Guest Editor's Introduction: Nietzsche's Ancient History

Nietzsche's reflection "What I Owe to the Ancients" in Twilight of the Idols has served as the touchstone for innumerable discussions in the scholarship on his work and thought. Not surprisingly, given the devotion to and kinship with the Greek philosophers that Nietzsche expressed throughout his productive career, these discussions have tended to focus on the impact of those philosophers (especially Socrates and Plato) on Nietzsche's intellectual development and especially on his mature views. That focus has not been misplaced, of course; one can hardly overestimate Nietzsche's intellectual debt to philosophers in Greek antiquity. But the authors in this issue have been encouraged especially to explore untreated and undertreated topics and to examine from fresh angles topics one might have thought spent.

In that spirit, Richard Bett takes up the question to what extent the Romans play a role in Nietzsche's thought and writing. As the scattered and scant textual evidence would suggest, there is little to be said for a systematic influence here. But in Nietzsche's praise of "Rome and its noble and frivolous tolerance" (BGE 46), Bett reveals, on the one hand, an upward trend in Nietzsche's attention to and esteem for the whole culture as one that in many ways leaves behind the kind of moralizing contemporary Europe cannot get beyond, such that its frivolity becomes it, as a virtue. This upward trend parallels the increasing urgency of Nietzsche's heated invective against Christianity and asceticism that culminates in his last works. And, on the other hand, in a select few great-souled Romans whom Nietzsche regards with unusually unstinting admiration—individuals like Caesar, Horace, and Petronius—Bett discovers a similar virtue, arguing that "Nietzsche is disputing the idea that belief is a distinguishing feature of great human beings; on the contrary, he says, typical characteristics of the great are 'thoughtlessness, skepticism, the permission to be able to shed a belief.'"

Roman frivolity is countered in the next two essays by the sober-minded, hardheaded, and courageous character of a Greek writer whom Nietzsche held in especially high regard. Nietzsche's esteem for the ancient historian Thucydides is no revelation, of course, but Scott Jenkins, Joel Mann, and Getty Lustila set out here to look beyond the obvious affinities and to describe more precisely his contribution to Nietzsche's own efforts to combat Platonic and Christian "idealism" and ascetic morality. Of course, Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War gives us far more than a retelling of events; Thucydides is also a keen historiographer, a compelling writer, and an astute observer of human psychology. Jenkins argues that the accounts Thucydides offers of the behavior of historical agents and the psychological theories we find in the History made his work a model for Nietzsche and that they shed light on "the virtues of factuality and intellectual courage" that Nietzsche attributes to Thucydides.

As Jenkins does, Mann and Lustila find that Thucydides's primary appeal for Nietzsche is "rooted in a rejection of moral absolutism," but they trace that rejection further back, to a surprising source in the Sophist Protagoras. Shoring up Mann's previous work on Nietzsche and the Greek Sophists (an interpretation with which Jenkins takes some issue),¹ and illuminating further what the Sophists mean for Nietzsche's philosophy, Mann and Lustila develop a persuasive and careful exegesis of Daybreak in order to argue that if Thucydides is a model for Nietzsche, so is Protagoras, since the stamp of his thought is to be found on Thucydides as well.

Jenkins, in his essay, finds the virtue of "factuality" that Nietzsche attributes to Thucydides a "philological" virtue, as indeed it is. This qualification would almost by itself serve to establish its singularity and importance for Nietzsche, who began as a professor of classical philology and remained one—in his own estimation—to the bitter end of his career. Sadly, it remains a commonplace in Nietzsche studies that he was driven from the ranks and "broke" with respectable academic philology following the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. Others have noted, however, and I have argued elsewhere, that...