NIETZSCHE ON THEOGNIS

The opening Nietzschean work, listed in my reference entry Nietzsches Werke, dates back to his student years at the University of Leipzig. The year is 1867, and this is Nietzsche’s very first publication in the reputable classical journal Rheinisches Museum. Titled On the History of the Collection of the Theognidean Anthology (Zur Geschichte der Theogneidischen Spruchsammlung), it is a philological work, discussing the textual collection and transmission of the poems of Theognis, and I probably wouldn’t have given it so much attention, had Nietzsche’s interest in the ancient poet of Megara ended there. However, this interest transcended philology, entering the realm of philosophy and spilling into Nietzsche’s much later major work Zur Genealogie der Moral (First Essay, Section 5), raising the uncomfortable, but intriguing, matter of eugenics and racial profiling. It is difficult to misunderstand the meaning of the following excerpt from Theognis:

“…We seek out rams and asses and horses that are purebred, Cyrnus, and everyone wishes that they could mount females of good stock; but a nobleman does not mind marrying the base daughter of a base man who is rich...Wealth has mixed up blood. And so, Polypaides, do not be surprised that the townsman’s stock is becoming enfeebled, since what is noble is mixing with what is base.”

According to the Wikipedia, Nietzsche has been quoted concerning Theognis in the following passage, that I have not been able to verify:

Nietzsche valued Theognis as an archetype of the embattled aristocrat, describing him as “...a finely formed nobleman who has fallen on bad times”, and “a distorted Janus-head” at the crossroads of social change.

But what is perfectly verifiable, of course, is the earlier mentioned reference to Theognis in Zur Genealogie der Moral: First Essay, Section 5:

“With regard to our problem, which may on good grounds be called a quiet problem and which elects to appeal to only a limited number of ears: it is of no small interest to ascertain that in those words and roots which denote "good" we catch glimpses of that arch-trait, on the strength of which the aristocrats feel themselves to be beings of a higher order than their fellows. Indeed, they call themselves in perhaps the most frequent instances simply after their superiority in power (e.g. “the powerful,” “the lords,” “the commanders”), or after the most obvious sign of their superiority, as for example “the rich,” “the possessors” (that is the meaning of arya; and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic). But they also call themselves after some characteristic idiosyncrasy; and this is the case which now concerns us. They name themselves, for instance, “the truthful”: this is first done by the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies “one who is” who has reality, who is real, who is true; and then with a subjective twist, the “true,” as the “truthful”: at this stage in the evolution of the idea, it becomes the motto and party cry of the nobility, and quite completes the transition to the meaning “noble,” so as to place outside the pale the lying, vulgar man, as Theognis conceives and portrays him, till finally the word after the decay of the nobility is left to delineate psychological noblesse, and becomes as it were ripe and mellow. In the word kakos, as in deilos (the plebeian in contrast to the agathos) cowardice is emphasized. This affords perhaps an inkling on what lines the etymological origin of the very ambiguous agathos is to be investigated. In the Latin malos (which I place beside melas) the common man can be distinguished as the dark-colored, above all as the black-haired man (“hic niger est---”), as the pre-Aryan occupant of the Italian soil, whose complexion formed the clearest feature of distinction from the dominant blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race; at any rate Gaelic offers us the exact analogue-- fin (for instance in the name Fin-Gal), the distinctive word of the nobility, finally for the good, noble, pure, originally meant the blond-headed, in contrast to the dark black-haired aboriginals.

The Celts, by the way, were throughout a blond race; it is wrong to associate as Virchow still does, those traces of an essentially dark-haired population which are to be seen on the more elaborate ethnographical maps of Germany with any sort of Celtic ancestry or with any admixture of Celtic blood: in this context it is rather the pre-Aryan population of Germany that surges up in these places. (The same is true of virtually all Europe: in point of fact, the suppressed race has finally again obtained the upper hand, in complexion, the shortness of the skull, and perhaps even in the intellectual and social qualities. Who can guarantee that modern democracy, still more modern anarchism, and indeed that inclination for the “commune,” the most primitive form of society, which is now common to all the socialists in Europe, does not in its real essence signify a monstrous counterattack — and that the conqueror and master race, the Aryan race, is not becoming inferior physiologically, too?)

I believe that I can explain the Latin bonus as “the “warrior,” provided I am right in tracing bonus back to an earlier duonus (compare bellum=duellum=duen-lum, which seems to me to contain duonus). Therefore, bonus as the man of strife, of rupture, “Entzweiung” (duo), as the man of war: one sees what constituted in ancient Rome “the goodness” of a man. Must not our actual German word gut mean “the godlike”, the man of “godlike race”? And is it not identical with the popular (originally noble) name) of the Goths?

The grounds for this conjecture do not appertain to this work.”

Having finished this large quotation from the much later work than the first Nietzschean publication, with which we properly started this entry, I hope that the reader understands the rationale connecting Theognis to Nietzsche, and to some later representatives of the German race, which necessarily requires the lengthy quotation above. Does this somehow implicate Nietzsche in the future crimes of his compatriots? Not any more than the old Theognis may be implicated in them. Not any more than anyone anywhere in the world who raises this intriguing and still popular after all these years subject may be implicated.