What I Owe the Ancients

1 To close, a word about that world into which I have sought paths, into which I may have found a new path—the ancient world. My taste, which may be the opposite of a tolerant taste, is far from saying yes wholesale here either: it does not like saying yes at all, prefers saying no, and likes saying nothing best of all… This holds for entire cultures, for books—it also holds for places and landscapes. At bottom, only a very small number of ancient books count in my life; the most famous are not among them. My sense of style, of the epigram as a style, awoke almost instantly on encountering Sallust. I have not forgotten the astonishment of my revered teacher Corssen when he had to give his worst Latin student the very highest grade—I was fully formed at a stroke. Compressed, severe, with as much substance as possible at its core, a cold malice toward the “beautiful word,” also toward the “beautiful feeling”—in this I recognized myself. Even in my Zarathustra, one will recognize in me a very serious ambition for Roman style, for what is “more lasting than bronze” in style.—It was no different when I first encountered Horace. To this day, no poet has given me the same artistic delight that an ode of Horace’s gave me from the beginning. In certain languages one cannot even aspire to what has been achieved here. This mosaic of words, in which each word, as sound, as position, as concept, radiates its force to right and left and across the whole; this minimum in the extent and number of signs, this maximum of energy in the signs achieved by it—all this is Roman and, if one will believe me, noble in the highest degree. All the rest of poetry becomes something too popular by comparison—a mere chattering of feelings…

2 I owe the Greeks no comparably powerful impressions; and, to put it bluntly, they cannot be for us what the Romans are. One does not learn from the Greeks—their manner is too foreign, and also too fluid, to exert an imperative, “classical” force. Who ever learned to write from a Greek! Who ever learned without the Romans!… Do not bring up Plato against me. In relation to Plato I am a thoroughgoing skeptic, and I have always been unable to join in the admiration for Plato the artist that is customary among scholars. In the end, I have the most refined judges of taste among the ancients themselves on my side here. Plato, it seems to me, jumbles all the forms of style together, making him an early decadent of style: he has something similar on his conscience to the Cynics who invented Menippean satire. To find the Platonic dialogue, this terribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, at all alluring, one must never have read good French writers—Fontenelle, for example. Plato is boring.—In the end my distrust of Plato goes deep: I find him so far astray from all the fundamental instincts of the Greeks, so thoroughly moralized, so Christian before Christianity—he already has the concept “good” as his supreme concept—that I would sooner use the harsh expression “higher fraud” for the whole phenomenon of Plato, or idealism, if that sounds more agreeable, than any other. We have paid dearly for this Athenian’s schooling among the Egyptians (—or among the Jews in Egypt?…). In the great calamity of Christianity, Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the “ideal,” which enabled the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and step onto the bridge that led to the “cross”… And how much Plato there still is in the concept “church,” in the church’s structure, system, practice!—My recreation, my preference, my cure for all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli’s The Prince are closest to me in their unconditional will to deceive themselves about nothing and to see reason in reality—not in “reason,” still less in “morality”… Nothing cures one so thoroughly as Thucydides of that wretched idealizing whitewash of the Greeks which the “classically educated” young man carries away into life as the reward for his high-school drill. 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. In him the culture of the Sophists, meaning the culture of the realists, finds its consummate expression: that invaluable movement amid the moral and idealistic fraud of the Socratic schools, which was just then breaking out everywhere. Greek philosophy as the decadence of the Greek instinct; Thucydides as the great summation, the final revelation of that strong, stern, hard sense of fact that the older Greek possessed by instinct. In the end, courage in the face of reality distinguishes such natures as Thucydides and Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of reality—consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has himself under control, consequently he keeps things under control as well…

3 To sniff out “beautiful souls,” “golden means,” and other perfections in the Greeks, to admire in them, say, calm in greatness, an ideal cast of mind, lofty simplicity—from this “lofty simplicity,” ultimately a piece of German foolishness, I was protected by the psychologist I carried within me. I saw their strongest instinct, the will to power; I saw them tremble before the unbridled violence of this drive—I saw all their institutions grow out of protective measures to keep them safe from one another, from the explosives within them. The tremendous tension within then discharged itself outward in terrible and ruthless hostility: the city-states tore one another to pieces so that the citizens of each might find peace from themselves. They needed to be strong: danger was close by—it lurked everywhere. The splendidly supple physicality, the audacious realism and immoralism peculiar to the Greek, arose from necessity, not from “nature.” They came only later, they were not there from the beginning. And with festivals and arts, too, they wanted nothing other than to feel themselves on top, to show themselves on top: these are means of glorifying oneself, in some circumstances of making oneself afraid of oneself… To judge the Greeks in the German manner by their philosophers, to use, say, the stolid respectability of the Socratic schools to learn what was fundamentally Greek!… The philosophers are, after all, the decadents of Greek civilization, the countermovement against the old, noble taste (—against the competitive instinct, against the city-state, against the value of the race, against the authority of tradition). The Socratic virtues were preached because the Greeks had lost them: irritable, fearful, unstable, actors all, they had a few reasons too many to let morality be preached to them. Not that it did any good: but grand words and poses suit decadents so well…

4 I was the first, in seeking to understand the older Greek instinct, still rich and even overflowing, to take seriously that wondrous phenomenon which bears the name of Dionysus: it can be explained only by an excess of strength. Anyone who pursues the Greeks as does the deepest living connoisseur of their culture, Jakob Burckhardt in Basel, knew at once that something had been accomplished here: Burckhardt added a separate section on this phenomenon to his “Culture of the Greeks.” For the opposite, consider the almost amusing poverty of instinct among German philologists when they come near the Dionysian. The famous Lobeck in particular, who crawled into this world of mysterious states with the venerable assurance of a worm dried out among books, and persuaded himself that he was being scholarly by being frivolous and childish to the point of nausea—Lobeck, with the full expenditure of his learning, gave us to understand that all these curiosities really amounted to nothing. Indeed, the priests may have imparted something not entirely worthless to the participants in such orgies: for example, that wine arouses pleasure, that human beings sometimes live on fruit, that plants bloom in spring and wither in fall. As for that so bewildering wealth of rites, symbols, and myths of orgiastic origin, with which the ancient world is quite literally overgrown, Lobeck finds in it an occasion to become still more witty. “The Greeks,” he says, Aglaophamus I, 672, “when they had nothing else to do, laughed, leaped, raged about, or, since human beings sometimes feel like doing this too, sat down, wept, and lamented. Others came along later and sought some reason for this striking behavior; and so, to explain those customs, the countless festival legends and myths arose. On the other hand, people believed that this comical activity, which happened to take place on festival days, necessarily belonged to the celebration too, and retained it as an indispensable part of worship.”—This is contemptible chatter; one will not take a Lobeck seriously for a moment. It affects us quite differently when we examine the concept of “Greek” that Winckelmann and Goethe formed, and find it incompatible with the element from which Dionysian art grows—with orgiastic frenzy. Indeed, I do not doubt that Goethe would have excluded anything of the sort, as a matter of principle, from the possibilities of the Greek soul. Consequently, Goethe did not understand the Greeks. For only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state, does the fundamental fact of the Greek instinct find expression—its “will to life.” What did the Greek assure himself of through 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 the collective continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. For this reason the sexual symbol was, for the Greeks, the venerable symbol in itself, the true profundity within the whole of ancient piety. Every detail in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, of birth aroused the highest and most solemn feelings. In the teaching of the mysteries, pain is pronounced holy: the “labor pains of the woman giving birth” sanctify pain in general—all becoming and growing, everything that guarantees a future, entails pain… For the pleasure of creation to exist, for the will to life eternally to affirm itself, the “torment of the woman giving birth” must also exist eternally… All this is what the word Dionysus means: I know no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism, that of the festivals of Dionysus. In it the deepest instinct of life, the instinct for life’s future, for life’s eternity, is felt religiously—the very path to life, procreation, as the holy path… Only Christianity, with its underlying resentment against life, made something impure of sexuality: it threw filth on the beginning, on the precondition of our life…

5 The psychology of orgiastic frenzy as an overflowing feeling of life and strength, within which even pain still acts as a stimulus, gave me the key to the concept of tragic feeling, which has been misunderstood both by Aristotle and, in particular, by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from proving anything about the Greeks’ pessimism in Schopenhauer’s sense that it must instead be regarded as its decisive rejection and counterexample. Saying yes to life even in its strangest and harshest 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 divined as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not to be rid of terror and pity, not to cleanse oneself of a dangerous emotion by discharging it violently—as Aristotle understood it—but, beyond terror and pity, to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming—that joy which also includes the joy of destruction… And with this I touch again the point from which I once set out—“The Birth of Tragedy” was my first revaluation of all values: with this I place myself back on the ground from which my willing, my ability grows—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus—I, the teacher of eternal recurrence…

1 A last word about the world I have looked for ways into, and to which I may have found a new way in: the ancient world. My taste may be the opposite of a tolerant taste. Even here it is far from saying yes to everything, wholesale. It does not much like saying yes at all. It would rather say no, and best of all it would say nothing… That is true of whole cultures. It is true of books. It is also true of places and landscapes. At bottom, only a very small number of ancient books count in my life, and the most famous are not among them. My sense of style, of the epigram as a style, woke almost the instant I came into contact with Sallust. I have not forgotten the astonishment of my revered teacher Corssen, when he had to give his worst Latin student the very top grade. At a single stroke I was fully formed. Compressed, severe, with as much substance as possible underneath, a cold spite toward the “beautiful word” and the “beautiful feeling” too—that is where I recognized myself. You will find in me, even in my Zarathustra, a very serious ambition for Roman style, for what is “more lasting than bronze” in style.—It was no different when I first came into contact with Horace. To this day no other poet has given me the artistic delight that a Horatian ode gave me from the start. In some languages you could not even want what is achieved here. This mosaic of words, in which every word—as sound, as position, as idea—sends its force out to the right and left and over the whole; this minimum in the size and number of signs, and the maximum in the energy of the signs that it achieves—all of this is Roman and, if you will believe me, noble in the highest degree. All the rest of poetry, by comparison, becomes something too popular—mere chatter about feelings…

2 I owe the Greeks no impressions nearly as strong. And to say it straight out, they cannot be for us what the Romans are. You do not learn from the Greeks. Their way is too foreign, and too fluid, to work as a command, to work as a “classic.” Who would ever have learned to write from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it without the Romans!… Do not bring up Plato against me. Where Plato is concerned I am a thorough skeptic. I have never been able to join in the admiration for Plato the artist that is customary among scholars. Here, in the end, I have the most refined judges of taste among the ancients themselves on my side. Plato, it seems to me, throws all the forms of style together. That makes him a first decadent of style. He has something on his conscience that is similar to what the Cynics have, who invented the Menippean satire. For the Platonic dialogue—this horribly smug and childish kind of dialectic—to seem attractive, you must never have read good French writers, Fontenelle for example. Plato is boring.—In the end my distrust of Plato goes deep. I find him so far astray from all the basic instincts of the Greeks, so moralized, so Christian before Christianity—he already has the concept “good” as the highest concept—that for the whole phenomenon of Plato I would rather use the harsh phrase “higher swindle,” or, if you prefer to hear it, idealism, than any other. People have paid dearly for the fact that this Athenian went to school with the Egyptians (—or with the Jews in Egypt?…). In the great calamity of Christianity, Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the “ideal.” It made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and step onto the bridge that led to the “cross”… And how much Plato is still in the concept of the “church,” in the structure, system and practice of the church!—My relief, my favorite, my cure for all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli’s Prince are closest to me, through their unconditional will not to fool themselves and to see reason in reality—not in “reason,” and even less in “morality”… Nothing cures you so thoroughly as Thucydides of the pitiful prettying-up of the Greeks into an ideal, which the “classically educated” young man carries off into life as his reward for his high school drilling. You have to 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. In him the culture of the Sophists, that is, the culture of realists, reaches its perfect expression: a priceless movement in the middle of the swindle of morality and ideals that was just then breaking out everywhere in the Socratic schools. Greek philosophy as the decadence of the Greek instinct; Thucydides as the great sum, the last revelation of that strong, strict, hard sense of fact that lay in the instincts of the older Greek. In the end, courage in the face of reality is what separates natures like Thucydides and Plato. Plato is a coward before reality—so he flees into the ideal. Thucydides has control of himself—so he also keeps control of things…

3 To sniff out “beautiful souls,” “golden means” and other perfections in the Greeks, or to admire in them, say, calm in greatness, the ideal turn of mind, lofty simplicity—from this “lofty simplicity,” a German silliness when all is said and done, I was protected by the psychologist I carried inside me. I saw their strongest instinct, the will to power. I saw them tremble before the unruly force of this drive. I saw all their institutions grow out of protective measures, meant to make them safe from one another against the explosive stuff inside them. The enormous tension within then discharged itself outward, in terrible and ruthless hostility. The city communities tore one another to pieces, so that the citizens of each could find peace from themselves. They needed to be strong. The danger was close—it lurked everywhere. The magnificently supple bodies, the daring realism and immoralism that belong to the Greek, were a matter of need, not of “nature.” That came later. It was not there from the start. And with festivals and arts they wanted nothing other than to feel on top and to show themselves on top. These are ways of glorifying themselves and, under some circumstances, of making themselves feared… To judge the Greeks the German way, by their philosophers, and to use, say, the honest-citizen respectability of the Socratic schools to find out what is basically Greek!… The philosophers are, after all, the decadents of Greek culture. They are the countermovement against the old, noble taste (—against the instinct for competition, against the city-state, against the value of race, against the authority of tradition). The Socratic virtues were preached because the Greeks had lost them. Irritable, fearful, unstable, all of them actors, they had a few reasons too many to let themselves be preached at about morals. Not that it helped at all. But big words and poses suit decadents so well…

4 I was the first to take seriously, as a way of understanding the older Greek instinct, which was still rich and even overflowing, that wonderful phenomenon that bears the name of Dionysus. It can be explained only by an excess of strength. Anyone who follows the Greeks closely—like the deepest expert on their culture alive today, Jakob Burckhardt in Basel—knew at once that something had been accomplished here. Burckhardt added to his “Culture of the Greeks” a section of its own on this phenomenon. If you want the opposite, look at the almost amusing poverty of instinct in German philologists when they come anywhere near the Dionysian. Above all the famous Lobeck, who crawled into this world of mysterious states with the venerable confidence of a worm dried out between books, and persuaded himself that he was being scholarly by being, to the point of disgust, frivolous and childish—Lobeck, with all the display of learning he could muster, gave us to understand that there is really nothing to any of these curiosities. In fact, the priests may have told the participants in such orgies a few things that were not worthless—for example, that wine arouses desire, that a person can at times live on fruit, that plants bloom in the spring and wither in the fall. As for that strangely rich store of rites, symbols and myths of orgiastic origin, with which the ancient world is quite literally overgrown, Lobeck finds in it a chance to become one notch cleverer still. “The Greeks,” he says in Aglaophamus I, 672, “if they had nothing else to do, laughed, jumped, and raged about, or, since a person sometimes feels like it, sat down and wept and wailed. Others then came along later and looked for some reason for this striking behavior; and so those countless festival legends and myths arose to explain those customs. On the other hand, people believed that the comical goings-on that happened to take place on festival days necessarily belonged to the celebration too, and held on to them as an indispensable part of worship.”—That is contemptible chatter. You cannot take a Lobeck seriously for a moment. It strikes us very differently when we examine the idea of “Greek” that Winckelmann and Goethe formed for themselves, and find it incompatible with the element from which Dionysian art grows—with orgiastic frenzy. I really do not doubt that Goethe would have ruled out anything of the kind, on principle, from the possibilities of the Greek soul. So Goethe did not understand the Greeks. For only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state, does the basic fact of the Greek instinct express itself: its “will to life.” What did the Greek assure himself of through these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life; the future promised and consecrated in the past; the triumphant yes to life beyond death and change; true life as the continuing life of the whole, through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. That is why the sexual symbol was, for the Greeks, the venerable symbol in itself, the real depth within all ancient piety. Every single detail in the act of procreation, in pregnancy, in birth, awakened the highest and most solemn feelings. In the teaching of the mysteries, pain is declared holy: the “labor pains of the woman giving birth” make pain holy in general—all becoming and growing, everything that guarantees the future, requires pain… For there to be the joy of creating, for the will to life to affirm itself eternally, there must also be, eternally, the “agony of the woman giving birth”… All of this is what the word Dionysus means. I know no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism, that of the Dionysian festivals. In it the deepest instinct of life, the instinct toward the future of life, toward the eternity of life, is felt in a religious way—the road to life itself, procreation, as the holy road… Only Christianity, with its resentment against life at the bottom of it, made something unclean out of sexuality. It threw filth on the beginning, on the very precondition of our life…

5 The psychology of orgiastic frenzy as an overflowing feeling of life and strength, a feeling in which even pain works as a stimulant, gave me the key to the idea of the tragic feeling. It has been misunderstood by Aristotle and, above all, by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from proving anything for the pessimism of the Greeks, in Schopenhauer’s sense, that it has to count instead as its decisive rejection and counter-evidence. Saying yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life, delighting in its own inexhaustibility as it sacrifices its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian. That is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not to get free of fear and pity, not to purge oneself of a dangerous emotion by discharging it violently—that is how Aristotle understood it—but to be, beyond fear and pity, the eternal joy of becoming itself—that joy which also includes the joy of destroying… And with that I touch again the place I once set out from. “The Birth of Tragedy” was my first revaluation of all values. With that I place myself again on the ground from which my will and my ability grow—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus—I, the teacher of the eternal return…