When the Senate appeals to Timon for his assistance as general and statesman, he first professes sympathy, then cries:
"If Alcibiades kill my countrymen,
Let Alcibiades know this of Timon,
That Timon cares not."
He may sack Athens, pull old men by the beard, and give the sacred virgins over to the mercies of the soldiery. Timon cares as little as the soldier's knife recks of the throats it cuts. The most worthless blade in Alcibiades' camp is more valued by him than any life in Athens. All feeling for country, home, even for the helpless, has utterly perished.
Shakespeare borrows a final touch from Plutarch, which, in his hand, becomes a masterpiece of bloodthirsty irony. He declares he does not, as they suppose, rejoice in the general desolation; his countrymen shall once more enjoy his hospitality. A fig-tree grows by his cave, which it is his intention to cut down; but before it is felled, any friend of his, high or low, who wishes to escape the horrors of a siege, is welcome to come and hang himself. He next announces that his grave is prepared, and they that seek him may come thither and find an oracle in his tombstone, then:
"Lips, let sour words go by and language end:
What is amiss, plague and infection mend!
Graves only be man's works and death their gain!
Sun, hide thy beams! Timon hath done his reign."
These are his last words. May pestilence rage amongst men! May it infect and destroy so long as there is a man left to dig a grave! May the world be annihilated as Timon is about to annihilate himself. The light of the sun will presently be extinguished for him; let it be extinguished for all!
This is not Othello's sorrow over the power of evil to wreck the happiness of noble hearts, nor King Lear's wail over the ever-threatening possibilities and the heaped-up miseries of life: it is an angry bitterness, caused by ingratitude, which has grown so great that it darkens the sky of life and causes the thunder to roll with such threatening peals as we have never heard even in Shakespeare. All that he has lived through in these last years, and all that he has suffered from the baseness of other men, is concentrated in this colossal figure of the desperate man-hater, whose wild rhetoric is like a dark essence of blood and gall drawn off to relieve suffering.
[1] New Shakespeare Society's Transactions, 1874, pp. 130-194.
[2] Swinburne: A Study of Shakespeare, pp. 212-215.