The onrush of Achilles daunts even Hector, and at the last moment he turns to flee, trying to find his way safe through one of the city gates. Achilles heads him off and three times they run completely round the city (which can only be village-size by modern standards).

Only then does Hector turn, perforce, to face Achilles, and is killed!

None of this can appear in Troilus and Cressida. The medieval poets, with their pro-Trojan/Roman prejudice, had to treat Hector much more gently, and Shakespeare inherits that attitude from them.

He has the two champions fight indeed, but it is Achilles who has to fall back, weakening. Hector says, gallantly,

—Act V, scene vi, line 14

And Achilles goes off, muttering that he is out of practice.

Yet something must be done to account for the fact that Hector does indeed die at the hands of Achilles, so Shakespeare makes the former do a most un-Hectorish thing. Hector meets an unnamed Greek in rich armor and decides he wants it. When the Greek tries to run, Hector calls out:

—Act V, scene vi, lines 30-31

Nowhere in Homer, nor anywhere else in this play, does Hector give anyone reason to think he would ever call a foeman "beast" or take the attitude that war is a hunt, with other men playing the role of animals, and it is partly because of this that some critics doubt that Shakespeare wrote the last act. And yet it is necessary for Hector to do something of this sort, in order that he might earn the retribution that now falls upon him.

Hector catches his prey and kills him. It is late in the day and Hector decides the day's fight is over. Perhaps he is helped to that decision by his eagerness to try on the new armor he has won. At any rate, he takes off his own armor, stands unprotected-and at that moment, Achilles and a contingent of his Myrmidons appear on the scene.

Hector cries out that he is unarmed, but Achilles orders his men to kill, and then says, in grim satisfaction:

—Act V, scene viii, lines 11-12

For Achilles to kill Hector in this way is unthinkable in a Homeric context and must strike any lover of the Iliad as simple sacrilege. But there it is-the medieval pro-Trojan, pro-Hector view.

Troilus bears the news of Hector's death to the Trojan army:

—Act V, scene x, lines 17-19

Niobe was a Theban queen, a daughter of Tantalus (see page I-13), whose pride in her six sons and six daughters led her to boast herself the superior of the goddess Latona (Leto), who had only one of each. La-tona's children, however, happened to be Apollo and Diana.

To avenge the taunt, Apollo and Diana shot down all twelve children, the twelfth in Niobe's arms. She wept continuously after that, day after day, until the gods, in pity, turned her to stone, with a spring of tears still bubbling out and trickling down.

This essentially ends the play. As Troilus says:

—Act V, scene x, line 22

To be sure, Troilus promises revenge on the Greeks and on Achilles particularly, but that is just talk. There can be no revenge. Troy must fall.

Nor has Troilus revenge on Diomedes or Cressida. Diomedes still lives and still has Cressida.

The fifth act is an ending of sorts, but it is not the ending toward which the first four acts were heading.

Shakespeare wrote a narrative poem and three plays set in the legendary days of Greek history. He wrote only one play that was based- in a very tenuous way-in the days of Greece's greatest glory, the fifth century b.c.

This century was the Golden Age of Athens, when she beat off giant Persia and built a naval empire, when she had great leaders like Themis-tocles, Aristides, and Pericles; great dramatists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; great sculptors like Phidias; great scientists like Anaxagoras; great philosophers like Socrates and Plato.

But Shakespeare chose to mark the time by writing a play, Timon of Athens, that is generally considered one of his least satisfactory. Many critics consider it to be an unfinished play, one that Shakespeare returned to on and off, never patching it to his liking, and eventually abandoning it.

The play opens in the house of a rich man. A Poet, a Painter, a Jeweler, and a Merchant all enter. They are given no names but are identified only by their professions. The Jeweler has a jewel and the Merchant says:

—Act I, scene i, line 13

The Lord Timon is the owner of the house; the center toward which all these and others are tending.

Timon is, apparently, a historical character who lived in Athens during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.-eight centuries after the Trojan War), so that we may set the opening of the play in the last quarter of the fifth century b.c.

Timon's fame to his contemporaries and near successors, such as Aristophanes and Plato, lay entirely in the fact that he was a misanthrope. In fact, he was referred to as "Timon Misanthropes" ("Timon the ManHater"). He lived by himself, professed to hate mankind and to detest human society. To the sociable Greeks, to whom conversation and social intercourse were the breath of life, there was something monstrous in this. Plutarch, in his "Life of Mark Antony," describes how, at a low point in his career, Antony decided for a while to imitate Timon and withdraw from human society. Shakespeare may have come across this while working on his play Antony and Cleopatra (see page I-370) and conceived the idea of writing a play centered on the condition of misanthropy. And, indeed, Timon of Athens seems to have been written immediately after Antony and Cleopatra, in 1606 or 1607.

Additional men enter and the Poet identifies them, saying: