In the first place, those " great" conceptions
—such, for example, as that of the indivisible and
inviolable poetic genius, Homer—were during the
pre-Wolfian period only too great, and hence in-
wardly altogether empty and elusive when we
now try to grasp them.
—such, for example, as that of the indivisible and
inviolable poetic genius, Homer—were during the
pre-Wolfian period only too great, and hence in-
wardly altogether empty and elusive when we
now try to grasp them.
Nietzsche - v03 - Future of Our Educational Institutions
Such an undecided
and imperfect state of public opinion is damaging
to a science in that its hidden and open enemies can
work with much better prospects of success. And
philology has a great many such enemies. Where
do we not meet with them, these mockers, always
ready to aim a blow at the philological " moles,"
the animals that practise dust-eating exprof 'esso,and 1 /
that grub up and eat for the eleventh time what they
have already eaten ten times before. For opponents
of this sort, however, philology is merely a useless,
harmless, and inoffensive pastime, an object of
laughter and not of hate. But, on the other hand,
there is a boundless and infuriated hatred of philo-
logy wherever an ideal, as such, is feared, where the
modern man falls down to worship himself, and
where Hellenism is looked upon as a superseded
and hence very insignificant point of view. Against
these enemies, we philologists must always count
upon the assistance of artists and men of artistic
minds ; for they alone can judge how the sword of
barbarism sweeps over the head of every one who
loses sight of the unutterable simplicity and noble
dignity of the Hellene; and how no progress in
commerce or technical industries, however brilliant,
no school regulations, no political education of the
masses, however widespread and complete, can pro-
tect us from the curse of ridiculous and barbaric
offences against good taste, or from annihilation by
the Gorgon head of the classicist.
## p. 148 (#168) ############################################
148 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
Whilst philology as a whole is looked on with
jealous eyes by these two classes of opponents, there
are numerous and varied hostilities in other direc-
tions of philology; philologists themselves are
quarrelling with one another; internal dissensions
are caused by useless disputes about precedence and
mutual jealousies, but especially by the differences
—even enmities—comprised in the name of philo-
logy, which are not, however, by any means
naturally harmonised instincts.
Science has this in common with art, that the
most ordinary, everyday thing appears to it as
something entirely new and attractive, as if meta-
morphosed by witchcraft and now seen for the first
time. Life is worth living, says art, the beautiful
temptress; life is worth knowing, says science.
With this contrast the so heartrending and dog-
matic tradition follows in a theory, and conse-
quently in the practice of classical philology derived
from this theory. We may consider antiquity
from a scientific point of view ; we may try to look
at what has happened with the eye of a historian,
or to arrange and compare the linguistic forms of
ancient masterpieces, to bring them at all events
under a morphological law; but we always lose the
wonderful creative force, the real fragrance, of the
atmosphere of antiquity ; we forget that passionate
emotion which instinctively drove our meditation
and enjoyment back to the Greeks. From this
point onwards we must take notice of a clearly
determined and very surprising antagonism which
philology has great cause to regret. From the
circles upon whose help we must place the most
## p. 149 (#169) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 149
implicit reliance—the artistic friends of antiquity,
the warm supporters of Hellenic beauty and noble
simplicity—we hear harsh voices crying out that
it is precisely the philologists themselves who are
the real opponents and destroyers of the ideals of
antiquity. Schiller upbraided the philologists with
having scattered Homer's laurel crown to the winds.
It was none other than Goethe who, in early life
a supporter of Wolf's theories regarding Homer,
recanted in the verses—
With subtle wit you took away
Our former adoration:
The Iliad, you may us say,
Was mere conglomeration.
Think it not crime in any way:
Youth's fervent adoration
Leads us to know the verity,
And feel the poet's unity.
The reason of this want of piety and reverence
must lie deeper; and many are in doubt as to
whether philologists are lacking in artistic capacity
and impressions, so that they are unable to do
justice to the ideal, or whether the spirit of negation
has become a destructive and iconoclastic principle
of theirs. When, however, even the friends of
antiquity, possessed of such doubts and hesitations,
point to our present classical philology as some-
thing questionable, what influence may we not
ascribe to the outbursts of the "realists" and the
claptrap of the heroes of the passing hour? To
answer the latter on this occasion, especially when
we consider the nature of the present assembly,
would be highly injudicious; at any rate, if I do
## p. 150 (#170) ############################################
150 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
not wish to meet with the fate of that sophist who,
when in Sparta, publicly undertook to praise and
defend Herakles, when he was interrupted with the
query: "But who then has found fault with him? "
I cannot help thinking, however, that some of these
scruples are still sounding in the ears of not a few
in this gathering; for they may still be frequently
heard from the lips of noble and artistically gifted
men—as even an upright philologist must feel them,
and feel them most painfully, at moments when his
spirits are downcast. For the single individual
there is no deliverance from the dissensions referred
to; but what we contend and inscribe on our banner
is the fact that classical philology, as a whole, has
nothing whatsoever to do with the quarrels and
bickerings of its individual disciples. The entire
scientific and artistic movement of this peculiar
centaur is bent, though with cyclopic slowness, upon
bridging over the gulf between the ideal antiquity
—which is perhaps only the magnificent blossom-
ing of the Teutonic longing for the south—and
the real antiquity; and thus classical philology
pursues only the final end of its own being, which
is the fusing together of primarily hostile impulses
that have only forcibly been brought together.
Let us talk as we will about the unattainability of
this goal, and even designate the goal itself as an
illogical pretension—the aspiration for it is very
real; and I should like to try to make it clear by an
example that the most significant steps of classical
philology never lead away from the ideal antiquity,
but to it; and that, just when peoptelire speaking
unwarrantably of the overthrowdT sacred shrines,
## p. 151 (#171) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 151
new and more worthy altars are being erected.
Let us then examine the so-called Homeric question
from this standpoint, a question the most important
problem of which Schiller called a scholastic
barbarism.
The important problem referred to is the question
of the personality of Homer.
We now meet everywhere with the firm opinion
that the question of Homer's personality is no
longer timely, and that it is quite a different thing
from the real "Homeric question. " It may be
added that, for a given period—such as our pre-
sent philological period, for example—the centre
of discussion may be removed from the problem
of the poet's personality; for even now a pains-
taking experiment is being made to reconstruct
the Homeric poems without the aid of personality,
treating them as the work of several different
persons. But if the centre of a scientific question
is rightly seen to be where the swelling tide of
new views has risen up, i. e. where individual
scientific investigation comes into contact with the
whole life of science and culture—if any one, in
other words, indicates a historico-cultural valua-
tion as the central point of the question, he must
also, in the province of Homeric criticism, take
his stand upon the question of personality as
being the really fruitful oasis in the desert of the
whole argument. For in Homer the modern
world, I will not say has learnt, but has examined,
a great historical point of view; and, even without
now putting forward my own opinion as to
whether this examination has been or can be
## p. 152 (#172) ############################################
152 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
happily carried out, it was at all events the first
example of the application of that productive
point of view. By it scholars learnt to recognise
condensed beliefs in the apparently firm, immobile
figures of the life of ancient peoples; by it they
for the first time perceived the wonderful capa-
bility of the soul of a people to represent the
conditions of its morals and beliefs in the form of
a personality. When historical criticism has con-
fidently seized upon this method of evaporating
apparently concrete personalities, it is permissible to
point to the first experiment as an important event
in the history of sciences, without considering
whether it was successful in this instance or not
It is a common occurrence for a series of
striking signs and wonderful emotions to precede
an epoch-making discovery. Even the experiment
I have just referred to has its own attractive
history; but it goes back to a surprisingly ancient
era. Friedrich August Wolf has exactly indicated
the spot where Greek antiquity dropped the
question. The zenith of the historico-literary
studies of the Greeks, and hence also of their
point of greatest importance—the Homeric question
—was reached in the age of the Alexandrian
grammarians. Up to this time the Homeric ques-
tion had run through the long chain of a uniform
process of development, of which the standpoint
of those grammarians seemed to be the last link,
the last, indeed, which was attainable by antiquity.
They conceived the Iliad and the Odyssey as the
creations of one single Homer; they declared it to
be psychologically possible for two such different
-
## p. 153 (#173) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 153
works to have sprung from the brain of one
genius, in contradiction to the Chorizontes, who
represented the extreme limit of the scepticism of
a few detached individuals of antiquity rather than
antiquity itself considered as a whole. To explain
the different general impression of the two books
on the assumption that one poet composed them
both, scholars sought assistance by referring to the
seasons of the poet's life, and compared the poet
of the Odyssey to the setting sun. The eyes of
those critics were tirelessly on the lookout for
discrepancies in the language and thoughts of the
two poems; but at this time also a history of the
Homeric poem and its tradition was prepared,
according to which these discrepancies were not
due to Homer, but to those who committed his
words to writing and those who sang them. It
was believed that Homer's poem was passed from
one generation to another viva voce, and faults
were attributed to the improvising and at times
forgetful bards. At a certain given date, about
the time of Pisistratus, the poems which had been
repeated orally were said to have been collected
in manuscript form; but the scribes, it is added,
allowed themselves to take some liberties with
the text by transposing some lines and adding
extraneous matter here and there. This entire
hypothesis is the most important in the domain
of literary studies that antiquity has exhibited;
and the acknowledgment of the dissemination of
the Homeric poems by word of mouth, as opposed
to the habits of a book-learned age, shows in
particular a depth of ancient sagacity worthy of
## p. 154 (#174) ############################################
154 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
our admiration. From those times until the
generation that produced Friedrich August Wolf
we must take a jump over a long historical vacuum;
but in our own age we find the argument left just
as it was at the time when the power of contro-
versy departed from antiquity, and it is a matter
of indifference to us that Wolf accepted as certain
tradition what antiquity itself had set up only as
a hypothesis. It may be remarked as most
characteristic of this hypothesis that, in the strict-
est sense, the personality of Homer is treated
seriously; that a certain standard of inner harmony
is everywhere presupposed in the manifestations
of the personality; and that, with these two ex-
cellent auxiliary hypotheses, whatever is seen to
be below this standard and opposed to this inner
harmony is at once swept aside as un-Homeric.
But even this distinguishing characteristic, in place
of wishing to recognise the supernatural existence
of a tangible personality, ascends likewise through
all the stages that lead to that zenith, with ever-
increasing energy and clearness. Individuality
is ever more strongly felt and accentuated; the
psychological possibility of a single Homer is ever
more forcibly demanded. If we descend back-
wards from this zenith, step by step, we find
a guide to the understanding of the Homeric
problem in the person of Aristotle. Homer was
for him the flawless and untiring artist who knew
his end and the means to attain it; but there is
still a trace of infantile criticism to be found in
Aristotle—i. e. , in the naive concession he made to
the public opinion that considered Homer as the
## p. 155 (#175) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 155
author of the original of all comic epics, the
Margites. If we go still further backwards from
Aristotle, the inability to create a personality is
seen to increase; more and more poems are attri-
buted to Homer; and every period lets us see its
degree of criticism by how much and what it con-
siders as Homeric. In this backward examination,
we instinctively feel that away beyond Herodotus
there lies a period in which an immense flood of
great epics has been identified with the name of
Homer.
Let us imagine ourselves as living in the time
of Pisistratus: the word " Homer" then compre-
hended an abundance of dissimilarities. What
was meant by "Homer" at that time? It is
evident that that generation found itself unable to
grasp a personality and the limits of its manifesta-
tions. Homer had now become of small conse-
quence. And then we meet with the weighty
question: What lies before this period? Has
Homer's personality, because it cannot be grasped,
gradually faded away into an empty name? Or
had all the Homeric poems been gathered together
in a body, the nation naively representing itself
by the figure of Homer? Was the person created
out of a conception, or the conception out of a person?
This is the real " Homeric question," the central
problem of the personality.
The difficulty of answering this question, how-
ever, is increased when we seek a reply in another
direction, from the standpoint of the poems them-
selves which have come down to us. As it is
difficult for us at the present day, and necessitates
## p. 156 (#176) ############################################
156 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
a serious effort on our part, to understand the law
of gravitation clearly—that the earth alters its
form of motion when another heavenly body
changes its position in space, although no material
connection unites one to the other—it likewise
costs us some trouble to obtain a clear impression
of that wonderful problem which, like a coin long
passed from hand to hand, has lost its original
and highly conspicuous stamp. Poetical works,
which cause the hearts of even the greatest geniuses
to fail when they endeavour to vie with them,
and in which unsurpassable images are held up
for the admiration of posterity—and yet the poet
who wrote them with only a hollow, shaky name,
whenever we do lay hold on him; nowhere the
solid kernel of a powerful personality. "For who
would wage war with the gods: who, even with
the one god? " asks Goethe even, who, though a
genius, strove in vain to solve that mysterious
problem of the Homeric inaccessibility.
The conception of popular poetry seemed to
lead like a bridge over this problem—a deeper
and more original power than that of every single
creative individual was said to have become active;
the happiest people, in the happiest period of its
existence, in the highest activity of fantasy and
formative power, was said to have created those
immeasurable poems. In this universality there
is something almost intoxicating in the thought of
a popular poem: we feel, with artistic pleasure,
the broad, overpowering liberation of a popular
gift, and we delight in this natural phenomenon
as we do in an uncontrollable cataract. But as
## p. 157 (#177) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 157
soon as we examine this thought at close quarters,
we involuntarily put a poetic mass of people in the
place of the poetising soul of the people: a long
row of popular poets in whom individuality has
no meaning, and in whom the tumultuous move-
ment of a people's soul, the intuitive strength of a
people's eye, and the unabated profusion of a
people's fantasy, were once powerful: a row of
original geniuses, attached to a time, to a poetic
genus, to a subject-matter.
Such a conception justly made people suspicious.
Could it be possible that that same Nature who so
sparingly distributed her rarest and most precious
production—genius—should suddenly take the
notion of lavishing her gifts in one sole direction?
And here the thorny question again made its
appearance: Could we not get along with one
genius only, and explain the present existence of
that unattainable excellence? And now eyes
were keenly on the lookout for whatever that
excellence and singularity might consist of. Im-
possible for it to be in the construction of the
complete works, said one party, for this is far from
faultless; but doubtless to be found in single songs:
in the single pieces above all; not in the whole.
A second party, on the other hand, sheltered them-
selves beneath the authority of Aristotle, who
especially admired Homer's "divine" nature in
the choice of his entire subject, and the manner
in which he planned and carried it out. If, how-
ever, this construction was not clearly seen, this
fault was due to the way the poems were handed
down to posterity and not to the poet himself—
## p. 158 (#178) ############################################
IS8 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
it was the result of retouchings and interpolations,
owing to which the original setting of the work
gradually became obscured. The more the first
school looked for inequalities, contradictions,
perplexities, the more energetically did the other
school brush aside what in their opinion obscured
the original plan, in order, if possible, that nothing
might be left remaining but the actual words of
the original epic itself. The second school of
thought of course held fast by the conception of
an epoch-making genius as the composer of the
great works. The first school, on the other hand,
wavered between the supposition of one genius
plus a number of minor poets, and another
hypothesis which assumed only a number of
superior and even mediocre individual bards, but
also postulated a mysterious discharging, a deep,
national, artistic impulse, which shows itself in
individual minstrels as an almost indifferent
medium. It is to this latter school that we must
attribute the representation of the Homeric poems
as the expression of that mysterious impulse.
All these schools of thought start from the
assumption that the problem of the present form
of these epics can be solved from the standpoint
of an aesthetic judgment—but we must await the
decision as to the authorised line of demarcation
between the man of genius and the poetical soul
of the people. Are there characteristic differences
between the utterances of the man of genius and
the poetical soul of the people t
This whole contrast, however, is unjust and
misleading. There is no more dangerous
## p. 159 (#179) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 159
assumption in modern aesthetics than that of
popular poetry and individual poetry, or, as it is
usually called, artistic poetry. This is the re-
action, or, if you will, the superstition, which
followed upon the most momentous discovery of
historico-philological science, the discovery and
appreciation of the soul of the people. For this
discovery prepared the way for a coming scientific
view of history, which was until then, and in many
respects is even now, a mere collection of materials,
with the prospect that new materials would con-
tinue to be added, and that the huge, overflowing
pile would never be systematically arranged. The
people now understood for the first time that the
long-felt power of greater individualities and wills
was larger than the pitifully small will of an in-
dividual man; * they now saw that everything truly
great in the kingdom of the will could not have
its deepest root in the inefficacious and ephemeral
individual will; and, finally, they now discovered
the powerful instincts of the masses, and diagnosed
those unconscious impulses to be the foundations
and supports of the so-called universal history. But
the newly-lighted flame also cast its shadow: and
this shadow was none other than that superstition
already referred to, which popular poetry set up
in opposition to individual poetry, and thus en-
larged the comprehension of the people's soul to
that of the people's mind. By the misapplication
of a tempting analogical inference, people had
* Of course Nietzsche saw afterwards that this was not so.
—TR.
## p. 160 (#180) ############################################
l6o HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
reached the point of applying in the domain of
the intellect and artistic ideas that principle of
greater individuality which is truly applicable only
in the domain of the will. The masses have never
experienced more flattering treatment than in thus
having the laurel of genius set upon their empty
heads. It was imagined that new shells were
forming round a small kernel, so to speak, and
that those pieces of popular poetry originated like
avalanches, in the drift and flow of tradition. They
were, however, ready to consider that kernel as
being of the smallest possible dimensions, so that
they might occasionally get rid of it altogether with-
out losing anything of the mass of the avalanche.
According to this view, the text itself and the
stories built round it are one and the same thing.
Now, however, such a contrast between popular
poetry and individual poetry does not exist at all;
on the contrary, all poetry, and of course popular
poetry also, requires an intermediary individuality.
This much-abused contrast, therefore, is necessary
only when the term individual poem is understood
to mean a poem which has not grown out of the
soil of popular feeling. but which has been composed
by a non-popular poet in a non-popular atmos-
phere—something which has come to maturity in
the study of a learned man, for example.
With the superstition which presupposes poet-
ising masses is connected another: that popular
poetry is limited to one particular period of a
people's history and afterwards dies out—which
indeed follows as a consequence of the first super-.
stition I have mentioned. According to this
## p. 161 (#181) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. l6l
school, in the place of the gradually decaying
popular poetry we have artistic poetry, the work of
individual minds, not of masses of people. But the
same powers which were once active are still so j
and the form in which they act has remained
exactly the same. The great poet of a literary
period is still a popular poet in no narrower sense
than the popular poet of an illiterate age. The
difference between them is not in the way they
originate, but it is their diffusion and propagation,
in short, tradition. This tradition is exposed to
eternal danger without the help of handwriting,
and runs the risk of including in the poems the
remains of those individualities through whose oral
tradition they were handed down.
If we apply all these principles to the Homeric
poems, it follows that we gain nothing with our
theory of the poetising soul of the people, and
that we are always referred back to the poetical
individual. We are thus confronted with the task
of distinguishing that which can have originated
only in a single poetical mind from that which
is, so to speak, swept up by the tide of oral
tradition, and which is a highly important
constituent part of the Homeric poems.
Since literary history first ceased to be a mere
collection of names, people have attempted to
grasp and formulate the individualities of the
poets. A certain mechanism forms part of the
method: it must be explained—i. e. , it must be
deduced from principles—why this or that in-
dividuality appears in this way and not in that.
People now study biographical details, environ-
L
## p. 162 (#182) ############################################
162 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
merit, acquaintances, contemporary events, and
believe that by mixing all these ingredients
together they will be able to manufacture the
wished-for individuality. But they forget that
the punctum saliens, the indefinable individual
characteristics, can never be obtained from a com-
pound of this nature. The less there is known
about the life and times of the poet, the less
applicable is this mechanism. When, however,
we have merely the works and the name of the
writer, it is almost impossible to detect the in-
dividuality, at all events, for those who put their
faith in the mechanism in question; and particu-
larly when the works are perfect, when they are
pieces of popular poetry. For the best way for
these mechanicians to grasp individual character-
istics is by perceiving deviations from the genius
of the people; the aberrations and hidden allusions:
and the fewer discrepancies to be found in a poem
the fainter will be the traces of the individual poet
who composed it.
All those deviations, everything dull and below
the ordinary standard which scholars think they
perceive in the Homeric poems, were attributed
to tradition, which thus became the scapegoat.
What was left of Homer's own individual work?
Nothing but a series of beautiful and prominent
passages chosen in accordance with subjective
taste. The sum total of aesthetic singularity
which every individual scholar perceived with his
own artistic gifts, he now called Homer.
This is the central point of the Homeric errors.
The name of Homer, from the very beginning, has
## p. 163 (#183) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 163
no connection either with the conception of aesthetic
perfection or yet with the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Homer as the composer of the Iliad and the
Odyssey is not a historical tradition, but an
cesthetic judgment.
The only path which leads back beyond the
time of Pisistratus and helps us to elucidate the
meaning of the name Homer, takes its way on the
one hand through the reports which have reached
us concerning Homer's birthplace: from which we
see that, although his name is always associated
with heroic epic poems, he is on the other hand no
more referred to as the composer of the Iliad and
the Odyssey than as the author of the Thebais or
any other cyclical epic. On the other hand, again,
an old tradition tells of the contest between Homer
and Hesiod, which proves that when these two
names were mentioned people instinctively thought
of two epic tendencies, the heroic and the didactic;
and that the signification of the name " Homer"
was included in the material category and not in
the formal. This imaginary contest with Hesiod
did not even yet show the faintest presentiment
of individuality. From the time of Pisistratus
onwards, however, with the surprisingly rapid
development of the Greek feeling for beauty, the
differences in the aesthetic value of those epics
continued to be felt more and more: the Iliad and
the Odyssey arose from the depths of the flood
and have remained on the surface ever since.
With this process of aesthetic separation, the
conception of Homer gradually became narrower:
the old material meaning of the name " Homer"
## p. 164 (#184) ############################################
164 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
as the father of the heroic epic poem, was changed
into the aesthetic meaning of Homer, the father of
poetry in general, and likewise its original proto-
type. This transformation was contemporary
with the rationalistic criticism which made Homer
the magician out to be a possible poet, which
vindicated the material and formal traditions of
those numerous epics as against the unity of the
poet, and gradually removed that heavy load of
cyclical epics from Homer's shoulders.
So Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, is an aesthetic judgment. It is, however,
by no means affirmed against the poet of these
epics that he was merely the imaginary being of
an aesthetic impossibility, which can be the opinion
of only very few philologists indeed. The majority
contend that a single individual was responsible
for the general design of a poem such as the
Iliad, and further that this individual was Homer.
The first part of this contention may be admitted;
but, in accordance with what I have said, the
latter part must be denied. And I very much
doubt whether the majority of those who adopt
the first part of the contention have taken the
following considerations into account.
The design of an epic such as the Iliad is not
an entire whole, not an organism; but a number
of pieces strung together, a collection of reflections
arranged in accordance with aesthetic rules. It is
certainly the standard of an artist's greatness to
note what he can take in with a single glance and
set out in rhythmical form. The infinite profusion
of images and incidents in the Homeric epic must
## p. 165 (#185) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 165
force us to admit that such a wide range of vision
is next to impossible. Where, however, a poet is
unable to observe artistically with a single glance,
he usually piles conception on conception, and
endeavours to adjust his characters according to a
comprehensive scheme.
He will succeed in this all the better the more
he is familiar with the fundamental principles of
aesthetics: he will even make some believe that he
made himself master of the entire subject by a
single powerful glance.
The Iliad is not a garland, but a bunch of
flowers. As many pictures as possible are crowded
on one canvas; but the man who placed them
there was indifferent as to whether the grouping
of the collected pictures was invariably suitable
and rhythmically beautiful. He well knew that
no one would ever consider the collection as a
whole; but would merely look at the individual
parts. But that stringing together of some pieces
as the manifestations of a grasp of art which was
not yet highly developed, still less thoroughly
comprehended and generally esteemed, cannot
have been the real Homeric deed, the real Homeric
epoch-making event. On the contrary, this design
is a later product, far later than Homer's celebrity.
Those, therefore, who look for the "original and
perfect design" are looking for a mere phantom;
for the dangerous path of oral tradition had reached
its end just as the systematic arrangement appeared
on the scene; the disfigurements which were
caused on the way could not have affected
the design, for this did not form part of the
## p. 166 (#186) ############################################
166 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
material handed down from generation to
generation.
The relative imperfection of the design must
not, however, prevent us from seeing in the
designer a different personality from the real
poet. It is not only probable that everything
which was created in those times with conscious
aesthetic insight, was infinitely inferior to the
songs that sprang up naturally in the poet's mind
and were written down with instinctive power:
we can even take a step further. If we include
the so-called cyclic poems in this comparison,
there remains for the designer of the Iliad and the
Odyssey the indisputable merit of having done
something relatively great in this conscious
technical composing: a merit which we might
have been prepared to recognise from the begin-
ning, and which is in my opinion of the very first
order in the domain of instinctive creation. We
may even be ready to pronounce this synthetisa-
tion of great importance. All those dull passages
and discrepancies—deemed of such importance,
but really only subjective, which we usually look
upon as the petrified remains of the period of
tradition—are not these perhaps merely the almost
necessary evils which must fall to the lot of the
poet of genius who undertakes a composition
virtually without a parallel, and, further, one
which proves to be of incalculable difficulty?
Let it be noted that the insight into the most
diverse operations of the instinctive and the
conscious changes the position of the Homeric
problem; and in my opinion throws light upon it.
## p. 167 (#187) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. \6j
We believe in a great poet as the author of the
Iliad and the Odyssey—but not that Homer was
this poet.
The decision on this point has already been
given. The generation that invented those
numerous Homeric fables, that poetised the myth
of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, and
looked upon all the poems of the epic cycle as
Homeric, did not feel an aesthetic but a material
singularity when it pronounced the name " Homer. "
This period regards Homer as belonging to the
ranks of artists like Orpheus, Eumolpus, Daedalus,
and Olympus, the mythical discoverers of a new
branch of art, to whom, therefore, all the later
fruits which grew from the new branch were
thankfully dedicated.
And that wonderful genius to whom we owe
the Iliad and the Odyssey belongs to this thank-
ful posterity: he, too, sacrificed his name on the
altar of the primeval father of the Homeric epic,
Homeros.
Up to this point, gentlemen, I think I have
been able to put before you the fundamental
philosophical and aesthetic characteristics of the
problem of the personality of Homer, keeping all
minor details rigorously at a distance, on the
supposition that the primary form of this wide-
spread and honeycombed mountain known as the
Homeric question can be most clearly observed
by looking down at it from a far-off height. But
I have also, I imagine, recalled two facts to those
friends of antiquity who take such delight in
accusing us philologists of lack of piety for great
## p. 168 (#188) ############################################
168 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
conceptions and an unproductive zeal for destruc-
tion.
In the first place, those " great" conceptions
—such, for example, as that of the indivisible and
inviolable poetic genius, Homer—were during the
pre-Wolfian period only too great, and hence in-
wardly altogether empty and elusive when we
now try to grasp them. If classical philology
goes back again to the same conceptions, and
once more tries to pour new wine into old bottles,
it is only on the surface that the conceptions are
the same: everything has really become new;
bottle and mind, wine and word. We everywhere
find traces of the fact that philology has lived in
company with poets, thinkers, and artists for the
last hundred years: whence it has now come
about that the heap of ashes formerly pointed to
as classical philology is now turned into fruitful
and even rich soil. *
And there is a second fact which I should like
to recall to the memory of those friends of antiquity
who turn their dissatisfied backs on classical
philology. You honour the immortal masterpieces
of the Hellenic mind in poetry and sculpture, and
think yourselves so much more fortunate than
preceding generations, which had to do without
them; but you must not forget that this whole
fairyland once lay buried under mountains of
prejudice, and that the blood and sweat and
arduous labour of innumerable followers of our
science were all necessary to lift up that world
* Nietzsche perceived later on that this statement was,
unfortunately, not justified. —Tr.
## p. 169 (#189) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 169
from the chasm into which it had sunk. We grant
that philology is not the creator of this world,
not the composer of that immortal music; but
is it not a merit, and a great merit, to be a mere
virtuoso, and let the world for the first time hear
that music which lay so long in obscurity, despised
and undecipherable? Who was Homer previously
to Wolfs brilliant investigations? A good old
man, known at best as a " natural genius," at all
events the child of a barbaric age, replete with
faults against good taste and good morals. Let
us hear how a learned man of the first rank writes
about Homer even so late as 1783: "Where does
the good man live? Why did he remain so long
incognito? Apropos, can't you get me a
silhouette of him? "
We demand thanks—not in our own name, for
we are but atoms—but in the name of philology
itself, which is indeed neither a Muse nor a Grace,
but a messenger of the gods: and just as the
Muses descended upon the dull and tormented
Boeotian peasants, so Philology comes into a
world full of gloomy colours and pictures, full of
the deepest, most incurable woes; and speaks
to men comfortingly of the beautiful and
godlike figure of a distant, rosy, and happy
fairyland.
It is time to close; yet before I do so a
few words of a personal character must be
added, justified, I hope, by the occasion of this
lecture.
It is but right that a philologist should describe
his end and the means to it in the short formula
## p. 170 (#190) ############################################
170 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
of a confession of faith; and let this be done in
the saying of Seneca which I thus reverse—
"Philosophia facta est quae philologia fuit. "
By this I wish to signify that all philological
activities should be enclosed and surrounded by a
philosophical view of things, in which everything
individual and isolated is evaporated as something
detestable, and in which great homogeneous views
alone remain. Now, therefore, that I have enunci-
ated my philological creed, I trust you will give
me cause to hope that I shall no longer be a
stranger among you: give me the assurance that
in working with you towards this end I am worthily
fulfilling the confidence with which the highest
authorities of this community have honoured me.
A
## p. (#191) ################################################
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## p. (#192) ################################################
OTHER NIETZSCHE AN LITERATURE
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## p. (#193) ################################################
OTHER NIETZSCHEAN LITERATURE
WHO IS TO BE MASTER OF
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## p. (#194) ################################################
OTHER NIETZSCHEAN LITERATURE
THE QUINTESSENCE OF
NIETZSCHE.
By J.
and imperfect state of public opinion is damaging
to a science in that its hidden and open enemies can
work with much better prospects of success. And
philology has a great many such enemies. Where
do we not meet with them, these mockers, always
ready to aim a blow at the philological " moles,"
the animals that practise dust-eating exprof 'esso,and 1 /
that grub up and eat for the eleventh time what they
have already eaten ten times before. For opponents
of this sort, however, philology is merely a useless,
harmless, and inoffensive pastime, an object of
laughter and not of hate. But, on the other hand,
there is a boundless and infuriated hatred of philo-
logy wherever an ideal, as such, is feared, where the
modern man falls down to worship himself, and
where Hellenism is looked upon as a superseded
and hence very insignificant point of view. Against
these enemies, we philologists must always count
upon the assistance of artists and men of artistic
minds ; for they alone can judge how the sword of
barbarism sweeps over the head of every one who
loses sight of the unutterable simplicity and noble
dignity of the Hellene; and how no progress in
commerce or technical industries, however brilliant,
no school regulations, no political education of the
masses, however widespread and complete, can pro-
tect us from the curse of ridiculous and barbaric
offences against good taste, or from annihilation by
the Gorgon head of the classicist.
## p. 148 (#168) ############################################
148 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
Whilst philology as a whole is looked on with
jealous eyes by these two classes of opponents, there
are numerous and varied hostilities in other direc-
tions of philology; philologists themselves are
quarrelling with one another; internal dissensions
are caused by useless disputes about precedence and
mutual jealousies, but especially by the differences
—even enmities—comprised in the name of philo-
logy, which are not, however, by any means
naturally harmonised instincts.
Science has this in common with art, that the
most ordinary, everyday thing appears to it as
something entirely new and attractive, as if meta-
morphosed by witchcraft and now seen for the first
time. Life is worth living, says art, the beautiful
temptress; life is worth knowing, says science.
With this contrast the so heartrending and dog-
matic tradition follows in a theory, and conse-
quently in the practice of classical philology derived
from this theory. We may consider antiquity
from a scientific point of view ; we may try to look
at what has happened with the eye of a historian,
or to arrange and compare the linguistic forms of
ancient masterpieces, to bring them at all events
under a morphological law; but we always lose the
wonderful creative force, the real fragrance, of the
atmosphere of antiquity ; we forget that passionate
emotion which instinctively drove our meditation
and enjoyment back to the Greeks. From this
point onwards we must take notice of a clearly
determined and very surprising antagonism which
philology has great cause to regret. From the
circles upon whose help we must place the most
## p. 149 (#169) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 149
implicit reliance—the artistic friends of antiquity,
the warm supporters of Hellenic beauty and noble
simplicity—we hear harsh voices crying out that
it is precisely the philologists themselves who are
the real opponents and destroyers of the ideals of
antiquity. Schiller upbraided the philologists with
having scattered Homer's laurel crown to the winds.
It was none other than Goethe who, in early life
a supporter of Wolf's theories regarding Homer,
recanted in the verses—
With subtle wit you took away
Our former adoration:
The Iliad, you may us say,
Was mere conglomeration.
Think it not crime in any way:
Youth's fervent adoration
Leads us to know the verity,
And feel the poet's unity.
The reason of this want of piety and reverence
must lie deeper; and many are in doubt as to
whether philologists are lacking in artistic capacity
and impressions, so that they are unable to do
justice to the ideal, or whether the spirit of negation
has become a destructive and iconoclastic principle
of theirs. When, however, even the friends of
antiquity, possessed of such doubts and hesitations,
point to our present classical philology as some-
thing questionable, what influence may we not
ascribe to the outbursts of the "realists" and the
claptrap of the heroes of the passing hour? To
answer the latter on this occasion, especially when
we consider the nature of the present assembly,
would be highly injudicious; at any rate, if I do
## p. 150 (#170) ############################################
150 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
not wish to meet with the fate of that sophist who,
when in Sparta, publicly undertook to praise and
defend Herakles, when he was interrupted with the
query: "But who then has found fault with him? "
I cannot help thinking, however, that some of these
scruples are still sounding in the ears of not a few
in this gathering; for they may still be frequently
heard from the lips of noble and artistically gifted
men—as even an upright philologist must feel them,
and feel them most painfully, at moments when his
spirits are downcast. For the single individual
there is no deliverance from the dissensions referred
to; but what we contend and inscribe on our banner
is the fact that classical philology, as a whole, has
nothing whatsoever to do with the quarrels and
bickerings of its individual disciples. The entire
scientific and artistic movement of this peculiar
centaur is bent, though with cyclopic slowness, upon
bridging over the gulf between the ideal antiquity
—which is perhaps only the magnificent blossom-
ing of the Teutonic longing for the south—and
the real antiquity; and thus classical philology
pursues only the final end of its own being, which
is the fusing together of primarily hostile impulses
that have only forcibly been brought together.
Let us talk as we will about the unattainability of
this goal, and even designate the goal itself as an
illogical pretension—the aspiration for it is very
real; and I should like to try to make it clear by an
example that the most significant steps of classical
philology never lead away from the ideal antiquity,
but to it; and that, just when peoptelire speaking
unwarrantably of the overthrowdT sacred shrines,
## p. 151 (#171) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 151
new and more worthy altars are being erected.
Let us then examine the so-called Homeric question
from this standpoint, a question the most important
problem of which Schiller called a scholastic
barbarism.
The important problem referred to is the question
of the personality of Homer.
We now meet everywhere with the firm opinion
that the question of Homer's personality is no
longer timely, and that it is quite a different thing
from the real "Homeric question. " It may be
added that, for a given period—such as our pre-
sent philological period, for example—the centre
of discussion may be removed from the problem
of the poet's personality; for even now a pains-
taking experiment is being made to reconstruct
the Homeric poems without the aid of personality,
treating them as the work of several different
persons. But if the centre of a scientific question
is rightly seen to be where the swelling tide of
new views has risen up, i. e. where individual
scientific investigation comes into contact with the
whole life of science and culture—if any one, in
other words, indicates a historico-cultural valua-
tion as the central point of the question, he must
also, in the province of Homeric criticism, take
his stand upon the question of personality as
being the really fruitful oasis in the desert of the
whole argument. For in Homer the modern
world, I will not say has learnt, but has examined,
a great historical point of view; and, even without
now putting forward my own opinion as to
whether this examination has been or can be
## p. 152 (#172) ############################################
152 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
happily carried out, it was at all events the first
example of the application of that productive
point of view. By it scholars learnt to recognise
condensed beliefs in the apparently firm, immobile
figures of the life of ancient peoples; by it they
for the first time perceived the wonderful capa-
bility of the soul of a people to represent the
conditions of its morals and beliefs in the form of
a personality. When historical criticism has con-
fidently seized upon this method of evaporating
apparently concrete personalities, it is permissible to
point to the first experiment as an important event
in the history of sciences, without considering
whether it was successful in this instance or not
It is a common occurrence for a series of
striking signs and wonderful emotions to precede
an epoch-making discovery. Even the experiment
I have just referred to has its own attractive
history; but it goes back to a surprisingly ancient
era. Friedrich August Wolf has exactly indicated
the spot where Greek antiquity dropped the
question. The zenith of the historico-literary
studies of the Greeks, and hence also of their
point of greatest importance—the Homeric question
—was reached in the age of the Alexandrian
grammarians. Up to this time the Homeric ques-
tion had run through the long chain of a uniform
process of development, of which the standpoint
of those grammarians seemed to be the last link,
the last, indeed, which was attainable by antiquity.
They conceived the Iliad and the Odyssey as the
creations of one single Homer; they declared it to
be psychologically possible for two such different
-
## p. 153 (#173) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 153
works to have sprung from the brain of one
genius, in contradiction to the Chorizontes, who
represented the extreme limit of the scepticism of
a few detached individuals of antiquity rather than
antiquity itself considered as a whole. To explain
the different general impression of the two books
on the assumption that one poet composed them
both, scholars sought assistance by referring to the
seasons of the poet's life, and compared the poet
of the Odyssey to the setting sun. The eyes of
those critics were tirelessly on the lookout for
discrepancies in the language and thoughts of the
two poems; but at this time also a history of the
Homeric poem and its tradition was prepared,
according to which these discrepancies were not
due to Homer, but to those who committed his
words to writing and those who sang them. It
was believed that Homer's poem was passed from
one generation to another viva voce, and faults
were attributed to the improvising and at times
forgetful bards. At a certain given date, about
the time of Pisistratus, the poems which had been
repeated orally were said to have been collected
in manuscript form; but the scribes, it is added,
allowed themselves to take some liberties with
the text by transposing some lines and adding
extraneous matter here and there. This entire
hypothesis is the most important in the domain
of literary studies that antiquity has exhibited;
and the acknowledgment of the dissemination of
the Homeric poems by word of mouth, as opposed
to the habits of a book-learned age, shows in
particular a depth of ancient sagacity worthy of
## p. 154 (#174) ############################################
154 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
our admiration. From those times until the
generation that produced Friedrich August Wolf
we must take a jump over a long historical vacuum;
but in our own age we find the argument left just
as it was at the time when the power of contro-
versy departed from antiquity, and it is a matter
of indifference to us that Wolf accepted as certain
tradition what antiquity itself had set up only as
a hypothesis. It may be remarked as most
characteristic of this hypothesis that, in the strict-
est sense, the personality of Homer is treated
seriously; that a certain standard of inner harmony
is everywhere presupposed in the manifestations
of the personality; and that, with these two ex-
cellent auxiliary hypotheses, whatever is seen to
be below this standard and opposed to this inner
harmony is at once swept aside as un-Homeric.
But even this distinguishing characteristic, in place
of wishing to recognise the supernatural existence
of a tangible personality, ascends likewise through
all the stages that lead to that zenith, with ever-
increasing energy and clearness. Individuality
is ever more strongly felt and accentuated; the
psychological possibility of a single Homer is ever
more forcibly demanded. If we descend back-
wards from this zenith, step by step, we find
a guide to the understanding of the Homeric
problem in the person of Aristotle. Homer was
for him the flawless and untiring artist who knew
his end and the means to attain it; but there is
still a trace of infantile criticism to be found in
Aristotle—i. e. , in the naive concession he made to
the public opinion that considered Homer as the
## p. 155 (#175) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 155
author of the original of all comic epics, the
Margites. If we go still further backwards from
Aristotle, the inability to create a personality is
seen to increase; more and more poems are attri-
buted to Homer; and every period lets us see its
degree of criticism by how much and what it con-
siders as Homeric. In this backward examination,
we instinctively feel that away beyond Herodotus
there lies a period in which an immense flood of
great epics has been identified with the name of
Homer.
Let us imagine ourselves as living in the time
of Pisistratus: the word " Homer" then compre-
hended an abundance of dissimilarities. What
was meant by "Homer" at that time? It is
evident that that generation found itself unable to
grasp a personality and the limits of its manifesta-
tions. Homer had now become of small conse-
quence. And then we meet with the weighty
question: What lies before this period? Has
Homer's personality, because it cannot be grasped,
gradually faded away into an empty name? Or
had all the Homeric poems been gathered together
in a body, the nation naively representing itself
by the figure of Homer? Was the person created
out of a conception, or the conception out of a person?
This is the real " Homeric question," the central
problem of the personality.
The difficulty of answering this question, how-
ever, is increased when we seek a reply in another
direction, from the standpoint of the poems them-
selves which have come down to us. As it is
difficult for us at the present day, and necessitates
## p. 156 (#176) ############################################
156 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
a serious effort on our part, to understand the law
of gravitation clearly—that the earth alters its
form of motion when another heavenly body
changes its position in space, although no material
connection unites one to the other—it likewise
costs us some trouble to obtain a clear impression
of that wonderful problem which, like a coin long
passed from hand to hand, has lost its original
and highly conspicuous stamp. Poetical works,
which cause the hearts of even the greatest geniuses
to fail when they endeavour to vie with them,
and in which unsurpassable images are held up
for the admiration of posterity—and yet the poet
who wrote them with only a hollow, shaky name,
whenever we do lay hold on him; nowhere the
solid kernel of a powerful personality. "For who
would wage war with the gods: who, even with
the one god? " asks Goethe even, who, though a
genius, strove in vain to solve that mysterious
problem of the Homeric inaccessibility.
The conception of popular poetry seemed to
lead like a bridge over this problem—a deeper
and more original power than that of every single
creative individual was said to have become active;
the happiest people, in the happiest period of its
existence, in the highest activity of fantasy and
formative power, was said to have created those
immeasurable poems. In this universality there
is something almost intoxicating in the thought of
a popular poem: we feel, with artistic pleasure,
the broad, overpowering liberation of a popular
gift, and we delight in this natural phenomenon
as we do in an uncontrollable cataract. But as
## p. 157 (#177) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 157
soon as we examine this thought at close quarters,
we involuntarily put a poetic mass of people in the
place of the poetising soul of the people: a long
row of popular poets in whom individuality has
no meaning, and in whom the tumultuous move-
ment of a people's soul, the intuitive strength of a
people's eye, and the unabated profusion of a
people's fantasy, were once powerful: a row of
original geniuses, attached to a time, to a poetic
genus, to a subject-matter.
Such a conception justly made people suspicious.
Could it be possible that that same Nature who so
sparingly distributed her rarest and most precious
production—genius—should suddenly take the
notion of lavishing her gifts in one sole direction?
And here the thorny question again made its
appearance: Could we not get along with one
genius only, and explain the present existence of
that unattainable excellence? And now eyes
were keenly on the lookout for whatever that
excellence and singularity might consist of. Im-
possible for it to be in the construction of the
complete works, said one party, for this is far from
faultless; but doubtless to be found in single songs:
in the single pieces above all; not in the whole.
A second party, on the other hand, sheltered them-
selves beneath the authority of Aristotle, who
especially admired Homer's "divine" nature in
the choice of his entire subject, and the manner
in which he planned and carried it out. If, how-
ever, this construction was not clearly seen, this
fault was due to the way the poems were handed
down to posterity and not to the poet himself—
## p. 158 (#178) ############################################
IS8 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
it was the result of retouchings and interpolations,
owing to which the original setting of the work
gradually became obscured. The more the first
school looked for inequalities, contradictions,
perplexities, the more energetically did the other
school brush aside what in their opinion obscured
the original plan, in order, if possible, that nothing
might be left remaining but the actual words of
the original epic itself. The second school of
thought of course held fast by the conception of
an epoch-making genius as the composer of the
great works. The first school, on the other hand,
wavered between the supposition of one genius
plus a number of minor poets, and another
hypothesis which assumed only a number of
superior and even mediocre individual bards, but
also postulated a mysterious discharging, a deep,
national, artistic impulse, which shows itself in
individual minstrels as an almost indifferent
medium. It is to this latter school that we must
attribute the representation of the Homeric poems
as the expression of that mysterious impulse.
All these schools of thought start from the
assumption that the problem of the present form
of these epics can be solved from the standpoint
of an aesthetic judgment—but we must await the
decision as to the authorised line of demarcation
between the man of genius and the poetical soul
of the people. Are there characteristic differences
between the utterances of the man of genius and
the poetical soul of the people t
This whole contrast, however, is unjust and
misleading. There is no more dangerous
## p. 159 (#179) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 159
assumption in modern aesthetics than that of
popular poetry and individual poetry, or, as it is
usually called, artistic poetry. This is the re-
action, or, if you will, the superstition, which
followed upon the most momentous discovery of
historico-philological science, the discovery and
appreciation of the soul of the people. For this
discovery prepared the way for a coming scientific
view of history, which was until then, and in many
respects is even now, a mere collection of materials,
with the prospect that new materials would con-
tinue to be added, and that the huge, overflowing
pile would never be systematically arranged. The
people now understood for the first time that the
long-felt power of greater individualities and wills
was larger than the pitifully small will of an in-
dividual man; * they now saw that everything truly
great in the kingdom of the will could not have
its deepest root in the inefficacious and ephemeral
individual will; and, finally, they now discovered
the powerful instincts of the masses, and diagnosed
those unconscious impulses to be the foundations
and supports of the so-called universal history. But
the newly-lighted flame also cast its shadow: and
this shadow was none other than that superstition
already referred to, which popular poetry set up
in opposition to individual poetry, and thus en-
larged the comprehension of the people's soul to
that of the people's mind. By the misapplication
of a tempting analogical inference, people had
* Of course Nietzsche saw afterwards that this was not so.
—TR.
## p. 160 (#180) ############################################
l6o HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
reached the point of applying in the domain of
the intellect and artistic ideas that principle of
greater individuality which is truly applicable only
in the domain of the will. The masses have never
experienced more flattering treatment than in thus
having the laurel of genius set upon their empty
heads. It was imagined that new shells were
forming round a small kernel, so to speak, and
that those pieces of popular poetry originated like
avalanches, in the drift and flow of tradition. They
were, however, ready to consider that kernel as
being of the smallest possible dimensions, so that
they might occasionally get rid of it altogether with-
out losing anything of the mass of the avalanche.
According to this view, the text itself and the
stories built round it are one and the same thing.
Now, however, such a contrast between popular
poetry and individual poetry does not exist at all;
on the contrary, all poetry, and of course popular
poetry also, requires an intermediary individuality.
This much-abused contrast, therefore, is necessary
only when the term individual poem is understood
to mean a poem which has not grown out of the
soil of popular feeling. but which has been composed
by a non-popular poet in a non-popular atmos-
phere—something which has come to maturity in
the study of a learned man, for example.
With the superstition which presupposes poet-
ising masses is connected another: that popular
poetry is limited to one particular period of a
people's history and afterwards dies out—which
indeed follows as a consequence of the first super-.
stition I have mentioned. According to this
## p. 161 (#181) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. l6l
school, in the place of the gradually decaying
popular poetry we have artistic poetry, the work of
individual minds, not of masses of people. But the
same powers which were once active are still so j
and the form in which they act has remained
exactly the same. The great poet of a literary
period is still a popular poet in no narrower sense
than the popular poet of an illiterate age. The
difference between them is not in the way they
originate, but it is their diffusion and propagation,
in short, tradition. This tradition is exposed to
eternal danger without the help of handwriting,
and runs the risk of including in the poems the
remains of those individualities through whose oral
tradition they were handed down.
If we apply all these principles to the Homeric
poems, it follows that we gain nothing with our
theory of the poetising soul of the people, and
that we are always referred back to the poetical
individual. We are thus confronted with the task
of distinguishing that which can have originated
only in a single poetical mind from that which
is, so to speak, swept up by the tide of oral
tradition, and which is a highly important
constituent part of the Homeric poems.
Since literary history first ceased to be a mere
collection of names, people have attempted to
grasp and formulate the individualities of the
poets. A certain mechanism forms part of the
method: it must be explained—i. e. , it must be
deduced from principles—why this or that in-
dividuality appears in this way and not in that.
People now study biographical details, environ-
L
## p. 162 (#182) ############################################
162 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
merit, acquaintances, contemporary events, and
believe that by mixing all these ingredients
together they will be able to manufacture the
wished-for individuality. But they forget that
the punctum saliens, the indefinable individual
characteristics, can never be obtained from a com-
pound of this nature. The less there is known
about the life and times of the poet, the less
applicable is this mechanism. When, however,
we have merely the works and the name of the
writer, it is almost impossible to detect the in-
dividuality, at all events, for those who put their
faith in the mechanism in question; and particu-
larly when the works are perfect, when they are
pieces of popular poetry. For the best way for
these mechanicians to grasp individual character-
istics is by perceiving deviations from the genius
of the people; the aberrations and hidden allusions:
and the fewer discrepancies to be found in a poem
the fainter will be the traces of the individual poet
who composed it.
All those deviations, everything dull and below
the ordinary standard which scholars think they
perceive in the Homeric poems, were attributed
to tradition, which thus became the scapegoat.
What was left of Homer's own individual work?
Nothing but a series of beautiful and prominent
passages chosen in accordance with subjective
taste. The sum total of aesthetic singularity
which every individual scholar perceived with his
own artistic gifts, he now called Homer.
This is the central point of the Homeric errors.
The name of Homer, from the very beginning, has
## p. 163 (#183) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 163
no connection either with the conception of aesthetic
perfection or yet with the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Homer as the composer of the Iliad and the
Odyssey is not a historical tradition, but an
cesthetic judgment.
The only path which leads back beyond the
time of Pisistratus and helps us to elucidate the
meaning of the name Homer, takes its way on the
one hand through the reports which have reached
us concerning Homer's birthplace: from which we
see that, although his name is always associated
with heroic epic poems, he is on the other hand no
more referred to as the composer of the Iliad and
the Odyssey than as the author of the Thebais or
any other cyclical epic. On the other hand, again,
an old tradition tells of the contest between Homer
and Hesiod, which proves that when these two
names were mentioned people instinctively thought
of two epic tendencies, the heroic and the didactic;
and that the signification of the name " Homer"
was included in the material category and not in
the formal. This imaginary contest with Hesiod
did not even yet show the faintest presentiment
of individuality. From the time of Pisistratus
onwards, however, with the surprisingly rapid
development of the Greek feeling for beauty, the
differences in the aesthetic value of those epics
continued to be felt more and more: the Iliad and
the Odyssey arose from the depths of the flood
and have remained on the surface ever since.
With this process of aesthetic separation, the
conception of Homer gradually became narrower:
the old material meaning of the name " Homer"
## p. 164 (#184) ############################################
164 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
as the father of the heroic epic poem, was changed
into the aesthetic meaning of Homer, the father of
poetry in general, and likewise its original proto-
type. This transformation was contemporary
with the rationalistic criticism which made Homer
the magician out to be a possible poet, which
vindicated the material and formal traditions of
those numerous epics as against the unity of the
poet, and gradually removed that heavy load of
cyclical epics from Homer's shoulders.
So Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, is an aesthetic judgment. It is, however,
by no means affirmed against the poet of these
epics that he was merely the imaginary being of
an aesthetic impossibility, which can be the opinion
of only very few philologists indeed. The majority
contend that a single individual was responsible
for the general design of a poem such as the
Iliad, and further that this individual was Homer.
The first part of this contention may be admitted;
but, in accordance with what I have said, the
latter part must be denied. And I very much
doubt whether the majority of those who adopt
the first part of the contention have taken the
following considerations into account.
The design of an epic such as the Iliad is not
an entire whole, not an organism; but a number
of pieces strung together, a collection of reflections
arranged in accordance with aesthetic rules. It is
certainly the standard of an artist's greatness to
note what he can take in with a single glance and
set out in rhythmical form. The infinite profusion
of images and incidents in the Homeric epic must
## p. 165 (#185) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 165
force us to admit that such a wide range of vision
is next to impossible. Where, however, a poet is
unable to observe artistically with a single glance,
he usually piles conception on conception, and
endeavours to adjust his characters according to a
comprehensive scheme.
He will succeed in this all the better the more
he is familiar with the fundamental principles of
aesthetics: he will even make some believe that he
made himself master of the entire subject by a
single powerful glance.
The Iliad is not a garland, but a bunch of
flowers. As many pictures as possible are crowded
on one canvas; but the man who placed them
there was indifferent as to whether the grouping
of the collected pictures was invariably suitable
and rhythmically beautiful. He well knew that
no one would ever consider the collection as a
whole; but would merely look at the individual
parts. But that stringing together of some pieces
as the manifestations of a grasp of art which was
not yet highly developed, still less thoroughly
comprehended and generally esteemed, cannot
have been the real Homeric deed, the real Homeric
epoch-making event. On the contrary, this design
is a later product, far later than Homer's celebrity.
Those, therefore, who look for the "original and
perfect design" are looking for a mere phantom;
for the dangerous path of oral tradition had reached
its end just as the systematic arrangement appeared
on the scene; the disfigurements which were
caused on the way could not have affected
the design, for this did not form part of the
## p. 166 (#186) ############################################
166 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
material handed down from generation to
generation.
The relative imperfection of the design must
not, however, prevent us from seeing in the
designer a different personality from the real
poet. It is not only probable that everything
which was created in those times with conscious
aesthetic insight, was infinitely inferior to the
songs that sprang up naturally in the poet's mind
and were written down with instinctive power:
we can even take a step further. If we include
the so-called cyclic poems in this comparison,
there remains for the designer of the Iliad and the
Odyssey the indisputable merit of having done
something relatively great in this conscious
technical composing: a merit which we might
have been prepared to recognise from the begin-
ning, and which is in my opinion of the very first
order in the domain of instinctive creation. We
may even be ready to pronounce this synthetisa-
tion of great importance. All those dull passages
and discrepancies—deemed of such importance,
but really only subjective, which we usually look
upon as the petrified remains of the period of
tradition—are not these perhaps merely the almost
necessary evils which must fall to the lot of the
poet of genius who undertakes a composition
virtually without a parallel, and, further, one
which proves to be of incalculable difficulty?
Let it be noted that the insight into the most
diverse operations of the instinctive and the
conscious changes the position of the Homeric
problem; and in my opinion throws light upon it.
## p. 167 (#187) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. \6j
We believe in a great poet as the author of the
Iliad and the Odyssey—but not that Homer was
this poet.
The decision on this point has already been
given. The generation that invented those
numerous Homeric fables, that poetised the myth
of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, and
looked upon all the poems of the epic cycle as
Homeric, did not feel an aesthetic but a material
singularity when it pronounced the name " Homer. "
This period regards Homer as belonging to the
ranks of artists like Orpheus, Eumolpus, Daedalus,
and Olympus, the mythical discoverers of a new
branch of art, to whom, therefore, all the later
fruits which grew from the new branch were
thankfully dedicated.
And that wonderful genius to whom we owe
the Iliad and the Odyssey belongs to this thank-
ful posterity: he, too, sacrificed his name on the
altar of the primeval father of the Homeric epic,
Homeros.
Up to this point, gentlemen, I think I have
been able to put before you the fundamental
philosophical and aesthetic characteristics of the
problem of the personality of Homer, keeping all
minor details rigorously at a distance, on the
supposition that the primary form of this wide-
spread and honeycombed mountain known as the
Homeric question can be most clearly observed
by looking down at it from a far-off height. But
I have also, I imagine, recalled two facts to those
friends of antiquity who take such delight in
accusing us philologists of lack of piety for great
## p. 168 (#188) ############################################
168 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
conceptions and an unproductive zeal for destruc-
tion.
In the first place, those " great" conceptions
—such, for example, as that of the indivisible and
inviolable poetic genius, Homer—were during the
pre-Wolfian period only too great, and hence in-
wardly altogether empty and elusive when we
now try to grasp them. If classical philology
goes back again to the same conceptions, and
once more tries to pour new wine into old bottles,
it is only on the surface that the conceptions are
the same: everything has really become new;
bottle and mind, wine and word. We everywhere
find traces of the fact that philology has lived in
company with poets, thinkers, and artists for the
last hundred years: whence it has now come
about that the heap of ashes formerly pointed to
as classical philology is now turned into fruitful
and even rich soil. *
And there is a second fact which I should like
to recall to the memory of those friends of antiquity
who turn their dissatisfied backs on classical
philology. You honour the immortal masterpieces
of the Hellenic mind in poetry and sculpture, and
think yourselves so much more fortunate than
preceding generations, which had to do without
them; but you must not forget that this whole
fairyland once lay buried under mountains of
prejudice, and that the blood and sweat and
arduous labour of innumerable followers of our
science were all necessary to lift up that world
* Nietzsche perceived later on that this statement was,
unfortunately, not justified. —Tr.
## p. 169 (#189) ############################################
HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY. 169
from the chasm into which it had sunk. We grant
that philology is not the creator of this world,
not the composer of that immortal music; but
is it not a merit, and a great merit, to be a mere
virtuoso, and let the world for the first time hear
that music which lay so long in obscurity, despised
and undecipherable? Who was Homer previously
to Wolfs brilliant investigations? A good old
man, known at best as a " natural genius," at all
events the child of a barbaric age, replete with
faults against good taste and good morals. Let
us hear how a learned man of the first rank writes
about Homer even so late as 1783: "Where does
the good man live? Why did he remain so long
incognito? Apropos, can't you get me a
silhouette of him? "
We demand thanks—not in our own name, for
we are but atoms—but in the name of philology
itself, which is indeed neither a Muse nor a Grace,
but a messenger of the gods: and just as the
Muses descended upon the dull and tormented
Boeotian peasants, so Philology comes into a
world full of gloomy colours and pictures, full of
the deepest, most incurable woes; and speaks
to men comfortingly of the beautiful and
godlike figure of a distant, rosy, and happy
fairyland.
It is time to close; yet before I do so a
few words of a personal character must be
added, justified, I hope, by the occasion of this
lecture.
It is but right that a philologist should describe
his end and the means to it in the short formula
## p. 170 (#190) ############################################
170 HOMER AND CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.
of a confession of faith; and let this be done in
the saying of Seneca which I thus reverse—
"Philosophia facta est quae philologia fuit. "
By this I wish to signify that all philological
activities should be enclosed and surrounded by a
philosophical view of things, in which everything
individual and isolated is evaporated as something
detestable, and in which great homogeneous views
alone remain. Now, therefore, that I have enunci-
ated my philological creed, I trust you will give
me cause to hope that I shall no longer be a
stranger among you: give me the assurance that
in working with you towards this end I am worthily
fulfilling the confidence with which the highest
authorities of this community have honoured me.
A
## p. (#191) ################################################
THE WORKS OF
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The Case of Wagner; Nietzsche contra Wagner;
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## p. (#192) ################################################
OTHER NIETZSCHE AN LITERATURE
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Scientific thought is put upon a new basis more in conformity
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"A vigorously written bit of work, packed full of shrewd
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'' The volume contains many obiter dicta of great shrewdness,
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## p. (#193) ################################################
OTHER NIETZSCHEAN LITERATURE
WHO IS TO BE MASTER OF
THE WORLD?
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche,
By A. M. LUDOVICI.
With a Preface by Dr. Oscar Levy.
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## p. (#194) ################################################
OTHER NIETZSCHEAN LITERATURE
THE QUINTESSENCE OF
NIETZSCHE.
By J.
