HERMES What an advantageous thing it is to shout loudly and to be annoying and impudent! It is useful not only to pleaders in court but to petitioners to Heaven. Lo and behold, Timon, who is now wretchedly poor, will become rich in an instant because he prayed vociferously and outspokenly and drew the attention of Zeus; but if he had bent his back and dug in silence he would still be digging neglected.

RICHES But I really can’t go to him, Zeus.

ZEUS Why not, my good Riches, when I have bidden you to do so?

RICHES Why, by Zeus, because he treated me contumeliously, bundled me out, made ducks and drakes of me, although I was his father’s friend, and all but thrust me out of the house with a pitchfork, throwing me away as people throw hot coals out of their hands. Am I to go back, then, and be betrayed into the hands of parasites and toadies and prostitutes?. Send me to men who will be pleased with the gift, Zeus, who will be attentive to me, who hold me in honour and yearn for me, and let these noddies abide with Poverty, whom they prefer to me; let them get a coat of skin and a pick from her and be content, poor wretches, with a wage of four obols, they who heedlessly fling away ten-talent gifts.

ZEUS Timon will never again treat you in any such way, for unless the small of his back is completely insensible, his pick has certainly taught him that he should have preferred you to Poverty. It seems to me, however, that you are very fault-finding. Now you are blaming Timon because he flung his doors open for you and let you go abroad freely, neither locking you in nor displaying jealousy; but at other times it was quite the reverse’; you used to get angry at the rich and say that they locked you up with bolts and keys and seals to such an extent that you could not put your head out into the light of day. At all events that was the lament you used to make to me, saying that you were being stifled in deep darkness. That was why you presented yourself to us pallid and full of worries, with your fingers deformed from the habit of counting on them, and threatened that if you got a chance you would run away. In short, you thought it a terrible thing to lead a virginal life like Danae in a chamber of bronze or iron, and to be brought up under the care of those precise and unscrupulous guardians, Interest and Accounts.

As a matter of fact, you used to say that they acted absurdly in that they loved you to excess, yet did not dare to enjoy ‘you when they might, and instead of giving free rein to their passion when it lay in their power to do so, they kept watch and ward, looking fixedly at the seal and the bolt; for they thought it enjoyment enough, not that they were able to enjoy you themselves, but that they were shutting out everyone else from a share in the enjoyment, like the dog in the manger that neither ate the barley herself nor permitted the hungry horse to eat it. Moreover, you laughed them to scorn because they scrimped and saved and, what is strangest of all, were jealous of themselves, all unaware that a cursed valet or a shackle-burnishing steward would slip in by stealth and play havoc, leaving his luckless, unloved master to sit up over his interests beside a dim, narrownecked lamp with a thirsty wick. Why, then, is it not unjust in you, after having found fault with that sort of thing in the past, to charge Timon with the opposite now?

RICHES Really, if you look into the truth, you will think that I do both with good reason, for Timon’s extreme laxity may fairly be deemed inconsiderate and unfriendly toward me; and on the other hand, when men kept me locked up in dark coffers, taking pains to get me fat and plump and overgrown, and neither laid a finger on me themselves nor brought me out into the light of day for fear that I might be seen by someone else, I used to consider them senseless and arrogant because they let me grow soft in such durance when I had done no wrong, and were unaware that after a little they would go away and leave me to some other favourite of fortune.