“De peccanti meipso justè retribuebas mihi. Jusisti enim, & sic est, ut pœna sua sibi sit omnis inordinatus animis.”
i.e. “By my own sin Thou didst justly punish me. For thou hast commanded, and so it is, that every inordinate affection should bear its own punishment.”[[174]]
“Timon of Athens,” we are informed by Dr. Drake (vol. ii. p. 447), “is an admirable satire on the folly and ingratitude of mankind; the former exemplified in the thoughtless profusion of Timon, the latter in the conduct of his pretended friends; it is, as Dr. Johnson observes,—
“‘A very powerful warning against that ostentatious liberality, which scatters bounty, but confers no benefits, and buys flattery but not friendship.’”
There is some doubt whether Shakespeare derived his idea of this play from the notices of Timon which appear in Lucian, or from those given by Plutarch. The fact, however, that the very excellent work by Sir Thomas North, Knight, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romaines, &c., was published in 1579,—and that Shakespeare copies it very closely in the account of Timon’s sepulchre and epitaph, show, I think, Plutarch to have been the source of his knowledge of Timon’s character and life.
One of the Emblem writers, Sambucus, treated of the same subject in eighteen Latin elegiacs, and expressly named it, Timon the Misanthrope. The scene, too, which the device represents, is in a garden, and we can very readily fancy that the figure on the left is the old steward Flavius come to reason with his master,—
Μισάνθρωπ
Τίμων.