What I Owe to the Ancients

 

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In conclusion, a word on that world into which I have sought to find a way, into which I have perhaps found a new way - the ancient world.  My taste, which may be called the opposite of a tolerant taste, is even here far from uttering a wholesale Yes: in general it dislikes saying Yes, it would rather say No, most of all it prefers to say nothing at all.... This applies to entire cultures, it applies to books - it also applies to towns and countrysides.  It is really only quite a small number of books of antiquity which count for anything in my life; the most famous are not among them.  My sense of style, of the epigram as style, was awoken almost instantaneously on coming into contact with Sallust.  I have not forgotten the astonishment of my honoured teacher Corssen when he had to give top marks to his worst Latin scholar - I had done all in a single blow.  Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold malice towards 'fine words', also towards 'fine feelings' - in that I knew myself.  One will recognize in my writings, even in my Zarathustra, a very serious ambition for Roman style, for the 'aera perennius' [more enduring than brass] in style - I had the same experience on first coming into contact with Horace.  From that day to this no poet has given me the same artistic delight as I derived from the very first from an Horatian ode.  In certain languages what is achieved here is not even desirable.  This mosaic of words in which every word, as sound, as locus, as concept, pours fourth its power to left and right and over the whole, this minimum in the range and number of signs which achieves a maximum of energy of these signs - all this is Roman and, if one will believe me, noble par excellence.  All other poetry becomes by comparison somewhat too popular - a mere emotional garrulousness ...

 

 

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I received absolutely no such strong impressions from the Greeks; and, not to mince words, they cannot be to us what the Romans are.  One does not learn from the Greeks - their manner is too strange, it is also too fluid to produce an imperative, a 'classical' effect.  Who would ever have learned to write from a Greek!  Who would ever have learned it without the Romans! ... Let no-one offer me Plato as an objection.  In respect to Plato I am a thorough sceptic and have always been unable to join in the admiration of Plato the artist which is traditional among scholars.  After all, I have here the most refined judges of taste of antiquity themselves on my side.  It seems to me that Plato mixes together all forms of style; he is therewith in the matter of style a first décadent: he has on his conscience something similar to the Cynics who devised the Satura Menippea. [Menippus (third century B.C.), of the Cynic school of philosophy, produced a number of satires no longer extant.] For the Platonic dialogue, that frightfully self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectics, to operate as a stimulus one must never have read any good French writers - Fontenelle, for example.  Plato is boring. - Ultimately my mistrust of Plato extends to the very bottom of him: I have him deviated so far from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellenes, so morally infected, so much an antecedent Christian - he already has the concept 'good' as the supreme concept - that I should prefer to describe the entire phenomenon 'Plato' by the harsh term 'higher swindle' or, if you prefer, 'idealism', than by any other.  It has cost us dear that this Athenian went to school with the Egyptians (- or with the Jews in Egypt?...).  In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the 'ideal' which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on to the bridge which led to the 'Cross'.... And how much there still is of Plato in the concept 'Church', in the structure, system, practice of the Church! - My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides.  Thucydides, and perhaps the Principe of Machiavelli, are related to me closely by their unconditional will not to deceive themselves and to see reason in reality - not in 'reason', still less in 'morality'.... For the deplorable embellishment of the Greeks with the colours of the ideal which the 'classically educated' youth carries away with him into life as the reward of his grammar-school drilling there is no more radical cure than Thucydides.  One must turn him over line by line and read his hidden thoughts as clearly as his words: there are few thinkers so rich in hidden thoughts.  Sophist culture, by which I mean realist culture, attains in him its perfect expression - this invaluable movement in the midst of the morality-and-ideal swindle of the Socratic schools which was then breaking out everywhere.  Greek philosophy as the décadence of the Greek instinct; Thucydides as the grand summation, the last manifestation of that strong, stern, hard matter-of-factness instinctive to the older Hellenes.  Courage in fact of reality ultimately distinguishes such natures as Thucydides and Plato: Plato is a coward in face of reality - consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has himself under control - consequently he retains control over things ...

 

 

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From scenting out 'beautiful souls', [From the title of Book VII of Goethe's novel WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP: 'Confessions of a Beautiful Soul'.] 'golden means' and other perfections of the Greeks, from admiring in them such things as their repose in grandeur, their ideal disposition, their sublime simplicity - from this 'sublime simplicity', a niaiserie allemande [German foolishness] when all is said and done, I was preserved by the psychologist in me.  I saw their strongest instinct, the will to power, I saw them trembling at the intractable force of this drive - I saw all their institutions evolve out of protective measures designed for mutual security against the explosive material within them.  The tremendous internal tension then discharged itself in fearful and ruthless external hostility: the city states tore one another to pieces so that the citizens of each of them might find peace within himself.  One needed to be strong: danger was close at hand - it lurked everywhere.  The splendid supple physique, the reckless realism and immoralism which pertains to the Hellene was a necessity, not a 'natural quality'.  It was produced, it was not there from the beginning.  And one employed festivals and arts for no other purpose than to feel oneself dominant, to show oneself dominant: they are means for making oneself feared.... To judge the Greeks by their philosophers, in the German manner, perchance to employ the philistinism of the Socratic schools as a clue to what is fundamentally Hellenic! ... But the philosophers are the décadents of Hellenism, the counter-movement against the old, the noble taste (- against the agonal instinct, against the polis, against the value of the race, against the authority of tradition).  The Socratic virtues were preached because the Greeks had lost them: excitable, timid, fickle, comedians every one, they had more than enough reason to let morality be preached to them.  Not that it would have done any good: but big words and fine attitudes are so suited to décadents ...

 

 

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I was the first to take seriously that wonderful phenomenon which bears the name Dionysus as a means to understanding the older Hellenic instinct, an instinct still exuberant and even overflowing: it is explicable only as an excess of energy.  Whoever has investigated the Greeks, such as that profoundest student of their culture now living, Jacob Burckhardt of Basel, realizes at once the value of this line of approach: Burckhardt inserted a special section on the said phenomenon into his Culture of the Greeks.  For the opposite of this, one should take a look at the almost laughable poverty of instinct displayed by German philologists whenever they approach the Dionysian.  The celebrated Lobeck especially, who crept into this world of mysterious states with the honest self-confidence of a dried-up bookworm and by being nauseously frivolous and childish persuaded himself he was being scientific - Lobeck intimated, with a great display of erudition, that these curiosities were of no consequence.  To be sure, the priests might have communicated a number of valuable pieces of information to the participants in such orgies - that wine arouses desire, for example, that man can live on fruit if need be, that plants bloom in spring and wither in autumn.  As regards that strange wealth of rites, symbols and myths of orgiastic origin with which the antique world was quite literally overrun, Lobeck finds in them an occasion for becoming a trifle more ingenious.  'When the Greeks had nothing else to do,' he says (Aglaophamus I, 672), 'they used to laugh, jump, race about or, since man sometimes feels a desire for this, they used to sit down and weep and wail.  Others later came along and sought some reason for all this striking behaviour; and thus those countless myths and legends arose to explain these practices.  On the other hand, one believed that the droll activities which now took place on festival days necessarily pertained to festival celebration and retained them as an indispensable part of divine worship.' - This is contemptible chatter and no-one is likely to take a Lobeck seriously for a moment.  We are affected quite differently when we probe the concept 'Greek' which Winckelmann and Goethe constructed for themselves and find it incompatible with that element out of which Dionysian art evolved - the orgy.  I have, in fact, no doubt that Goethe would have utterly excluded anything of this kind from the possibilities of the Greek soul.  Consequently Goethe did not understand the Greeks.  For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian condition, that the fundamental fact of the Hellenic instinct expresses itself - its 'will to life'.  What did the Hellene guarantee to himself with these mysteries?  Eternal life, the eternal recurrence of life; the future promised and consecrated in the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond death and change; true life as collective continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality.  It was for this reason that the sexual symbol was to the Greeks the symbol venerable as such, the intrinsic profound meaning of all antique piety.  Every individual detail in the act of procreation, pregnancy, birth, awoke the most exalted and solemn feelings.  In the teachings of the mysteries, pain is sanctified: the 'pains of childbirth' sanctify pain in general - all becoming and growing, all that guarantees the future, postulates pain.... For the eternal joy in creating to exist, for the will to life eternally to affirm itself, the 'torment of childbirth' must also exist eternally.... All this is contained in the word Dionysus: I know of no more exalted symbolism than the Greek symbolism, the symbolism of the Dionysian.  The profoundest instinct of life, the instinct for the future of life, for the eternity of life, is in this word experienced religiously - the actual road to life, procreation, as the sacred road.... It was only Christianity, with ressentiment against life in its foundations, which made of sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life ...

 

 

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The psychology of the orgy as an overflowing feeling of life and energy within which even pain acts as a stimulus provided me with the key to the concept of the tragic feeling, which was misunderstood as much by Aristotle as it especially was by our pessimists.  Tragedy is so far from providing evidence for pessimism among the Hellenes in Schopenhauer's sense that it has to be considered the decisive repudiation of that idea and the counter-verdict to it.  Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types - that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet.  Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge - it was thus Aristotle understood it - : but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming - that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.... And with that I again return to the place from which I set out - the Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: with that I again plant myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will and can - I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus - I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence ... [For Nietzsche's theory that all events recur eternally and its emotional significance in providing the most extreme formula of life-affirmation, see THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, Part III ('Of the Vision and the Riddle', 'The Convalescent' and 'The Seven Seals') and Part IV ([The Intoxicated Song').]