Timon
(
Τίμων).
1.
The son of Timarchus of Phlius, a philosopher of the sect of the Skeptics, who flourished
in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, about B.C. 279 and onwards. He first studied philosophy
at Megara, under Stilpo, and then returned home and married. He next went to Elis with his
wife, and heard Pyrrho, whose tenets he adopted. Driven from Elis by straitened
circumstances, he spent some time on the Hellespont and the Propontis, and taught at
Chalcedon as a sophist with such success that he realized a fortune. He then removed to
Athens, where he passed the remainder of his life, with the exception of a short residence at
Thebes. He died at the age of almost ninety.
Timon appears to have been endowed by nature with a powerful and active mind, and with that
quick perception of the follies of men which betrays its possessor into a spirit of universal
distrust both of men and truths, so as to make him a skeptic in philosophy and a satirist in
everything. His agnosticism (to use a modern term) is shown by his saying that man need only
know three things—viz. what is the nature of things, how we are related to them,
and what we can gain from them; but as our knowledge of things must always be subjective and
unreal, we can only live in a state of suspended judgment. He wrote numerous works both in
prose and poetry. The most celebrated of his poems were the satiric compositions called
silli (
σίλλοι), a word of somewhat
doubtful etymology, but which undoubtedly describes metrical compositions of a character at
once ludicrous and sarcastic. The invention of this species of poetry is ascribed to
Xenophanes of Colophon. (See
Xenophanes.)
The
Silli of Timon were in three books, in the first of which he spoke in his
own person, and the other two are in the form of a dialogue between the author and Xenophanes
of Colophon, in which Timon proposed questions, to which Xenophanes replied at length. The
subject was a sarcastic account of the tenets of all philosophers, living and
dead—an unbounded field for skepticism and satire. They were in hexameter verse,
and from the way in which they are mentioned by the ancient writers, as well as from the few
fragments of them which have come down to us, it is evident that they were very admirable
productions of their kind (
Diog. Laert. ix. 12, 109- 115; Euseb.
Praep. Ev. xiv. p. 761). The fragments of his poems are collected by
Wölke,
De Graecorum Syllis (Warsaw, 1820), and by Paul
in his
Dissertatio de Sillis (Berlin, 1821). See
Parodia.
2.
The Misanthrope (
ὁ μισάνθρωπος), lived in the time of the
Peloponnesian War. He was an Athenian, of the demus of Colyttus, and his father's name was
Echecratides. In consequence of the ingratitude he experienced and the disappointments he
suffered from his early friends and companions, he secluded himself entirely from the world,
admitting no one to his society except Alcibiades, in whose reckless and variable disposition
he probably found pleasure in tracing and studying an image of the world he had abandoned;
and at last he is said to have died in consequence of refusing to suffer a surgeon to come to
him and set a broken limb. One of Lucian's pieces bears his name (
Aristoph. Av. 1548;
Aristoph. Lys. 809;
Plut. Ant. 70; Lucian,
Timon; Suid. s. h. v.). See
Binder, Ueber Timon den Misanthropen (1856). His name is
embalmed in English literature in Shakspeare's play
Timon of Athens.