there is a wrangle between him and the slaves of the young debtor. An epilogue assures us that the latter will gain the gold and draws the moral of a liberal use of wealth as the mean between miserliness and prodigality. Of this subplot, if he knew it, Shakespeare did not make use.

One final version deserves mention, this an anonymous English comedy, which bears very substantial resemblances to Shakespeare's treatment, including the opening scenes displaying Timon's extravagance and the role of the honest servant who remains loyal to Timon in his fall. There is again a subplot, this time about a wealthy simpleton who gives away all his riches on the promise of a winged horse. Timon himself lures this fool's bride away at the very wedding. It is not clear which of the two plays is indebted to the other, or whether both, perhaps, borrowed from a common source, now unknown. Shakespeare's Timon, at all events, was not a romancer, and his subplot, involving the figure of Alcibiades, does not reiterate the theme of senseless squandering, but develops issues of civic relations and responsibilities that give the work a stamp of its own.

We may begin our discussion with a strange and rather pathetic scene between Timon and the philosopher Apemantus, a bitter and uncompromising critic of human folly of the stripe of the cynic Diogenes. It is the second of a series of encounters before Timon's cave, whither he has fled since discovering the ingratitude of his friends: earlier had come Alcibiades, banished and raising an army against Athens—Timon grants him some of his new gold, and gives some also to the pair of concubines who accompany him, on condition that they disseminate syphilis; later, after news of the gold is abroad, come some highwayman, the faithful steward, a poet and painter from among his former claque, and senators of Athens to beseech his aid against the siege of Alcibiades. The reasons for these visits are various, as are their effects.

Apemantus, for his part, is not interested in gold. Though, like the others in Timon's prosperous days, he had attended his mansion, it was to reproach his indiscriminate benevolence and to assail the hypocrisy of his guests:

I scorn thy meat; ’twould choke me, for I should ne’er flatter thee. O you gods! What a number of men eats Timon, and he sees ’em not! It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man's blood; and all the madness is, he cheers them up too.

(I.ii.38-42)¹⁷

He had disdained the luxury of Timon's house: “What needs these feasts, pomps, and vain-glories?” (I.ii.244); refused his gifts; and anticipated the peril in his giving: “Thou giv’st so long, Timon, I fear me thou wilt give away thyself in paper shortly” (242-43). And he was prescient of the consequences: “Men shut their doors against a setting sun” (141). After the transformation of Timon, the meeting of these two is rich in comic possibilities, since there is something paradoxical in the notion of a fellowship of misanthropes. Apemantus’ first words suggest a professional's contempt for competition: “I was directed hither. Men report thou dost affect my manners, and dost use them” (IV.iii.200-01). Timon launches right in: “’Tis then because thou dost not keep a dog whom I would imitate. Consumption catch thee!” (202-03), and the scene concludes with a ridiculous flurry of invective, of which a sample: “Tim. Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon! / Apem. A plague on thee, thou art too bad to curse” (361-62), degenerating finally to “Apem. Beast! Tim. Slave! / Apem. Toad! / Tim. Rogue, rogue, rogue!” (374-77), about as social an exchange as the rock Timon hurls. The flavor of this, like the character Apemantus himself, derives from an anecdote in Plutarch. But in the body of the scene Shakespeare grounds such insults in arguments which go beyond the reciprocal contumely of doubles and carry the theme of the play.

Apemantus charges Timon's demeanor to compulsion: “If thou didst put this sour cold habit on to castigate thy pride ’twere well; but thou dost it enforcedly. Thou’dst courtier be again wert thou not beggar” (241-44). Apemantus is wrong, of course, ignorant still of Timon's gold. Timon does, however, acknowledge the influence of his former state upon his present bitterness:

I, to bear this, that never knew but better, is some burthen. Thy nature did commence in sufferance, time hath made thee hard in ’t. Why shouldst thou hate men? … If thou hadst not been born the worst of men, thou hadst been a knave and flatterer.

(268-71, 277-78)

For Timon, his present condition is a fallen one, the exile from his former life a loss, while for Apemantus it is all one, since ingratitude and selfishness were always the reality behind the false front erected upon Timon's beneficence. Timon does not reject or see through that former grace; he mourns it, and in its absence abandons entirely the ways of men, while Apemantus dwells as before among the Athenians. Apemantus, then, is right to tell Timon: “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends” (301-02).¹⁸ But that middle is not, as he would have it, simply a mean between refinement and rough solitude. For, in Apemantus’ view, the world is already less than human: “The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts” (349-50; cf. I.i.249-50, 272). “What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus,” asks Timon, “if it lay in thy power?” “Give it to the beasts,” replies the philosopher, “to be rid of the men.” “Wouldst thou have thyself fall in the confusion of men, and remain a beast with the beasts?” “Ay, Timon.” “A beastly ambition. … And what a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation!” (322-28, 345-47). All distinctions, man, beast, above or in between, are collapsed for Apemantus. For Timon, there was a better state, and it has been betrayed.¹⁹

If we return, now, to the beginning scenes of the play and to Timon's happier times we may observe that Shakespeare does not represent Timon's hospitality as a riot of indulgence, pride, flattery, and corruption in the way the anonymous Timon comedy does, where Timon uses his wealth to seduce a friend's bride. There is, to be sure, a certain unctuousness about Timon's entourage, and they are not forgetful of their interests; but under his noble patronage these motives are sublimated, and a world of honor and friendship stands forth that conveys something of the grace, albeit idealized or even just a figment, of a courtly time, where a just lord by his generous dispensations bestowed a fair order upon his realm. A guest says of Timon: “He outgoes the very heart of knidness” (I.i.273-74), and: “The noblest mind he carries that ever govern’d man” (280). I do not insist that these judgments are entirely sincere, and certainly they are not disinterested. But Timon, even in his misfortune, perceives himself as having been instructed in “the icy precepts of respect” (IV.iii.260), and the possibilities of such a world had been real for him.

Timon's is, of course, an illusory paradise. Scholars have perceived that Timon of Athens is indebted to the tradition of morality plays. In this model, Timon is drawn to the allegorical figure of Mankind. “Typically,” writes the critic who has studied this connection most thoroughly, “Mankind appears innocent and helpless before the World, who offers him unlimited opportunities to indulge in sinful behavior in return for allegiance. Mankind always accepts and is immediately introduced to the World's pleasures. The primary manifestations of Mankind's worldliness are his unbounded sense of power over the world around him, his enjoyment of abundant material wealth, and his excessive indulgence of the senses.”²⁰ The same writer, Lewis Walker, shows that the masque at Timon's banquet, in which Cupid leads in five ladies dressed as Amazons and impersonating the five senses, derives directly from the morality tradition (165-68). Yet the analogy with Mankind does not hold. Walker observes that Timon is free of lust, violence, and covetousness (168, 171), and suggests that the banquet and betrayal conjure up as well the archetype of the Last Supper (170).

Avarice and concupiscence are vices of Athens which, in contrast to Timon's corner of it, seems a fallen world. Forms of the word usury, as the critic cited above points out, occur more often in Timon than in any other play of Shakespeare.²¹ Corresponding, however, to the two sides of Timon's liberality—selflessness and waste—Athens too wears a double aspect. Timon's creditors are not necessarily evil men. The senator who instructs his servant to importune Timon for payment explains: “My uses cry to me … his days and times are past, and my reliances on his fracted dates have smit my credit. … Immediate are my needs” (II.i.20-23; 25). To the requests of Timon's steward for further loans the senators “answer in a joint and corporate voice”—a single voice, that is, but also alluding to joint-stock corporations and the business of investment—“that now they are at fall, want treasure, cannot do what they would, are sorry” (II.ii.208-10). Timon construes this ingratitude as a reflex of the miserliness natural to old age (219-23); he has no notion that assets may be committed, that rich men may want ready cash. Timon has lived, as his steward suggests, “in a dream of friendship” (IV.ii.34), and construes economic relations exclusively in moral terms.

To be sure, Timon's own friends, to whom he then applies, are appalling hypocrites; a stranger, the chance witness of one such friend's mean evasions, exclaims upon “the monstrousness of man,” and draws the lesson: “Men must learn now with pity to dispense, for policy sits above conscience” (III.ii.74, 88-89). But can Timon's bounty be forever sustained by credit? There is a confusion of semantic regions here, the ethical and economic, whose specific differentiation is the product of new practices of commerce characteristic of early capitalism. The business of interest upon investment is still mysterious, and is readily reduced to a simpler conception of exchange. Witness for this a conversation between several of Timon's creditors: “Titus: I’ll show you how t’observe a strange event. Your lord sends now for money? / Hortensius: Most true, he does. / Titus: And he wears jewels now of Timon's gift, for which I wait for money. / Hortensius: It is against my heart. / Lucius’ Servant: Mark how strange it shows, Timon in this should pay more than he owes: and e’en as if your lord should wear rich jewels, and send for money for ’em” (III.iv.18-25). A commentator explains: “whatever the actual distribution of Timon's jewels, the position really is that the very man who wears them is sending also for repayment of the money which bought them.”²² There is a complete crossing here of gift-giving and trade, so that in his master's calling in of debts, Hortensius sees only an “ingratitude … worse than stealth” (28).

If we understand the underlying contrast between Timon and Athens as that between a medieval ideal of a natural economy marked by gift-giving and personal ties on the one hand and the new conditions of merchant finance on the other, and recognize that each social form, moreover, has its own view of the vices of the other, whether prodigality or greed, then we may see in Timon's flight from his city an emblem of the passing of the ancient mode, its incompatibility with the new conditions of exchange.²³ Shakespeare's conception of the new state of society is a complex one, exhibited chiefly in the subplot involving Alcibiades. It is beyond the scope of this study to explore this matter in detail, but some discussion of it is necessary to our theme. Alcibiades is banished by the senate of Athens for his spirited defense of a veteran soldier who has killed a fellow-citizen in a quarrel. His valor is the bulwark of the city, but his aggressive sense of honor is at odds with civil ways. Something coarse about him was intimated in the feast at Timon’s, where Timon observed, “You had rather be at breakfast of enemies than a dinner of friends,” to which Alcibiades replied: “So they were bleeding new, my lord, there's no meat like ’em” (I.ii.75-77). Later, as I have indicated, he marches with two courtesans.

Whether his honesty and courage are survivals of an older code that rubs against the grain of city life, or the egotism which inspires him to avenge the senate's insult is itself a reflex of modern selfishness, I shall not decide. Perhaps these categories of old and new do not capture his personality, and the tension between civil and military authority is grounded in a different problem. What we can say is that after Timon's ruin, the powers in the city fall out with one another. Alcibiades, moreover, perceives his cause as one with Timon’s, whereas Timon looks on him no kindlier than on the rest: “Tim: Warr’st thou ’gainst Athens? / Alcib. Ay, Timon, and have cause. / Tim. The gods confound them all in thy conquest, and thee after, when thou hast conquer’d! / Alcib. Why me, Timon? / Tim. That by killing of villains thou wast born to conquer my country” (IV.iii.104-08). For Timon, since his bankruptcy, all the cosmos, sun, moon, sea and earth, the laws themselves exist by theft (IV.iii.438-47), and soldiers are plainly no exception.

And yet, for all his spite, all sides court him. Alcibiades, who recalls the prosperity of Timon as “a blessed time” (IV.iii.80), alludes also to Timon's “great deeds, when neighbour states, but for thy sword and fortune, trod upon them”—that is, the Athenians (95-96). The senators, in turn, feel “a lack of Timon's aid,” and entreat him to assume the captainship and absolute power in the war against Alcibiades (V.i.146, 159-61). Later still, a messenger reports to the senate that a courier he knew “was riding from Alcibiades to Timon's cave, with letters of entreaty, which imported his fellowship i’ th’ cause against your city, in part for his sake moved” (V.ii.9-13). Why Timon's services should be so necessary is unclear. He appears to have a talismanic virtue, like Oedipus in the Oedipus at Colonus, bestowing victory upon the side his presence favors. Timon, however, remains aloof, despising any part in men's affairs, and praying for their indiscriminate destruction. For him, this is but the natural consequence of their inveterate viciousness; in a sense, he wishes them merely to be what they are.

In the end, civil war is forestalled by the senators’ appeal for mercy toward the innocent. Those who exiled Alcibiades are dead; even Timon has been invited home (V.iv.26-29; 18-20). Alcibiades, in turn, vows strictly to restrain his men from violence, or submit them to the full justice of the city's laws—a reference, no doubt, to the offense that caused the breach originally (58-63). Timon himself, the audience discovers just prior to this scene, is dead, and one feels that he plays something of the scapegoat, and that his death, for all his hatred, is the sacrifice that redeems his people. This is to figure the fall of Timon according to a different schema, which cross-cuts the other to make a richer, perhaps a deeper thing of it. Like the composure of differences in the denouement, the scapegoat motif is an element of comedy, and fulfills the expectations roused by numerous scenes of wit and farce throughout the drama. I shall not interpret the significance of this regenerated world. In any case, it was never so bad as Timon thought it. Timon's society was that over which he had presided; that gone, men were beasts. The thing between he could not recognize, a different order and, it appears, viable, despite its vices. Perhaps even, by his ordeal, he ransomed it.

Like Knemon, Timon is both wild and noble. Both have the virtues of a passing age, which serves as an ideal for the present. In Menader, the autonomy of the individual household stands as the antithesis to the bonds of sentiment, commerce, and kinship which constitute the civic order. This order, in turn, is grounded in a communal identity sustained by ritual and by the presiding benevolent grace of Pan. In Shakespeare, the vision of a bountiful community based on the moral solidarity of friendship and sharing projects as its opposite the universal violence of mere animal selfishness. This complex gives way to a new world of investment and profit, to which the bygone “blessed time” is both a debased and a redemptive memory. These two different conceptions generate two different forms: in Menander, the well-made, new comic pattern of separation and reintegration, based on ties of marriage among households; in Shakespeare, a plot in two main phases, co-ordinate with the transformation of Timon. Loosely, one may identify the same or similar elements—collective identity, individualism, a mediating social relationship—but these, like the characterization of the misanthrope and the structure of the narrative, reflect in their detail the ideologies and tensions of two different and determinate forms of society.

In the anonymous Timon comedy, as we have seen, Timon conceives a passion for a lady, but that occurs before his disillusionment. Molière is the first, so far as I know, to have made a misanthrope a lover. The move is obviously a crucial one, for it plants a contradiction within the bosom of the misanthrope himself. Knemon was consistent; Timon metamorphosed; but Alceste harbors two natures in him. Passion, he confesses, defies reason (I.i.247-48). For the purpose of analysis, we may examine these two motives in him separately, and then consider the strategy and meaning of their commingling in a single soul.

The object of Alceste's rage is social hypocrisy, a theme at most marginal to Menander's Dyscolus, pertaining only to Gorgias’ initial doubts of Sostratos’ sincerity in his designs on a poor farmer's daughter, and subordinate also in Shakespeare's Timon to selfishness and ingratitude as the vices of the age. In his demand for absolute candor, Alceste appears antiquated, a throwback to stricter and less compromising times. His friend Philinte warns him: “This great rigor of virtues of bygone times offends against our age and ordinary ways … One must bow to the times without stubbornness” (I.i.153-54, 156). Again and again the contrast is drawn or implied between the relaxed manners of the present and the old days with their pristine rectitude.²⁴ Bound up with the idea of the present is the world of polite society, the bienséance (77) of the city and the court, where a refined code of conduct demands above all that appearances be maintained. Against such a pliable custom Alceste, from the beginning of the play to the end, lays claim to being a “man of honor” (cf. 16, 1806, and passim).

This opposition between an old-fashioned standard of honor and the current courtier-ways of good society reflects the long struggle, only recently settled in blood during the insurrection of the Fronde, between a proud and independent aristocracy and the more supple, not to say submissive, habits to be acquired at the court of Louis XIV.²⁵ There was a strong color of egotism and arrogance in the old nobility's wilful pursuit of glory, at least seen retrospectively, but their inbred, if often volatile, sense of dignity or honor also seemed like a natural style of virtue. Corneille's heroes and heroines perhaps best illustrate this lofty spirit, but we may taste the flavor of it also in the figures of Dom Carlos and Dom Alonse, the brothers of Dona Elvire, in Molière's Dom Juan, in the homilies of Dom Juan's caste-conscious father, Dom Luis, or even, if we allow for a certain change of valences, in the egotistical energy of Dom Juan himself—Dom Juan was first presented the year before the appearance of the Misanthrope. The honesty of such aristocrats has its source in a haughty disdain of dissimulation, which would suggest the need to earn another's favor. Dom Juan's conversion to hypocrisy at the end of the play is a surrender, as he knows, to the mores of his age (V.ii). Alceste stands fast against them.

There was, however, a quibble in the meaning of honesty (honnêteté) or an honest man (honnête homme, Mis. 48). in the period when these plays were produced; the terms had been appropriated to signify precisely the gracious civility of the courtier in the new conditions of a strong and centralized monarchy. From this point of view—and it is the dominant one in the Misanthrope—Alceste's behavior, far from being “honest,” is boorish and uncivilized (sauvage). His frankness, then, is mere contrariness, as Célimène observes (669-80), and, as such, is simply one more blind foible, like those she mocks in her satirical sketches of her other acquaintances: the longwinded art of saying nothing (580), the air of mystery that conceals mere commonplaces (592), the vanity of namedropping (598), puffed-up pride (618), and the petty carping of the faultfinder, who imagines that wisdom is the knack of contradicting, that only fools grant cheerful admiration, and that, in despising all the achievements of the time, he “elevates himself above all other men” (641-44).

It is here that Alceste protests against her flippant caricatures, and one suspects the last portrait may have touched too close to home. More than this, Célimène's little portfolio of characters suggests that scorning society is just another way of courting its regard, thus exposing, in Alceste's severity, a need, like everyone else’s, for public approbation. Alceste himself says, “I want to be special” (Je veux qu’on me distingue, 63), and critics have drawn the conclusion from this that he has “a sense of insecurity, a need of psychological affirmation,”²⁶ or have discovered “his utter dependence on the humanity he despises, his total infatuation with that which he professes indifference to.”²⁷ Alceste, however, desires not mere indiscriminate acclaim, but a respect for merit (62). In what precisely Alceste's peculiar merit resides is perhaps unclear, but before reducing his cantankerousness to a psychological reflex, it is well to recall that the idea of merit was not at all opaque to the old aristocracy, where it attached in part to birth and in part to action and success. Alceste cannot make good his claim to merit in such terms, because—among other reasons—the social basis for them has ceased to exist.

The reason why his pretensions to merit seem a pose is that he is weak. We may in this light reconsider his attitude toward his law-suit and his petulant desire to see the judgment go against him in order to expose the villainy of the times (196-200). This seems—and is—a childish way to deal with injured pride, but Alceste's only alternative is to be ingratiating, and that is a worse affront to dignity. In his helplessness, it is perverse for Alceste to insist on the old ideals of merit and honor, and perhaps this is why he vents his spleen in petty confrontations over the virtues of a sonnet. Yet Oronte, the insulted versifier, actually takes his complaint to the Marshal's Tribunal, which was established in order to abolish the practice of duelling among gentlemen (751). It is Oronte who treats the matter as an affair of honor. Alceste is not the ridiculous party here: “Will the pronouncement of those gentlemen,” he asks, “condemn me to find the verses which we quarrelled over good?” (761-62). The triviality of courtly life is manifest here; meanwhile, those who will not join the game of cultivating influence risk the loss of their possessions through machinations at court. This is the process of domesticating the nobility.

Alceste, then, stands for a conception of personal worth that has an antique aroma in a world of courtesy and compliance. He has, as Eliante says, “something noble and heroic about him, a rare virtue in today's generation” (1166-67). But the circumstances in which he finds himself leave him without any basis upon which to assert that worth, save for a general rage against unearned recognition. This sense of merit without a correlative in the social order generates a vague notion of private or interior value. Here, at the point of interiority, Alceste's ideal of honor meets his demand for absolute sincerity, that one express only what is in one's heart (35-36). This latter theme opens upon the romantic motive in Alceste.

For the amour between Alceste and Célimène, Molière drew, even to the point of direct quotation here and there, upon a play he had composed some five years earlier, Dom Garcie de Navarre or The Jealous Prince, a melodrama based on an Italian model by Ciconnini. In this story, a coy princess, who deems that a woman's honor does not allow too plain an expression of her feelings (73-74), puts to the test her incurably possessive suitor, demanding perfect faith in her despite a series of compromising indications, some accidental, some contrived to examine his resolution. Dom Garcie fails them all, but in the end she accepts him, “jealous or not jealous,” as she says (1870). The congruence between this situation and that of Alceste and the coquettish Célimène made the transfer quite natural. Célimène's true sentiments are more mysterious than those of the princess; Eliante suggests that Célimène's own heart may be mistaken about itself (1180-84).

Correspondingly, Alceste is not simply jealous, although he is that, but inspired as well by his passion for sincerity to determine the inmost disposition of Célimène's soul. His indignation with Philinte was another matter: Philinte had bestowed too lavishly his compliments on a bare acquaintance, but there was no doubt where his real affections lay. Célimène's are hidden from everyone, perhaps even from herself. Her name, derived from the French celer or the Latin celare, meaning to conceal, and the Greek participal ending -menē, signifies the self-concealer or the hidden one. With Célimène, the question begins to arise, not only what her true desire may be, but whether there is, behind the façade of her coquetry and charm, a fixed or core emotion, a soul, a heart—to use the word that occurs well over six dozen times in the play. With Philinte and the rest, Alceste demanded honesty; with Célimène he seeks for certainty, and with this, the Misanthrope takes that abstract or philosophical turn which carries the issue beyond candor and courtly flattery to epistemological concerns about signs and evidence, knowledge and ultimate being.

The pursuit of absolute certainty, the demand, in the biblical phrase, for a sign, is so pervasive a theme in the Misanthrope that it will suffice here to identify some of the key words: témoins, witnesses or evidence; une marque certaine (1606); éclaircissements (1599); un franc aveu (1637); expliquer nettement (1643); point d’obscurité, no doubt whatsoever (1687); assurance (1397); garant (1399); preuves sûres (830). Alceste takes satisfaction at the prospect of losing his court case because it will survive as a “marque insigne, un fameux temoignage” (1545) of the wickedness of his era. Words will not suffice for Alceste; he must see. When Oronte attempts repeatedly, in advance of reading his sonnet, to offer some self-deprecating apologies for his style, Alceste impatiently interrupts: “We shall soon see”; and “We’re going to see”; and “Let's see!” (309, 312, 314).

The proof of Oronte's claims will be the text. Alceste is severe with Oronte's lame attempt at love poetry, but as critics have pointed out, his motives are perhaps not entirely literary; Oronte has just come from Célimène's house, and Alceste may well be venting his spleen here on a suspected rival.²⁸ Oronte, certainly, has not said the poem is addressed to Célimène, but if Alceste has drawn this conclusion, it is of a piece with his disposition throughout the play to distrust the spoken word and place his confidence in writing—which proves to be no less ambiguous a medium. Thus he treats a letter divulged to him by the prude Arsinoe as an incontestable document of Célimène's fickleness; but again, it is unaddressed, and he has only Arsinoe's word that it was intended for Oronte. Célimène confounds all his suspicions by suggesting—only suggesting, however—that it was addressed to a woman (1344). The same theme is struck when Alceste's servant brings word that his trial has gone badly and he must immediately leave town. The official notice, he says, was scrawled in a hand the devil couldn’t make out (1451-54). An hour later, a friend visited, demanded pen and paper, and jotted down some words which would take Alceste to “the bottom of this mystery” (1470). Alceste demands the sheet at once, expecting to be enlightened on the matter (1472), but the servant left it home on the table. When Alceste returns with the news that he has lost his case, he reports on still another unreliable text, this time a scandalous book which had been circulated under his name to rouse prejudice against him (1500-04). Grimarest, a contemporary of Molière’s, wrote later that Molière himself had been the victim of such a maneuver.²⁹ True or not, the device serves as another lesson to Alceste in the uncertainties of literary attribution. Célimène is finally discomfited, of course, by a pair of letters, each in the hands of the wrong rival, in which together she mocks the full tally of her suitors. The others abandon her, but to Alceste she confesses that he alone has reason to resent her. Papers once more are equivocal, and Alceste is obliged to evaluate her explanations and assurances. As a final test, he demands that she renounce the world with him, scorns her counter-offer of marriage, and retires.

Molière had probed the problem of truth and hypocrisy two years earlier in Tartuffe, where Orgon is convinced of the absolute piety of his casuistic guest. Orgon's wife, Elmire, conceives the plan of concealing him under a table so that he may witness Tartuffe's amorous advances toward her. She first broaches the idea to her husband in this way: “But let us suppose now, from some place that one could take, one made you see everything and hear everything clearly. What would you say then of your gentleman?” Orgon replies: “In that case, I would say that … I wouldn’t say anything, because that cannot be” (1345-49). What cannot be? That Tartuffe will be seen to behave improperly? Or that there is a place from which one can see and hear everything—and, what is more, clearly? The scandal of Tartuffe is that his motives are, in the last analysis, hidden; to judge him by his sincerity is an empty endeavor. If he offends, it is against the custom of the world, and the secret of the play is that he would be no less dangerous for being honest. Alceste, for all his obsession with sincerity, has intimations that absolute knowledge of another is unattainable. To Arsinoe's malicious insinuations of Célimène's disloyalty, he replies: “one cannot see into hearts” (1116). He knows that friendship requires a certain mystery (278). He is a subtle and often sympathetic figure, despite his excesses; but he cannot renounce his determination to be certain of Célimène, whose fascination, one imagines, dwells largely in her mystery.

It is inviting to speculate about the psychology of such a compulsion. Various writers have done this with considerable insight, judging now in favor of, now against the character of Alceste. There is undoubtedly a streak of petty egotism behind his proud honesty. On a more general level, Alceste's demand for authenticity reflects the most profound intellectual and spiritual inquiries in Molière's age: the radical dualism of Descartes, who drove the wedge between reason and appearances; Gassendi's critique of the transcendental ego; the hidden motives of the heart in Pascal's dark vision of human nature; or the humane scepticism of Molière's friend, La Mothe le Vayer, whose essays, like that On the Solitary Life, provide illustrations in a spirit of genial agnosticism of the sentiments and conflicts in Molière's critical plays.³⁰ All of these thinkers were preoccupied with problems of essence and appearance, self and certainty.

I shall not deliver a verdict on whether Molière endorsed the well-bred discretion of Philinte or Alceste's relentless urge to unmask the ultimate truth. Both postures, we may observe, depend upon a sense that intrinsic values have vanished or are hidden. Alceste gives his blessing to the reasonable union between Philinte and Eliante, whose first love is Alceste himself; Philinte pursues Alceste at the last moment of the action in order to persuade him to renounce his plan of solitary exile, which perhaps reveals that he too requires, if only as a foil, the standards and convictions of his friend. The flight of the misanthrope is an image of society's own lost sense of self, which is conceived as the passing of aristocratic honor. That honor had enabled an ideal harmony of individualism and community, as it appears to a society in which manners have abolished integrity and honesty is incompatible with company. The problematic feature of identity and knowledge, of being and appearance, may be seen as the reflection on the levels of psychology and metaphysics of a transformation in social behavior.

If we survey the histories of our three misanthropes, we may note, to begin with, that the occasion of their departure from society occurs at three different moments in the course of the dramatic action: in Menander's play, Knemon resides alone from the beginning; Timon withdraws midway through the story; and Alceste makes his move only in the closing verses of the comedy. We may observe also that, in each succeeding play, the place of exile is increasingly remote. Knemon's farm is in the Attic countryside, albeit in a distant quarter; Timon inhabits a forest beyond the borders of the city, but clearly within an easy march of it; while Molière's hero intends to retreat to a desert beyond the reach of all humanity. These differences correspond perhaps to the different possibilities of individual subsistence in the three worlds conjured up by the dramas. An Athenian farmer was more or less capable of surviving in isolation. To escape the nexus of social and economic relations in the early modern world required a more radical breach with society. Timon's cave, at least, can be imagined and staged; Alceste's desert is an undefined elsewhere, for the power of the court extends everywhere. Not that retreat from the court was an entirely quixotic gesture. The hostility of Louis XIII and XIV to the solitaries of Port-Royal suggests that a militant retirement possessed a genuine ideological force.³¹ Nevertheless, Alceste's withdrawal from the authority of the centralized monarchy and its bureaucracy seems as much a spiritual as a physical act, and Philinte will not, perhaps, have to travel very far to catch up with him.

We have seen that each of our misanthropes, for all the violence of their humors, embodies the values of a traditional and passing way of life, and earns a measure of respect and even obeisance from the society he abandons. For the new forms all have about them something that is morally lax, fragmentary, and disordered. In Menander's Athens, it is the exploitative self-indulgence of the urbane rich; in Shakespeare's Athens, which is to say, Elizabethan London, it is avarice and ingratitude; Molière's Paris is pompous and hypocritical. Each society seems to need and to court, in different ways, the authenticity of the misanthrope. He stands in each case as a kind of half-repressed meaning which one desires to recover even as it appears to have lost all relevance. He is absurd, but the world without him seems brittle, without values. Rich idlers, usurers, courtiers—all seem strangely atomized, without a natural relation to self and others. And yet, in each case, the new order proves vital and coherent. Symbolically, this strength and solidarity are manifested in a gesture of humble sincerity: Sostratos weds Knemon's daughter, and wins his father's consent also to a second unprofitable union, that of his own daughter to Gorgias; Shakespeare's Athenian senators repent of their contempt for Timon, and submit to peace with Alcibiades; Alceste's rivals join him in his demand for candor from Célimène, and she, like Philinte and Eliante, deems him worthiest of all. Yet none of this alters the fact that the misanthrope is marginal, expendable, that Greek gentry, English profiteers, French gentlemen have another side, a style of their own, and it works. By contrast, the uncompromising rigor of the misanthrope is boorish, even savage.

In this parodox of the misanthrope, this lack which is not a lack, this signified at once absent and transcendent which is, on a philosophical level, the very theme of Molière's Misanthrope, I perceive the effect of a mystery or a mystification within the ideology that informs the world of each of our three dramas. Let me state in a single word their respective secrets: in Menander's Dyscolus, it is class; in Timon of Athens, it is capital; in the Misanthrope, it is, in the final analysis, the mystery of the commodity. Menander masks the increasing class differentiation of Athenian society under the old communal code of kinship and ritual identity. Shakespeare subsumes the world of investment and profit under moral forms of solidarity. In the case of Molière, the connection is indirect: his society of poseurs is homologous, in Goldmann's sense of the term, with the structure of commodity relations. Just as, for the commodity, a product's use value is simply the condition for its exchange value, its abstract equivalence to every other commodity as a function of mere quantity rather than quality, so Molière's courtiers appear to be mere counters, interchangeable operators, who have lost all qualitative value or identity.

To a certain extent, I suspect, this transformation in the sense of personal worth was due to the conditions of employment at the French court and in the regional administrations, where office-holders, through the venal distribution of commissions, came to regard their titles and positions as mere purchases. Goldmann cites a passage in the Memoires of Arnauld d’Andilly, where he “comments on his own refusal to pay one hundred livres for the post of secrétaire d’Etat in 1622: ‘Subsequent events,’ he writes, ‘showed that I had made a great mistake: yet I should be excused for this, on the ground that, having come to Court in the time of Henri IV, I had been brought up to believe that one's own efforts and fidelity were alone sufficient, without money, to secure a charge’.”³² Under these conditions, the aristocratic sense of merit was etherealized into a personal and interior consciousness of self. Alceste's integrity appears as a mysterious essence, a substance without effects or properties, like Célimène's heart. With all due irony, Molière represents the genesis of the modern mystification of human relations in the ideology of sincerity and the inward self.

Notes

1. Cicero, De amicitia; cit. in the Melmoth (1773) translation by Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VI (London and New York, 1966), 248, n. 2.

2. Christian Meier, Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), p. 9; cf. also Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God; A Study of the Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody (London, 1964), p. 47, n. 1.

3. See the chapter on Plautus’ Aulularia in David Konstan, Roman Comedy (Ithaca, 1983).

4. Lucien Goldmann, “Genetic Structuralism and the History of Literature,” trans. Catherine and Richard Macksey, in Richard Macksey, ed., Velocities of Change (Baltimore, 1974), p. 89.

5. Michael Anderson, “Knemon's Hamartia,” Greece and Rome, 2nd ser., 17 (1970), 199.

6. The quotation in the text is from Anderson, loc. cit.; Schäfer's book is Menanders Dyskolos (Meisenham am Glan, 1965).

7. The scene perhaps echoes a motif in tragedy, e.g. Euripides’ Electra; see Sander M. Goldberg, The Making of Menander's Comedy (London, 1980), pp. 18, 77.

8. On the double nature of Knemon, see Goldberg, p. 73; Goldberg notes the ways in which Menander keeps Knemon from seeming merely farcical, pp. 82-84; contrast, for example, Morose in Ben Jonson's Epicoene.

9. Minding someone else's business is, in Greek, polypragmosynē; see Victor Ehrenberg, “Polypragmosynē: A Study in Greek Politics,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 67 (1947), 46-67; A. W. H. Adkins, “Polupragmosunē and ‘Minding One's Own Business’,” Classical Philology, 71 (1976), 301-27.

10. Anderson, p. 204.

11. Edwin S. Ramage, “City and Country in Menander's ‘Dyskolos’,” Philologus, 110 (1966), 201.

12. L. A. Post, “Some Subtleties in Menander's Dyscolus,” American Journal of Philology, 84 (1963), 51; cf. p. 50.

13. Ramage, p. 211.

14. See Goldberg, p. 88, for the reversal of the comic norm in the young man's sententiousness and Kallipides’ impatience. Goldberg comments: “Sostratos’ ability to win his father to the marriage, followed by Gorgias’ eventual acceptance of the arrangement, resolves the tension between city and country and between rich and poor that has surfaced at intervals through the play” (p. 88).

15. One may compare the finale of Aristophanes’ Wasps, or the kōmos in the Acharnians, for similar moments of ritual festivity.

16. Discussion of the genre of Timon, with a review of modern opinion, may be found in Rolf Soellner, Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy (Columbus, Ohio, 1979), pp. 15-29. The background to Shakespeare's Timon is discussed fully in Bullough (above, n. 1). The dramatic adaptations of Lucian's Timon are examined by Christopher Robinson, Lucian and his Influence in Europe (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1979) pp. 99-104. On Lucian's own relation to earlier comedy, see Graham Anderson, Lucian: Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic (Leiden, 1976), pp. 90-94.

17. Cited according to the Arden edition, ed. H. J. Oliver (London, 1959). The text of Menander's Dyscolus is F. H. Sandbach, ed., Menandri Reliquiae Selectae (Oxford, 1972); that of Molière is Robert Jouanny, ed., Théâtre Complet de Molière (Paris, n.d.). All translations are my own.

18. Oliver notes (ad loc.): “Apemantus surely scores a point here.”

19. Soellner observes: “By his new mode of life, Timon has in practice accepted the argument that living according to nature's simple plan is preferable to wealth and luxury” (p. 94); but this misses Timon's continued idealization of his former state; cf. also p. 95.

20. Lewis Walker, “Timon of Athens and the Morality Tradition,” Shakespeare Studies, 12 (1979), 159.

21. Walker, p. 177, n. 33 (8 times).

22. Oliver, ad vv. 24-25.

23. Contrast, e.g., Soellner, p. 114: “I do not think that the play has a simple dominant social or economic theme, such as the decay of feudalism or the evils of usury.” I should make it clear that I do not consider the world over which Timon had presided to be exemplary of feudal relations as they really functioned, but rather an idealized image of such relations, projected as an innocent past. Soellner has a good discussion of Timon's behavior in the context of renaissance conceptions of charity, pp. 122-25, and a bibliographical note on social interpretations of Timon, p. 226, n. 1.

24. Cf. vv. 59, 117, 145, 220, 234, 359, 389, 1069-70, 1167, 1485, 1546, 1557, 1760.

25. See Paul Bénichou, Man and Ethics: Studies in French Classicism, trans. Elizabeth Hughes (New York, 1971), pp. 46-47, 65-66.

26. Martin Turnell, The Classical Moment (Westport, Conn., 1971), p. 99.

27. Lionel Gossman, Men and Masks: A Study of Molière (Baltimore, 1963), pp. 69-70.

28. See Robert McBride, The Sceptical Vision of Molière: A Study in Paradox (New York, 1977), p. 121; cf. p. 232, n. 45, for further references.

29. McBride, p. 108.

30. On Descartes and Gassendi, see Gossman, pp. 10-13 and passim; on Pascal, see Bénichou, and Goldmann, The Hidden God; on La Mothe le Vayer, see McBride. For literary influence, the case for La Mothe le Vayer is far the most convincing.

31. Goldmann, The Hidden God, pp. 105-06; cf. p. 414 under the year 1637.

32. The Hidden God, p. 129.