Twilight of the Idols by Nietzsche Friedrich Large Duncan

Author:Nietzsche, Friedrich, Large, Duncan [Nietzsche, Friedrich, Large, Duncan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, UK
Published: 1998-05-31T21:00:00+00:00

WHAT I OWE THE ANCIENTS

1

In conclusion, a word about the world which I sought to approach, and to which I perhaps found a new approach—the ancient world. Here again my taste, which may be the opposite of a tolerant taste, is far from saying yes indiscriminately: it is very loath to say yes, and prefers to say no, likes best of all to say absolutely nothing... This is true for whole cultures; it is true for books—it is also true for locations and landscapes. Basically there is a very small number of ancient books that count for anything in my life; the most famous are not among them. My feeling for style, for the epigram as style, was stirred almost the moment I came into contact with Sallust.* I have not forgotten the amazement of my dear teacher Corssen* when he had to give his worst pupil in Latin the best mark of all—I had finished in one draft. Terse, austere, with the greatest possible substance as its basis, a cool malice towards the ‘fine phrase’, and the ‘fine feeling’, too—I sensed myself here. One will recognize in me, even in my Zarathustra, a very serious ambition for Roman style, for the ‘aere perennius’* in style.—My first contact with Horace* was no different. To this day I have never had the same artistic delight in any poet as I was given from the start by one of Horace’s odes. In certain languages what is achieved here cannot even be desired. This mosaic of words, in which every word radiates its strength as sound, as place, as concept, to the right and to the left and over the whole, this minimum in the range and number of its signs, the maximum which this attains in the energy of the signs—all this is Roman and, if I am to be believed, noble par excellence. All the rest of poetry becomes, in comparison, something too popular—a mere emotional garrulous-ness...

2

To the Greeks I owe no similarly strong impressions at all; and, to say it straight out, they cannot be to us what the Romans are. One does not learn from the Greeks—their manner is too alien, and too fluid, to have an imperative, ‘classical’ effect. Who would ever have learnt how to write from a Greek! Who would ever have learnt without the Romans!... Now let no one cite Plato here as an objection. In relation to Plato I am a thoroughgoing sceptic and have never been able to join in the admiration for Plato the artist which is conventional among scholars. In the last resort I have here the most refined arbiters of taste among the ancients themselves on my side. Plato, it seems to me, mixes up all stylistic forms, which makes him a first stylistic decadent:* he has on his conscience something similar to the Cynics* who invented the satura Menippea.* The Platonic dialogue, that dreadfully self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectics, can only have a stimulating effect if one has never read any good Frenchmen—Fontenelle,* for example.

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