Abstract

Two great evaluative questions about The Birth of Tragedy ask how accurate the book is about Greece’s “tragic age,” and how nostalgic it is for that age. Wilamowitz raised the question of accuracy as soon as the book was published, and the issue has never gone away. As for nostalgia, even without accepting extreme versions of the charge, you can still worry that BT portrays Socrates as such a calamity—a monstrosity, and therefore a freakish birth, something that did not have to happen—as to invite the pious wish that he had never come along, and that the tragic age of Greece could have lived a little longer.Both evaluative questions are implicated in a perennial interpretive question: who is Nietzsche’s god ..