TIMOLEON, a celebrated general of ancient Greece, born, of a noble family, in Corinth, about 395 B.C.; ardently espoused the cause of the Greeks in Sicily, who were in danger of forfeiting their liberties to the Carthaginians, and headed an army to Syracuse, where he defeated and drove out Dionysius the Younger (344), subsequently cleared the island of the oppressors, and brought back order and good government, after which he quietly returned to private life, and spent his later years at Syracuse, beloved by the Sicilians as their liberator and benefactor; d. 337 B.C.
TIMON OF PHLIUS, a Greek philosopher, a disciple of PYRRHO (q. v.), flourished 280 B.C.; wrote a satirical poem on the whole Greek philosophy up to date, which is the source of our knowledge of his master’s opinions. Also the name of a misanthrope of Athens, a contemporary of Socrates.
TIMOR (500), the largest of the long chain of islands which stretches eastward from Java, of volcanic formation, mountainous, wooded, and possessing deposits of various metals, but mainly exports maize, sandal-wood, wax, tortoise-shell, &c.; population consists chiefly of Papuans, whose native chiefs are the real rulers of the island, which belongs, the W. portion of it to Holland and the E. to Portugal; E. of Timor lies a group of three low-lying islands of coral formation, known as Timor-Laut or Tenimber Islands (25); Dutch possession.
TIMOTHY, a convert of St. Paul’s, associate and deputy, to whom, as in charge of the Church at Ephesus, he wrote two epistles in the interval between his imprisonment and death at Rome, the First Epistle to direct him in the discharge of his pastoral duties, and the Second to invite him to Rome, and counsel him, should he not be dead before he arrived.
TIMUR THE TARTAR. See TAMERLANE.
TINDAL, MATTHEW, English deistical writer, born in Devonshire; studied at Oxford, became Fellow of All Souls’, was first a Protestant, then a Catholic, and then a free-thinker of a very outspoken type, exhibited in a polemic which provoked hostility on all sides; his most famous work was “Christianity as old as Creation; or, the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature,” a work which did not attack Christianity, but rationalised it (1656-1733).
TINEWALD, THE, name of the Manx Parliament.
TINNEVELLI (23), a town of Madras Presidency, SE. India, capital of a district (1,916) of the same name; lies 50 m. N. of Cape Comorin, and adjoins Pallamcotta, head-quarters of the British military and government; is a centre of Protestant mission work, and possesses a Sind temple and a Hindu college.
TINTAGEL HEAD, a rocky headland, 300 ft high, on the W. Cornish coast, 22 m. W. of Launceston; associated with the Arthurian legend as the site of King Arthur’s castle and court; 6 m. distant lies Camelford, the famous Camelot.
TINTERN ABBEY, one of the most beautiful ruined abbeys of England, founded by the Cistercian monks in 1131 on the Wye, in Monmouthshire, 5 m. above Chepstow; associated with Wordsworth’s great poem, “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.”