Timon, or the Misanthrope (1-5)

TIMON Ho, Zeus, you Protector of Friends and Guests and Comrades, Keeper of the Hearth, Lord of the Lightning, Guardian of Oaths, Cloud-Compeller, Loud-thunderer and whatever else crazy poets call you, above all when they are in trouble with their verses, for then to help them out you assume a multitude of names and so shore up the weak spots in their metre and fill up the gaps in their rhythm! Where now is your pealing levin, your rolling thunder and your blazing, flashing, horrid bolt?[*] All that has turned out to be stuff and nonsense, pure poetic vapour except for the resonance of the names. That famous, far-flying, ready weapon of yours has been completely quenched in some way or other and is cold, not even retaining a tiny spark of resentment against wrong doers.

Indeed, anyone who should undertake to commit perjury would be more afraid of a guttering rushlight than of the blaze of your all-conquering thunderbolt. What you menace them with is such a mere firebrand, they think, that they do not fear flame or smoke from it and expect the only harm they will get from the stroke is to be covered with soot.

That is why even Salmoneus dared to rival your thunder, and he was far from ineffective at it, for

Yet while you were still young and quick-tempered and violent in your wrath, you were very active against sinners and oppressors and you never made truce with them then. No, your bolt was always busy at all costs; your aegis shook, your thunder pealed, and your lightning was launched out incessantly like skirmish fire. The earth shook like a sieve, the snow fell in heaps, the hail was like cobblestones (if I may talk with you familiarly), and the rain-storms were fierce and furious, every drop a river ; consequently, such a flood took place all in a moment in the time of Deucalion that when everything else had sunk beneath the waters a single chest barely escaped to land at Lycoreus, preserving a vital spark of human seed for the engendering of greater wickedness.

The result is that you are reaping the fruit of your laziness. Nobody either sacrifices or wears wreaths in your honour any longer, except now and then a man who does it as something incidental to the games at Olympia; and even in that case he does not think he is doing anything at all necessary, but just contributes to the support of an ancient custom. Little by little, most noble of the gods, they have ousted you from your high esteem and are turning you into a Cronus. I will not say how many times they have robbed your temple already ; some of them, however, have actually laid their

Come, you marvellous ruler, when will you stop overlooking these things in such a careless way ? When will you punish all this wrong-doing? How many conflagrations and deluges will be enough to cope with such overwhelming insolence in the world ?

For instance, let me put aside generalities and speak of my own case. After raising so many Athenians to high station and making them rich when they were wretchedly poor before and helping all who were in want, nay more, pouring out my wealth in floods to benefit my friends, now that I have become poor thereby I am no longer recognized or even looked at by the men who formerly cringed and kowtowed and hung upon my nod. On the contrary, if I chance to meet any of them in the road, they treat me as they would the gravestone of aman long dead which time has overturned, passing by without even a curious glance..-- Indeed, some of them, on catching sight of me in the distance, turn off in another direction, thinking that the man who not long ago showed himself their saviour and benefactor will be an unpleasant and repulsive spectacle.