"What dost thou think 'tis worth?": Timon of Athens and Politics as a Nonreligious Religion

If Othello is a character “perplex’d in the extreme,” Timon of Athens perplexes in the extreme. Apemantus, the cynic philosopher of Shakespeare’s Athens, suitably introduces Timon: “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends” (4.3.301-2). Because it pushes extremis to the limit, Timon is a paradigmatically excessive and liminal play. The Athens of Shakespere’s Timoni s governed by a weak and corrupt oligarchi, a Senate whose irrational rigor almost provokes a civil war: thievery and prostitution proliferate and the State is unable to keep Athenian bellicosità at bay. Indiscriminately open yo everybody, Timon’s house seems to be the only place in Athens where friendship, sympathy and companionship are possibile, and where positive social energies may circulate. But when the socipolitical values of generosty and hospitality are overthrown and denied (indeed in his moment of need Timon’s friends all prove to be hard-hearted and ungrateful), Timon turns from a paragon of philanthropy into a monster of misanthropy. Paradoxically, however, Timon’s self-inflicted exile (he leaves the polis, dies in the woods, and is found buried on the shore) makes peace and social coexistence possibile again, allowing foe a different economy to take over. Karl Marx in The Capital accurately describes the kind of relational value, founded on the use and the exchange of gold and objects, which Timon of Athens radically opposes in both its parts. Opposition and negation are textual strategies with which the drama keeps formulatine its most radical and extreme question: “What dost thou think ‘tis worth?” (1.1.211). If omnipotence and magic are attributes Marx associates with money, Timon’s ‘magic of bounty’ is, as the article tries to prove, related to a kind of economico that tries to do without money as a universal mediator, a nonreligious re-ligion.