Homer and Classical Philology | Page 8

everything
which was created in those times with conscious æsthetic insight, was infinitely inferior
to the songs that sprang up naturally in the poet's mind and were written down with
instinctive power: we can even take a step further. If we include the so-called cyclic
poems in this comparison, there remains for the designer of the Iliad and the Odyssey the
indisputable merit of having done something relatively great in this conscious technical
composing: a merit which we might have been prepared to recognise from the beginning,
and which is in my opinion of the very first order in the domain of instinctive creation.
We may even be ready to pronounce this synthetisation of great importance. All those
dull passages and discrepancies--deemed of such importance, but really only subjective,
which we usually look upon as the petrified remains of the period of tradition--are not

these perhaps merely the almost necessary evils which must fall to the lot of the poet of
genius who undertakes a composition virtually without a parallel, and, further, one which
proves to be of incalculable difficulty?
Let it be noted that the insight into the most diverse operations of the instinctive and the
conscious changes the position of the Homeric problem; and in my opinion throws light
upon it.
We believe in a great poet as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey--but not that Homer
was this poet.
The decision on this point has already been given. The generation that invented those
numerous Homeric fables, that poetised the myth of the contest between Homer and
Hesiod, and looked upon all the poems of the epic cycle as Homeric, did not feel an
æsthetic but a material singularity when it pronounced the name "Homer." This period
regards Homer as belonging to the ranks of artists like Orpheus, Eumolpus, Dædalus, and
Olympus, the mythical discoverers of a new branch of art, to whom, therefore, all the
later fruits which grew from the new branch were thankfully dedicated.
And that wonderful genius to whom we owe the Iliad and the Odyssey belongs to this
thankful posterity: he, too, sacrificed his name on the altar of the primeval father of the
Homeric epic, Homeros.
Up to this point, gentlemen, I think I have been able to put before you the fundamental
philosophical and æsthetic characteristics of the problem of the personality of Homer,
keeping all minor details rigorously at a distance, on the supposition that the primary
form of this widespread and honeycombed mountain known as the Homeric question can
be most clearly observed by looking down at it from a far-off height. But I have also, I
imagine, recalled two facts to those friends of antiquity who take such delight in accusing
us philologists of lack of piety for great conceptions and an unproductive zeal for
destruction. In the first place, those "great" conceptions--such, for example, as that of the
indivisible and inviolable poetic genius, Homer--were during the pre-Wolfian period only
too great, and hence inwardly altogether empty and elusive when we now try to grasp
them. If classical philology goes back again to the same conceptions, and once more tries
to pour new wine into old bottles, it is only on the surface that the conceptions are the
same: everything has really become new; bottle and mind, wine and word. We
everywhere find traces of the fact that philology has lived in company with poets,
thinkers, and artists for the last hundred years: whence it has now come about that the
heap of ashes formerly pointed to as classical philology is now turned into fruitful and
even rich soil.[2]
[2] Nietzsche perceived later on that this statement was, unfortunately, not justified.--TR.
And there is a second fact which I should like to recall to the memory of those friends of
antiquity who turn their dissatisfied backs on classical philology. You honour the
immortal masterpieces of the Hellenic mind in poetry and sculpture, and think yourselves
so much more fortunate than preceding generations, which had to do without them; but

you must not forget that this whole fairyland once lay buried under mountains of
prejudice, and that the blood and sweat and arduous labour of innumerable followers of
our science were all necessary to lift up that world from the chasm into which it had sunk.
We grant that philology is not the creator of this world, not the composer of that immortal
music; but is it not a merit, and a great merit, to be a mere virtuoso, and let the world for
the first time hear that music which lay so long in obscurity, despised and undecipherable?
Who was Homer previously to Wolf's brilliant investigations? A good old man, known at
best as a "natural genius," at all events the child of a barbaric age, replete with