Abstract

As a still quite young professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, Nietzsche taught a rather traditional, almost antiquarian, course on ancient rhetoric. The title of his 1872–73 lecture notes—"Presentation of Ancient Rhetoric" —clearly indicates that this time Nietzsche did not spoil for a fight or set out to uncover the hidden hybridity of origins as he did in his controversial book of the same year in which the origin of Greek tragedy is revealed as miscegenation between the Dionysian and Apollonian principles. Rather his lecture notes exhibit an apparent commitment to following the traditional rhetorical...