Making sense of the Greek crisis

Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens is surprisingly appropriate for the present financial crisis that Greece finds itself in. To paraphrase Flavius, “we have seen better days”. Timon was a wealthy man whose pleasure was giving gifts to his friends. His ruin came through his inability to support his spending; he took loans from his friends to pay for the very gifts he gave them. Eventually he was forced to mortgage all his holdings and became bankrupt, abandoned by his friends. Although originally written as a metaphor for the behaviour of James I and his court in the 17th century, it is equal...