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a previously fixed designation, but through invitation. (The same is true, I believe, of ''we" in much philosophy, and particularly
in ethics.) It is not a matter of "I" telling "you'' what I and others think, but of my asking you to consider to what extent you and
I think some things and perhaps need to think others.
8. A wall-known and influential example is A.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values [MR], and From
the Many to the One: A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society [MO]. The
basic idea is widespread, and not confined to those who directly discuss the Greeks.
9. Dodds held the former view; the latter is dominant in Adkins, MR and MO. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus [JZ],
very reasonably warns against pressing the distinctions too hard: see in particular p. 25 seq.
10. Nietzsche thought modem culture drastically dilapidated, more in need of redemptive rescue than it will be the aim of
this study to claim. One does not have to accept his view in order to agree with his remark: "So if we understand Greek culture,
we see that it's gone for good. Hence the classicist is the great skeptic in our cultural and educational circumstances" (notes for
"Wit Philologen" [III 76], translated as "We Classicists" by William Arrowsmith in UO, p. 345).
11. So Engels, Anti-Dühring , Marx-Engels Werke 20, p. 168: "Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science;
without slavery, no Roman Empire. Without Hellenism and the Roman Empire as the base, also no modern Europe .... It costs
little to inveigh against slavery and the like in general terms, and to pour high moral wrath on such infamies .... But that tells us
not one word as to how these institutions arose, why they existed, and what role they have played in history" (quoted by M. I.
Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modem Ideology , p. 12 [AS]).
12. Heinrich yon Staden, "Nietzsche and Marx on Greek Art and Literature: Case Studies in Reception," Daedalus , Winter
1976, p. 87.
13. A remark he used twice, in the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science and in the epilogue to Nietzsche contra
Wagner .
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14. Notably in "We Classicists" [III 49], UO p. 337. However, he also said, "Infancy and childhood have their ends in
themselves, they are not stages " (ibid. [V 186], UO p. 385). Von Staden points out that the image of the Greeks as children
was shared by the young Marx.
15. For a comprehensive study of this book, see M. S. Silk and J.P. Stem, Nietzsche on Tragedy .
16. Despite its title, Tracy B. Strong's book Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration does not really offer a Nietzschean
politics. The claim that Nietzsche's politics, such as they were, were not adequate to his own insights, is well argued by Mark
Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought .
17. I do not believe that this point is sufficiently acknowledged by Alasdair MacIntyre, who in his After Virtue and, more
recently, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? indeed rejects what I have been calling the progressivist view, but treats modern
outlooks, in particular liberalism, as merely an incoherent assemblage of fragments from past traditions. He thinks that a
tradition does run from the Greeks, if I understand him, but the major contributor in antiquity was Aristotle, and it culminated in
St. Thomas. For some criticism of his view of modernity, see my review of the later book, London Review of Books , January
1989.
18. The Anti-Christ , 60. He was, however, well aware of ways in which Christianity perpetuated classical antiquity: see "We
Classicists" [III 13], UO p. 329.
19. The Critic as Artist , in Intentions (first published 1891), p. 119.
20. The Body and Society , p. 86. It is one of the merits of this remarkable book that its insight and learning enable one to
understand what did happen, while preserving the sense that it might not have happened.
21. It is raised by Bas van Fraasen, "Peculiar Effects of Love and Desire," in Perspectives on Self-Deception , ed. Brian
McLaughlin and Amélie Rorty.
22. A central text is the Phaedrus , which explores two different contrasts, between rhetoric and philosophy, and between
speech and writing; the treatment of the second contrast helps to make the discussion of the first much subtler and more
problematic than it is, for instance, in the Gorgias . A very helpful examination of the dialogue is G. R. F. Ferrari, Listening to the
Cicadas: A Study of Plato's Phaedrus , in particular chap. 2, and, for the question whether the attitude to writing expressed by
Socrates undermines Plato's own writing, chap. 7.
23. "The concerns of the tragedians are sometimes consigned to the melancholy category of religious philosophy" (Robert
Parker, Mi asma , p. 308). The view that philosophy replaced tragedy is held by Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes ,
translated by T. G. Rosenmeyer, with the addition of an extra chapter, as The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and
Literature ; see especially chap. 5. (References to Snell's book will be to the translation.) It must be distinguished from
Nietzsche's view that philosophy made tragedy impossible. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness , p. 12 seq. [FG],
argues for the study of tragedy in these connections, but not many of her reasons are specific to tragedy; some of them, such as
her emphasis on "complex" and "concrete'' characters (p. 13), seem to apply more to the novel than to tragedy.
24. Aeschylus Agamemnon , ed. J. D. Denniston and Denys Page, pp. xv-xvi. The introduction, from which these remarks
are taken, is by Page (cf. p. vi). Lloyd-Jones, JZ p. 107, offers a good correction on the subject of Aeschylus's intelligence,
though he does not take up the relations of tragedy to philosophy.
25. For a useful account, see Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy : in particular, for the civic aspect, chap. 3.
26. See, among others, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et tragédie en Grace ancienne , vol. 1 [MT],
translated by Janet Lloyd as Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece , and vol. 2; Nicole Loraux, Façons tragiques de tuer une
femme [FT], translated by Anthony Forster as Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman ; Charles Se-gal, Tragedy and Civilization .
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