HOMER and Classical Philology
Translated by an AI Model
Published 1869
HOMER and Classical Philology.
A lecture by Friedrich Nietzsche. BASEL. 1869.
In our time, there is no unified and clearly discernible public opinion on classical philology. This is felt both by the educated public and among the younger generation of scholars in the field. The reason lies in its multifaceted nature, the lack of conceptual unity, and the unorganized aggregate state of diverse scholarly activities bound together only by the name "Philology." One must honestly admit that philology is, in a sense, borrowed from several sciences and brewed like a magic potion from the most disparate juices, metals, and bones. Moreover, it harbors an artistic element, imperative on aesthetic and ethical grounds, which stands in significant conflict with its purely scientific demeanor. It is as much a piece of history as it is a piece of natural science as it is a piece of aesthetics: history, insofar as it seeks to comprehend the manifestations of specific national individualities in ever-new images, the governing law in the flux of phenomena; natural science, insofar as it strives to fathom humanity's deepest instinct, the language instinct; and finally, aesthetics, because it singles out the so-called "classical" antiquity from a range of ancient cultures, with the claim and intention of unearthing a buried ideal world and holding up the mirror of the classical and eternally exemplary to the present. That these utterly diverse scientific and aesthetic-ethical impulses have united under a common name, under a kind of sham monarchy, is primarily explained by the fact that philology, by its origin and at all times, has also been pedagogy. From a pedagogical perspective, a selection of the most teachable and educationally beneficial elements was necessary, and thus, from a practical profession, under the pressure of need, that science or at least that scientific tendency which we call philology developed. The aforementioned different fundamental directions of philology have, at certain times, emerged with varying degrees of emphasis, in connection with the cultural level and taste development of the respective period; and individual representatives of this science tend to always conceive of the directions most suited to their abilities and intentions as the central directions of philology, so that the public's estimation of philology is highly dependent on the impact of philological personalities. In the present day, that is, in a time that has witnessed outstanding talents in almost every possible direction of philology, a general uncertainty of judgment has prevailed, along with a pervasive weakening of interest in philological problems. Such an indecisive and lukewarm state of public opinion affects a science sensitively, as its open and secret enemies can work with much greater success. And philology, in particular, has a great abundance of such enemies. Where does one not encounter the scoffers, always ready to strike a blow at the philological "moles," the breed that makes dust-swallowing its profession, that turns over and rummages through the clod of earth for the eleventh time after it has already been turned over ten times? For this type of opponent, however, philology is indeed a useless, yet harmless and innocuous pastime, an object of jest, not of hatred.In contrast, a deep and untamed hatred of philology thrives wherever the ideal as such is feared, where modern man falls in blissful self-admiration, where Hellenism is regarded as an overcome, and therefore very indifferent, viewpoint. Faced with these enemies, we philologists must always count on the support of artists and artistically inclined natures, for they alone can empathize with how the sword of barbarism hangs over the head of every individual who loses sight of the ineffable simplicity and noble dignity of the Hellenic, how no matter how brilliant the progress of technology and industry, no matter how contemporary the school regulations, no matter how widespread the political education of the masses, none can protect us from the curse of ridiculous and Scythian aberrations of taste and from annihilation by the terribly beautiful Gorgon's head of the Classical. While the aforementioned two classes of opponents view philology as a whole with suspicion, there are numerous and highly diverse antagonisms towards specific directions within philology, struggles fought by philologists against philologists, purely domestic disputes caused by useless rank-seeking and mutual jealousies, but above all by the already emphasized diversity, indeed hostility, of the fundamental drives subsumed under the name philology but not merged. Science has this in common with art: that the most everyday things appear to it entirely new and attractive, indeed, as if by the power of an enchantment, as if just born and now experienced for the first time. Life is worth living, says art, the most beautiful seductress; life is worth knowing, says science. This juxtaposition reveals the internal and often heartbreaking contradiction in the concept and, consequently, in the activity of classical philology guided by this concept. If we approach antiquity scientifically, whether we seek to understand what has come to be with the eye of the historian, or categorize, compare, and perhaps reduce to a few morphological laws the linguistic forms of ancient masterpieces in the manner of a natural scientist: we always lose the wonderfully formative, indeed, the very scent of the ancient atmosphere; we forget that longing impulse that, with the power of instinct, as the most gracious charioteer, led our senses and enjoyment to the Greeks. From this perspective, attention should be drawn to a very specific and initially very surprising antagonism that philology always regrets the most. It is precisely from those circles on whose support we must most certainly count—the artistic friends of antiquity, the warm admirers of Hellenic beauty and noble simplicity—that discordant tones sometimes arise, as if philologists themselves were the true adversaries and destroyers of antiquity and ancient ideals. Schiller reproached philologists for tearing Homer's wreath. It was Goethe, who, formerly a supporter of Wolf's views on Homer, expressed his "defection" in these verses:
With your keen minds, as is your way, you've freed us from all reverence, and we freely confessed that the Iliad is but a patchwork. May our defection offend no one; for youth knows how to ignite us, so that we prefer to think of it as a whole, to joyfully perceive it as a whole.
For this lack of piety and desire for reverence, one might well think, the reason must lie deeper: and many waver as to whether philologists altogether lack artistic abilities and sensibilities, making them incapable of doing justice to the ideal, or whether the spirit of negation, a destructive iconoclastic tendency, has become powerful within them. But if even the friends of antiquity characterize the overall nature of present-day classical philology as thoroughly questionable with such misgivings and doubts, what influence must the outbursts of the "realist" and the phrases of the day's heroes then have? To answer the latter at this point would be entirely inappropriate given the circle of men gathered here; lest I fare like that sophist who undertook to publicly praise and defend Heracles in Sparta, but was interrupted by the cry:
Who chastised him?
On the other hand, I cannot shake the thought that even in this circle, here and there, some of those reservations resonate, as they are often heard from the mouths of noble and artistically gifted people, indeed, as an honest philologist truly has to feel them most agonizingly, not in the dull moments of depressed mood. For the individual, there is no escape from the aforementioned dichotomy: but what we assert and hold high like a banner is the fact that classical philology, in its grand entirety, has nothing to do with these struggles and tribulations of its individual disciples. The entire scientific-artistic movement of this peculiar centaur proceeds with immense force, but cyclopean slowness, to bridge that chasm between ideal antiquity—which is perhaps only the most beautiful blossom of Germanic longing for the South—and the real; and thereby classical philology strives for nothing less than the ultimate completion of its very essence, a complete fusion and unification of the initially hostile and only forcibly brought together fundamental drives.
Though one may speak of the unattainability of the goal, indeed, even call the goal itself an illogical demand—the striving, the movement along that line, is present, and I would like to try to illustrate with an example how the most significant steps of classical philology never lead away from ideal antiquity, but towards it, and how precisely where one speaks abusively of the overthrow of sanctuaries, only newer and worthier altars have been built. Let us therefore examine from this standpoint the so-called Homeric question, the very one whose most important problem Schiller spoke of as a learned barbarity. By this most important problem is meant the question of Homer's personality. One now hears everywhere the emphatic assertion that the question of Homer's personality is no longer timely and lies quite apart from the real "Homeric question." Now, it may indeed be admitted that for a given period, for example, for our philological present, the center of the said question may move somewhat away from the personality problem: for it is precisely in the present that the most careful experiment is being made to construct the Homeric poems without the actual aid of a single personality, but as the work of many persons. But if one rightly finds the center of a scientific question where the full stream of new insights has poured forth, i.e., at the point where individual scientific research touches the overall life of science and culture, if one thus designates the center according to a cultural-historical evaluation, then one must also remain with the personality question in the realm of Homeric research, as the truly fruitful core of an entire cycle of questions. For in Homer, the modern world has, I will not say learned, but first tested a great historical perspective; and without already stating my opinion here as to whether this test was or could be successfully made on this particular object, it nevertheless provided the first example for the application of that fruitful perspective. Here one learned to recognize condensed ideas in the seemingly fixed forms of older national life; here, for the first time, the wonderful ability of the national soul to pour states of custom and belief into the form of personality was recognized. After historical criticism has fully and confidently mastered the method of letting seemingly concrete personality evaporate, it is permissible to designate the first experiment as an important event in the history of the sciences, quite apart from whether it was successful in this case. It is the usual course that an epoch-making discovery is preceded by a series of striking omens and preparatory individual observations. This experiment also has its fascinating prehistory, but at an astonishingly great temporal distance. Friedrich August Wolf began precisely where Greek antiquity dropped the question. The peak that the literary-historical studies of the Greeks, and thus also their center, the Homeric question, reached, was the age of the great Alexandrian grammarians. Up to this peak, the Homeric question has passed through the long chain of a uniform developmental process, the last link of which, at the same time the last that was at all attainable by antiquity, appears to be the standpoint of those grammarians.They understood the Iliad and the Odyssey as creations of a single Homer: they declared it psychologically possible for works of such diverse overall character to have sprung from one genius, in contrast to the Chorizontes, who represent the utmost skepticism of individual ancient personalities, not of antiquity itself. To explain the differing overall impression of the two epics while assuming one poet, they invoked the different stages of life, comparing the poet of the Odyssey to the setting sun. The eye of those critics possessed tireless sharpness and vigilance for diversities in linguistic and conceptual expression; at the same time, however, a history of Homeric poetry and its tradition had been constructed, according to which these diversities were attributed not to Homer, but to his redactors and singers. Homer's poems were thought to have been transmitted orally for a time, exposed to the vagaries of improvising and sometimes forgetful singers. At a given point, in the time of Pisistratus, the orally surviving fragments were supposedly collected in writing; but the redactors were allowed to be credited with dull and disruptive additions. This entire hypothesis is the most significant in the field of literary studies that antiquity has to offer; in particular, the recognition of an oral dissemination of Homer, in contrast to the weight of habit in a book-learned age, is an admirable pinnacle of ancient scholarship. From those times to those of Friedrich August Wolf, one must make a leap across an enormous vacuum; beyond this boundary, however, we find research precisely back at the point where antiquity had run out of strength to proceed: and it is irrelevant that Wolf took as certain tradition what antiquity itself had put forth as a hypothesis. The characteristic of this hypothesis can be described as making earnest, in the strictest sense, with the personality of Homer, everywhere presupposing regularity and inner harmony in the expressions of the personality, and, with two excellent subsidiary hypotheses, dismissing as non-Homeric everything that contradicts this regularity. But this same fundamental trait, the desire to recognize a tangible personality instead of a supernatural being, also runs through all those stages leading up to that peak, and always with greater energy and growing conceptual clarity. The individual is increasingly felt and emphasized, the psychological possibility of a Homer increasingly demanded. If we go backward step by step from that peak, we encounter Aristotle's conception of the Homeric problem. For him, Homer is the flawless and infallible artist, well aware of his aims and means: yet, in his naive surrender to popular opinion, which also attributed the archetype of all comic epics, the Margites, to Homer, there is still a point of immaturity in historical criticism. If we go backward from Aristotle, the inability to grasp a personality steadily increases; more and more poems are heaped under Homer's name, and each age shows its degree of criticism in how much and what it allows to stand as Homeric. One involuntarily feels, in this slow retreat, that beyond Herodotus lies a period in which an immeasurable flood of great epics was identified with the name of Homer. If we transport ourselves to the age of Pisistratus: at that time, the word "Homer" encompassed a wealth of the most disparate things. What did Homer mean then? Evidently, that age felt itself unable to scientifically encompass a personality and the limits of its expressions. Homer had almost become an empty shell here.Now we are faced with an important question: what lies before this period? Has Homer's personality, because it could not be grasped, gradually evaporated into an empty name? Or was the entire heroic poetry embodied in a naive folk manner at that time, and visualized under the figure of Homer? Has a concept thus been made from a person, or a person from a concept? This is the actual "Homeric question," that central problem of personality. The difficulty of answering it increases, however, if one attempts an answer from another side, namely from the standpoint of the preserved poems. Just as it is difficult today and requires serious effort to grasp the paradox of the law of gravity, namely that the Earth changes its form of motion when another celestial body changes its position in space, without any material bond between the two: so it is currently difficult to fully appreciate that wonderful problem, which, passing from hand to hand, has increasingly lost its original, most striking character. Works of poetry that even the greatest geniuses shrink from emulating, in which eternally unsurpassed models for all periods of art are given: and yet their poet is a hollow name, fragile wherever one touches it, nowhere the secure core of a presiding personality. "For who would dare to fight with gods, the fight with the One?" says even Goethe, who, if any genius, wrestled with that mysterious problem of Homeric inaccessibility. The concept of folk poetry seemed to offer a bridge over this; a deeper and more original power than that of any single creative individual was supposed to have been at work here, the happiest people in their happiest period, in the highest activity of imagination and poetic creative power, were supposed to have produced those immeasurable poems. In this generality, the idea of folk poetry has something intoxicating; one feels the broad, overwhelming unleashing of a popular quality with artistic pleasure and rejoices in this natural phenomenon, just as one rejoices in an irresistibly flowing mass of water. But as soon as one wanted to approach this thought and look it in the face, one involuntarily replaced the poetic folk soul with a poetic folk mass, a long series of folk poets, in whom the individual meant nothing, but in whom the surge of the folk soul, the vivid power of the folk eye, the unweakened fullness of the folk imagination was mighty: a series of primordial geniuses, belonging to a time, a genre of poetry, a subject. But such an idea rightly aroused suspicion: should the same nature, which deals so sparingly and economically with its rarest and most precious product, genius, have squandered it in an inexplicable whim at a single point? Here the problematic question returned; is it not perhaps possible to get by with a single genius and explain the existing stock of that unreachable excellence? Now the eye sharpened for what constituted that excellence and singularity. Impossible in the overall design of the complete works, said one party, for this is thoroughly flawed, but rather in the individual song, in the individual in general, not in the whole.In contrast, another party invoked the authority of Aristotle, who most admired Homer's "divine" nature precisely in the design and selection of the whole; if this design did not emerge so clearly, it was a defect attributable to tradition, not to the poet, the result of revisions and interpolations by which the original core had gradually been obscured.The more the former approach sought out unevenness, contradictions, and confusions, the more decisively the latter discarded what, in its view, obscured the original plan, in order to possibly hold the peeled-out ur-epic in its hands.It was in the nature of the second approach that it adhered to the concept of an epoch-making genius as the founder of great, artful epics.In contrast, the other approach wavered back and forth between the assumption of a genius and a number of lesser imitators: and another hypothesis, which only requires a series of capable but mediocre singer individualities, but presupposes a mysterious flow, a deep artistic popular drive that manifests itself in the individual singer as an almost indifferent medium.It is a consequence of this approach to present the incomparable merits of the Homeric poems as the expression of that mysteriously flowing drive.All these approaches assume that the problem of the current state of those epics is to be solved from the standpoint of an aesthetic judgment:one expects the decision from the correct determination of the boundary line between the genial individual and the poetic folk soul.Are there characteristic differences between the manifestations of the genial individual and the poetic folk soul?But this whole juxtaposition is unjustified and misleading.The following consideration teaches this.There is no more dangerous opposition in modern aesthetics than that between folk poetry and individual poetry, or, as one usually says, art poetry.This is the backlash, or if you will, the superstition, that the most momentous discovery of historical-philological science brought with it, the discovery and appreciation of the folk soul.For with it, the ground was first created for an approximately scientific consideration of history, which until then, and in many forms until now, was a simple collection of material, with the prospect that this material would accumulate ad infinitum, and it would never be possible to discover the law and rule of this eternally new wave.Now, for the first time, one understood the long-felt power of greater individualities and manifestations of will than the vanishing minimum of the individual human being; now one recognized how everything truly great and far-reaching in the realm of will could not have its deepest-seated root in the short-lived and weak individual form of the will; now, finally, one felt the great mass instincts, the unconscious popular drives, as the actual bearers and levers of so-called world history.But the newly shining flame also cast its shadow:and this is precisely that superstition mentioned earlier, which opposes folk poetry to individual poetry and thereby, in a most questionable way, extends the vaguely conceived concept of the folk soul to that of the folk spirit.Through the misuse of an admittedly seductive conclusion by analogy, one had come to apply that proposition of greater individuality, which only has its value in the realm of will, also to the realm of intellect and artistic ideas.Never has anything more flattering been done to the so unbeautiful and unphilosophical masses than here, where one placed the wreath of genius on its bald head.One imagined it as if new layers of bark were constantly forming around a small core; one conceived of these mass consolidations as arising much like avalanches, that is, in the course, in the flow of tradition. This small core, however, one was inclined to assume as small as possible, so that it could occasionally be discounted without losing anything from the total mass. According to this view, tradition and the transmitted are virtually the same. However, in reality, such a contrast between folk poetry and individual poetry does not exist; rather, all poetry, and naturally folk poetry too, requires a mediating individual. This often misused juxtaposition only makes sense if individual poetry is understood as poetry that has not grown out of popular sentiment but goes back to an unpopular creator and has been nurtured in an unpopular atmosphere, perhaps in a scholar's study. Connected with the superstition that assumes a poetic mass is the other superstition that folk poetry is limited to a given period for each people and then dies out, which is, incidentally, a consequence of that first superstition. According to this notion, art poetry, the work of individual minds, no longer of entire masses, replaces this gradually dying folk poetry. But the same forces that were once active are still active now; and the form in which they operate has remained exactly the same. The great poet of a literary era is still a folk poet and in no sense less so than any ancient folk poet was in an illiterate period. The only difference between the two concerns something entirely different from the manner of their poetry's creation, namely its propagation and dissemination, in short, its tradition. This, without the aid of binding letters, is in eternal flux and exposed to the danger of absorbing foreign elements, remnants of those individualities through which the path of tradition leads. If we apply all these statements to the Homeric poems, it follows that we gain nothing from the theory of the poetic folk soul; that we are in all circumstances referred to the poetic individual. The task thus arises of grasping the individual and distinguishing it from what has, so to speak, been washed up in the flow of oral tradition – a component of the Homeric poems considered to be highly significant. Since literary history ceased to be, or be allowed to be, a mere register, attempts have been made to capture and formulate the individualities of poets. The method brings with it a certain mechanism; it is to be explained, and consequently derived from reasons, why this and that individuality manifests itself in one way and not another. Now, biographical data, environment, acquaintances, and contemporary events are used, and it is believed that from the mixture of all these ingredients, the desired individuality has been brewed. Unfortunately, it is forgotten that the moving point, the undefinably individual, cannot be obtained as a result. The less that is known about a time and life, the less applicable that mechanism is. But if one only has the works and the name, then the proof of individuality is in a bad state, at least for the friends of that mentioned mechanism; especially bad if the works are quite perfect, if they are folk poems. For what those mechanics can most readily grasp as individual are the deviations from the folk genius, the excrescences and distorted lines; thus, the fewer excrescences a poem has, the paler the drawing of its poetic individual will turn out to be.All those excrescences, everything dull or excessive that one believed to find in the Homeric poems, one was immediately ready to attribute to the vexatious tradition. What then remained as the individually Homeric? Nothing but a subjectively chosen series of particularly beautiful and prominent passages. The epitome of aesthetic singularity, which the individual recognized according to their artistic ability, they now called Homer. This is the core of the Homeric errors. The name Homer, from the outset, has no necessary connection either to the concept of aesthetic perfection or to the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer as the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey is not a historical tradition, but an aesthetic judgment.
The only path that leads us back beyond the time of Pisistratus and advances our understanding of the name Homer, goes, on the one hand, through the Homeric city legends: from which it becomes unequivocally clear how epic heroic poetry and Homer are everywhere identified, while he is nowhere regarded as a poet of the Iliad and Odyssey in any other sense than, say, of the Thebaid or another cyclic epic.
On the other hand, the ancient fable of a contest between Homer and Hesiod teaches us that two epic directions, the heroic and the didactic, were perceived when these names were mentioned, and thus the significance of Homer was placed in the subject matter, not in the form.
That fictitious contest with Hesiod does not even show a dawning premonition of the individual.
However, from the time of Pisistratus onwards, with the astonishingly rapid development of Greek aesthetic sensibility, the aesthetic differences in value of these epics were felt ever more distinctly:
The Iliad and the Odyssey emerged from the flood and have remained on the surface ever since.
In this aesthetic selection process, the concept of Homer became increasingly narrower:
the old material meaning of Homer, the father of epic heroic poetry, transformed into the aesthetic meaning of Homer, the father of poetry in general and at the same time its unattainable prototype.
This transformation was accompanied by rationalistic criticism, which translated the miraculous Homer into a possible poet, which asserted the material and formal contradictions of those numerous epics against the unity of the poet, and gradually relieved Homer's shoulders of that heavy bundle of cyclic epics.
So Homer as the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey is an aesthetic judgment.
However, this does not at all imply that the poet of the aforementioned epics is merely an illusion, in truth an aesthetic impossibility: which will be the opinion of only a few philologists.
Most, rather, assert that the overall design of a poem like the Iliad requires an individual, and that this individual is precisely Homer.
One will have to concede the first point, but I must deny the second, based on what has been said.
I also doubt whether most have come to acknowledge the first point based on the following consideration.
The plan of such an epic as the Iliad is not a whole, not an organism, but a stringing together, a product of reflection proceeding according to aesthetic rules.
It is certainly the measure of an artist's greatness how much he can simultaneously survey with an overall glance and rhythmically shape.
The infinite richness of a Homeric epic in images and scenes makes such an overall glance quite impossible.
But where one cannot survey artistically, one tends to string concepts together and devise an arrangement according to a conceptual schema.
This will succeed all the more perfectly the more consciously the arranging artist handles the fundamental aesthetic laws: indeed, he will even be able to create the illusion as if the whole had floated before him as an intuitive whole in a powerful moment.
The Iliad is not a wreath, but a garland of flowers.
As many images as possible are placed within a frame, but the compiler was unconcerned whether the grouping of the assembled images was always pleasing and rhythmically beautiful.
For he knew that the whole did not matter to anyone, but only the individual parts.
However, that stringing together, as the manifestation of an artistic understanding that was still little developed, even less understood, and generally appreciated, cannot possibly have been the actual Homeric deed, the epoch-making event.
Rather, the plan is precisely the most recent product and far younger than Homer's fame.
Those, then, who search for the "original and perfect plan" are searching for a phantom; for the perilous path of oral tradition had just been completed when the systematic planning was added; the distortions that this path brought with it cannot have affected the plan, which was not included in the transmitted mass.
However, the relative imperfection of the plan must not be used to portray the planner as a different person from the actual poet.
It is not only probable that everything created with conscious aesthetic insight in those times was infinitely inferior to the songs that gushed forth with instinctive power.
Indeed, one can go a step further.
If one brings the great so-called cyclic poems into comparison, the planner of the Iliad and the Odyssey has the undeniable merit of having achieved the relatively highest in this conscious technique of composing; a merit that we would be inclined from the outset to acknowledge in the same person who is considered the foremost in the realm of instinctive creation.
Perhaps a far-reaching implication in this connection will even be welcomed.
All those weaknesses and flaws, considered so significant yet in their totality most subjectively appraised, which one is accustomed to view as the petrified remnants of the tradition period – are they not perhaps only the almost necessary evils to which the brilliant poet had to succumb in the grandly conceived, almost unprecedented, and incalculably difficult composition of the whole?
One certainly notices that the insight into the entirely different workshops of the instinctive and the conscious also shifts the Homeric problem's question: and, as I believe, towards the light.
We believe in the one great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey – but not in Homer as this poet.
The decision on this has already been made.
That era, which invented countless Homeric fables, which composed the myth of the Homeric-Hesiodic contest, which regarded all the poems of the Cycle as Homeric, felt not an aesthetic but a material singularity when it uttered the name "Homer."
For this era, Homer belongs in the line of artist names like Orpheus, Eumolpus, Daedalus, Olympus, in the line of mythical discoverers of a new branch of art, to whom all later fruits grown on this new branch were gratefully dedicated.
And indeed, that most wonderful genius, to whom we owe the Iliad and the Odyssey, also belongs to this grateful posterity; he too sacrificed his name on the altar of the ancient father of epic heroic poetry, Homer.
Up to this point, and strictly avoiding all details, I have intended, esteemed audience, to present to you the philosophical and aesthetic fundamentals of the Homeric personality problem: assuming that the basic formations of that widely ramified and deeply fissured mountain range, known as the Homeric question, can be shown most sharply and clearly from a great distance and from above.
At the same time, I flatter myself to have reminded those friends of antiquity, who so readily accuse us philologists of a lack of piety towards great concepts and an unproductive destructiveness, of two facts by way of example.
Firstly, those "great" concepts, such as that of the inviolable, single, and undivided poetic genius Homer in the pre-Wolfian period, were in fact only too grand and therefore internally very empty and fragile concepts when roughly handled; if classical philology now returns to the same concepts, it is only seemingly the old wineskins; in truth, everything has become new, wineskin and spirit, wine and word.
Everywhere one senses that philologists have lived with poets, thinkers, and artists for almost a century.
Hence it is that the heap of ashes and slag, formerly referred to as classical antiquity, has now become fertile, indeed luxuriant, arable land.
And there is a second thing I would like to say to those friends of antiquity who turn away from classical philology with dissatisfaction.
You revere the immortal masterpieces of the Hellenic spirit in word and image and believe yourselves to be much richer and happier than any generation that had to do without them: well, do not forget that this entire enchanting world once lay buried, covered by mountainous prejudices; do not forget that blood and sweat and the most arduous intellectual labor of countless disciples of our science were necessary to make that world rise from its oblivion.
Philology is not the creator of that world, it is not the composer of this immortal music; but shouldn't it be a merit, and a great one at that, to merely be a virtuoso and let that music resound again for the first time, music that lay so long undeciphered and unappreciated in a corner?
Who was Homer before Wolf's courageous intellectual act?
A good old man, at best known under the label "natural genius," in any case the child of a barbaric age, full of offenses against good taste and good morals.
Let us hear how, as late as 1783, an excellent scholar wrote about Homer: "Where does the dear man reside?
Why did he remain incognito for so long?
By the way, can't you get me a silhouette of him?"
We demand gratitude, not at all in our name, for we are atoms - but in the name of Philology itself, which, though neither a Muse nor a Grace, is a messenger of the gods; and just as the Muses descended to the gloomy, afflicted Boeotian farmers, so she comes into a world full of dark colors and images, full of the deepest and most incurable pains, and tells comforting tales of the beautiful, bright divine figures of a distant, blue, happy enchanted land. So much. And yet a few more words must be said, and of the most personal kind. But the occasion of this speech will justify me. It is fitting for a philologist to condense the goal of his endeavors and the path thereto into the short formula of a creed; and so let this be done by inverting a sentence of Seneca: "philosophia facta est quae philologia fuit." This is to express that all and every philological activity should be encompassed and enclosed by a philosophical worldview, in which everything individual and isolated evaporates as something contemptible, and only the whole and the unified remain. And so let me hope that with this direction I will not be a stranger among you; give me the confidence that, working with you in this spirit, I will be able to, in particular, live up to the excellent trust that the high authorities of this community have placed in me, in a worthy manner. -