Degrees, observances, customs and laws,
Decline to your confounding contraries;
And let confusion live!--Plagues, incident to men,
Your potent and infectious fevers heap
On Athens, ripe for stroke! Thou cold sciatica,
Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt
As lamely as their manners! Lust and liberty
Creep in the minds and manners of our youth,
That 'gainst the stream of virtue they may strive,
And drown themselves in riot! Itches, blains,
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 before
been 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