Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume TwoNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume Two
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy, Ancient
But as the youths to be educated were brought up struggling against
one another, so their educators were in turn in emulation amongst
themselves. Distrustfully jealous, the great musical masters, Pindar
and Simonides, stepped side by side; in rivalry the sophist, the higher
teacher of antiquity meets his fellow-sophist; even the most universal
kind of instruction, through the drama, was imparted to the people
only under the form of an enormous wrestling of the great musical and
dramatic artists. How wonderful! "And even the artist has a grudge
against the artist!" And the modern man dislikes in an artist nothing
so much as the personal battle-feeling, whereas the Greek recognises
the artist _only in such a personal struggle._ There where the modern
suspects weakness of the work of art, the Hellene seeks the source of
his highest strength! That, which by way of example in Plato is of
special artistic importance in his dialogues, is usually the result
of an emulation with the art of the orators, of the sophists, of the
dramatists of his time, invented deliberately in order that at the end
he could say: "Behold, I can also do what my great rivals can; yea
I can do it even better than they. No Protagoras has composed such
beautiful myths as I, no dramatist such a spirited and fascinating
whole as the Symposion, no orator penned such an oration as I put
up in the Georgias--and now I reject all that together and condemn
all imitative art! Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an
orator!" What a problem unfolds itself there before us, if we ask
about the relationship between the contest and the conception of the
work of art!--If on the other hand we remove the contest from Greek
life, then we look at once into the pre-Homeric abyss of horrible
savagery, hatred, and pleasure in destruction. This phenomenon alas!
shows itself frequently when a great personality was, owing to an
enormously brilliant deed, suddenly withdrawn from the contest and
became _hors de concours_ according to his, and his fellow-citizens'
judgment. Almost without exception the effect is awful; and if one
usually draws from these consequences the conclusion that the Greek was
unable to bear glory and fortune, one should say more exactly that he
was unable to bear fame without further struggle, and fortune at the
end of the contest. There is no more distinct instance than the fate
of Miltiades. Placed upon a solitary height and lifted far above every
fellow-combatant through his incomparable success at Marathon, he feels
a low thirsting for revenge awakened within himself against a citizen
of Para, with whom he had been at enmity long ago. To satisfy his
desire he misuses reputation, the public exchequer and civic honour and
disgraces himself. Conscious of his ill-success he falls into unworthy
machinations. He forms a clandestine and godless connection with Timo
a priestess of Demeter, and enters at night the sacred temple, from
which every man was excluded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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