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.