Aryan, German, or Greek? Nietzsche's Prometheus between antiquity and modernity

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Classical Receptions Journal Vol 5. Iss. 1 (2013) pp. 38–62

Aryan, German, or Greek? Nietzsche’s
Prometheus between antiquity
and modernity
Adam Lecznar*

This article explores Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception of the ancient Greek mythical
figure Prometheus as a window onto the philosopher’s changing notions regarding
antiquity. In the first instance it will examine the sources of the myth, both
ancient and modern, in order to assess how Nietzsche’s appropriation fits into
the broader history of Promethean receptions. It will then turn to two of

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Nietzsche’s main philosophical works, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and The Gay
Science (1882). By closely analysing the texture of Nietzsche’s Prometheus in
these works this article will demonstrate that Nietzsche initially used the Titan as
a marker of the relationship between ancient Greece and modern Germany and of
the potential for a shared identity that might link them. In addition to this it
becomes clear that Nietzsche’s conception of the Titan changed dramatically
between the two works as well as afterwards, and this article will argue that
these changes are key to understanding Nietzsche’s evolving attitude to the
relationship between antiquity and modernity.

Introduction
In the spring of 1859, the young Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) had just returned
to boarding school after the Easter holidays when he realized that he had not written
to one of his oldest friends for the entire time. He was in his first year at the
prestigious Schulpforta near his hometown of Naumburg, a school renowned for
its emphasis on the texts of ancient Greece and Rome and its consequent production
of many eminent classical philologists during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies.1 When Nietzsche detailed three things that he had written during the holi-

*Correspondence to Adam Lecznar, Department of Greek and Latin, University College
London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. adam.lecznar@gmail.com
1 Silk and Stern (1981: 15) list the following: Johann August Ernesti (1707–81),
Karl Böttiger (1760–1835), Friedrich Thiersch (1784–1860), Ludwig Doederlein
(1791–1863), Georg Ludolf Dissen (1784–1837), August Meineke (1790–1870),
Otto Jahn (1813–69), Ludwig Breitenbach (1813–85), Hermann Bonitz (1814–88),
August Nauck (1822–92), Curt Wachsmuth (1837–1905), and Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Möllendorf (1848–1931).

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doi:10.1093/crj/cls004 Advance Access published 31 May 2012

NIETZSCHE’S PROMETHEUS BETWEEN ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

day, he demonstrated not only that he had found these studies interesting but also
that one figure in particular had fired his imagination:

First of all an unsuccessful play, entitled Prometheus, cluttered up with countless false per-
ceptions on this topic, secondly three poems on the same subject which I do to death in a
third work. This third work, incidentally, is a curious thing but not yet ready: it is six
closely-typed pages long and is entitled ‘Question marks and comments along with a general
exclamation mark concerning three poems entitled Prometheus.’ It tells the story of a poet’s
opposition to the public, and the whole thing is a mixture of rubbish and nonsense. . . . I don’t
know how I could have such ridiculous ideas.2

Within only a few months of his exposure to Graeco–Roman antiquity, Nietzsche
was already expressing an interest in the ancient Greek mythical figure
Prometheus.3 This particular character would reappear throughout a good portion

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of Nietzsche’s later writings, and in this article I want to explore some of the ways in
which an examination of Nietzsche’s evolving appropriation of Prometheus can lead
us to a better understanding of his reception of antiquity.4
Ideas and figures drawn from the ancient world informed much of Nietzsche’s
thought. Before devoting himself entirely to a nomadic philosophical life, Nietzsche
spent ten years (1869–79) as Professor of Classical Philology at the University of
Basle. When we add this to the years he studied classics at school and university, we
find that he spent almost half of his active life in some way devoted to the study of
antiquity.5 However, it is not immediately clear what role Nietzsche’s interest in the

2 See Nietzsche’s Kritische Gesamtausgabe des Briefwechsels 1.1 (1975: 59). ‘Erstens ein
mißglücktes Schauspiel, betitelt Prometheus, angefüllt mit einer Unzahl falscher
Begriffe über diesen Gegenstand, zweitens drei Gedichte eben darüber, die ich in
einer dritten heruntergemacht habe. Diese dritte Schrift ist übrigens ein eigenthümliches
Ding ist aber noch nicht fertig, erst 6 enge Quartseiten lang und ist betitelt ‘Fragezeichen
und Notizen nebst einem allgemeinen Ausrufezeichen über drei Gedichte betitelt,
Prometheus.’ Es wird darin ein Dichter im Gegensatz zum Publicum aufgeführt, und
das ganze ist ein Gemisch von Unsinn und Blödsinn. . . . Ich weiß nicht wie ich auf solche
verrückte Ideen kommen konnte.’ (My translation. All emphases in quotes will be from
the original).
3 See von Reibnitz (1992: 238) for details of these works.
4 Since Nietzsche’s references to Prometheus appear in his discussions of ancient Greece,
I will use the terms ‘antiquity’ and ‘ancient world’ to refer solely to Greece and not to
ancient Rome. Nietzsche was ambivalent towards Rome: at one point he suggested it
would have been better for Persians rather than Romans to have conquered Greeks in
antiquity (see Montinari 2003: 69), and yet in The Twilight of the Idols (1889) he could
suggest that his favourite ancient writer was Horace and that ‘The Greeks have never
given me impressions as strong as [Horace’s]; and to come right out and say it, the Greeks
cannot be to us what the Romans are.’ See Nietzsche (2005: 224).
5 Benne (2005: 1).

ADAM LECZNAR

ancient world should play in writings that so often tackled contemporary concerns.
This apparent incongruity has sometimes led scholars to draw a clear demarcation
between Nietzsche’s philological and philosophical writings, and furthermore
between his interests in antiquity and modernity.6
This tendency, however, has started to change and there have been several recent
attempts to infuse studies of Nietzsche’s output with an appreciation of his philo-
logical past.7 James Porter (2000: 5) has suggested that:

Nietzsche’s critiques are no less interesting for first taking shape in the field of classical
philology. On the contrary, philology gave Nietzsche an immediate view onto the condition
of modernity and especially of the modern German cultural imaginary, . . . that is, the ways in
which Nietzsche’s contemporary modernity imagined itself, its identity, and its history.

Porter makes two separate but connected arguments here and throughout his study.

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The first is that Nietzsche’s interest in antiquity functions as a recurring touchstone
in his critique of modernity. The second is that Nietzsche’s sensitive appreciation of
the myths and texts of the ancient world gave him an insight into the ways in which
his contemporary society conceived of itself.8 Antiquity, in this reading, functions
less as an actual historical era than as a construct that bolsters an ideology of mod-
ernity and which can be reworked and refashioned depending upon the role that it
needs to play in different instantiations of that ideology.9 Nietzsche was in a good
position, therefore, to interrogate these ideologies and to create his own relationship
between antiquity and modernity on account of his philological training.
In this article I will use the figure of Prometheus to explore and enlarge upon these
two points. Simply as a result of the large number of appropriations and represen-
tations of the Titan that took place during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries it is clear that the figure was an important part of the contemporary
‘cultural imaginary’ with which Nietzsche was engaging. The fact that Nietzsche
did return to Prometheus throughout his life can provide us with insights into how
he engaged with a particularly charged part of his own cultural heritage.
Nietzsche’s depiction of Prometheus will also help us to explore Porter’s idea that
antiquity is as much a product of modernity as it is a historical entity in its own right.
I would like to make two additions to this argument. The first is that such a con-
ception of antiquity relies on the perception that there are certain overlaps and
continuities between the two historical contexts that are in-play. In the case of

6 See Porter (2000: 1) for an account of this approach.
7 See also Benne (2005), which concentrates on how Nietzsche uses philological techniques
in his later philosophy, and Müller (2005), which stresses the different roles that the
Greeks play in Nietzsche’s philosophy but does not analyse Prometheus.
8 Müller (2005: 6–7) provides a short account of how the German educational system
fuelled this obsession with classical Graeco–Roman culture, and how Nietzsche stood in
opposition to the usual humanistic and classicizing tendencies of such an education.
9 See Porter (2009).

NIETZSCHE’S PROMETHEUS BETWEEN ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

Nietzsche, these would be ancient Greece and modern Germany. Without these
continuities and without the feeling that ancient Greece and modern Germany were
in some way similar I suggest that there would be no attempt (or desire) to study and
recuperate the ancients. My second point is that this dialogue between antiquity and
modernity comes to have its force when figures such as Prometheus are considered
to have significance that spans the different historical and cultural situations. That
is, it is activated when they are deployed as ‘modern’ though they are ostensibly
‘ancient’. In this article I will interrogate how Nietzsche, one of the most archetyp-
ally ‘modern’ of thinkers, conceptualized this relationship.
My argument will proceed in four sections. First, I will examine various ancient
Greek and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German (and more broadly
European) depictions of Prometheus to investigate why the Titan was such an
important part of the German cultural self-conception by the time that Nietzsche

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was writing. My focus will shift in the second section to Nietzsche’s invocations of
the Titan in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) and then, in the
third section, to The Gay Science (1882). In the conclusion I will address the striking
absence of Prometheus from Nietzsche’s published writings after The Gay Science.
As we will see, the various answers that Nietzsche gives to the question of whether
Prometheus was Aryan, German, or Greek provide competing interventions into the
debate about the possibility of antiquity informing our perception of the modern
world.

Promethean contexts: ancient and modern
Hesiod and Aeschylus are the two main ancient literary sources for the Prometheus
myth and, although Nietzsche alludes briefly to the Hesiodic version in his notes, it
was the Aeschylean tragedy Prometheus Bound (PB) that most informed his later use
of the Titan.10 Aeschylus presents Prometheus as a figure in defiant rebellion against
the tyrannical king of the gods, Zeus.11 The play depicts the Titan chained to a
mountain for the entire duration as punishment for stealing fire from the gods in
order to give it to humankind and thus aid humanity’s development in contravention
of a plan amongst the gods to destroy them. Prometheus maintains his defiance

10 An unpublished story can be found at Nietzsche (1978: 461–3), which alludes to the
Hesiodic Prometheus. Otherwise, it would seem that this particular version was not
suitable to his aims.
11 Thomson (1932: 6), ‘Zeus is a tyrant and his rule a tyranny. . . . We cannot evade it: we
must accept it and try to understand it.’ The debate continues as to whether the play was
written by Aeschylus or not, but since Nietzsche based his estimation of the play partly
on its Aeschylean authorship I will refer to Aeschylus as the author throughout this
article. Both Griffith (1977) and West (1990) argue persuasively against Aeschylean
authorship; Hall (2010: 230) provides a rebuttal.

ADAM LECZNAR

against Zeus despite mounting threats and the play concludes when the king of the
gods sinks the Titan into the mountain as punishment for his intransigence.12
   The characterization of Prometheus in this tragedy provided two threads that
would run through later appropriations of the myth: the Titan’s defiance in the face
of omnipotent divinity and his philanthropic actions for the benefit of humankind.13
This latter narrative, repeated in Prometheus’ appearance in Plato’s Protagoras
(320c–328d), casts the Titan and his gift of fire as the catalyst for all human culture
and subsequent technical development.14 By depicting Prometheus both as a rebel
and an initiator of culture, the Aeschylean tragedy provided later writers with a
fertile ground in which their own concerns could take root and flourish.
   From the late eighteenth century onward appearances of the Titian became in-
creasingly regular in literature and philosophy.15 Hans Blumenberg (1985: 561) has
suggested: ‘In a way that was comparable to no other epoch before it, it compre-

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hended itself in and by means of the Titan’, and proof of this suggestion can be
found in the striking fact that a group including, but not limited to, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Lord Byron, the two Shelleys, A. W. Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling and
Karl Marx all turned to the Titan to explore their own contemporary concerns.16
Prometheus was the perfect paradigm for those who, in the aftermath of the
Enlightenment, wanted to highlight humankind’s growing intellectual
self-sufficiency, diminishing dependence on religious belief structures and growing
intolerance of political oppression. In a world that was becoming increasingly aware
of the power of science and technology, the Titan functioned doubly as an encour-
agement for, and warning against, further scientific development. By harnessing the
power of electricity, for example, it seemed for a period that humans could assume
the role of quasi-divine creators, a possibility that Mary Shelley explored, to its most
pessimistic limits, in Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818).17

12 PB is considered to be the first part of a lost tragic trilogy: see Griffith (1983: 281–305) for
   a possible reconstruction.
13 As Pucci (2005: 56) points out, this work contains the first appearance of the word
   philanthropos.
14 Pucci (2005) treats the ancient tradition of Promethean appropriations.
15 See e.g. Raggio (1958); Walzel (1968); Trousson (1976); Blumenberg (1985); Turato
   (1988). Kerényi (1963) offers a similar study, but does not concentrate on modern
   appropriations.
16 See Dougherty (2006: 91–115) for an introduction to this phenomenon; Holmes (2008)
   discusses its influence while Curran (1986) sketches out the English context.
17 See Fulford et al. (2004: 179–97) for an introduction to the burgeoning cultural reson-
   ance of electricity in this era, as well as a Promethean allusion: one contemporary com-
   mentator reported on Benjamin Franklin’s kite-experiments on lightning by claiming
   ‘The fable of Prometheus is verify’d’ (181). Shelley’s reception of the Titan also resonates
   with a version of the Prometheus myth, attested in Pausanias Description of Greece 10.4.4,
   where the Titan is described as having fashioned humankind out of clay.

                                                42

NIETZSCHE’S PROMETHEUS BETWEEN ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

As we will see in the next section, Nietzsche was aware of this burgeoning
Promethean phenomenon. Another way in which Nietzsche engaged specifically
with contemporary discourses on Prometheus was in his consultation of philological
writings. For example, Karl Otfried Müller (1797–1840) could write, describing PB,
that ‘[h]istorical allusions are not to be expected in this play[.]
Prometheus . . . represents the provident, aspiring understanding of man, which
ardently seeks to improve in all ways the condition of our being.’18 Müller will
appear later in our story for his extensive writings on ethnic groups in ancient
Greece that provided some of the main parameters for Nietzsche’s later appropri-
ation of the Titan in BT. The Prometheus of the passage above is a universal figure
who, even in his ancient Greek context, represents the development of all human-
kind rather than specifically ancient Greek historical events.
A more nuanced account was that of Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97). Burckhardt was

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a historian who was at Basle at the same time as Nietzsche and whose impact on the
young academic has often been underestimated.19 Burckhardt objected strongly to
Müller’s reading of PB.20 Rather, he offered an evocation of the Titan that com-
bined historical particularity with universal relevance in his posthumously pub-
lished lectures on Griechische Kulturgeschichte (given at Basle from 1872–85),
lectures that Nietzsche had attended:

Amidst the gleaming sacrifices and festivals the image of the bound one on the mountain
[Prometheus] must have always intruded haphazardly into the thoughts of the Greeks; in it
they would have recognized the true relationship between man and the gods.21

Burckhardt suggests that Prometheus is a symbol of the Athenian distrust of the
divine and an antidote to the cheerful picture of ancient Greeks that could be
drawn from the accounts of their festivals. This can be read, partly, as symptomatic
of his project to demonstrate the dark side of antiquity and to undercut the humanist
and classicist veneration of ancient Greece in favour of a more anthropological and
violent account, a project that some scholars believe profoundly influenced, and was
indeed carried on by, Nietzsche.22 However, although Burckhardt’s description

18 Müller (1858: 432). The book in which this comment was made, Geschichte der grie-
chischen Litteratur, was consulted by Nietzsche twice in January and April 1870: see
Crescenzi (1994: 395 and 398).
19 See Ruehl (2003) and (2008). See also Müller (2005: 55–96).
20 Burckhardt (2002: 242).
21 Burckhardt (2005: 353). ‘Auch zwischen die glänzendsten Opfer und Feste hinein muß ja
immer das Bild des Gefesselten auf dem Gebirge hie und da in den Gedanken der
Griechen aufgetaucht sein und dann wußte man, wie man mit den Göttern eigentlich
daran war.’ My translation.
22 Burckhardt believed that the opposite to this cheerful picture was what he called ancient
Greek pessimism, and the concept of pessimism, also derived from Arthur
Schopenhauer, was very influential on Nietzsche’s work. See e.g. Dienstag (2008).

ADAM LECZNAR

might appear to locate the Titan’s significance solely in what it explains about the
ancient Greek religious attitude, these Greeks are in fact undergoing a realization
about a universal theme: the relationship between man and god. These readings both
demonstrate that Prometheus’ meaning was not solely located within his ancient
context even in studies where one might expect such a focus.
During the nineteenth century, Prometheus became affiliated to a wide variety of
concerns that demonstrated his transhistorical appeal. In antiquity he had been a
tragic hero who defended humankind in the face of divine antipathy and who
instigated their cultural and intellectual development. Later men and women
deployed the Titan and these characteristics according to their own various agendas.
When Nietzsche invoked Prometheus in his first book he demonstrated sensitivity to
the doubly ancient and modern resonances of Prometheus. This sensitivity gener-
ated striking results.

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Prometheus in The Birth of Tragedy
Our first exposure to Prometheus in Nietzsche’s writings comes in The Birth of
Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) [BT ].23 This immediately alerts us to the
possibility that it will be challenging to tie the Titan to just one historical context. BT
is a work that is notoriously difficult to categorize as philology or philosophy since it
displays facets of both disciplines: Nietzsche purposefully uses an exposition of the
ancient world to facilitate a discussion about modernity. This is both what made the
book unpalatable to Nietzsche’s academic contemporaries on its release, and also what
makes it so fruitful for our analysis.24 First, however, some background on the work.
Throughout BT Nietzsche tries to establish continuity between the two contexts
of Greece and Germany. He sets out one aspect of his programme at the start of the
work:

We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics when we have come to realise, not
just through logical insight but also with the certainty of something directly apprehended,
that the continuous evolution of art is bound up with the duality of the Apolline and the
Dionysiac[.] (BT §1: 14).25

The metaphysical concepts of the Apolline and the Dionysiac provide the means
through which this continuity will be demonstrated. Nietzsche describes this

23 All English translations of BT are from Nietzsche (1999). See footnotes for reference to
the Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW), in the bibliography at Nietzsche (1972).
24 The young philologist Ulrich van Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, an almost contemporary of
Nietzsche’s at Schulpforta, wrote a scathing review of the work, which instigated several
later responses. All these texts are collected at Grunder (1969).
25 KGW 3.1: 21. ‘Wir werden viel für die aesthetische Wissenschaft gewonnen haben, wenn
wir nicht nur zur logischen Einsicht, sondern zur unmittelbaren Sicherheit der
Anschauung gekommen sind, dass die Fortentwickelung der Kunst an die Duplicität
des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen gebunden ist [.]’

NIETZSCHE’S PROMETHEUS BETWEEN ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

opposition as continuous and thus still in force in his contemporary context. The
Apolline stands for sculptural form and calm, as best evoked in sculpture, while the
Dionysiac stands for formlessness and intoxication, as best evoked in music.26 These
dual drives produce the best art, which Nietzsche sees as the main aim of all human
culture, when they achieve perfect harmony. Nietzsche believes that this has
happened only once before: in ancient Athens and in the Attic tragedy of
Aeschylus and Sophocles.27 He sees the music dramas of the composer Richard
Wagner (1813–83) to be the most likely source of a resurgence of similarly powerful
art in his contemporary society.
Although Wagner’s influence on BT as a whole is ubiquitous, I argue that his
influence on Nietzsche’s deployment of Prometheus is mainly superficial.28 PB was
Wagner’s favourite tragedy and Aeschylus his favourite tragedian. Accordingly, it
has been argued that Nietzsche’s decision to use Aeschylus and PB prominently can

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be traced back to Wagner’s high estimation.29 This seems to be the case when
Nietzsche chose to place an illustration of the Titan on the frontispiece of BT.30
In his preface, addressed to Wagner, Nietzsche affirms this connection:

I now imagine the moment when you, my revered friend, will receive this work. I see
you . . . as you study Prometheus Unbound on the title page, read my name, and immediately
feel convinced that, whatever the work may contain, its author has something serious and
urgent to say, and also that, while conceiving these thoughts, he was conversing with you
constantly, as if you had been present and as if he could only write down things which were
appropriate in your presence. (BT Foreword to Richard Wagner: 13).31

26 For the history of this duality in German thought, see Vogel (1966).
27 In Nietzsche’s account Euripides marked the death knell of this tragic genius.
28 See Silk and Stern (1981: 55–8) for a good introduction to Wagner’s influence on BT.
29 Ibid., pp. 254–7.
30 For the genesis of the frontispiece see Brandt (1991); for a reading of the image in relation
to Nietzsche and Wagner see Ruehl (2003: 61–5, with reproduction of the icon on 62).
For Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner in the run up to BT, and its genesis more
generally, see Silk and Stern (1981: 31–61) and Bosco (2004: 310–20). See Schadewaldt
(1999: 126–8) for a reconstruction of Wagner’s Ring Cycle based on Aeschylus’
Prometheia. Cf. Ewans (1982: 256–60) and Foster (2010), who base it on the Oresteia.
Lloyd-Jones (1982: 126–42); Deathridge (1999); Bosco (2004: 310–20) and Goldhill
(2008) tackle Wagner’s more general use of the Greeks.
31 KGW 3.1: 19. ‘[Ich] vergegenwärtige . . . mir den Augenblick, in dem Sie, mein hoch-
verehrter Freund, diese Schrift empfangen werden: wie Sie . . . den entfesselten
Prometheus auf dem Titelblatte betrachten, meinen Namen lesen und sofort überzeugt
sind, dass, mag in dieser Schrift stehen, was da wolle, der Verfasser etwas Ernstes und
Eindringliches zu sagen hat, ebenfalls dass er, bei allem, was er sich erdachte, mit Ihnen
wie mit einem Gegenwärtigen verkehrte und nur etwas dieser Gegenwart
Entsprechendes niederschreiben durfte.’

ADAM LECZNAR

However, beyond the fact that Prometheus was a privileged figure in Wagner’s own
conception of ancient Greek tragedy I argue that there was no deeper intellectual
connection between the two versions of the Titan. This is due to their different
conceptions of the relationship between antiquity and modernity. In the same the-
oretical work in which Wagner describes Prometheus as ‘the most profound of all
tragedies’ [die tiefsinnigste aller Tragödien] he also suggests that: ‘In truth, our
modern art is only one link in the chain of artistic development of Europe as a whole
[nur ein Glied in der Kette der Kunstentwickelung des gesammten Europa], which
finds its origin amongst the Greeks.’32 Wagner subscribes to a teleological reading of
history that suggests that ancient Greek tragedy, and thus Prometheus, is a proto-
typical version of what should be achieved in modernity. Nietzsche, by contrast,
uses antiquity to demonstrate the state which modernity can return to in terms of its
conception of art and its appropriation of the Dionysiac. Wagner’s Prometheus

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could never be Nietzsche’s, even if Wagner’s veneration of the figure encouraged
Nietzsche’s deployment of the Titan at certain junctures.
   Nietzsche’s most extensive discussion of Prometheus in BT comes in section nine.
It is preceded and followed by references to Prometheus and PB which stress
Nietzsche’s idea that the Greeks constructed their aesthetically pleasing tragedies
out of dark and terrible myths.33 The Greeks mitigated some of the cruelty that lay
at the heart of the stories by creating works of art: they sacrificed Dionysiac truth for
Apolline form in order to maintain a balance of both. Nietzsche begins section nine
with an analogy that clarifies this idea. Staring at the sun and then looking away, he
says, causes dark spots to appear in our eyesight for protection. The relationship
between tragedy and myth enacts the inverse process to this: the Greek myths were
so dark and dreadful that tragic heroes became ‘radiant patches to heal a gaze seared
by gruesome night’ (BT §9: 46).34 Nietzsche uses Oedipus and Prometheus to il-
lustrate this.
   Oedipus, according to Nietzsche, ‘was understood by Sophocles as the noble
human being who is destined for error and misery despite his wisdom, but who in
the end, through his enormous suffering, exerts on the world around him a magical,
beneficent force which remains effective even after his death’ (BT §9: 47).35
Nietzsche thus conflates the two Sophoclean plays involving this particular charac-
ter, Oedipus Tyrannos and Oedipus at Colonus. Nietzsche continues: ‘at this point it
becomes clear that the poet’s whole interpretation of the story is nothing other than

32 Wagner (1849: 9 and 5). My translation.
33 See BT § 3: 23; BT § 4: 27; BT §10: 53; BT § 11: 55.
34 KGW 3.1: 61. ‘leuchtende Flecken zur Heilung des von grausiger Nacht versehrten
   Blickes.’
35 KGW 3.1: 61. ‘[Oedipus] ist von Sophokles als der edle Mensch verstanden worden, der
   zum Irrthum und zum Elend trotz seiner Weisheit bestimmt ist, der aber am Ende durch
   sein ungeheures Leiden eine magische segensreiche Kraft um sich ausübt, die noch über
   sein Verscheiden hinaus wirksam ist.’

                                           46

NIETZSCHE’S PROMETHEUS BETWEEN ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

one of those images of light held out to us by healing nature after we have gazed into
the abyss’ (BT §9: 47).36 In his attempt to demonstrate the truth of the opening
analogy, Nietzsche reveals that the true content of the Oedipus myth is contained
beyond the tragedy and even beyond Greece: ‘There is an ancient popular belief,
particularly in Persia, that a wise magician can only be born out of incest’ (BT §9:
47).37 The suggestion seems to be that the Greek tragedies on the Oedipal theme are
renderings of what is a darker, and originally Persian, myth.
   Nietzsche proceeds to invoke Prometheus: ‘I shall now contrast the glory of
passivity with the glory of activity which shines around the Prometheus of
Aeschylus’ (BT §9: 48).38 While Nietzsche had previously sketched an initial reading
of Oedipus garnered solely from the Sophoclean tragedies in which he featured,
Prometheus is introduced in a strikingly different manner:

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What the thinker Aeschylus had to tell us here, but what his symbolic poetic image only
hints at, has been revealed to us by the young Goethe in the reckless words of his
Prometheus:
Here I sit, forming men
In my own image,
A race to be like me,
To suffer and to weep,
To know delight and joy,
And heed you not,
Like me! (BT §9: 48).39

This is a key moment in his interpretation of the Titan and it is here that we see the
first hints that Prometheus may embody a connection between ancient Greece and

36 KGW 3.1: 62. ‘und hier zeigt sich, dass die ganze Auffassung des Dichters nichts ist als
   eben jenes Lichtbild, welches uns, nach einem Blick in den Abgrund, die heilende Natur
   vorhält.’
37 KGW 3.1: 62. ‘Es giebt einen uralten, besonders persischen Volksglauben, dass ein
   weiser Magier nur aus Incest geboren werden könne [.]’
38 KGW 3.1: 63. ‘Der Glorie der Passivität stelle ich jetzt die Glorie der Activität gegen-
   über, welche den Prometheus des Aeschylus umleuchtet.’
39 KGW 3.1: 63. ‘Was uns hier der Denker Aeschylus zu sagen hatte, was er aber als
   Dichter durch sein gleichnissartiges Bild uns nur ahnen lässt, das hat uns der jugendliche
   Goethe in den verwegenen Worten seines Prometheus zu enthüllen gewusst:
   Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen,
   Nach meinem Bilde,
   Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
   Zu leiden, zu weinen,
   Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich,
   Und dein nicht zu achten,
   Wie Ich!’

                                             47

ADAM LECZNAR

modern Germany. By introducing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)
Nietzsche suggests two things. The first is that a German author from under a
century earlier has expressed the message of Prometheus more accurately than
Aeschylus. The second is that the underlying Prometheus myth has appealed to
both ancient Greek and modern German contexts and thus generated these twin
connected artistic responses. It is this second idea, and the reasons that Nietzsche
postulates for it, which will be the focus of my ensuing analysis.
The Goethean poem that Nietzsche excerpts was written in 1773/4 (though first
published anonymously in 1785) and speaks to many aspects of the post-
Enlightenment interest in Prometheus.40 Nietzsche suggests that it is the ‘reckless
words’ [verwegene Worte] of Goethe that mark his reading of Prometheus as su-
perior to Aeschylus’s.41 Nietzsche is almost certainly referring to the particularly
aggressive and hateful tone with which the narrator of Goethe’s ode attacks Zeus,

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the god who is the target of his entire poem.42 Another aspect of the poem that would
have appealed to Nietzsche is that Goethe seems to have made the Titan into a
human. The figure still displays certain Titanic qualities, and indeed slips back into
that guise in the lines that Nietzsche quotes where he threatens Zeus with a race of
men that he is creating who have no dependence on divinity. However, elsewhere he
says to the god ‘Still you must leave / My earth intact/ My small hovel, which you
did not build, / And this my hearth / Whose glowing heat/ You envy me’ (6–11).43
Goethe thus depicts Prometheus depending on fire, the very gift that he was re-
ported to have provided to humans. The defiance of Goethe’s Prometheus is of a
different tenor to that of the Aeschylean hero. It is no longer the chosen obduracy of
a Titan who holds the key to his own release but is too principled to use it. Rather, it
is the brave defiance of a human being who must make use of his technological skills
in a universe that lacks a divine benefactor.
Nietzsche confirms that he has chosen to articulate Prometheus through Goethe’s
poem because of its anti-divine invective when he describes the poem as ‘the true

40 See Jølle (2004).
41 Goethe had a lifelong relationship with Prometheus, returning to him on numerous
occasions to try to create a work of art that dealt successfully with the Titan. By the
end of his life, Goethe’s output of Promethean works amounted to three fragmentary
dramas and one ode. For various analyses see Blumenberg (1985: 399–557); Kerényi
(1963: 3–18); Trousson (1976: 240–67 and 278–87). See Riedel (2000: 156–70) for
Goethe’s appropriation of antiquity in general and Reinhardt (1991) for the genesis
and reception of this ode in particular.
42 Schweizer (2011: esp. 53–8) labels this sort of attack ‘misotheistic’ and discusses how
Nietzsche’s Prometheus fits into this general trend in literature.
43 See Goethe (1994: 26–31) for both German and English. ‘Mußt mir meine Erde / Doch
lassen stehn / Und meine Hütte, die du nicht gebaut, / Und meinen Herd, / Um dessen
Glut / Du mich beneidest.’

NIETZSCHE’S PROMETHEUS BETWEEN ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

hymn of impiety’ (BT §9: 48).44 However, despite invoking the German context,
Nietzsche continues to refer to the Athenian context of Prometheus. He declares:

The Greek artist in particular had an obscure feeling that he and these gods were mutually
dependent, a feeling symbolized precisely in Aeschylus’ Prometheus . . . The magnificent
‘ability’ of the great genius, for which even eternal suffering is too small a price to pay, the
bitter pride of the artist: this is the content and soul of Aeschylus’ play[.] (BT §9: 49).45

At first, therefore, he seems to have only used the German poem in order to elucidate
a reading of the Aeschylean tragedy from a particular anti-religious perspective.
Nietzsche has introduced Prometheus in his German and Greek contexts ostensibly
in order to represent a universal truth about humanity and its relationship with the
gods in the style of the philological readings of the Titan by Burckhardt and Müller

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that we looked at earlier.
Nevertheless, when Nietzsche turns to the myth that underpins these two artistic
formulations he undercuts this universality by rooting his Prometheus in an unex-
pected identity. He declares, in a similar move to the one he used in his discussion of
Oedipus, that the main significance of the figure lies beyond its ancient Greek
formulation:

But even Aeschylus’s interpretation of the myth does not plumb its astonishing, terrible
depths . . . Originally, the legend of Prometheus belonged to the entire community of Aryan
peoples and documented their talent for the profound and the tragic; indeed, it is not unlikely
that this myth is as significant for the Aryan character as the myth of the Fall is for the
Semitic character and that the relationship between the two myths is like that between
brother and sister. (BT §9: 49).46

While Oedipus represented the wisdom of an ancient Persian folktale, Prometheus
was a possession of the entire Aryan community. Nietzsche goes further and

44 KGW 3.1: 64. ‘der eigentliche Hymnus der Unfrömmigkeit’.
45 KGW 3.1: 64. ‘Der griechische Künstler insbesondere empfand im Hinblick auf diese
Gottheiten ein dunkles Gefühl wechselseitiger Abhängigkeit: und gerade im Prometheus
des Aeschylus ist dieses Gefühl symbolisirt [. . .] Das herrliche ‘Können’ des grossen
Genius, das selbst mit ewigem Leide zu gering bezahlt ist, der herbe Stolz des Künstlers -
das ist Inhalt und Seele der aeschyleischen Dichtung [.]’
46 KGW 3.1: 64–5. ‘Aber auch mit jener Deutung, die Aeschylus dem Mythus gegeben hat,
ist dessen erstaunliche Schreckenstiefe nicht ausgemessen . . . Die Prometheussage ist
ein ursprüngliches Eigenthum der gesammten arischen Völkergemeinde und ein
Document für deren Begabung zum Tiefsinnig-Tragischen, ja es möchte nicht ohne
Wahrscheinlichkeit sein, dass diesem Mythus für das arische Wesen eben dieselbe char-
akteristische Bedeutung innewohnt, die der Sündenfallmythus für das semitische hat,
und dass zwischen beiden Mythen ein Verwandtschaftsgrad existiert, wie zwischen
Bruder und Schwester.’

ADAM LECZNAR

suggests that it is a fundamental myth of Aryan morality and identity, comparable in
stature to the myth of the Fall in Semitic myth.47
   This passage has elicited much critical comment, mostly revolving around the
idea of ancient and modern identities. Bruce Lincoln (1999: 64) locates the import-
ance of this Aryan/Semitic dichotomy in antiquity when he suggests that
‘Nietzsche’s focus shifted from the opposition of [Apolline] and [Dionysiac] internal
to (and constitutive of) Greek civilisation to the opposition of Greeks and their
antithetical other’. Others have situated its significance in Nietzsche’s contemporary
context by invoking this dichotomy in discussions of whether or not Nietzsche held
anti-Semitic views and thus defined his own German identity by means of the
Aryan/Semitic opposition.48 I wish to build on these approaches by suggesting
that Nietzsche’s Prometheus is supposed to activate both these contexts simultan-
eously. It not only differentiates the ancient Greek and modern German commu-

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nities from other cultures and belief-systems but also affirms a connection and
similarity between these different historical epochs. Prometheus thus becomes
one of the figures in which Nietzsche sees an overlap between antiquity and mod-
ernity, and the Aryan version of the Titan becomes a concrete example of the
communion that Nietzsche postulates between Greece and Germany.
   This theory is made more plausible by the significance that the Aryan category
held during the period that Nietzsche was writing. After the proposition by Sir
William Jones in 1786 that the Sanskrit, Greek and Latin languages had all de-
veloped from a common linguistic predecessor, named Indo-European or
Indo-Germanic, there were various attempts to reconstruct the mythology and
culture of the prototypical human beings who had spoken the language.49 A popular
historical account regarding the heritage of this people emerged amongst German
scholars that linked Germanic peoples with the Greeks and was famously enshrined
in K. O. Müller’s Die Dorier (1824).50 Müller’s Dorians were a race from the north
who ruthlessly conquered the indigenous peoples of Greece and thereby became the

47 Though it is striking that they are depicted as genetically related, ‘brother and sister’,
   there is nevertheless a hierarchy constructed between the male crime of Prometheus and
   the female sin of Eve. See also Cancik (1995: 63) and Pütz (2001).
48 See, inter alia, Cancik (1995: 127-8); Porter (2000: 273-86); Pütz (2001). Williamson
   (2004: 214–6) describes the earlier attempt to create an Aryan Prometheus by Adalbert
   Kuhn (1812–81), the comparative mythographer and philologist.
49 See Lincoln (1999: 76–100).
50 See Hall (1997: 4–16). Bernal (1987: 308–16) accuses Müller of effectively introducing an
   autochthonous ‘Aryan’ model of Greek history that ignored connections between Greek
   and non-Greek cultures; see Blok (2011) for a response. Cf. Nietzsche (1967: 146) for his
   own judgment, which is remarkably close to Bernal’s: ‘How distant you must be from the
   Greeks to suppose such a narrow-minded autochthony as O[tfried] Müller.’ My
   translation.

                                             50

NIETZSCHE’S PROMETHEUS BETWEEN ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

most powerful Hellenic people by the time of Athenian classical antiquity.51 Since
the term ‘Aryan’ was interchangeable with the terms ‘Indo-European’,
‘Indo-Germanic’, ‘Doric’ and ‘Dorian’ in this period, it is striking that Nietzsche
introduces an Aryan Prometheus just after having juxtaposed an ancient Greek
dramatist and a German poet: it seems clear that Nietzsche is asserting a connection
between the different identities.52
   But how does Nietzsche use Prometheus to do this? One clue can be found when
Nietzsche continues his analysis:

The myth of Prometheus presupposes the unbounded value which naı̈ve humanity placed on
fire as the true palladium of every rising culture; but it struck those contemplative original
men as a crime, a theft perpetrated on divine nature, to believe that man commanded fire
freely, rather than receiving it as a gift from heaven, as a bolt of lightning which could start a

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blaze, or as the warming fire of the sun. Thus the very first philosophical problem presents a
painful, irresolvable conflict between god and man, and pushes it like a mighty block of rock
up against the threshold of every culture. (BT §9: 49).53

The myth of Prometheus thus stands both for the discovery of fire and for the
ensuing philosophical queries and dilemmas which attend this discovery. This
chimes in with Nietzsche’s earlier comment that Prometheus demonstrated the
Aryan ‘talent for the profound and the tragic’ [Begabung zum Tiefsinnig-
Tragischen]: Nietzsche makes the Prometheus myth a foundational document of
philosophical enquiry, as well as Aryan morality. Although he suggests that this is a
moment that appears on ‘the threshold of every culture’, by describing the original
Aryans as ‘contemplative’ [beschaulich] Nietzsche clearly characterizes them as
having a particular sensitivity for these sorts of issues. Their propensity to contem-
plate, which will be emphasized further on in the passage, is what leads them to
ponder their creation of fire and to conceptualize it as an act of hubris against
divinity.

51 For historical Dorians see Chadwick (1976). For the German obsession with Spartans
   rather than Athenians as pure Dorians see Rawson (1969: 306–42).
52 See von Reibnitz (1992: 246–7). See also Arvidsson (2006) for different uses of the
   concept Aryan in nineteenth century.
53 KGW 3.1: 65. ‘Die Voraussetzung jenes Prometheusmythus ist der überschwängliche
   Werth, den eine naive Menschheit dem Feuer beilegt als dem wahren Palladium jeder
   aufsteigenden Cultur: dass aber der Mensch frei über das Feuer waltet und es nicht nur
   durch ein Geschenk vom Himmel, als zündenden Blitzstrahl oder wärmenden
   Sonnenbrand empfängt, erschien jenen beschaulichen Ur-menschen als ein Frevel, als
   ein Raub an der göttlichen Natur. Und so stellt gleich das erste philosophische Problem
   einen peinlichen unlösbaren Widerspruch zwischen Mensch und Gott hin und rückt ihn
   wie einen Felsblock an die Pforte jeder Cultur.’

                                               51

ADAM LECZNAR

  Nietzsche confirms the Aryan philosophical disposition when he states:

The curse in the nature of things, which the reflective Aryan is not inclined simply to explain
away, the contradiction at the heart of the world, presents itself to him as a mixture of
different worlds, e.g. a divine and a human one[.] (BT §9: 50).54

Nietzsche again uses the word ‘beschaulich’, rendered here as ‘reflective’, and thus
emphasizes the Aryan tendency to interrogate and challenge the relationship be-
tween divine and human worlds. This particular stance is made sharper by the
contrast that Nietzsche draws with the Semitic attitude to the gods, as encapsulated
in the myth of Adam and Eve and the concept of sin. Nietzsche associates this latter
concept with ‘curiosity, mendacious pretence, openness to seduction, lasciviousness,
in short: in a whole series of predominantly feminine attributes’ (BT §9: 50).55 The

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transgressive message of the Prometheus myth thus vouchsafes a philosophical
conception of human capabilities that is predicated on positive, and, in
Nietzsche’s account, masculine qualities. This is in contradistinction to the nega-
tive, passive and feminine response to divinity that Nietzsche sees as a key aspect of
Semitic sin.
   Not only does the figure of the Aryan Prometheus point towards the origins of
philosophy, but it also contains the origin of the tragic art-form that is the subject of
Nietzsche’s present enquiry. He makes this clear when he declares that ‘[w]hat
distinguishes the Aryan conception is the sublime view that active sin is the true
Promethean virtue; thereby we have also found the ethical foundation of pessimistic
tragedy’ (BT §9: 50).56 Tragedy too has become an Aryan possession. It is denied to
Semites in order to bolster the Aryan identity that Nietzsche has constructed to
shore up his continuum of ancient Greece and modern Germany. The philosophical
and tragic legacy of the primitive Aryans is thus shown to stretch right down to
Aeschylus and Goethe, both of whom use Prometheus to explore how to challenge
divinity rather than how to kowtow before it.
   By designating Prometheus as Aryan in section nine of BT Nietzsche appeals
simultaneously to his ancient Greek and modern German resonances. While Goethe
and Aeschylus offer representations of the figure that speak to their anti-religious
interests, their affinity with the Titan and with his impious resonances comes from
the fact that they are descended from Aryans. Ancient Aryans had created the myth

54 KGW 3.1: 65–6. ‘Das Unheil im Wesen der Dinger - das der beschauliche Arier
   nicht geneigt ist wegzudeuteln-, der Widerspruch im Herzen der Welt offenbart sich
   ihm als ein Durcheinander verschiedener Welten, z.B. einer göttlichen und einer mens-
   chlichen [.]’
55 KGW 3.1: 65. ‘die Neugierde, die lügnerische Vorspiegelung, die Verführbarkeit, die
   Lüsternheit, kurz eine Reihe vornehmlich weiblicher Affectionen [.]’
56 KGW 3.1: 65. ‘Das, was die arische Vorstellung auszeichnet, ist die erhabene Ansicht
   von der activen Sünde als der eigentlich prometheischen Tugend: womit zugleich der
   ethische Untergrund der pessimistischen Tragödie gefunden ist [.]’

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NIETZSCHE’S PROMETHEUS BETWEEN ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

of Prometheus for two main reasons. The first is that it helped to explain the
achievement of fire in an active philosophical manner as a theft from the gods.
The second is that the myth was symptomatic of the Aryan propensity for tragedy.
As we recall, it was precisely his hope for the rebirth of tragedy that encouraged
Nietzsche to suggest the metaphysical continuity between ancient Greece and
modern Germany. Therefore, we see that the Aryan Prometheus functions as a
representation of an identity that not only exists in opposition to Semitism but
that also confirms affinities between two different geographical and temporal situ-
ations. Though these themes will continue to revolve around Prometheus in his later
appearances, certain changes will make this continuity more difficult to affirm.

Prometheus in The Gay Science

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After BT Nietzsche’s life and thought would go through some profound transform-
ations. We find them best summed up in the new preface that Nietzsche wrote in
1886 when he decided to republish BT with the subtitle ‘Hellenism and Pessimism’
[Hellenismus und Pessimismus] instead of ‘from the Spirit of Music’. Already we
see that Nietzsche is retrospectively marking the subject matter of BT as a ‘Hellenic’
phenomenon rather than one that extends beyond this context and discusses a
universal tragic phenomenon. As we explore the preface which he entitled
‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’ [Versuch einer Selbstkritik] we see that this historiciza-
tion of Greek concerns was just one of the intellectual developments that had taken
place in the intervening fourteen years.
   Of Nietzsche’s judgements on his earlier work there are two that are particularly
pertinent to the form that Prometheus could take after BT. The first is Nietzsche’s
claim that his first book had an ‘anti-moral tendency’ which was most clear in ‘its
consistently cautious and hostile silence about Christianity – Christianity as the
most excessive, elaborately figured development of the moral theme that humanity
has ever had to listen to’ (BT Attempt at Self-Criticism §5: 9).57 It was in his
discussion of Semitic sin and the opposition between Prometheus and Eve as two
comparably important foundational myths of morality that Nietzsche came closest
to raising the spectre of Christianity. With hindsight it appears strange that
Nietzsche did not raise the Christian ramifications of this opposition, and
Nietzsche’s current desire to break his silence might have implications for
Prometheus. While it was useful for Prometheus to be Aryan in order to construct
a strong opposition with Semitism, no such strong opposition exists between
Christianity and Aryanism. And if he is not Aryan, then it is not clear how

57 KGW 3.1: 12. ‘Vielleicht lässt sich die Tiefe dieses widermoralischen Hanges am besten
   aus dem behutsamen und feindseligen Schweigen ermessen, mit dem in dem ganzen
   Buche das Christenthum behandelt ist, - das Christenthum als die ausschweifendste
   Durchfigurirung des moralischen Thema’s, welche die Menschheit bisher anzuhören
   bekommen hat.’

                                           53

ADAM LECZNAR

Prometheus can figure in any discussions of the relationship between ancient Greece
and modern Germany.
These issues are revisited by Nietzsche’s second pertinent judgement on BT.
This is that he had ‘ruined the grandiose Greek problem . . . by mixing it up with the
most modern things!’ (BT Attempt at Self-Criticism §6: 10).58 He attributes this
declaration to his mounting disappointment with the German nation in the after-
math of its unification in 1872, as well as with the inferior achievements of German
music. Nietzsche’s great hope in BT, that Wagner’s music dramas would return his
contemporary German culture to the same level as had existed in ancient Athens,
had not come to pass. He describes current German music as ‘the most un-Greek of
all possible forms of art’ (BT Attempt at Self-Criticism §6: 10).59 If Nietzsche truly
believes that he mishandled his discussion of ancient Greece by bringing in modern
concerns then it wouldn’t matter if Prometheus were Aryan or not any more.

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Prometheus could no longer stand for a convergence between what was Aryan,
what was German and what was Greek because Nietzsche’s belief in any such con-
nection between these categories had all but evaporated.
When we turn to the final appearances of Prometheus in Nietzsche’s published
writings, we find that these issues were already at work in Nietzsche’s intellectual
evolution four years before their diagnosis in the new preface to BT.60 In The Gay
Science (1882) [GS], the main work in what is sometimes called Nietzsche’s middle
period, Nietzsche uses Prometheus three times.61 Two of these are of particular
importance.62 The first is in a section entitled ‘Origin of Sin’ [Herkunft der Sünde],
which discusses how the notion of sin has come to govern modern conceptions of
morality:

Sin, as it is now experienced wherever Christianity reigns or once reigned: sin is a Jewish
feeling and a Jewish invention; and given that this is the background of all Christian morality,
Christianity can be said to have aimed at ‘Judaizing’ the whole world. The extent to which
this has succeeded in Europe is best brought out by how alien Greek antiquity – a world
without feelings of sin – strikes our sensibility as being, despite all the good will expended by

58 KGW 3.1: 14. ‘ich [verdarb] mir nämlich überhaupt das grandiose griechische
Problem . . . durch Einmischung der modernsten Dinge. . .!’
59 KGW 3.1: 14. ‘die ungriechischeste aller möglichen Kunstformen[.]’ Wagner had by
now been dead for three years but the friendship between him and Nietzsche had
deteriorated after its high point of 1872. See Silk and Stern (1981: 107–15) for details.
60 For another short appearance of Prometheus in Daybreak (1881) see Nietzsche (1997a
§ 83: 49).
61 All English translations of GS are from Nietzsche (2001). See footnotes for reference to
the KGW in the bibliography at Nietzsche (1973). For general introductions to GS see
Allison (2001: 71–109).
62 For other appearance see GS § 251: 149.

NIETZSCHE’S PROMETHEUS BETWEEN ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

entire generations and many excellent individuals to approach and incorporate this world.
(GS §135: 124).63

Nietzsche uses Prometheus to illustrate this lost Hellenic perspective: ‘[t]he
Greeks . . . were closer to the thought that even sacrilege can have dignity – even
theft, as in the case of Prometheus [.]’ (GS §135: 125).64 In this passage Christianity
and Judaism are depicted as the main culprits for the growth of a morality based on
sin that contrasts with an ancient Greek, and Promethean, morality of crime.
   The first thing we notice is that Greek antiquity has become irremediably
‘alien’ to Nietzsche’s modernity due to the Christianization of his contemporary
society. When Nietzsche confirms that this alienation has taken place despite
the many attempts of German thinkers to assimilate a vision of the ancient world
into their discussions of the modern, he seems to cast doubt even on the efficacy

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of his own attempts in BT to create continuity between antiquity and modernity.
The appearance of Prometheus now draws attention to the inaccessibility of
the ancient world where once it had symbolized its recoverability through its
appeal to an Aryan heritage. The fact that Prometheus is not Aryan but specifically
Greek responds both to this remoteness and also to the fact that his new opposition is
Greek and Christian rather than Aryan and Semitic. The term Aryan had not
dropped out of Nietzsche’s philosophical vocabulary entirely. It would return in
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), where Nietzsche would utilize the concept to
show the dissimilarity between contemporary Germans and ancient Aryans.65 An
Aryan identity could no longer conjure the same consistencies between antiquity
and modernity as it had done in BT, and Prometheus now stands at the end of a path
to a specifically Greek antiquity that Nietzsche and his contemporaries cannot
retread.66
   Nietzsche confirms the failure of BT when he concludes that, ‘in [the Greeks’]
need to incorporate into and devise some dignity for sacrilege, they invented tragedy
– an art form and a pleasure that has remained utterly and profoundly foreign to

63 KGW 5.2: 164. ‘Sünde, so wie sie jetzt überall empfunden wird, wo das Christenthum
   herrscht oder einmal geherrscht hat: Sünde ist ein jüdisches Gefühl und eine jüdische
   Erfindung, und in Hinsicht auf diesen Hintergrund aller christlichen Moralität war in
   der That das Christenthum darauf aus, die ganze Welt zu ‘verjüdeln’. Bis zu welchem
   Grade ihm diess in Europa gelungen ist, das spürt man am feinsten an dem Grade von
   Fremdheit, den das griechische Alterthum - eine Welt ohne Sündengefühle - immer
   noch für unsere Empfindung hat, trotz allem guten Willen zur Annäherung und
   Einverleibung, an dem es ganze Geschlechter und viele ausgezeichnete Einzelne nicht
   haben fehlen lassen.’
64 KGW 5.2: 165. ‘Den Griechen dagegen lag der Gedanke näher, dass auch der Frevel
   Würde haben könne - selbst der Diebstahl, wie bei Prometheus [.]’
65 See Nietzsche (1997b: 14–5; 24; 117).
66 See Lincoln (1999: 101–20).

                                            55

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