Two-mouthed play: the duality of the Philoctetes

προσαναγκάζειν τὸν Σωκράτη ὁμολογεῖν αὐτοὺς τοῦ αὐτοῦ ἀνδρὸς εἶναι κωμῳδίαν καὶ τραγῳδίαν ἐπίστασθαι ποιεῖν, καὶ τὸν τέχνῃ τραγῳδοποιὸν ὄντα καὶ κωμῳδοποιὸν εἶναι.

Socrates was compelling them to admit that the same man could have the knowledge required for writing comedy and tragedy—that the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well. Plato, Symposium.

To some it seems impossible that I could still have something left to say about Sophocles' Philoctetes. A friend has delicately suggested that I should make an end. Let's end with the man who wrote it - a man whose work embodies a fusion of thought and feeling. As the late Eduardo Galeano wrote,

My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, its plenitude.

Sophocles was about 88 when his Philoctetes was performed, winning first prize. It's an old man's play, a storehouse of an extraordinary life in 5th century Athens.

It's worth noticing that his abandoned character was neither a woman, a poor man, or someone of less than 100% Greek ethnicity. This is not a tale of racism, sexism or classism. Rather, it's a story about what the best are capable of doing to their peers under the intense pressures of life, war, and duty.

Never in dispute is the fact that Philoctetes was most cruelly used by the Atreides and by Odysseus at their bidding. His resulting suffering and alienation are explored in potent speeches. Nothing hides the sordidness of the case, nothing embellishes. The harsh natural world coupled with the mute neglect and indifference of his peers is voiced with the plenitude Galeano speaks of:

Birds my victims, tribes of bright-eyed wild creatures,
tenants of these hills, you need not flee from me or my house.
No more the strength of my hands, of my bow, is mine.
Come! It is a good time to glut yourselves freely on my discolored flesh . . .
                                                                        (Grene 1148-52)

ὦ πταναὶ θῆραι χαροπῶν τ᾽ ἔθνη θηρῶν, οὓς ὅδ᾽ ἔχει χῶρος οὐρεσιβώτας, μηκέτ᾽ ἀπ᾽ αὐλίων φυγᾷ 1150πηδᾶτ᾽: οὐ γὰρ ἔχω χεροῖν τὰν πρόσθεν βελέων ἀλκάν, ὦ δύστανος ἐγὼ τανῦν, ἀλλ᾽ ἀνέδην, ὁ δὲ χῶρος ἄρ᾽ οὐκέτι φοβητὸς οὐκέθ᾽ ὑμῖν, 1155ἕρπετε: νῦν καλὸν ἀντίφονον κορέσαι στόμα πρὸς χάριν ἐμᾶς σαρκὸς αἰόλας: 

But the thrust and climax of the play is not here. His suffering is rendered with naturalistic power, but this is one moment within a larger mythical encounter. (We noted the co-presence of both naturalism and mythic language early on in our reading of this play.)

Sophocles expands the tragic frame to bring in Odysseus, the man of occasion, the crafty illusionist, the resourceful man of words. Odysseus is comedic through and through; his skills are practical, group-oriented, businesslike. He is an agent sent to do a job -- he is there to ensure through winning words a happy end for all.

We miss part of the strange texture of the play if we do not relish the potential comedy of Odysseus. His self-referential denigration as the false Merchant would be delightful in the hands of the right actor. Twice in the play Odysseus runs offstage to avoid being shot by Philoctetes or pummeled by Neoptolemus. Depending on how this is performed, it can be a dramatic show of cowardly smarts, or a broader "feets-don't-fail-me-now" piece of farce typical of low characters in ancient Comedy.

Odysseus announces at the very start that he has a ruse; he seems confident of its ability to persuade Philoctetes to return to the war. At every point in the play, we are uncertain whether fateful events are unfolding of themselves, or we are audiences to a script authored and directed by Odysseus. The tension is structural: Tragedy's dignity, pathos, and claim to significance are never more at risk than when comedy threatens to puncture the spell.

. . . the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well.

Sophocles appears to have fulfilled the high goal of Socrates: he has shown he knows how to produce both genres -- a double-mouthed play. Poised perfectly, the text turns endlessly around this duality, not unlike one of those ambiguous illusions that seem one moment to be one thing, and suddenly quite another thing altogether.

The heightened relation of the comedic and tragic in the Philoctetes differs from earlier works of this playwright. The text holds both masks in tension.

It might be fanciful to see a resemblance here to the tension Socrates speaks of in the Symposium with regard to Eros, but it's hard to resist. At the feast he tells Diotima's tale of the inevitable attraction of Poros and Penia, Resource (or, Contrivance) and Poverty, whose union produces Eros the archer. Poros and Penia are like figures in the tapestry of the Philoctetes: a man in isolation, lacking all, unloved, encounters an artful speaker seeking his seduction.

As Socrates puts it:

Eros is ever poor, and far from tender or beautiful as most suppose him: [203d] rather is he hard and parched, shoeless and homeless; on the bare ground always he lies with no bedding, and takes his rest on doorsteps and waysides in the open air. . .

Eros is . . .  always weaving some stratagem; desirous and competent of wisdom, throughout life ensuing the truth; a master of jugglery, witchcraft, [203e] and artful speech.

The rhetorical duel of the Philoctetes -- strangely akin to that which Socrates finds within Eros itself -- sets in motion the endgame of the Trojan war and mirrors its beginning. Odysseus woos Philoctetes and takes him off in his ship, much as Paris had seduced Helen. Fortunes are turning. Philoctetes' heel will be made whole, enabling him to wound Paris mortally in the heel. The saddest man on Earth has the Heraclean bow, and he's on his way to Troy.

χαῖρ᾽, ὦ Λήμνου πέδον ἀμφίαλον, 

καί μ᾽ εὐπλοίᾳ πέμψον ἀμέμπτως, 

ἔνθ᾽ ἡ μεγάλη Μοῖρα κομίζει 

γνώμη τε φίλων χὠ πανδαμάτωρ 

δαίμων, ὃς ταῦτ᾽ ἐπέκρανεν.

Farewell, foothold of Lemnos embraced by two seas, [1465] and send me sailing fair to my heart's content there where mighty Fate and the intent of my friends carries me, and the all-taming god who has brought these things to pass.

A review of Mary Beard's new book

Jutta sends along this review of Mary Beard's new book, Confronting the Classics. It sounds like a fun read - the sort of thing that would provoke undead minds to find out more about those whose cultural value has, for the past 70 years or so been marked more in the breach than the observance.

A Minoan fresco from Knossos, Greece, known as the 'Ladies in Blue,' which dates from 1500 B.C. but was extensively restored in the early 1900s. The Bridgeman Art Gallery

If her intent - and Beard is a highly regarded classicist at Cambridge -  is to stimulate interest, hoping that a virus of curiosity might prod schools and media mavens to give the Classics a tad more centrality, or at least visibility, then of course more power to her. She does seem to be aiming beyond the heads of those already enchanted by, or receiving a salary for expertise related to, the "ancient" Greeks and Romans -- no mean feat, and a generous thing for a scholar to do.

What might not be quite so strongly emphasized in Beard's book -- I can't tell from the review, but will be curious to discover -- is an argument we don't hear so much any more: That the Classics are always current, always central to our languages, our words, syntax, rhetorical susceptibilities, logical powers, scientific interests. The classics are the wellspring of our underlying vernacular: we can not say "logic" without invoking, as from Olympus, the richly shared semantic burden of the λόγος of Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. The fact that some folks might have neither read nor even heard of these Greek authors carries no weight -- when one says "logic," one summons a symposium living on in the λόγος -- a lively 2500-year conversation going on within the philology of that word to this day.

The classics won't be irrelevant or otherwise superfluous so long as we insist on attempting to apply reason to our world. It would be like trying to walk without feet - or better, without the gravity that keeps us grounded as well as able to stand, move, and look around us. As much as we might consider Socrates rather out of date, at some moment, in the αγορά of daily interaction, the smile of his awe at our all-knowing modernity could cease to flatter. In that moment, we might learn to see ourselves with a bit more classical candor, and share a bit of his good humor.

Beware the poets -- and Attic tragedy

In a possibly apocryphal dialogue called Minos, Plato has Socrates explain how Minos came to have the terrible reputation he garnered at Athens. He blames the Athenian authors of tragedy:

Socrates
Do you not know which of the Greeks use the most ancient laws?
Companion
Do you mean the Spartans, and Lycurgus the lawgiver?
Socrates
But whence is it that [318d] the best of those ordinances come? Do you know?

The Nurse's saucy reply: Hippolytus scene II continued

The regal speech of Phaedra in scene II of Hippolytus captures the queen in her moment of resolve. Earlier, with the Nurse, she was raving of wild hunts and kills. Once the secret burden is uttered, Phaedra collects herself, ponders her options, and delivers her speech with poise to the women of Troezen.

The Nurse then returns and the entire tone of the scene changes. If we had any doubts that the Nurse is a "low" character (apart from her servant status, "crone" qualities, lack of a proper name, etc.), her erratic behavior is another clue. Earlier, upon learning Phaedra's secret, the Nurse declared her intention to jump off a cliff. Moments before that she had been confidently speaking of the mixing bowl of Sophrosyne, diluted enough to handle any crisis, including love.

She now returns, speaking in a jumpy, colloquial style, with yet another perspective. She's had time to reflect on her earlier intention to end it all, she says, and now has a better idea:

You are in love: why is that so strange? It is a condition you share with many. [440] Will you, because of love, destroy your own life? Those who are in love today or shall be tomorrow get little profit, then, if they must die for it.

Where Phaedra had spoken of "a life's shipwreck," the Nurse says, in Grene's translation,

                              The tide of love,
at its full surge, is not withstandable.

Is the Nurse's language really reaching so high? Her blunt literalness makes complete sense without having to resort to figuration:

Κύπρις γὰρ οὐ φορητὸν ἢν πολλὴ ῥυῇ,ἣ τὸν μὲν εἴκονθ᾽

Cypris, if she streams upon us in great force, cannot be endured. (Kovacs)

When the Nurse then speaks of sex and procreation, she cites "old writings" and those who bother with the Muses. Her examples of wisely dealing with overpowering eros -- Semele and Cephalus -- seem like the learned citations in the mouths of Shakespeare's rude mechanicals while undermining her point. Euripides' audience, like the bard's, would relish the ironies.

The contrasting styles of the two women say much about how they think, where they "are coming from." The queen has offered a philosophic deliberation; she began with elaborate address and proceeded from generalities to the particulars of her situation, before reaching a firm resolve on the side of honorable motherhood and a free, strong Athens.

The Nurse is of the commons, and her arguments appeal to pragmatic problem solving. She laces her words with sarcasm:

ἐρᾷς: τί τοῦτο θαῦμα; σὺν πολλοῖς βροτῶν You are in love - is that a wonder? It is a condition you share with many.

Or, more colloquially: "What's the big deal? Join the crowd."

So there is the interplay, here, of a royal tragic figure with a commoner. Their lexical "attire" reflects their station and their orientation -- their values, assumptions about the world, and readiness to "go with the flow." But other oppositions are bundled in -- the one and the many, the philosophic claims of knowledge of the Good:

Phaedra: Only one thing, they say, competes in value with life, the possession of a heart [γνώμην - judgment, purpose, resolve] blameless and good. 426-7

μόνον δὲ τοῦτό φασ᾽ ἁμιλλᾶσθαι βίῳ,

γνώμην δικαίαν κἀγαθήν ὅτῳ παρῇ.

versus the seeming logic -- the slippery rhetorical enthymemes of the sophist, whose strictly pragmatic techniques promise to serve anyone to attain any end. ("This is one of the wise principles mortals follow --" the Nurse says -- "dishonorable deeds should keep to the dark.")

The dialogue is operating from much the same dichotomy found in Plato's dialogues between his philosopher and any number of sophists. On the one hand, a quest for real knowledge mirroring the Good; on the other, any argument, well deployed, that persuades the crowd that the speaker is right.

Phaedra's reply with its political forewarning could almost be taken from the critique of poets in the Republic:

Phaedra
This is the thing that destroys the well-governed cities and houses of mortal men: words that are too skilfully spoken! Words to delight the ear—that is not at all what you must speak, but rather such advice as brings a good name [εὐκλεὴς]!

τοῦτ᾽ ἔσθ᾽ ὃ θνητῶν εὖ πόλεις οἰκουμένας

δόμους τ᾽ ἀπόλλυσ᾽, οἱ καλοὶ λίαν λόγοι.

οὐ γάρ τι τοῖσιν ὠσὶ τερπνὰ χρὴ λέγειν,

ἀλλ᾽ ἐξ ὅτου τις εὐκλεὴς γενήσεται.

The Nurse's saucy comeback smacks of the Aristophanic world of ribald comedy:

Nurse
[490] Why this high and haughty tone? Noble-sounding words are not what you need but the man!

τί σεμνομυθεῖς; οὐ λόγων εὐσχημόνων
δεῖ σ᾽, ἀλλὰ τἀνδρός.

With each accusing the other's manner of speech, the argument has moved from substance (logos) to metalanguage, to critiques of style (lexis). The oppositions at work -- knowledge vs technique, nature vs art, elegant words vs. carnal realities -- are now fleshed out. (It is interesting that Phaedra offers a dichotomy between pretty words and εὐκλεὴς -- good name (or fame) -- some would find a distinction without a difference.) The chorus will mutter about how each has something worth saying.

Underlying all these oppositions is a contested question: What, when all is said and done, do we know of ourselves?

The Nurse says to the Queen:

οὐ γὰρ ἄλλο πλὴν ὕβρις 475
τάδ᾽ ἐστί, κρείσσω δαιμόνων εἶναι θέλειν,

It is hubris, nothing else, to try to best the gods.

Nothing in our binary schemes quite helps here. We are left in mid-air, juggling the comicality of the Nurse's character against the common sense of her insight. At root is the essentially contested question of human nature. Are we to struggle with the Gods or are we their slaves? Our lives and human world are forged in how we answer.

An unusual wall painting in Pompeii.

As we've often alluded to the complex relationship of the worldview of the Greeks to that of the Hebrews -- here's a painting found at Pompei that suggests at least an awareness of the Old Testament wisdom books among 1st Century AD Romans:

According to Theodore Feder, the painting depicts the scene of Solomon in judgment, and the two women each claiming to be the mother of an infant, and how he decided that case. Feder says it's quite likely that the two figures on the far left, observing the scene, were meant to represent Socrates and Aristotle, thus bringing Hellenic philosophy into the chambers of Israel's wisest king.

Interestingly, Socrates's posture here is not unlike that of a satyr, which is interesting in light of a tradition stemming from Plato's Symposium. In that dialogue, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus, an ugly old satyr to all appearances, but one who contains invaluable riches within. Feder's article is here. More on Silenus on the Ovid blog here.

(Thanks to Arline for the pointer to Feder's article.)

Inferno 4

Translated into English terza rima by Peter D’Epiro
[Note: A revised version of this translation was posted on 3.23.15]

A deafening peal of thunder broke the deep
Slumber inside my head and made me start
Like someone forcibly aroused from sleep.
Standing, I let my rested vision dart
Around that place, then fixed my gaze to know
What clue to where I was it could impart.
I stood at the edge of a cliff—down below
There gaped the abysmal vale of suffering, where
The blare of countless shrieks gives voice to woe.
It was dark, and deep, and full of misty air,
And though I peered to plumb its vast extent,
I failed to see a single thing down there.
“To that blind world now let us make descent,”
The poet, deathly pale, began to say;
“See that you follow me.” And I, intent
On learning what his pallor might convey,
Said, “How shall I come if you yourself appear
Frightened, who comfort me in my dismay?”

Eros in Plato

Delancey Place offers "eclectic excerpts" from a large variety of books and blogs. You can subscribe and get them every day. Here's the excerpt from the Symposium for Valentine's Day:


In today's excerpt - symposia, the private banquets of the elite in ancient Athens. One such famous gathering was hosted by Agathon and attended by Socrates. The subject of the evening's discussion was the nature of Eros, the great god of desire. It is worth noting how esteemed homosexuality was at this time:

"Agathon, in a grand rhe­torical flourish befitting a poet, concludes [the early portion of the discussion by saying] that though all the gods are happy, Eros is 'the most happy, since he is the most beautiful and the best.'
 
"To this much, all the participants save the still-silent Socrates agree. But beyond Eros's power and proximity to happiness, there is little else on which the guests can establish common ground. One speaker, Pausanias, refuses to see Eros as a single entity, claiming that he must be divided in two as Common Eros and Heavenly Eros - the one, a seedy creature drawn by sexual appetite and so depraved that he will even sleep with women; the other, a more transcendent being attracted by mind as well as beauty, who finds his consummate expression in the higher love between boys and older men. Eryximachus, on the other hand, views Eros as a pantheistic force found not only in the hearts of gods and humans but 'also in nature - in the physical life of all animals, in plants that grow in the ground, and in virtually all living organisms.' 

"Finally, Aristophanes maintains in a celebrated fable that human beings were originally joined two at a time to form complete wholes. Overly powerful, these four-legged creatures provoked the suspicion of the gods, who had them sundered to reduce their strength; now each half walks the earth in search of its other. The fable explains our sexual orientation, for men originally joined to men will seek their complement in the same sex, while those origi­nally joined to women will seek their other half accordingly. It also explains our sense of longing and loss, as we wander the earth in search of the one who will make us whole. '[W]here happiness for the human races lies,' Aristophanes concludes, is 'in the successful pursuit of love.' Eros is the great benefactor who will '[return] us to our original condi­tion, healing us, and making us blessed and perfectly happy.'

"A pantheistic force animating the world; a schizophrenic deity both plebeian and patrician; a guide who leads us only to ourselves: Eros, clearly, is no simple god. He is, Socrates contends, no god at all. Draw­ing together the strands of these various reflections, Socrates main­tains that Eros is, rather, a 'great spirit' who is 'midway between what is divine and what is human,' his ambiguous nature owing to the strange circumstances of his conception. Sired at the birthday party of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, Eros is the child of Pov­erty, who came to the festivities uninvited as a beggar, and the god Plenty, a welcome guest who passed out there drunk. How Plenty is able to perform in such a state, we are not told (presumably, a feat of the gods), but perform he does, producing a son who is neither 'mor­tal nor immortal.' Now fully grown, Eros takes after his mother. Con­stantly in need, he is 'hard, unkempt, barefoot, homeless.' But, like his father, he is 'brave, enterprising, and determined.' Having inher­ited 'an eye for beauty and the good,' Eros continually searches for these two qualities through love, as befits one conceived in the pres­ence of Aphrodite. 

"Straddling the human and the divine, Eros is an emissary, con­ducting 'all association and communication, waking or sleeping,' between the gods and men. His twofold nature explains his defin­ing characteristic - desire itself. For what is desire but the human acknowledgment that one is in need, that one is lacking? As Socrates explains, 'the man who desires something desires what is not avail­able to him, and what he doesn't already have in his possession.' "

Author: Darrin M. McMahon  
Title: Happiness: A History 
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly PressDate: Copyright 2006 by Darrin M. McMahon
Pages: 32-34

Happiness: A History

by Darrin M. McMahon by Atlantic Monthly Press

Hardcover

If you wish to read further: Buy Now

 

Tales told by Socrates and Raphael

As has been mentioned before, Verity's notes to Paradise Lost, some of which are available online, are quite sensible and useful. His notes to Books 5 and 6 can be accessed here.

Of the Father's 16-line decree that begins on line 600 announcing the Son, his rule, his power of mediating the Father's glory, word and will, the editor wisely begs off, saying, "upon the particular theological bearing of this passage it would, I think, be out of place to comment," confining his note to scriptural sources, of which there are several.

Rather than look at the theology (we did, somewhat, in our last session, finding it more subtle, cryptic and complex than its austere brevity lets on), I want to suggest that the shape of Raphael's story might offer some interesting parallels and contrasts with Plato's cave allegory, which Socrates tells in Republic 7. The reasons for the comparison should become clear.

In the Republic, Socrates describes the human condition as essentially benighted. We are bound, like prisoners, fixed in the darkness, compelled to look at shadows of stage props. The props are behind us, between our backs and the fire that projects their images on the cave wall.

The story tells how one of these turns his neck and sees the two-dimensional props, and immediately understands that he's been seeing something of less substance than these. He's then dragged out of the cave into the bright light of day, where he is at first blinded, then gradually becomes accustomed to the sun's illuminating actual things. Socrates assures us that if this fellow were to return to tell his fellow cave dwellers what he saw, they would take him for a madman. But the shape of the story is clear: it's a journey through space, a paradigm of the eye and of light. It moves from darkness and servitude to light and freedom, from illusion to truth, from a kind of dreamworld to a stable, clear and serene upper world where one can contemplate things as they really are. So far, Plato's tale can be said to correspond to the pervasive solar imagery of dawn in Book 5 -- a process of gradual illumination.

If we turn to the story Raphael tells Adam and Eve, we find an parallel ascent, from Nature, the garden, the flower that turns to the sun, upward along a dynamic scale of being which follows the sublimation being described by the Angel as all things are consumed, transformed and refined. At a certain point, prompted by Adam's questions, Raphael has to pause and make clear that he is about to speak of warring spirits and high matter beyond the reach of human experience:

how shall I relate
To human sense th' invisible exploits [ 565 ]
Of warring Spirits; how without remorse
The ruin of so many glorious once
And perfet while they stood; how last unfould
The secrets of another World, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal? yet for thy good [ 570 ]
This is dispenc't,

He is, then, going to speak in allegory, in figure -- we must be wary of taking what is said too literally, it will require interpreting:

and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik'ning spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best, though what if Earth
Be but the shaddow of Heav'n, and things therein [ 575 ]
Each to other like, more then on earth is thought?

One might be tempted here to find a suggestion of Platonism -- the spiritual world is to the physical world as Plato's Forms are to the shadowy figures on the walls of the cave.

But the story Raphael goes on to tell is anything but a journey that ends in gradual, eye-opening enlightenment. Instead we are carried back in time to a prime moment before our world was made. And we hear, rather than see, an act of power. God decrees the rule of his Son, and almost instantaneously Satan conceives malice, revolts, and launches the cataclysm of Book 6. Instead of a tranquil contemplative conclusion, Raphael's tale rises to a moment of perfect order; at God's Word, heavenly order shatters.

Raphael's story is but a beginning -- an enigmatic opening of a story still unfolding. He will go on to speak of Satan's rout and fall, which brings us back to the opening of Book 1. But is this a purely cyclical structure? With the creation in Book 7, another chapter begins; it will encompass another fall, then all of human history, then look beyond history.

The shape of Milton's story strongly diverges from Plato's. Where the cave dweller begins in dark servitude and ascends to brilliant plenitude, the tale of the angel and the poet begins in sweetness and light, and falls into disorder and harsh history. In Plato, knowledge, gained by toil and struggle, is the goal and liberating end of education; for Adam and Eve, knowledge will neither be the goal, nor the means of leaving or repairing the fallen world. Still, the Greek world's highest literary form was tragedy, where the culture of Milton and Dante finds its fullest expression in the comic.

Birth and Rebirth in Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragödie

There's no simple way to talk about The Birth of Tragedy. As many note, it's "a young man's work;" Nietzsche felt compelled to write it, and equally compelled, many years later, to take it apart, regretting especially sections 16 - 25 which foretell a German cultural rebirth, thanks to the midwifely exertions of Richard Wagner in the wake of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer.

What's clear is that in writing it, Nietzsche was committing professional suicide, as Marianne Cowan notes in her intro to Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks:

The Birth of Tragedy presented a view of the Greeks so alien to the spirit of the time and to the ideals of its scholarship that it blighted Nietzsche's entire academic career. It provoked pamphlets and counter-pamphlets attacking him on the grounds of common sense, scholarship and sanity. For a time, Nietzsche, then a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, had no students in his field. His lectures were sabotaged by German philosophy professors who advised their students not to show up for Nietzsche's courses. WP

It seems fair to say that Nietzsche wrote under the pressure of several enthusiasms: for Greek culture (especially early tragedy); for music (especially that of Wagner); for epistemological questions (represented mainly by Kant); as well as by several critical obsessions -- a detestation of his contemporary German world of newspapers, politics, "Alexandrian" music and decadent sensibility.

So he tells us a story of the birth of an art form - tragedy - out of the spirit of another art form - music. What follows is merely an effort to describe and summarize his argument.

Nietzsche referred to the nature of the relation of Apollo and Dionysus as "the capital question" (die Hauptfrage). In Nietzsche's story, they tend to be associated with a variety of artistic and cultural polarities, e.g., painting vs. music, verbal differentiation vs. harmonic unity, the power of statement vs. the power of voice, culture vs. nature, science vs. art, prose vs. poetry, classic vs. romantic, spatial vs. temporal, eye vs. ear, stillness vs. motion, recognition vs. revelation, contemplation vs. action, figurative vs. proper* meaning, and the like.

The Apollonian dream is an unavoidable, uncontrolled response (it holds out "the head of Medusa" (sect. 2))  that shelters us from the sheer annihilative power of Dionysus. At the heart of Greek tragedy is the chorus of dancing satyrs -- not optimistic middle-class cafe goers -- who are rapt in an apprehension of the God who dissolves all that is, and because that apprehension is intolerable, a dreamlike realm of extraordinary beauty is thrown up as a shield -- the tragic hero and his tale, on the stage.

So we have the originary progenitor, Dionysus, only apprehended through music, who fathers, or causes, the counterblow of the plastic, visual realm of the Apollonian. In tragedy these two art forms, or modes, strike a balance that is perfect in Aeschylus, already slipping in Sophocles, and, by the time of Euripides, whom Nietzsche accuses along with Socrates of destroying music, is thoroughly debased.

Just as Euripides reduced the gods and heroes from mythic stature to characters not unlike ourselves in his plays, Socrates placed the word, the intellect, the logic and method of scientific inquiry above the wild dance of the satyrs, and has led us on a voyage of discovery unlike anything that came before. Socrates is the major articulation in Nietzsche's "history," since he at once ends the glory days of Dionysus and Apollo, and begins the voyage of the scientific mind.

Science gives us the world made over in an image the human mind can fathom. But look around us, Nietzsche says -- do we see a culture that nourishes Homeric visions and Aeschylean magic? Something important has been left out -- ignored, suppressed, or destroyed -- along the way. In section 15, the original ending of the book, the good ship Socrates runs into trouble:

But science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly toward its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points; and while there is no telling how this circle could ever be surveyed completely, noble and gifted men nevertheless reach, e'er half their time and inevitably, such boundary points (Grenzpunkte) on the periphery from which one gazes into what defies illumination. When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail -- suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy. (Kaufmann trans. p. 97-98).

Nun aber eilt die Wissenschaft, von ihrem kräftigen Wahne angespornt, unaufhaltsam bis zu ihren Grenzen, an denen ihr im Wesen der Logik verborgener Optimismus scheitert. Denn die Peripherie des Kreises der Wissenschaft hat unendlich viele Punkte, und während noch gar nicht abzusehen ist, wie jemals der Kreis völlig ausgemessen werden könnte, so trifft doch der edle und begabte Mensch, noch vor der Mitte seines Daseins und unvermeidlich, auf solche Grenzpunkte der Peripherie, wo er in das Unaufhellbare starrt. Wenn er hier zu seinem Schrecken sieht, wie die Logik sich an diesen Grenzen um sich selbst ringelt und endlich sich in den Schwanz beisst - da bricht die neue Form der Erkenntniss durch, die tragische Erkenntniss, die, um nur ertragen zu werden, als Schutz und Heilmittel die Kunst braucht. Project Gutenberg EBook.

A few interpretive comments: Nietzsche tells a story of origin which becomes a story of destiny. The logic of his narrative presents Apollo, Dionysus, and Socrates as three interrelated entities who are necessary to each other even as they remain,  in various and not simple ways, antagonists. Smiling Socrates ended the tragic Dionysian era, and at the end of his scientific quest, inevitably (unvermeidlich), lies the horror that lay behind the glorious culture he killed, auguring a new tragic culture on the horizon.

In the sections following 15 we hear strains of another Nietzsche -- not the cool analytic philologist or gifted philosopher of aesthetics, but Nietzsche the scathing critic of contemporary society. A prophetic note enters as he foresees a new beginning in which Germany is to play a central role. We may sense that the book founders at this point, but it seems doomed to do by the structure of its argument. Like the head of the ourobouros, the seeds of that future rebirth are there from the beginning of his tale.

*This particular polarity is made much of by Paul de Man.