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In his last days, after his defeat at Actium, M. Antonhis sojourned in solitude by the sea declaring that he was going to live like Timon, since the injuries and ingratitude which he hadsuffered from his friends had taught him, like Timon, to distrust and detest all mankind. So both Strabo (17.1.9) and Plutarch relate. Plutarch explains that this man Timon was a citizen of Athens who lived at the time of the Peloponnesian War, to judge from plays of Aristophanes and Plato Comicus, in which Timon was held up to ridicule as a surly misanthrope who repulsed all friendly advances but displayed unwonted cordiality towards the brilliant young politician Alcibiades, because he divined, and gleefully predicted, that Alcibiades would do infinite mischieftoAthens (Ant.69–70; Alc. 16). The reference to the ingratitude of Timon's friends is illumined by Lucian's dialogue Timon, or the Misanthrope, in which Timon, identified as son of Echecratides and demotes of Colyttus, has lavished his patrimony on flattering friends who abandon him once his funds are exhausted, and in consequence he has been reduced to labouring in the fields. Luckily he digs up a crock of gold, and when his former friends reappear one by one in the hope of battening on him again, he repulses them with blows and clods of earth.

Physiognomy (φυσιογνωμονία), the systematic diagnosis of a man's character from his bodily features, originated as a branch of Greek medicine. True, it had antecedents in Babylonia, but the Babylonian science was more concerned with the prediction of the vicissitudes of a man's life than with deciphering his mental and moral qualities, and even deliverances dealing with such qualities were couched in the omen form. Prophetic physiognomists or metoposcopi held their ground throughout classical antiquity, but it was recognized that there were two classes of physiognomist, the seers and the physicians. The medical science of physiognomy was an attempt to extend the idea of treating a man's visible conditions as signs or symptoms of his invisible state, and to produce a list of signs such that the mind's construction could be inferred when it was not transparent. According to Galen this science was invented by Hippocrates himself, which is likely enough, for physiognomical observations occur in probably authentic Hippo-cratic treatises, and there seem to be none in earlier Greek authors. It was introduced into Athens about the time of Socrates, for the philosopher Antisthenes devoted a treatise to it, and there was a story of a visiting expert's diagnosing Socrates as stupid and fond of women.