1    Sound to this coward and lascivious town
2    Our terrible approach.
A parley sounded
Enter Senators on the walls
3    Till now you have gone on and fill'd the time
4    With all licentious measure, making your wills
5    The scope of justice; till now myself and such
6    As slept within the shadow of your power
7    Have wander'd with our traversed arms and breathed
8    Our sufferance vainly: now the time is flush,
9    When crouching marrow in the bearer strong
10   Cries of itself 'No more:' now breathless wrong
11   Shall sit and pant in your great chairs of ease,
12   And pursy insolence shall break his wind
13   With fear and horrid flight.

14   Noble and young,
15   When thy first griefs were but a mere conceit,
16   Ere thou hadst power or we had cause of fear,
17   We sent to thee, to give thy rages balm,
18   To wipe out our ingratitude with loves
19   Above their quantity.

20   So did we woo
21   Transformed Timon to our city's love
22   By humble message and by promised means:
23   We were not all unkind, nor all deserve
24   The common stroke of war.

25   These walls of ours
26   Were not erected by their hands from whom
27   You have received your griefs; nor are they such
28   That these great towers, trophies and schools
29   should fall
30   For private faults in them.

31   Nor are they living
32   Who were the motives that you first went out;
33   Shame that they wanted cunning, in excess
34   Hath broke their hearts. March, noble lord,
35   Into our city with thy banners spread:
36   By decimation, and a tithed death--
37   If thy revenges hunger for that food
38   Which nature loathes--take thou the destined tenth,
39   And by the hazard of the spotted die
40   Let die the spotted.

41   All have not offended;
42   For those that were, it is not square to take
43   On those that are, revenges: crimes, like lands,
44   Are not inherited. Then, dear countryman,
45   Bring in thy ranks, but leave without thy rage:
46   Spare thy Athenian cradle and those kin
47   Which in the bluster of thy wrath must fall
48   With those that have offended: like a shepherd,
49   Approach the fold and cull the infected forth,
50   But kill not all together.

51   What thou wilt,
52   Thou rather shalt enforce it with thy smile
53   Than hew to't with thy sword.

54   Set but thy foot
55   Against our rampired gates, and they shall ope;
56   So thou wilt send thy gentle heart before,
57   To say thou'lt enter friendly.

58   Throw thy glove,
59   Or any token of thine honour else,
60   That thou wilt use the wars as thy redress
61   And not as our confusion, all thy powers
62   Shall make their harbour in our town, till we
63   Have seal'd thy full desire.

64   Then there's my glove;
65   Descend, and open your uncharged ports:
66   Those enemies of Timon's and mine own
67   Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof
68   Fall and no more: and, to atone your fears
69   With my more noble meaning, not a man
70   Shall pass his quarter, or offend the stream
71   Of regular justice in your city's bounds,
72   But shall be render'd to your public laws
73   At heaviest answer.

74   'Tis most nobly spoken.

75   Descend, and keep your words.

76   My noble general, Timon is dead;
77   Entomb'd upon the very hem o' the sea;
78   And on his grave-stone this insculpture, which
79   With wax I brought away, whose soft impression
80   Interprets for my poor ignorance.

Reads the epitaph
81    'Here lies a
82   wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft:
83   Seek not my name: a plague consume you wicked
84   caitiffs left!
85   Here lie I, Timon; who, alive, all living men did hate:
86   Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay
87   not here thy gait.'
88   These well express in thee thy latter spirits:
89   Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs,
90   Scorn'dst our brain's flow and those our
91   droplets which
92   From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
93   Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
94   On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead
95   Is noble Timon: of whose memory
96   Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,
97   And I will use the olive with my sword,
98   Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each
99   Prescribe to other as each other's leech.
100  Let our drums strike.