Several years ago, Karl Christ and Suzanne Marchand argued, on different occasions, that the German reception of antiquity is marked by three general factors which shaped the philological enterprise throughout the 1800s: a tendency toward aesthetic idealization, the demand for rigorous scholarship, and an ideological appropriation of antiquity. Although it might be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to disentangle these three factors, they each represent a complex, semiconscious, cognitive field that develops as a reaction to very specific historical and intellectual circumstances. Irrespective of whether we approach antiquity from an aesthetic point of view, from a scholarly perspective, or in terms of the political imaginaire, what is at stake is the attempt to (re-)formulate the relationship between antiquity and modernity, or, more generally, between past and present. Although this problem is as old as antiquity itself, it leads to far-reaching questions within the discourse of classical scholarship in nineteenth-century Germany, which perceives itself as both “scientific” and “historicist” at the same time.

As a professor of Greek language and literature who taught at the University of Basel and the local Pädagogium, Nietzsche was certainly unable to avoid this problem, and his own attempts to come to terms with the idea of “antiquity” as a cultural point of reference led him substantially to rethink the notion of a “classical tradition” against the background of its fragile conceptual foundations.