10).

“… really no more similar than an ape is to Heracles—indeed, even less; about as similar as our Dr. phil. von Wilamowitz is to the type of the ‘Socratic man’ whom our friend [Nietzsche] designates as the ‘noblest opponent’ of an artistic culture, although our Dr. phil. rather amusingly supposes that the designation fits him and the likes of him” (p. 12).

This last passage is important because it also illustrates Nietzsche’s high esteem of the “Socratic man.” Afterphilologie, to be sure, was written by Rohde, not Nietzsche; but the two men were very close friends at that time, and the point of Rohde’s pamphlet was to expose misinterpretations of The Birth of Tragedy.

In 1873 Wilamowitz replied once more with a sequel to his Zukunftsphilologie.5 The tenor of his reply may be gleaned from a remark near the end: “I should waste my time and energy on the inanities and wretchednesses of a couple of rotted brains?” (p. 23). Later, both Wilamowitz and Rohde made great reputations as classical philologists and never reprinted these early essays—presumably because they felt embarrassed by them.

Rohde, incidentally, had published a review of The Birth of Tragedy in the Norddeutsche allgemeine Zeitung, Sunday, May 26, 1872, before Wilamowitz’s pamphlet appeared. And in 1882 he published a very critical and hostile review of Wilamowitz’s Antigonos von Karystos (1881) in the Litterarische Centralblatt. Both of these reviews were reprinted in his Kleine Schriften (2 vols., 1901).

Nietzsche never referred to Wilamowitz in any of his works and went his own way without letting resentment eat into his soul. There are a few references to Wilamowitz in Nietzsche’s letters of 1872 and 1873; but the most revealing passage is found in a letter to Rohde, March 19, 1874:

“To refute Dräseke’s6 contribution to the question of Wagner, of belly-shaking memory, Herr Bruno Meier7 has written a lengthy and weighty treatise in which I am solemnly denounced as an ‘enemy of our culture,’ besides being represented as a wily deceiver among those who are deceived. He sent me his treatise personally, even furnishing his home address; I will send him the two essays of Wilamops. That’s surely Christian beneficence toward one’s enemies. For the delight of this dear Meier over Wilamops will surpass all words.”

To explain Nietzsche’s nickname for Wilamowitz: Mops is the German word for a pug, but the term was actually used to refer to a person with a disgruntled facial expression before it was transferred to the dog; it designates the quintessence of the comic, stupid, coarse, unfriendly, and inelegant. Mopsig means “boring;” sich mopsen, “to be bored.” Mops seems to be related etymologically to the English “mope.”

Nietzsche took Wilamowitz’s attack very lightly; yet it has been claimed that Wilamowitz finished Nietzsche as a philologist, and even that Nietzsche retired in 1879, after only ten years as a professor, because the students stayed away as a result of Wilamowitz’s polemics. In fact, the size of enrollments had nothing to do with Nietzsche’s decision.

It may be of some interest to indicate what he taught and to note how few students he had all along. During his first year he gave the following courses (the number of students is indicated in each case in parentheses): Aeschylus’ Choephori (6), Greek Lyric Poets (7), Latin Grammar (8). The next year: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (11), Metrics (5), Hesiod’s Erga (11). The third year: Introduction to the Study of Philology (9), Introduction to the Study of Plato’s Dialogues (6), Introduction to Latin Epigraphy (9). In the summer of 1872, after the publication of The Birth, Nietzsche lectured on Pre-Platonic Philosophers (10) and Aeschylus Choephori (7); but that winter he had only two students in his Greek and Roman Rhetoric, and neither was a philologist. This drop in the number of students was surely due to Wilamowitz’s first polemic. By the next summer, however, his lectures on the Pre-Platonic Philosophers drew eleven students; in 1876 the same course drew ten, and his lectures On Plato’s Life and Doctrines nineteen. In 1878, finally, just before his retirement, he had more students than ever, though certainly not many: Hesiod’s Works and Days (13), Plato’s Apology of Socrates (6), Greek Lyrical Poets (13), Introduction to the Study of Plato (8). These data may give some idea of Nietzsche’s career as a professor of classical philology, which was not exhausted by The Birth of Tragedy.

About the book opinions still differ, as they do about all of Nietzsche’s works. F. M. Cornford, one of the leading British classicists of the first half of the twentieth century, known to generations of students for his translations of many Platonic dialogues and his remarkable commentaries, said in From Religion to Philosophy (1912) that The Birth was “a work of profound imaginative insight, which left the scholarship of a generation toiling in the rear.”

For all that, Wilamowitz had a point, though he was completely blind to Nietzsche’s merits. Some of the “philology” of the future aped the manifest defects of Nietzsche’s book without partaking of his genius—and, by a remarkable irony of fate, Nietzsche himself was to suffer a great deal, posthumously, from pseudo-scholars who substituted effusive prose for precision and correctness.

On the whole, however, the general estimate of posterity has been much closer to Cornford’s view, and he himself and Jane Harrison have done a good deal to sustain Nietzsche’s central intuitions.

In 1965 Professor Gerald F. Else followed up his monumental analysis of Aristotle’s Poetics (1957) with a short study of The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy8 in which he argues that Aristotle, Nietzsche, Gilbert Murray, and the Cambridge school have all been importantly wrong about the origin of tragedy. He shows his usual mastery of the whole literature, and in his notes at the end of the volume he gives abundant references to recent literature on the subject.