Sow all th’ Athenian bosoms; and their crop Be general leprosy: breath infect breath, That their society (as their friendship) may Be merely poison!’ Timon is here just as ideal in his passion for ill as he had been before in his belief of good, Apemantus was satisfied with the mischief existing in the world, and with his own ill-nature. One of the most decisive intimations of Timon’s morbid jealousy of appearances is in his answer to Apemantus, who asks him, ‘What things in the world can’st thou nearest compare with thy flatterers? _Timon._ Women nearest: but men, men are the things themselves.’ Apemantus, it is said, ‘loved few things better than to abhor himself.’ This is not the case with Timon, who neither loves to abhor himself nor others. All his vehement misanthropy is forced, up-hill work. From the slippery turns of fortune, from the turmoils of passion and adversity, he wishes to sink into the quiet of the grave. On that subject his thoughts are intent, on that he finds time and place to grow romantic. He digs his own grave by the sea-shore; contrives his funeral ceremonies amidst the pomp of desolation, and builds his mausoleum of the elements. ‘Come not to me again; but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood; Which once a-day with his embossed froth The turbulent surge shall cover.—Thither come, And let my grave-stone be your oracle.’ And again, Alcibiades, after reading his epitaph, says of him, ‘These well express in thee thy latter spirits: Though thou abhorred’st in us our human griefs, Scorn’d’st our brain’s flow, and those our droplets, which From niggard nature fall; yet rich conceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye On thy low grave’—— thus making the winds his funeral dirge, his mourner the murmuring ocean; and seeking in the everlasting solemnities of nature oblivion of the transitory splendour of his life-time. CORIOLANUS