Ep. 299: Philosophy in Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens” (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 299 is something like what role does money have in human psychology? And as I hope you heard in our previous posting, we read Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton from probably 1605 or so. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer gratulating thy plenteous bosom in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Wes: This is Wes Alwan giving myself away in paper from the Carpenter's Boat Shop in Maine.

0:41 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey getting up from a meal of smoke and lukewarm water in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:47 Jonathan: And our special guest, this is Jonathan Bate at Early morning in Phoenix, Arizona, where it's less than 100 degrees, which is a triumph for a summer's day.

0:59 Mark: Yes, thanks for coming back. Thanks for participating last time. That was a great treat to have you reading Flavius with us.

1:06 Jonathan: I always get cast as the good guy. As a student I played Camillo in the Winter's Tale and the Earl of Warwick in Henry IV Part 2. So Flavius is in that kind of genre of the one loyal servant who stays good as the world collapses around him. I want to play a villain sometimes.

1:26 Mark: Let's have you start off, just tell us a little about the place of Just to be clear to folks, so you with Eric Rasmussen did a new edition of the entirety of Shakespeare's corpus. So it seems like you're well positioned to tell us where this least popular, I say in quotes is that this play that we picked based on its apparent philosophical content, that it was in ancient Greece, it had Alcibiades. We had just revisited the symposium a little bit, so there was some overlap there. But it is obviously not a very typical play of his. Can you say something about its place in the corpus?

1:56 Jonathan: It's really interesting for everyone, not least me, to sort of revisit Timon because as you say, it is one of Shakespeare's least popular, least performed plays, possibly the least popular of all. I think about one of his other classical plays, Titus Andronicus, which came earlier in his career and used to be very unpopular but now is an absolute favourite with students because it's like some kind of R rated Hollywood movie full of sex and violence. But Timon isn't like that. Timon is a very philosophical play. It is, as you said at the outset, basically a play about money.

So in some ways that you kind of feel in. In our world, where since the great financial crisis and with inequality such a big issue in our societies, this is a play that ought to be speaking to our time. And that is one of the things about Shakespeare, that what keeps him alive through the centuries is that different plays speak to the preoccupations of different ages. We saw that in the 20th century when Paul Robeson started playing Othello and issues of race became so central. So where does Timon sit in Shakespeare's career? Well, it's in the second half of his career.

You remember, halfway through Shakespeare's career, Queen Elizabeth dies, King James of Scotland also becomes King of England. And Shakespeare's company get the gig as the King's men, the top acting company, ready to perform at court whenever King James wanted. And King James was very interested in ideas so early in his reign. We find Shakespeare writing a number of plays that address some of King James's favorite ideas. He writes Measure for Measure, which is a play about justice and mercy, also about the sex trade and corruption in the city, something King James wanted to get on top of.

He writes King Lear, which is a play about the terrible consequences of dividing the kingdom of Britain into three. King James has come with the hope of uniting the kingdoms of England and Scotland. So that division of the kingdoms idea, very Jamesian or Jacobean, as we say. And he writes Macbeth, which is a play about Catholic conspiracies, about witchcraft, which King James had written a treatise on, about the idea of the sort of divine right of kings, the magical power of the king's touch. So he's really tuned into King James's interests now.

Something that became controversial pretty early in King James career was the question of patronage, of people vying for position at court and of writers and artists trying to get the patronage of the king and then of various aristocrats trying to be the king's favourite. And King James is sort of dishing out favors. He's giving great estates and money to various aristocrats, often in return for sexual favors. And as I say, there's a whole cluster of writers trying and artists of all kinds trying to get the ear of the king. So questions around flattery and patronage of great interest at this time.

And Shakespeare has also been getting interested in kind of madness, in people going from a high position to a low position. King Lear, you know, the king who finds himself eventually stripped naked on the heath. And a play that talks about changing places between the king and the beggar, the justice and the thief. But what Shakespeare's not so good at is writing plays about city life. That's something that a slightly younger dramatist called Thomas Middleton specializes in. So what seems to have happened is that Shakespeare perhaps having got a little bit tired also there's a lot of plague outbreaks in London at that time.

So he's spending more and more time away from London, back in Stratford upon Avon, in the countryside, his hometown, staying away from the plague. He's backing away from a central role. He stops being an actor, for example, until this time, up to 1606, Shakespeare is acting in his own plays and other people's plays. So he decides to bring on a collaborator. He brings on this man, Middleton, who specialises in plays about city life, plays about money. And they try co writing this play, Timon of Athens. They find the story in classical sources. It's briefly there in one of Plutarch's lives.

There are also other sources for it, but because it's a collaboration, they haven't worked together before. It's an uneven play. You can really feel in the writing that there are moments where Shakespeare is going at full throttle. Once Timon is in exile and out in the woods. It's very like when King Lear is in exile out on the heath, railing against humankind, railing against injustice. And there are some fantastic speeches there. But at other times it all seems a little bit clunky, a little bit repetitive. It's like these people have lent money to Timon and Timon has lent money to these people and then they ask for the debts to be paid in.

And as we saw in the reading last week, innumerable unidentified servants keep coming and going. So it doesn't look like it was a success. It wasn't published, as many of the most popular plays were. It wasn't published immediately after performance. There's no record of revivals. It may even have only been performed once or twice and then just ditched as a failure. But it gets into Shakespeare's First Folio, the collection of his comedies, tragedies and histories. A big book that Eric Rasmussen and I have just re edited. And although through history it has been performed fewer times than pretty well any other play, it's had a few notable fans, perhaps most notably Karl Marx.

It was Marx's favourite Shakespeare play, unsurprisingly, because it's all about money, it's all about capital. I think from your point of view as philosophers, to me, what's really interesting about it is, as you said in the introduction, the way that it brings together the cynical philosophy of Diogenes, who's sort of represented as Apemantus the Cynic, includes the figure of Alcibiades, but in a rather curious way, in that this is not the Alcibiades, the beautiful young man of various Socratic dialogues, Platonic sources, in which Alcibiades is very much associated with love, sex, desire.

Homoeroticism seems to be very literal of that. Although one or two modern productions have sort of played up the idea of a homoerotic relationship between Timon and Alcibiades. Why does Timon have no family, no wife, no kids? Maybe he's gay. Two other philosophical aspects that are really interesting. One is classical ideas of ethics and the good life were very much fed to Shakespeare through Cicero. And one of Cicero's key texts is De Officiis of Benefits, in which Cicero argues that the structure of society, the sort of harmony between different families in ancient Rome, is dependent on a system of reciprocal benefits that involves gift giving, doing someone a favor so they will do you a favor, and that keeps the whole system going.

And Shakespeare's really interested in this idea. Cicero actually appears as a character in Julius Caesar. And you might remember in Julius Caesar, when Brutus and Cassius fall out, it's precisely over the feeling that they've let each other down over this question of reciprocal benefits, this idea that if you lend someone money when they're in trouble, they should lend you money when you're in trouble. And that's the system that breaks down in Timon. So I think there's a kind of Ciceronean context. And then the other thing that is really interesting is the opening scene where the poet and the painter are seeking the patronage of Timon.

There's a discussion about the relative merits of poetry and painting as forms of representation, as forms of art. In many ways, it's one of the very, very few moments in Shakespeare where questions of aesthetics, a theory of art, come into play. And I think that bit of dialogue is really interesting. Can poetry represent reality in a way that painting can't? You know the old saying going back to Horace, ut pictura poesis. Poetry is like painting, but Shakespeare's interested in exploring. Well, maybe poetry can do things that painting can't. So lots of really interesting stuff.

But in the end, the play itself, a bit of a dud.

10:35 Wes: Just speaking to some of that. There's some different threads here, and one of them, yeah, it's very interesting that in the beginning he starts with the arts. And I think there are a lot of ideas in this play. And it's not. It really looks to me like a rough draft and it's not all fleshed out and integrated. But one of the ideas is, you know, this talk of flattery in the context of money, but also I think more broadly, you know, as you mentioned, in the context of the way power works with gift giving, Apemantus actually compares this to grooming among monkeys, which in fact is a way that chimpanzees establish political alliances, gift giving and including grooming, and so favors done for each other.

But Plato famously accuses persuasive arts rhetoric of being a form of flattery. And he also does that with the arts. So I think in the Republic. So this concept of flattery, it's like a well known philosophical accusation. But it's interesting that, you know, it's an accusation that can be rendered towards a lot of different targets which in fact turn out to be related. So you can talk about the arts, but you can talk about social deception. So this concept of untruth being a condition of life and social niceties being fraught with dishonesty and maybe the nature of the social is.

Involves lying, just inevitably that's just to be social is to be dishonest or to conceal or something like that. So in Timon, in a way it's like a lack of sophistication or it's an idealism. He wants to pretend that social niceties and flattery. So it's not just about money and gift giving. To me, all of it's about just the surface level social relations. I think Timon wants to believe that that is the substance of the social, that there aren't these two domains that are separated, one subterranean and one on the surface. They must come together and be the same thing.

And if they're not the same thing, then fuck it. Friendship is impossible and social relations in any honest or authentic sense are impossible. So that was what I found really fascinating about the play. And there are a lot of great speeches and great ideas, very well thought out ideas and connections in the play. Just plot wise and overall structured as a play, it's a lot rougher.

12:45 Jonathan: But yeah, the idea that it might actually be an unfinished draft, I mean that has been suggested by scholars. As I say, we don't have evidence of performance in Shakespeare's lifetime. So it is possible they worked on the draft Middleton and Shakespeare and they thought its collaboration is not working because interestingly, a year or two later, Shakespeare turns to another collaborator, a guy called George Wilkins co writes a play called Pericles. And again, it doesn't work as a collaboration, although that one is successful on stage. And so then he ditches Wilkins and turns to John Fletcher and they have some successful collaborations.

Very end of Shakespeare's career. So the idea that it, as I say, it's not fully worked through. It's more. They're kind of backing off the ideas, but they haven't linked it to the stagecraft seems to be very plausible. I like your point about it not just being about money and flattery, but about, as it were, the whole structure of society. Because it is very much a play of two halves. That the first half is about all these social relations in Athens, the archetypal city, the place of civilization. You know that word civilization coming from Civitas, Latin, the idea of the city.

And if you think of that Athenian idea, you know, you're either Greek or you're a barbarian out there. Roman idea of city as a place of civilization. In contrast to the kind of the wilderness, the wild place. Second half of the play goes out into the wilderness, into the wild place, into the idea of isolation. The whole notion of society is kind of ripped apart there.

14:14 Dylan: I think it's a good point about the one dimensionality of friendship as Timon understands it. I found myself thinking about that quite a bit. Where in the beginning of the play it's basically transactional friendship, friendship of use, as Aristotle would put it. And I think you're right, Wes, that in a lot of ways his downfall is predicated on his lack of sophistication or conflation of those things. And though maybe it really goes to the question of the idea that that might be how court works or how social structure works, that's how it's held together in this sort of uncontracted reciprocal benefit.

That's the way you put it, Jonathan. Uncontracted transactional interactions that involve a lot of trust because they're not contracted. They involve people who you can't really fight about them. It's sort of on your honor. And maybe there's more about that. Timon would accuse all the people who turn him down as being unhonorable. He doesn't use that word, but I feel like that's what he must mean in being deeply disappointed about it. And we would consider it naivete. But maybe part of that is because there are other social structures that go in there.

15:31 Wes: What's interesting about the transactional nature of his relationships. There's always transactional components to relationships. And people are to some extent, either they're unaware of them or they might be Highly cynical in the colloquial sense about it. It's like, yeah, I'm going to do favors for friends and get favors back. And that's a lot of how power works. And I scratch your back, you scratch mine. Although in Timon's case, it's, I'm going to scratch your back, and I'm going to scratch your back again. If you try and scratch my back, I'm going to give that back before you can even give it to me.

He doesn't. In a way, it's because he won't let himself be given something that he gets into trouble. And in a sense, it's a power grab. Right. Because it's. The gift giver is in the power position. But I just. I wanted to say one other thing. Is that. So he's the inversion of a cynic in a way. It's not that he understands that he's treating relationships as transactional. It's that he's treating the transactional as if it were a substantive relationship. He doesn't understand at all that there's a difference. There's an element of idealism in that it's almost regressive or infantile.

Right. It's like. And this word bounty is used. It's like, I'm going to nurture you. I'm going to give you food, I'm going to give you things. I'm going to treat you like my children.

16:37 Jonathan: And just picking up on Dylan's point of the problem with Timon's idea of friendship is it is entirely transactional. If one thinks about real friendship. Yeah. You know, there is things like gift giving, reciprocity. These are key parts of it. But the other aspect of friendship is something called love. And of all Shakespeare's plays, this is the one where is the love. Timon doesn't seem to sort of realize that part of what human relationships are about is love. The poet early in the play has this line about Timon, his large fortune upon his good and gracious nature hanging subdues and properties to his love and tendance, all sorts of hearts. But we don't really sort of see that in the play. We don't see his love and tendance. The only person who really loves in the play is Flavius, who loves his master.

17:36 Mark: Yeah, I've been looking over the final confrontation that Timon has with Flavius. That this is after Timon has already given money to the saying, go and spread venereal disease among Athens, had this long exchange with Apemantus, where they basically just tell each other to screw off. Act four. It's the end of act four. Flavius comes in at 4:57, something like that. And at first Timon says he doesn't recognize him. I, you know, I know thee not. And then Flavius is insisting, oh, no, I. You know, I'm the one person who stayed faithful to you and Timon, you know, I don't know.

I don't remember it. I've never had anybody honest around me. Like, you know, he's completely suffered some sort of mental break here. I guess he's not just kidding him. But then, you know, you're trying to be nice to me. But aren't you just doing this out of some subtle wish to have this reciprocated, you know, as we've been talking about? And Flavius managed to. Oh, no, no, I'm. I'm with you all the way. And Timon says, okay, fine. I found an honest man. Take the gods out of my misery. Has sent thee treasure. Go live rich and happy. But thus conditioned.

Thou shalt build from men, hate all, curse all, show charity to none, but let the famished flesh slide from the bone ere thou relieve the beggar. Give to dogs what thou deniest to men. Let prison swallow them, debts wither them to nothing. Be men like blasted woods, and may diseases lick up their false bloods. And so farewell and thrive. Basically, get out of here. You know, take this money. Isn't cursing him like he did the other people he gave money to, like, screw you. And made this money be a poison to everyone this comes in contact with? But he's more, take his money, but don't be like I was start as a cynic right now.

19:21 Jonathan: He's so missing the point, because in the previous speech, the Flavius actually uses that word, benefit, my most honored lord. For any benefit that points to me, either in hope or present, either in the future or now, I would exchange it for this one wish that you had power and wealth to requite me by making rich yourself. Flavius is saying, I don't want money. I don't want this gold. My only wish is that you can once again be in a position of wealth yourself. I think Timon, as you say, he's absolutely kind of reached rock bottom of cynicism at that point.

And of course, one of the nice things about the play is that Apemantus is called the philosopher. He's, I think, the only actually sort of explicitly named philosopher in Shakespeare. But when Apemantus has that line, you know, I do not follow friend or lover. Speaking about the idea of being totally isolated, actually, Apemantus rather enjoys company. You know, he enjoys being there on the edge of society in order to sort of make cynical jokes at the expense of other. Apemantus isn't really a kind of Diogenes going off to live in his barrel kind of character.

That's Timon. Timon is the real cynic.

20:36 Mark: Yeah. I'm sure we'll get into this in our second part of this discussion. We're going to talk more about Diogenes and Cynics. But you would think, you know, we've been talking about friendship, that Apemantus could show up. And he seems interested in bonding. Oh, at last you accept my judgment, Timon, that all these people were a bunch of blood suckers. It seems that they should be able to have some sort of solidarity in their mutual despise of mankind.

21:04 Wes: Well, he also tells Timon he's not the real thing.

21:06 Mark: Yeah.

21:07 Wes: Because the reasons for it are because of misfortune, essentially.

21:11 Dylan: Yeah. And Timon actually, in the end, he's in this weird situation where he's, like, come across a ton of money in the middle of the woods, right?

21:21 Jonathan: Yes.

21:22 Wes: Yeah.

21:22 Mark: He's looking for a root. He's looking for just some grubs to eat.

21:26 Dylan: Well, I went back and forth. Was money, not really money in that scene. I honestly couldn't tell if he actually had gold or if it was like,

21:34 Wes: something like he does because he's giving it away to the people.

21:38 Dylan: Yeah. Okay.

21:39 Mark: But earlier, Apemantus at the party was, like, finished his grace. And he's like, I'm just gonna sit and eat root. Like, I'm just gonna have, you know, some vegetables. I'm not partaking of your giant feast. I'm gonna sit here and. And so this was the thing that when Timon has finally become a cynic in his life choice, I'm digging in the ground for root that uses that same word for vegetables and happens to find all this gold there.

22:04 Wes: At that point, he could go back and pay his debts and say, all right, I've learned my lesson. I'm not gonna be overly trusting. But that's not what he wants. Everything his lost is lost for him. That's why, even though this feels a lot like King Lear, it's very different, because the kind of loss involved is. Is very different. It's not that he's ultimately been deprived by family members, and it's not even a matter of pride. Exactly. It's that the social relations don't turn out to be the way he wants them to be. Transactional in the fullest sense. And so if they can't be that way, then they can't be at all. So there's no going back. Even if he finds gold, which I thought was an interesting way to do the play. Because it kind of hammers that point home. Why have him find gold in the woods? It's not just about having lost all his money.

22:53 Mark: This maybe is a good way to pivot to just talking about this. As Jonathan, you were saying that Shakespeare was interested in the psychology of madness. And clearly this is not merely a philosophical reaction. This is a breakdown. He doesn't remember Flavius.

23:08 Wes: He's.

23:08 Mark: I can only describe his monologue where he decides to go off to the woods as a rant. The beginning of the second half of the play. It's not a philosophical contemplation. He's just, the hell with it. The hell with you. The hell with everything. And this is pretty much, with some little exceptions, when with Flavius there, okay, fine, I wish you well, but he just really has become a nihilist. And therefore when he does run into gold, it doesn't matter anymore. Everything is lost. It seems an overreaction. Is this really supposed to be a study in psychology? You know, Breaking Bad level we're seeing? It seems like the kind of things that we see in the jealousy taking over Othello or, you know, the Hamlet's self torture that are much more. I don't know, it's not such a sharp psychotic break such that we just can't identify with this character.

23:58 Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, I think Shakespeare's always interested in. Is actually something that goes back to classical tragedy, isn't it? The idea of the breaking point where extreme emotion absolutely takes over. So many of Shakespeare's tragedies have a character in whom the reason and the passions are well balanced. Horatio in Hamlet is the sort of classic example of that. Those characters are there, they represent the kind of good side of friendship. And they're there as a foil to show the audience what happens when the tragic protagonist, due to extremity of circumstance, loses that balance between reason and passion.

When passion completely takes over and they start speaking in a way that is completely irrational, as you say, that just becomes a rant. And we see that with Lear And Timon is possibly the most sort of extreme example of that. That great speech when he starts accusing even the elements of the sun, the earth and the moon as all Being thieves, all just out to thieve from the other elements. The entire sort of cosmic system is breaking down. He seems to say that. And that's because his mind has broken down. He's lost his reason out of this passion.

The extremity comes very much from anger, doesn't it? Shakespeare didn't know the Greek tragedies directly, but he knew Seneca very well. And classic pattern of a Seneca tragedy is where you get this great surge of anger. That then leads to a tragic catastrophe.

25:34 Wes: Just to continue with that point, I think he's recognizing something real, right? Which is that you have a cosmology in which you imagine that there's some purpose or teleology or beneficence. Right. The sun is a bounteous or it's a giver in a way, worthy of one's worship. The sun is actually indifferent or in it for itself. So that the accusation of thieving in a way is apt. It's seizing on something real. It's an expression of disillusionment with a conception of the universe that is more purposeful and has some teleology to it. There's some role for the divine, let's say. And everything in the end can look like thievery or indifference or dog eat dog world, something like that.

26:16 Jonathan: As opposed to reciprocity. Because a positive kind of teleology would say there's a kind of benign, reciprocal relationship between the moon and the sea through the movement of the tides. But Timon turns that upside down.

26:27 Dylan: Yeah. And characterizing it in terms of thievery again reveals to me that he's still in the same place of understanding things as being reciprocal or not. In this case, though, it's become that he's on the unjust side of it. Right. The world is out to get him. But in a way, it's an unchanged view of the world. In that the world is. Is acting out against or for you. As opposed to being indifferent. You're accusing the son of being a thief or something like that. You're understanding there being an active role regarding the justice of the arrangement of the natural world. That isn't just. It is what it is.

27:06 Wes: This concept of reciprocity is really interesting because it also involves the concept of mutual influence. So early on, one of the interesting things about the play is Timon tells us a lot about his ideals, about how he conceives of the world and relationships. And one of the things he says is that friends command one another's fortunes. And what he means is that this is his rationale. For giving away all his money and being trusting about it. And it's a perversion of a famous ancient Greek saying, the things of friends are in common, which is also a foundation for the political.

So this idea of commanding one another's money is a variation on that. But also this word fortune, can mean not just riches, but any vicissitude in life. And those things are shared by friends. In other words, what friends share is there's a shared future. And they affect each other's fortunes because they rub off on each other and affect each other, change each other's characters. And so, in the context of friendship, one's fate and one's fortunes change. So that concept of reciprocity, mutual influence that I described is a much more sophisticated one than the one that Timon likes, which is much simpler.

That, I think, is the world that Timon yearns for, the simplicity of the transactional, where a shared fortune is not a matter of mutual influence on character, for instance, it's just, here's your stuff. You take that. And in a way, we have some separation from each other at the emotional level.

28:42 Jonathan: And then we've sort of been talking a lot about transformation. Opposites, of course, that idea of fortune in the sort of medieval theory of tragedy, which also influences Shakespeare, is this idea of the wheel of fortune going from high estate to low, that notion of transformation. That's the core of Karl Marx's reading of the play, which I think is very powerful. I just wondered what you guys, as philosophers think about this. What Marx writes is this, as I say, Timon was his favorite Shakespeare play. He says, in Timon of Athens, Shakespeare attributes two qualities to money.

It is the visible deity, the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their opposites. The universal confusion and inversion of things. It brings incompatibles into fraternity. And it is the universal whore, the universal pander between men and nations. And obviously, in that latter point, he's sort of picking up on the fact that, as we discussed last week, the only women in the play are these two whores who come on briefly with Alcibiades. But I think that idea of money as something that transforms human and natural qualities into their opposites is pretty powerful.

29:55 Wes: Yeah, I think this goes towards Marx's conceptions of fetishization and commoditization. Right. He's interested in the way in which human relationships can end up being turned into things. Maybe reified is another word we might use. And so they can take on, so things. You know, some things that are tangible and that we can touch, enjoy, and get physical pleasure out of, can take on a much larger significance and a relational significance, but they can become kind of black holes for that. So they can actually deprive us of and alienate us from those authentic human relational things, get us to focus on the concrete thing as opposed to the more complicated relationship between human beings.

30:38 Dylan: I'm brought back to a point you made earlier, Wes, about reminding us that Timon really refuses to completely participate in the full transactional nature of this. Right. He wants to stay on one side of the transaction as being the giver. And he very, you know, I can't even think of the adjective, but prominently refuses to accept a gift from someone who. He had gotten the guy out of jail or something like that earlier. And I think that's super telling. There's almost like this note of hubris or something like that going on in that even though he's understanding the world and these relationships as being fully transactional, he also refuses to participate in it in a transactional manner in which he would be receiving as well as giving.

And that causes him problems. I mean, in some ways, one might say that that could easily be a core piece of the failure of his household, is because he's constantly giving and never participating in the other parts of the transactions.

31:42 Wes: It's not a Godfather move, right? So the Godfather comes in and says, all right, I'm going to do this favor.

31:48 Dylan: Yes.

31:49 Wes: It says, and then someday I'm going to ask you to do me a favor too.

31:53 Dylan: Yes, yes, you got to ask. The Godfather would have said, thank you very much and put it in his dresser.

31:59 Wes: Yeah, yeah. If you want to create a political alliance.

32:02 Dylan: Yes.

32:03 Wes: When you give, you create a debt. You cannot create alliances by being a sun like source of bounty, which metabolically, where nothing returns, there's no metabolism, there's no actual relationship, in a sense.

32:16 Jonathan: Just picking up on your Godfather reference, the thing that keeps Shakespeare alive is the way that he addresses the big questions which recur through the ages. So if we were doing a Timon of Athens movie in a modern setting, what would we be looking at? Would we be looking at Lehman Brothers, New York, around about the time of the financial crash, Some guy who's big into philanthropy and then it all goes wrong and he heads up to the woods in Vermont or something. Do you think this could work? Is there some mileage in this?

32:48 Dylan: I just read a book in which the Bernie Madoff scandal played a big role in sort of the background, a version of that scandal. And so I immediately think of something like that.

32:58 Jonathan: But the interesting thing there is Timon is not corrupt.

33:01 Dylan: He's not a Bernie Madoff character, which is just a long swindle. Right?

33:05 Mark: He is the person who is born rich. Do we know how Timon got his money in the first place? It seems like he's just always had money. There's no sense that like these self made billionaires or whatever, that they're just constantly thinking and I work so many hours a day like no, he's rich in that he doesn't think about money. He uses it transactionally because he likes the flavor of people being around him. He throws these lavish parties. You know, he doesn't just send Flavius and say just give my money to good charities, whatever. You know, he wants the people around him and to be grateful and to feel like he's in a position of power. He has these connections to people.

33:40 Wes: He's a trust fund kid with a,

33:42 Dylan: with an entourage, 100%. He's. He's definitely not new money. He did, he did start a business and make his money.

33:50 Jonathan: No. And he doesn't use his money to get sexual favors, for example. You know, he. He's not sort of, you know, surrounded by beautiful young women, right?

33:58 Mark: I'm looking at the end of Act 2 that when he is finally convinced by Flavius that he is in financial trouble, he's like go to Ventidius. He just offered me money in the last scene and greet him for me. Bind him. Suppose some good necessity touches his friend which craves to be remembered with those five talents. So he's okay once he knows he's been convinced that okay, the well is not eternally deep. I'm running low. He's fine sending out these people. It's not Flavius that sends by himself, that sends all these servants out to collect. Timon is okay with that. So I think he is okay with the transactional. I would not interpret this in maybe as strictly as we have been that he just wants to be in the position of power and now even to have to ask for money. He's collapsed because his sense of self like no, he's. He's fine.

34:46 Wes: He waits until he's lost everything though. That's the difference.

34:49 Mark: But it's interesting that he doesn't react at that point to like this was so defined my self worth. It's only when people are ungrateful and the way they're ungrateful, they're all like, oh, we wish him so well. But you know, I'm a little short right now. Like they're very willing to give him, you know, as many fine words and praise. As long as it doesn't actually cost anything.

35:10 Jonathan: That's absolutely right.

35:11 Mark: To respond to Jonathan, this thing about Marx. Let me just read a little of that. This is on line 425 is the beginning of the speech. But he's talking to these bandits that have come to him. He's giving them money in a very nihilistic way. Outdo more robbing. It's all fine. Nobody's innocent. So if you rob somebody, they're all thieves too. He says, I'll example you with thievery. The sun's a thief. And with his great attraction robs the vast sea.

35:36 Wes: The moon's an errant thief.

35:38 Mark: And her pale fire she snatches from the sun. The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves the moon into salt tears. The earth's a thief that feeds and breeds by a composture stolen from general excrement. Each thing's a thief. So in other words, it's not the transformation into capital, into liquid, into money. That there might just be something in the basic transactional. It's not actually transactional. This is a predatory nature of existence. That each thing, when responding to its own laws of nature. Its own internal teleology, takes from other things.

It's not that it means. It's not that the sun means to evaporate the sea. It's not that the sun is being jealous, you know, that we can impute it to it. Any bad motives. It's just every human being that we're dogs. If we act according to our human nature, we will scramble and we will care only about ourselves. Which seems to be a very different thing. This is saying something fundamental about human nature. Than Marx's critique of we are all fine, but then you had to commoditize everything. No, there's something just built into human interactions that makes them bad.

36:42 Jonathan: The dog imagery just keeps coming back, doesn't it? There's a fantastic essay on the play by the great critic William Empson, called Timon's Dog. And very much focuses on that repeated dog image. And indeed the figure of Apemantus as Timon's dog.

36:59 Dylan: I do think that the characterization of thievery, though, in these things is applying a kind of. Well, it's applying a sense of justice. Right? The only way it can be thievery is if it's taken from you unjustly. Which is different than, I guess I wouldn't characterize a lion killing and eating a antelope as thieving the life of the antelope.

37:24 Wes: It's really about causality and influence. Again, coming back to that concept, right? Because you can take one physical object applying force to another in a collision and moving, you know, you can say, well, it stole some of the momentum or force or something like that, or energy really is what it would come down to. So you can conceive of causality and influence per se as being nefarious and being a form of robbery and all that stuff. So it's a dissatisfaction with the naturalistic frame that is the universe, as opposed to a teleological or religious or however you want to think about it.

38:00 Dylan: But it's radically moralizing your interactions with the natural world, right? It means that when you're out at sea, the sea is actually, I mean, I guess it's not so foreign, right? The notion that the sea, when you're out on a ship is actually attacking you on purpose, right? I mean, you were sort of alluding to this personification of the natural world into things that are doing that. You're being punished for the bad things that happen to you, even from natural consequences. And you're also being smiled upon. When the bounty of the land is great and I have lots of vegetables and the game is running wild and I have all kinds of food in my stores, that must mean that the universe is smiling upon me.

And when I'm out at sea and the waves are crashing down upon me, that must be because I'm being punished because I've done something wrong. I mean, there's something that is true about the way of human beings in looking at the world in those terms, but it definitely is moralizing the whole world.

39:00 Wes: He wants to be a perpetual motion machine. He wants to be a non entropic system, something exempt from entropy. So I can give off all of this stuff and yet never lose. You know, it's a kind of hubris and aspiring to the divine.

39:15 Jonathan: But he does come at the end to this, I think, very beautiful, powerful moment of acceptance. Of acceptance of death, of limitation. The thing about wealth is the idea. There's always someone with a bigger yacht. You know, it's never ending. But what he says at the end, you know, come not to me again, but say to Athens. Timon hath made his everlasting mansion upon the beached verge of the salt flood. So instead of the idea of a mansion in which you have your great parties and I want to buy a bigger house, but the everlasting mansion, the final mansion, is the 6 foot by 3 of the grave, and he makes it on the edge of the sea, who once a day, with his embossed froth, the turbulent surge shall cover that fantastic sense of the tide coming in and out over the grave.

Hither come and let my gravestone be your oracle. Lips, let sour words go by and language end. You know, it's kind of almost a Wittgensteinian moment, isn't it? Whereof we cannot speak, there must be silence. Let go of all those sour words, all that anger. Let language end. What is amiss. Plague and infection mend, and it is written in a time of plague. But then graves only be men's work, and death their gain. Sun, hide thy beams. Timon hath done his reign. There is a kind of closure there that, making sense in the moment of death always reminds me of fantastic moment at the end of Ezra Pound's translation of Sophocles, great play, the Women of Trachis, where Heracles, in his death, comes at the end, and he says, in the moment of death.

Come at it that way, my boy. What splendor. It all coheres. It's only in that moment of death that a kind of wisdom comes. It sort of comes through this acceptance of mortality, this sense. I'm not going to strive anymore for wealth. I'm not going to vent anymore. Just going to accept.

41:08 Mark: You're making me understand better. The very end of the play. So the epitaph. Here lies a wretched corpse, a wretched soul bereft. Seek not my name. A plague consume you, wicked caitiffs left, which is just wretches. He said, a plague consume you, wicked wretches. Left, here lie I, Timon, who alive all living men did hate. Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here. Thy gate, which I originally read that as just screw all of you. In other words, just continuing the rant, but it's actually saying, I know I was filled with hate and bile.

Pass by. Don't let that infect you. And that sort of Alcibiades is like, I was taking such great offense at this war crimes thing and your treatment of me. And, oh, it's just all so wearying. Let's just have peace. And it really seemed like, why would he, given that he just read this epitaph where Timon is still just cursing us out. Why would that settle anything? Why would we feel, oh, well, Timon's dead, so I guess we don't have to fight, and it just seemed entirely irrelevant. But you're Kind of making me understand.

42:08 Jonathan: It is odd, this whole thing about the two epitaphs that I think is part of the unfinished, messy quality of the text. But I think you've nailed it there.

42:16 Mark: So that's a good place to end part one. We're going to have part two. Seth will be back. If you are a supporter that part two will already be in your feed. See y'. All.

42:25 Wes: Bye. Good night.

42:26 Dylan: Bye. Good night.