Timandra is one of two women who accompany Alcibiades into Timon’s cave in Act 4, Scene 3. She appears only in this single scene, yet her presence marks a crucial moment in the play’s anatomy of human nature and the reversals that define Timon’s descent. She enters as a woman of the trade—a prostitute—and serves as both a mirror of Timon’s corrupted world and a target for his most vicious invective. Her few lines reveal her function: she comes not out of love or loyalty to Alcibiades, but out of the same hunger for gold that has animated everyone else in the play. When she asks Timon for more money, she does so with a bluntness that strips away all pretense. She wants what he has, period. She will do anything for it.
Timon’s response to Timandra is particularly savage, even by the standards of his misanthropy. He launches into a curse that treats her sexuality as a disease to be weaponized and spread. He instructs her to continue as a prostitute, to infect her clients with venereal disease, to use her body as a weapon of destruction. The cruelty is absolute—he is not condemning her for her profession but rather commanding her to perfect it as an instrument of harm. In this way, Timandra becomes a vessel for Timon’s belief that all human connection is transactional and corrupt, and that the worst we can wish on each other is the fulfillment of our own appetites. She does not resist or defend herself; she simply curses him back (“Hang thee, monster!”) and exits. Her defiance is as minimal as her presence, but it stands as a final refusal—a moment when even a prostitute will not accept the terms of his hatred.
Timandra matters precisely because she is disposable. She has no name in the world except as an object of appetite; she will be forgotten the moment the scene ends. Yet Shakespeare gives her a voice and a moment of dignity even as Timon strips her of both. She represents the bottom rung of Athens’s social order—those who have nothing but their bodies, who cannot afford to refuse any transaction—and in her willingness to take gold from a madman in a cave, she embodies the play’s darkest vision of how poverty and desperation make us all complicit in the systems that destroy us.
Hang thee, monster!
Go to hell, monster!
Timandra · Act 4, Scene 3
Timandra, a prostitute, curses Timon when he launches into a bitter monologue about her profession and her body. The line is memorable because it is one of the few moments when Timon's victims speak back, rejecting his authority to define them. It tells us that even those with nothing left can refuse to accept the role a bitter man wants to assign them.
Give us some gold, good Timon: hast thou more?
Give us some gold, good Timon: do you have more?
Timandra · Act 4, Scene 3
Timandra asks Timon for gold, cutting through his invective to get to the practical point—if he is so disgusted with her, he can at least pay her. The request matters because it shows that Timon's words, however eloquent, cannot actually harm her or change what she does—she still needs money, and she will take it from him. It reveals that beneath all the curse and philosophy lies a simple economy that no amount of rage can disrupt.
