ABSTRACT
A few years ago, in a book which demonstrates the contribution of the classics to the literatures of modern Europe, an eminent classical scholar described Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida as a "distant, ignorant, and unconvincing caricature of Greece." Timon of Athens is still more outrageous as a representation of society in that city at the height of its civilization, when it was the "educator of Hellas." Most students nowadays gain their impressions of the tale of Troy divine primarily from Troilus and Cressida. It is quite misleading to expect to find something resembling the author's admiring attitude towards the ancient Greeks in the literature of the Renaissance. Furthermore, in his first epistle to the Corinthians (6.9 ff.) St. Paul gives a lengthy catalogue of vices and depravities of the Greeks, which will keep them out of the Kingdom of Heaven.
