James I. Porter, "Don - T Quote Me On That!" - Wi

“Don't Quote Me on That!
”:: Wilamowitz Contra Nietzsche in 1872 and 1873

Author(s): James I. Porter
Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies , Vol. 42, No. 1, Special Issue Nietzsche's Ancient
History (Autumn 2011), pp. 73-99
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.42.1.0073
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“Don’t Quote Me on That!”: Wilamowitz Contra
Nietzsche in 1872 and 1873
James I. Porter
Abstract: This article examines an oddity that has gone unnoticed since
Nietzsche first pointed it out to his friend and confidant Erwin Rohde in 1872—
namely, that Wilamowitz, in his attack on The Birth of Tragedy, systemati-
cally misquotes Nietzsche. A large number of the quotations from The Birth of
Tragedy by Wilamowitz in both installments of Zukunftsphilologie! are pseudo-
quotations—whether they are off by a word or more or whether they are a collage
of phrases drawn freely from Nietzsche’s vocabulary. This essay revisits the
debate from the angle of nineteenth-century philology in its relation to textual
authority (both primary and secondary). A complete appendix of Wilamowitz’s
misquotations from The Birth of Tragedy and from Rohde’s Afterphilologie
lays out, for the first time, this evidence of the practices of the first Nietzschean
philologist in history, Wilamowitz himself.
I. Wilamowitz Contra Nietzsche
W hen Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931) set out to critique

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,
three months after it appeared in January 1872, he was faced with something of
a dilemma.1 What stance should he assume in his polemic against this bizarre
piece of writing that fell outside of every known convention in classical studies?
A strange hybrid of philologically informed musings on Greek mythology, musi-
cology, and Schopenhauerian philosophy, it lacked all the usual signs of classical
scholarship: There were no footnotes, no quotations from Greek sources in the
original and only a single passage in translation (a few verses from Sophocles),
no citations of primary sources, and no references to classical scholarship of
any kind. Not even its narrative could be reduced to the plot lines familiar from
ancient or modern textbooks—be this Aristotle’s Poetics or Bernays’s writings
on the effects of tragedy according to Aristotle.2 Instead, Nietzsche produced his
own “witches’ brew” that was perhaps less novel in its general outlines than in its
mode of presentation. The story about the dual synthesis of Apollo and Dionysus
was an ongoing point of fascination in German letters, philology, and classical
scholarship.3 But no classical scholar would have ever dared to put his thoughts
JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 42, 2011.

Copyright © 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
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74 James I. Porter
into the bold, romanticizing poetic form that Nietzsche’s work assumed. And
given the controversies surrounding Nietzsche’s meteoric rise—his award of a
professorship at the tender age of twenty-four essentially on the basis of sheer
promise (and without a doctoral dissertation at that)—with GdT Nietzsche was
indeed risking academic notoriety, if not professional suicide. Was he thumbing
his nose at the establishment? Did he despise classical studies as much as he
appeared to do? Or was he merely trying to rejuvenate them?
Wilamowitz took umbrage and decided to speak out on behalf of the entire
profession. Whatever his personal motivations may have been (jealousy, envy,
egotism, and professional loyalty have all been named in the past), he felt per-
sonally and professionally insulted. The decision to respond was quick, but the
form that the response would take weighed heavily on him. He knew that there
would be costly repercussions as well—as did all the players in this famous
clash from 1872–73. His initial intention was to write a review of GdT, but his
outrage quickly turned into rage, and he ended up penning what he referred
to as “my invective [meine Invective].”4 He soon realized that no respectable
journal would accept a frontal assault like his, but he remained undeterred. Thus,
already in mid-March 1872, he confided while he was in Markowitz, his home
in Prussia: “Now I’ll probably have written in such a way that Die Göttinger
Gelehrten Anzeigen won’t accept my review, [and] essentially I would have to
admit that they are right, since no serious person could read more than the first
page of such rubbish.”5 And a month later, once he had returned to Berlin, it
appears that he had to work hard to tone down his earlier version (or versions),
which was (or were) too pointed (he uses the term ‘zähmen’ [restrain]).6 His
response would now have to take the form of a “pamphlet” (Broschüre) rather
than that of a review essay.7 And it would have to be privately financed. Its first
installment would be published in May 1872.
This still left dangling the puzzle of how to approach the hybrid monstros-
ity of Nietzsche’s text. There were two immediate challenges. The first was
the problem of audience. Wilamowitz wanted to reach his fellow classicists
and to demonstrate how sadly wanting Nietzsche’s book was when measured
against every possible standard of the field. The second was the problem of
tone. He wished to convey his sense of outrage but also to compose an invec-
tive (what Rohde would later correctly characterize as a ‘Schmähschrift’ and a
‘Pasquille,’ a defamatory piece of writing, lampoon, or diatribe). The two goals
were mutually cancelling. A third challenge had to do with what we might call
the problem of an incommensurability of forms. Nietzsche’s work, as we saw,
is stubbornly unscholarly in form. What sense was there in trying to shoehorn
it back into a scholastic mode and to treat it in a properly academic way? This
problem is obviously tied to the first, that of audience. Only if Wilamowitz
could show up Nietzsche’s errors of fact could he demonstrate to his peers
Nietzsche’s deficiencies in philology. But what if Nietzsche made absolutely

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“Don’t Quote Me on That!” 75
no pretensions to philology? What if, as Wilamowitz states in the opening

pages of “Future Philology!” “Mr. Nietzsche by no means presents himself
as [or “acts like”] a scholarly researcher [tritt ja nicht als wissenschaftlicher
forscher auf]”?8 What if Nietzsche were casting to the winds the apparatus of
the philologist and assuming the garb of an intuitionist, a priest, a journalist,
or an initiate (epopt) instead?9 In that case, Wilamowitz had only one choice:
to presume that, or make out as if, Nietzsche was arguing from philologi-
cal fact, or that he was at the very least arguing on the basis of philological
knowledge, however disguised this may have been, and then to critique him
on those grounds.
This, of course, complicated matters somewhat. One has to wonder how a
critique made on such an assumption could actually ever touch Nietzsche’s
arguments. It is obvious that the bulk of Nietzsche’s claims in GdT cannot be
substantiated by any appeal to evidence, for the simple reason that the arguments
there fundamentally rest not on the hard facts of science (Wissenschaft) but on
some other level, which we might variously call rhetorical, aesthetic, or cultural
grounds, with a heavy dose of imaginative invention besides. There is nothing
in the shape of his book that ought to lead anyone to expect otherwise. Quite the
contrary, GdT advertises its self-invented character from the first page, indeed
from the very first words, with its appeal to “the immediate certainty of vision,” or
rather “intuition [Anschauung],” as a way of fathoming the “profound mysteries”
of antiquity and of tying modern knowledge directly to ancient mythological
divinity (here, Apollo and Dionysus).10
And yet Nietzsche’s reputation was made, or rather unmade, on the assump-
tion that he was building a scholarly case in his first book based on evidence
that could be sought out either in the ancient texts or in some other attestation
from Greek antiquity. That this assumption is warranted is transparently false,
as it was even to Nietzsche when he wrote and then published the work. He
knew that any such attempt at discrediting him on scholarly grounds was a lot
like pushing at an open door. Asked by a scholar for “proof, just a single piece
of evidence, that in reality the strange images on the skēnē [stage] were mir-
rored back from the magical dream of the ecstatic Dionysian chorus,” Nietzsche
gave the best possible answer he could, and the only available one as well:
“Just how, then, should the evidence approximately read? […] Now the hon-
orable reader demands that the whole problem should be disposed of with an
attestation, probably out of the mouth of Apollo himself: or would a passage
from Athenaeus do just as well?”11 The scholar in question was Otto Ribbeck,
a colleague of Nietzsche’s closest confidant, Erwin Rohde, who was himself
teaching classics at Kiel at the time. Ribbeck was simply following his profes-
sional instincts. Classicists were and still are trained professionally to back up
every statement about ancient reality with a footnote to some prior fact, claim,
evidence, or objective positive proof, whether directly (by means of a citation

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76 James I. Porter
or a quotation from some ancient text or testimony) or indirectly (by way of

secondary scholarship).12
Wilamowitz chose to engage Nietzsche on the ground of classical philol-
ogy. And when he did so he was entering into a battle over the value of what is
sometimes known as ‘Fußnotenphilologie,’ or footnote philology.13 Footnotes
are, as has been said about classics in the wake of Wilamowitz, “the foundation
of scholarship”: That is why they lie at the foot of the page.14 It was a view that
Wilamowitz himself plainly held already in 1872 when he viciously attacked
Nietzsche for his impoverished scholarship, first in Zukunftsphilologie! Eine
Erwidrung auf Friedrich Nietzsches “Geburt der Tragödie” (Future Philology!
A Reply to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy”) and then in an identically
titled sequel pamphlet from 1873, bearing a slightly revised subtitle (Future
Philology! Second Part: A Reply to the Attempts to Rescue Fr. Nietzsche’s
“Birth of Tragedy”), now responding to the interventions of Richard Wagner (an
open letter to Nietzsche) and Erwin Rohde, whose own tract (an open letter to
Wagner published in August 1872, a few months after Wilamowitz’s pamphlet
had appeared) was facetiously entitled Afterphilologie and thus played on the
connotations of “false,” “anal,” and “post-.”15
In their outward form alone, Wilamowitz’s two pamphlets could not contrast
more sharply with Nietzsche’s book than they already do in their stated intent:
They are festooned with footnotes. The first essay, a mere twenty-seven pages
short, contains on average two footnotes per page, and many of these are elaborate,
learned disquisitions in miniature, often taking up anywhere from a quarter to a
third of the page. The second installment is shorter and contains fewer notes but
is still heavily decorated with footnotes along with the rest of the scholarly appa-
ratus (citations and quotations of primary and secondary materials in the origi-
nals, with Greek set in Greek font, etc.). But form merely follows function. And
so, unsurprisingly, Wilamowitz’s attitude is identical to Ribbeck’s as witnessed
above: “And what are Mr. N’s proofs (b e w e i s e) for the sufferings that of all
times then, the Greeks, those eternal children, who innocently and unsuspectingly
delighted in the beautiful light, allegedly endured—nay, enjoyed—in impotent
ecstasy?” (Zu1 36/8; translation adapted, emphasis in original). A quotation from
GdT follows, and then there is a brief comment: “welch nest voll blödsinn! [What
a pile of nonsense!]” (Zu1 36/8). Moments later, Wilamowitz complains again,
“What a disgrace, Mr. N, to alma mater Pforta!” meaning Schulpforta, the highly
acclaimed secondary school that both had attended and which had prepared them
for their future careers at the university, one evidently more so than the other, or so
Wilamowitz would have us believe. And yet, behind the polemics, one senses that
Wilamowitz must have seen in Nietzsche a grotesque reflection of himself and of
the philological tradition that both had inherited from identical sources. A sibling
rivalry more than a clash of opposites was in play here (more on this below).

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There is something disingenuous in the demand that Nietzsche should be

as fully accountable as any philologist even though he made no pretenses to
behaving like one in his treatise on the birth of tragedy. How could Wilamowitz
honestly expect to find proof of Nietzsche’s “intuitions” in his treatise? But this
only begins to describe the dilemma of the situation. I have already noted how
Wilamowitz’s choice of “weapons” (his term) involved him in an incommen-
surability of forms.16 Challenging Nietzsche’s philological credentials while
allowing that Nietzsche never actually sought to “present himself as a scholarly
researcher” to work within the philological paradigms put a strange burden of
proof on Wilamowitz’s shoulders.
These problems notwithstanding, Wilamowitz struck out wildly, countering
Nietzsche at every possible level: at the level of form (by dignifying his polemic
with the trappings of scholarship), at the level of content (by correcting him on
particulars), and at the level of tone. Tone is a signal component of scholarship,
equal to all the rest in Wilamowitz’s eyes, and Nietzsche, he believes, has it all
wrong. To make the point palpable, Wilamowitz starts off by giving Nietzsche
the floor, which is to say the first, valuable page-plus of Wilamowitz’s own
piece, thereby allowing Nietzsche to indict himself, while intruding an appar-
ent minimum of editorial commentary (more on this appearance of restraint
in a moment). Next, Wilamowitz proceeds to attack what the reader has just
read, less for what it says than for the way it reads: “This is just a sample and
foretaste of the tone and tenor [ton und tendenz] of The Birth of Tragedy, both
of which seem self-incriminatory in any case […]. As it stands, tone and tenor
are the book’s main offenses. Mr. Nietzsche by no means presents himself as
a scholarly researcher” (Zu1 29/3; emphasis added). The question of tone and
tenor returns at the close of the first pamphlet, not as an explicit theme but in
the way Wilamowitz assumes the mantle of tradition and respectability, as the
savior of all that Herr Nietzsche threatens to destroy. “But one thing I demand:
that Mr. N be faithful to his word,” Wilamowitz intones, before he strikes a
louder note:
Let him seize the thyrsus; let him move from India to Greece. But let him
step down from the chair from which he is supposed to teach scholarship
[wissenschaft]. Let him gather tigers and panthers around his knees but not
Germany’s philological youth who—in the asceticism of self-denying work—
are supposed to learn to look everywhere only for the truth, to free their judg-
ment through eager devotion, so that classical antiquity will provide them with
that unique and eternal insight which only the favor of the Muses promises, and
which only classical antiquity can guarantee in such abundance and purity[:]
meaning in their hearts
and form in their minds—
[den gehalt in ihrem busen
und die form in ihrem geist—] (Zu1 55/24; translation adapted)

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78 James I. Porter
So ends the first of Wilamowitz’s dyspeptic scholarly discharges against

Nietzsche and his unscholarly effusions, here on an effusive and nearly unintel-
ligible note of Wilamowitz’s own—this time, however, in the name of Classical
Scholarship, with himself starring as the self-appointed prophet of the disci-
pline.17 What Wilamowitz fails to acknowledge here is that his own tone varies
considerably throughout his screed. Here he takes the high moral ground of the
German professoriate, and he even dares to ask Nietzsche to step down from
his chair at Basel. Elsewhere, Wilamowitz can be taunting, contemptuous, and
derisive, as in his discussion of satyrs: “[I]f one wanted to expose the madness
of Nietzsche’s idiosyncrasies, one could begin with comedy, since Nietzsche
applied to comedy the doctrines that were issued for tragedy” (Zu1 47 n. 36/31
n. 36; translation adapted). One of the several reasons why Wilamowitz decided
against submitting his pamphlet to an academic journal was that its editors
“would hardly approve of my tone.”18
The final two lines of his pamphlet quoted above, which appear without any
attribution, are adapted from the last two verses of Goethe’s poem Dauer im
Wechsel.19 Evidently, their relevance lies in their quasi-Platonism: Classical
studies promise something like an everlasting core in the ever-changing world
of reality. But while Wilamowitz feels free to use Goethe as he sees fit, he
is less charitable when it comes to letting Nietzsche quote from Germany’s
cherished national poet. A page earlier, Wilamowitz refers to a quotation given
by Nietzsche from Goethe’s Faust, pt. 1, at the close of GdT 9: “Das ist deine
Welt! Das heisst eine Welt! —” Oddly, Wilamowitz’s own rendering of the same
quotation, claiming to be a quotation of Nietzsche’s quotation, reads: “das ist
eine welt, das ist deine welt!” Wilamowitz continues: “[So] triumphs Mr. N.
He does not suspect that Faust is posing this question with bitter irony. Did he
not understand even Goethe?” (Zu1 54/23; translation adapted). Without enter-
ing into the different layers of irony that surround this moment, let us stick to
the most obvious—namely, that Wilamowitz has misquoted either Nietzsche or
Goethe or both at once. Which is it? Though on any account the differences in
question are minor, the imprecision is undeniable—and rather inexplicable.20
A simple misfiring of a quotation would not draw much attention by itself were
it not for the fact that Wilamowitz is making so much of his own philological
standards, on the one hand, and of his opponent’s lack of “devotion to truth
[wahrheitsliebe]” and to “history and critique,” on the other (Zu1 55/23).
Nor is this the solitary example of its kind in Wilamowitz’s rebuttal of
Nietzsche. In fact, this unexplained oddity is one of the least noticed hallmarks
of Wilamowitz’s pamphlet. As it happens, Wilamowitz consistently misquotes
Nietzsche in his refutation of him—not always, but to such a large extent that
one has to wonder whether the errors are unwilled or intentional. Given that
Wilamowitz had opted to critique Nietzsche in a philological fashion, all the
while acknowledging that Nietzsche made little or no pretenses to philological

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display, Wilamowitz’s slippery use of quotation in his polemic takes on a

peculiar, and even a symbolically charged, force. I believe that the pattern of
misquotations in Wilamowitz’s pamphlets is both willful and systematic and
that the logic of his strategy can be re-created if we reconsider the pragmatic
constraints of his situation.
Nietzsche’s flagrant disregard for scholarly convention was palpable, not
least in his eschewal of any citational apparatus. In response, Wilamowitz would
impose the system of philology back upon Nietzsche. But there was a catch.
How seriously did Wilamowitz regard Nietzsche’s text? And how closely did he
choose to read it? How closely did he deem it worth reading? Nietzsche’s mon-
strosity, GdT, put Wilamowitz in an uncomfortable double bind. In responding
to this essay, Wilamowitz had to accomplish two contradictory goals at one and
the same time: He wished to demonstrate how greatly he valued the citational
scholarly apparatus but—for the same reason—how little he valued Nietzsche’s
text. And so, as paradoxical as it may sound to us today, the way he decided to
prove both points was by misquoting Nietzsche’s text in as systematic a way
as possible. This, at least, is what the remainder of the present essay will set
out to show.
II. Quotation as a Weapon
In the remainder of this essay, I want to document Wilamowitz’s quotational

style in Zukunftsphilologie! and then to examine what this pattern of misquota-
tion tells us about his posture as a philologist who, on his own admission, upheld
the highest standards of textual accuracy. The contrast between his inaccuracy
in the one department and his demands for perfection in the other is stark. It is
surely significant. And it is very noticeable, once one catches wind of it.
Indeed, Nietzsche noticed the problem himself. Thus, in a letter from July 16,
1872, Nietzsche wrote to his friend and co-conspirator Rohde: “I say p. 8: ‘Apollo
could not have countered any more dangerous force by holding out [entgegen-
halten] the Gorgon’s head against it’ [GdT 2; translation adapted]; Wil. says, in
place of this, ‘swings’ [schwingen] on p. 9 and on p. 18, where he even misquotes
me [mich … falsch citiert] with quotation marks [mit Anführungsstrichen]. I still
can’t figure out what W.’s problem is—assuming he knows what the aegis is”
(emphasis in original). Now, in the first case, Wilamowitz merely paraphrases
Nietzsche (“he has Apollo swing the Gorgon’s head rather than the Aegis” [Zu1
32/6]), whereas in the second he does appear to be rewriting Nietzsche’s text
from whole cloth while at the same time availing himself of the same verb,
‘schwingen’: “freilich hat Apollon zuerst ‘gegen das andringende dionysische
das medusenhaupt geschwungen’ [Of course, at first Apollo “swung the Gorgon’s
head against the advancing Dionysian power”]” (Zu1 41/13; translation adapted).

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80 James I. Porter
No wonder Nietzsche is puzzled. Not only is Wilamowitz willfully misconstruing

his text (by “Gorgon’s head” Nietzsche plainly means the Aegis of Zeus), but
what is worse he is transmogrifying that text into something utterly unrecogniz-
able and no longer Nietzsche’s own. And when Wilamowitz repeats the same
verb (‘swings’ [schwingen]) to link the two “citations” in his own text, he is
merely reinforcing the deep nature of the substitution that has taken place. In
Wilamowitz’s mind at least, Nietzsche not only meant but actually said some-
thing quite other than what his text reads.
We might discount this as an instance of scholarly lassitude on Wilamowitz’s
part. He could, after all, be freely paraphrasing Nietzsche, substituting a word
or two here and there while sticking to the gist of his meaning and conveying
the bulk and essence of the original. But Nietzsche obviously did not take it this
way: He finds Wilamowitz’s misquotation egregious and outside the scholarly
norm—a norm that he can hold Wilamowitz to justifiably, not least of all in view
of the fact that Wilamowitz appears to be upholding it himself in his criticisms
of Nietzsche. It is no contradiction on Nietzsche’s part that he failed to observe
scholarly conventions in GdT but expected to find them elsewhere. Trained
in the finest traditions of German philology, Nietzsche could tell the differ-
ence between good and bad scholarship with ease. Rohde would raise the very
same objection in Afterphilologie, not only on Nietzsche’s behalf but also at his
prompting: Nietzsche orchestrated Rohde’s reply, down to the last detail.21 Thus,
Rohde complained, the word Nietzsche had used was ‘entgegenhält,’ and “not
‘schwingt,’ as the diatribist makes our friend say, using his favorite move, by
falsifying his language [mit beliebter Fälschung seiner Worte], and even using
quotation marks [mit Anführungszeichen]” (Aft 86–87 n. **). Part of this remark
is lifted from Nietzsche’s letter to Rohde quoted above, as is the whole of its gist.
And if it should strike us as odd that Nietzsche notices only this one instance of
misquotation, we can be fairly certain that such was not the case. The telltale word
‘favorite’ suggests this by itself. Moreover, Rohde’s response is sprinkled with
further references to the phenomenon beyond the one instance that we happen to
know was discussed thanks to the preserved correspondence between Nietzsche
and Rohde.22 Indeed, from the beginning, Rohde is keen to point out the vari-
ous ways in which Wilamowitz has produced a distortion (Verdrehung) and a
falsification (Fälschung) of Nietzsche’s position—his “favorite” moves.23 And
the compilation of this list surely reflects conversations held privatim between
the two co-conspirators as they drew up their joint strategy against Wilamowitz.
Something has gone terribly wrong here. For when Wilamowitz starts off
his rebuttal, the impression he gives is that he intends to treat Nietzsche’s text
with nothing but the utmost seriousness. As mentioned, the pamphlet com-
mences with a long, direct quotation from GdT, which takes up over a page
of Wilamowitz’s text. How long the quotation actually runs is hard to know,
because although Wilamowitz opens the passage with a quotation mark, there is

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no close quote at any point to mark the end of the excerpt. Partway through this
exercise Wilamowitz begins to interject page references into his text. After the
first page reference comes a first footnote, which appears at the bottom of the first
page of Wilamowitz’s text and reads: “The numbers in the text give the pages
of Nietzsche’s book” (Zu1 28 n. 1).24 We are being put on notice: Wilamowitz
intends to proceed in a sharply philological manner, dissecting Nietzsche’s text
page by page, passage by passage, and word by word, all the while citing it
chapter and verse as he moves through the work as though it were a classical text.
(This is a tack that he abandons in the second installment of Zukunftsphilologie!
a year later, for obvious reasons. As the new subtitle suggests—A Reply to the
Attempts to Rescue Fr. Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy”—his aim there is to
rebut Rohde’s attempt to save Nietzsche while further damning GdT.) So at first,
everything is all high seriousness. Only, the method breaks down even before it
has a chance to get off the ground.
The first detectable alteration comes in the very first sentence of the quota-
tion, which is also the first sentence of the pamphlet and which begins, “Wie
verändert sich plötzlich die wildniss unsrer ermüdeten cultur, […] [How suddenly
the desert of our exhausted culture is changed, […]]” (Zu1 28/2). Appearances
notwithstanding, this is not an exact quotation of Nietzsche’s original, which
instead reads: “Aber wie verändert sich plötzlich jene eben so düstere geschilderte
Wildniss unserer ermüdeten Cultur, […] [But how suddenly that desert of
our exhausted culture, just described in such gloomy terms, is changed […]]
(orthography apart, the differences in the original are marked with underscoring
[GdT 117]).25 If one looks closely, it becomes quite obvious that Wilamowitz is
not seeking to reproduce Nietzsche’s text with any degree of faithfulness—he
has elected to leave out a half dozen words from the original, which stems from
GdT 20—but neither is he indicating anywhere his refusal to do so. The quotation
continues, now dotted with brief editorial queries in angle brackets:
[…] wenn sie der dionysische zauber berührt! ein sturmwind packt alles abgelebte,
morsche, zerbrochene, verkümmerte, hüllt es wirbelnd in eine rote staubwolke
<rot?> und trägt es, wie ein geier <wie ist das?> in die lüfte.
[…] when it is touched by the Dionysian magic! A tempest seizes everything that
has outlived itself, everything that is decayed, broken, and withered, and shrouds
it, whirling, in a cloud of red dust <red?> to carry it into the air like a vulture <like
a what?>. (Zu1 28/2; translation adapted)
There will be more to say about these editorial intrusions in a moment. At any
rate, Wilamowitz carries on for a few more lines, now in a way more faithful to
the original, until the quotation abruptly breaks off a little over halfway into the
same, first page. Here, Wilamowitz takes over, first by switching into the mode
of paraphrase and then by entering into more extensive editorial comments and
critique. He then resumes the original quotation, picking up where he left off,

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82 James I. Porter
only to interrupt things again for another brief bout of commentary, and finally
completes the quotation with one last round of Nietzsche’s words. The process
is worth examining closely, as this will allow us to watch Wilamowitz at work
in his peculiar, opening demolition of Nietzsche.
The break occurs where I have inserted a right-angle bracket below, which
is confusingly missing from Wilamowitz’s text. I have put Nietzsche’s original
text into boldface for the sake of clarity where Wilamowitz makes no such
differentiation. As will soon become apparent, Wilamowitz is not content to
maintain the boundaries of direct quotation, but neither is he keen to mark
their violation:
—Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian life and the rebirth of
tragedy,26 the age of the Socratic man is over.27 [<]This strange species of
man is also called theoretical man, critic, optimist, non-mystic—all those are quite
horrifying things. But with the exception of the musicians of the future, everything
that participates in Hellenic culture since Socrates belongs to this group. For, since
Socrates, the “Alexandrian culture” has prevailed (104),28 which is best of all
characterized as a culture of the opera.> Put on wreaths of ivy, put the thyrsus
into your hand, and do not be surprised when tigers and panthers lie down,
fawning, at your knees. Only dare to be tragic men!29 <or Buddhists—which is
the same thing (100, 10830); Nirvana, of course, not in the sense of what it means
historically but how it appears in the stratosphere of metaphysics[>] You shall
accompany the Dionysian pageant from India to Greece. Prepare yourself
for hard strife, but believe in the miracles of your god (117). (Zu1 28–29/2–3;
translation adapted)
So runs Wilamowitz’s rendition of Nietzsche, in effect offering an encapsula-

tion of some of the highlights of his text and a “foretaste” of his style. The punc-
tuation of Wilamowitz’s original is, as anyone can see, a disaster. Punctuation
is meant to mark off editorializing comments; internal quotations set within
the larger, framing quotation are given in their own quotation marks, while the
framing quotations lack all quotation marks. Page references are supplied to
remind the reader that a paraphrase—or rather, a double voicing that has fallen
out of the quotational framework—is occurring and where its textual basis is
anchored. Nonetheless, telling apart quotations from paraphrases, paraphrases
from references, references from pastiches, and in one case a sentence from
another is impossible to do. Run-on punctuating structures abound, confus-
ingly, due to the lack of paired quotational markers. The closing angle bracket
after “opera” is an orphan. Wilamowitz had been using this sign earlier to
interject derogatory editorial comments in his own voice: “<red?>”; “<like a
what?>”; “<who sings?>.” Here, the effect of the bracket is to turn everything
before it into one such comment (which it is). But the overall impression is
one of sloppy workmanship on Wilamowitz’s part, despite all the pretenses to
scholarly accuracy. The problem is mirrored in the sequel starting with “<or
Buddhists —,” which lacks a closing right-angle bracket. The language from

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GdT (p. 117) is accurately reproduced in itself; but one would never know this
from the way in which Wilamowitz interferes with the flow of Nietzsche’s
text unless one had Nietzsche’s original to hand to compare it with.31 For all
intents and purposes, Wilamowitz has contaminated Nietzsche’s text with his
own voice and has brought whatever clarity Nietzsche had originally attained
into a massive blur.
And that is the point. A great many of the passages purveyed as quotations
from GdT by Wilamowitz in both installments of Zukunftsphilologie! turn
out on closer inspection to be pseudo-quotations, which is to say either near-
quotations or partial quotations, whether they are off by a word or more or
whether they are a collage of phrases drawn freely from Nietzsche’s vocabu-
lary. Sometimes they are vague reminiscences of the original, serving as mere
mnemonics intended to bring back to mind something of the gist and flavor of
Nietzsche’s text. Sometimes they are free inventions by Wilamowitz himself
put into inverted commas—and hence specious quotations altogether. We could
say that Wilamowitz is citing from memory, were it not for the fact that his page
references are consistently perfect even where his quotations are not.32 He quite
plainly has Nietzsche’s book open before him.33
Alternatively, Wilamowitz was working hastily under publication deadlines
or other constraints. Anyone who wishes to put this forward as an excuse for the
indelible results of his efforts may do so. That argument might hold for the first
pamphlet but not for both, and the quoting style is identical in both documents.
What is so striking in all of this is the clash between the two levels of accuracy
that run through Wilamowitz’s pamphlets: He is perfectly capable of quoting
Nietzsche to the letter, while in other places he offers more of a pastiche or else
what I would call, for want of a better phrase, a translation into German—his
own German—of Nietzsche’s original language, albeit of a fairly approxima-
tive sort. This latter kind of citational practice is absolutely characteristic of
Wilamowitz’s critique of Nietzsche’s first book, to a degree that is unparalleled
in any of his other writings, as will be shown below. Because this fact has never
been truly noted, I want to draw attention to it in the simplest possible way while
making some provisional conclusions on this basis.
To this end, attached to the present essay are two appendixes in which I exhibit
the passages in which Wilamowitz claims, in his two pamphlets from 1872 and
1873, to be quoting from GdT directly and where GdT fails to bear out his claims.
My aim is to put on record this startling fact about Wilamowitz’s onslaught
against Nietzsche. One immediate implication of this analysis is obvious. It is
that Wilamowitz was not always talking about the same text that Nietzsche had
published, despite his claims to the contrary. And at least in one case it emerges
that Wilamowitz is quoting himself, which is to say, his own confection of words,
which he claims comes from Nietzsche but which he had invented in his ear-
lier pamphlet and displayed there as a quotation from Nietzsche. The second

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84 James I. Porter
appendix also includes a handful of misquotations from Afterphilologie for

good measure. The reader is urged to consult these appendixes for further
evidence of the claims to follow.
Once one takes into account this complete tally of the quotational discrepan-
cies in both installments of Zukunftsphilologie!—established here for the first
time—the results are, I think, indisputably clear: Wilamowitz is not terribly
interested in verbal accuracy when it comes to the philology he practiced on
Nietzsche’s text. By way of a control, it only makes sense to ask how his treat-
ment of Nietzsche’s words compares vis-à-vis his other philology from around
the same period. The most immediate answer is available in his citations of
Greek texts from Zukunftsphilologie! itself. And here, to the extent I have been
able to determine so far, Wilamowitz scores a near perfect grade.34 A howler in
Greek would mean a major embarrassment, all the more so given Wilamowitz’s
stridency in his criticism of Nietzsche’s use of philology. And in his schol-
arly publications from the time Wilamowitz shows himself once again to be
more careful in his quotations of ancient and modern authors than he was with
Nietzsche, though it is perhaps fair to say that Wilamowitz has a strong preference
for communing directly with the blood of the ancient ghosts than with his peers
and contemporaries.35 Consequently, references to modern scholarship in his
other writings tend to be minimal and terse. Typical examples are such fleeting,
positive citations as “vgl. [cf.] Gaisford Hephaist. I 101. Lorenz, Epicharm. 36”
or “Bergk comm. 143.”36 Criticisms are equally laconic (“[E]iniges hat Welcker
kl. Schriften II 280 richtig beurtheilt; ihm lag aber doch nur das Mythische im
Sinn [Welcker’s assessment (in his) Kl(eine) Schriften was partially correct; but
he had only myth in mind]”), as are self-criticisms, which are rare events (“Was
ich Hermes VII 142, 4 gesagt habe, ist an sich haltlos [What I said (in) Hermes
(vol.) 7(: p.) 142 (n.) 4 is completely untenable]”).37 As a rule, Wilamowitz
prefers citations over quotations, and he uses these to play favorites, drawing
up lists of allies and foes so as to mete out agreement or dissent.38 In those rare
cases where he does quote from contemporary scholars verbatim, he tends to be
exact, as in a footnote to an article from 1877 in which he quotes from Johannes
Classen’s preface to a commentary on Thucydides with considerable care, down
to the level of punctuation, which he preserves with near perfect accuracy.39 A
hint of Wilamowitz’s earlier imprecision with respect to Nietzsche, however,
appears in the same article when he quotes from another scholar but gives the
wrong page number and modifies the original words by singularizing the subject
and predicate and failing to indicate an ellipsis, a device he elsewhere knows
how to employ perfectly well.40
In other words, if we look about elsewhere, we see that contemporary scholarly
conventions of quotation admitted of absolute precision and that Wilamowitz
knew perfectly well how to follow these when he so wished. It seems, moreover,

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that he did follow those conventions to the letter most of the time in his published
scholarship from the 1870s, to the extent that he deigned to quote from his peers
at all. As noted, his primary modus operandi was to leap over the heads of his
predecessors and contemporaries into the more fertile soil of antiquity, at least to
all appearances. In all of these respects, his treatment of Nietzsche (and Rohde)
was egregious when measured against his own standard practice and against
that of his academic peers.
That Wilamowitz was a stickler for rules should be unsurprising. He and his
peers considered themselves to be philologists first and foremost, and so too
standard-bearers of the philological ideal, whose creed might as well have run,
“We philologists are always looking everywhere for nothing but the truth,”
as Wilamowitz had put it in Zukunftsphilologie! in 1872. They were habitu-
ated to treating all texts in a philological fashion, ancient and modern alike.
To read was to read with an eye to textual error and to its possible correction.
The habit was so deeply ingrained that not even ancient authors were exempt
from the charge of corrupting their own works, as Wilamowitz nicely dem-
onstrates in an article from 1877, when he takes to task an otherwise obscure
biographer of Thucydides of unknown date, Marcellinus, in a way that puts
us in mind of nothing so much as his tract against Nietzsche: “In Marcellinus
3, 25 [sic; read: 3, 16] we find the remark that, produced in the first instance
through the stupidity of Marcellinus (not, say, through a scribal error), turns
the facts perversely into their opposite, namely that the name reads ’Όλορος
and not ’Oρόλος.”41 Interestingly, the identical point about Marcellinus’s mis-
take concerning the name of Thucydides’s father, Olorus, was made earlier
by Classen in 1869.42 In fact, the only difference between Classen’s text and
Wilamowitz’s lies in the rhetoric of vituperation (and the small detail that
Wilamowitz lists the wrong passage in Marcellinus). What is of even greater
interest is that Wilamowitz knew Classen’s work well enough to be able to
quote its author in some detail in an earlier article from 1876.43 But here, in
1877, Wilamowitz cites no modern authority for his observation.44 With this,
one more facet of quotation comes to the fore: The decision to use the tool is
invariably coupled with a decision not to use it; the absence of quotation can
be as meaningful as its presence.
We have learned two significant facts about Wilamowitz’s scholarly quota-
tional habits from the 1870s. First, lengthy or even brief quotation of his peers
is an absolute rarity in Wilamowitz. Second, and most glaringly, ad hominem
attacks on individual scholars are absent in Wilamowitz’s classical scholarship
from this period. On both counts, Nietzsche’s is an isolated case. It is not, for that
reason, one to be dismissed. Wilamowitz was the first scholar to read and inter-
pret Nietzsche’s text closely and, so to speak, philologically. In doing so, he not
only earned the dubious honor of being the first Nietzsche scholar (certainly the

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86 James I. Porter
first scholar of GdT ). He also set an unfortunate trend: the tradition of misreading
Nietzsche. Plainly, Wilamowitz had very little respect for Nietzsche’s text, and
he seemed more than content to show it.
III. Afterphilologie
Additional proof, if it is needed, may be found in Wilamowitz’s treatment of

Afterphilologie. Though cited with less frequency in the second installment
of Zukunftsphilologie! than GdT, Rohde’s text fares much better at the hands of
Wilamowitz than Nietzsche’s does in pure proportional terms: There are quota-
tional errors, but far fewer in Rohde’s case than in Nietzsche’s. An explanation
is not far to seek. I have already mentioned how Wilamowitz’s initial plans to
write a review of GdT quickly changed as his moral outrage grew and his essay
transformed into a polemical pamphlet, one that, as he recognized, would be
inadmissible in any scholarly setting. Dropping the pretenses of a scholarly
review (a format GdT was, to be sure, ill-suited to nourish), Wilamowitz had
effectively left all academic decorum behind.
The situation with Rohde is slightly different. Rohde wrote anonymously but
was easily unmasked by Wilamowitz.45 And Rohde’s stance was different from
Nietzsche’s. Where Nietzsche ignored the conventions of philology in order to
make his extravagant claims about metaphysical reality, Rohde sought hard to
ground those same claims again in Fußnotenphilologie. His position was that of
the outraged professional, and he reasoned from within the trenches, not from
somewhere beyond them. In short, he wished to prove that Nietzsche’s book pre-
supposed conventional philological knowledge and then shifted the arguments
to a higher level, one that took in the problems of culture, religion, philosophy,
and the very nature of the discipline of classics. In the process, it deliberately
eschewed the form of a primer or, as he repeatedly dubbed it, a “Hülfsbuchlein”
(brief handbook).46 Meanwhile, Wilamowitz, Rohde argued, was set on reduc-
ing the problems to just such a level, namely, that of an undergraduate survey.
Rohde effectively depicted Wilamowitz as an overeager secondary schooler,
fresh out of Schulpforta, who wanted to counter Nietzsche with the sort of eru-
dition that could be found in any handbook and who sought to bolster his case
with a mountain of citations from antiquity. At turns patient and exasperated,
Rohde, still twenty-six years old and three years Wilamowitz’s senior, tried to
give the newly minted Ph.D., whom he variously addressed as “the Dr. phil.”
and “the pamphleteer” or “the diatribist [der Pasquillant],” a lesson in “the phi-
lology of the present and the future.” Lacking Nietzsche’s flair for imaginative
flights, he elected to counter Wilamowitz on his own ground by appealing to
the basic stuff of classical philology—primary and secondary sources and their
true meaning—as in the following: “So, let us leave the diatribist at his school

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desk and examine the sparse yet ever so crucial reports that shed light for us on
the prehistory of tragedy […]” (Aft 93).
Thus, in Afterphilologie quotations are all that matter, be they distorted ver-
sions of Nietzsche standing in dire need of flagging for the unsuspecting reader
or else stolen by Wilamowitz from the classicist’s professional anthology of
secondhand knowledge and for that reason shopworn and worthless. Indeed,
the struggle between Rohde and Wilamowitz is a battle of quotations. And here,
Wilamowitz responded in kind in his second installment of Zukunftsphilologie!
by attempting to refute Rohde with Rohde’s more respectable weapons.47 But
even more significantly, at issue in Rohde’s eyes was a battle about the role of
quotations in the conduct of classical philology. Quotations stood symbolically
for the positivistic reliance on factual references, given the prevailing assump-
tion that the more facts one could assemble, the more precise was the picture of
truth one could paint. Thus, in Afterphilologie, Rohde claims that even philolo-
gists must draw inspiration from philosophy in formulating their ideas about
antiquity, especially where such hallowed notions as “the objectivity of a purely
historical science [Wissenschaft]” are concerned (Aft 73–74). Unity, the form
of the totality of things, the sources of one’s most universal notions—all this
has to be won from a deeper kind of perception than dry historicism could pro-
vide: “For the sort of objectivity [that touches the nature and essence of ancient
art] that pretends to rest on ‘attestations’ [Zeugnisse] alone is purely illusory”
(Aft 74). Nietzsche’s hand is to be felt here.48 But Rohde seems to have believed
what he was preaching, since he could sing the same tune elsewhere. In a letter
to Ribbeck from November 1872, Rohde likewise bemoaned “the wondrous
tendency of an age”—his own—that wasted its scholarly potential by promot-
ing sheer “cumulative activity [addirenden Thätigkeit]” over its opposite, an
“animating comprehensive view [beseelenden Gesammtanschauung] and an
ethical feeling for the whole.” Only a “purely ‘scientific’ age,” one that “rendered
things lifeless and cold,” could condemn a work like Nietzsche’s.49 In more
general terms, Rohde championed the older humanistic virtues of the “classical”
ideal, “culture,” and “civilization” from the age of Schiller and Wolf, just as
Nietzsche had done in GdT 20. In the simplest of terms, Rohde was appealing
to the basic problem of the incommensurability of science and art. For in ques-
tion was nothing less than the essence of the tragic work of art (Kunstwerk);
and no amount of dry science could fathom that.50 Wilamowitz never addressed
these largest of issues, nor could he afford to do so. For this would have meant
engaging in a fundamental debate about the essence of the discipline’s boundar-
ies. And doing that would have meant conceding the very ground on which he
stood and then meeting Nietzsche somewhere in the hazardous middle ground
of uncertain and unpoliced no-man’s-lands.51
Be that as it may, Rohde relentlessly attacked Wilamowitz for the way he piled
on citations from the past like an overeager “historical-critical after-philologist”

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88 James I. Porter
(Aft 92). Thus, when Nietzsche had merely touched on the initial, mythical
struggle between the two titular deities of tragedy, prior to their reconciliation and
unification in the tragic literary form, he left a small historical gap in the record:
This naturally presented the Dr. phil. with a golden opportunity to stuff the
lacuna with the tatters and scraps of his measly citations: and so, true to form,
he goes on to produce a whole flood of undigested scraps of information on
pp. 20 and 21, the mere sight of which, quite apart from the sheer disgust at this
wasteful display of what every student knows, makes one simply ask oneself in
amazement what the point of this whole bag of tricks is […]. Alas, the majority
of these scraps from his pile of tidbits prove absolutely nothing. (Aft 88)
And near the opening of his counter-salvo, Rohde mocks the “hail of citations
culled from the most travelled roads of the most common manuals [Hülfsbücher]”
(Aft 71). Evidently, the time Wilamowitz spent back in Berlin padding out
his refutation of Nietzsche with book learning did little to impress the likes
of Rohde. As Rohde depicts it, Afterphilologie and Zukunftsphilologie! stand
worlds apart. And they are divided, first and foremost, not by the tone and tenor
of their arguments, as Wilamowitz would have it, but by the very stance they
take toward the scholarly quotational apparatus and everything this implies.
But was this truly the case? Perhaps not, because Wilamowitz could always
counter that his use of Nietzsche’s quotations, at least, was intended in the first
instance to capture the gist and flavor of Nietzsche’s writing, which was not found
in particular words because it resided in the general effect of the words in their
totality. Being more or less precise in his rendition of Nietzsche’s text would have
made absolutely no difference to the final outcome of his analysis. Nietzsche
and Rohde would object to this double standard of philological precision, and so
might subsequent readers. And because Nietzsche himself had left a vacuum of
evidence surrounding his arguments, it fell to Wilamowitz to start all over from
the ground up. While something like this might be Wilamowitz’s only conceiv-
able line of defense, or rather excuse, it hardly begins to explain his exceptional
treatment of Nietzsche or his own use of loose paraphrase under the misleading
cover, or ruse, of quotation marks. A more plausible explanation lies in the dis-
ingenuousness of his “favorite” move itself, which scarcely went unnoticed at
the time, as we saw. Because Nietzsche showed so little respect for the conven-
tions of philology and disdained its quotational apparatus, Wilamowitz would
return the favor by treating Nietzsche’s text with contempt and by distorting the
very same apparatus, as if saying to his face: “If you feel that quoting sources
and philological precision are unimportant, then so do I (at least in your case).”
IV. Sibling Familiarities
But, then, why the double standard? Why did Wilamowitz nevertheless act as if
Nietzsche’s text contained a philological argument that could be disproved by

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philological means, when he had conceded that it could not (“Mr. Nietzsche by
no means presents himself as a scholarly researcher”)? The answer is surely that
Wilamowitz knew very well, as did Rohde, that behind the façade of indifference
to philological method in GdT lay a massive erudition and a hidden system of ref-
erences to ancient and modern sources alike. And all of this, he felt, was entirely
fair game for critique. Nietzsche was, after all, a first-rate classical scholar in his
own right with a sizable list of well-placed publications; and even Wilamowitz
initially stood in awe of the man.52 The fact that Nietzsche was concealing his
learning behind a mask of creativity in GdT would be a moot point to anyone
who supposed that Nietzsche’s stance was nothing more than a mask and that
his truest object in that work was his ostensible object—namely, ancient and not
modern culture. As it turns out, this supposition is wrong: The opposite was the
case, as even Wilamowitz must have known.53 That is, even Wilamowitz sensed
that Nietzsche’s book presented a mortal threat to modern classical studies, which
were but a fragment of modern (“Alexandrian”) culture. It did so not because it
thinly veiled Nietzsche’s own brand of positivistic historical-critical learning but
because it was reaching well beyond classical learning to another understanding
altogether, one that Wilamowitz could only dimly grasp. Reducing Nietzsche’s
ideas to their paraphrasable tone or content did not even come close to analyzing
their alarming potential. The only valid index of this latter was Wilamowitz’s
own stridency—and his sheer panic. And perhaps the best defense Wilamowitz
had was to ignore the largest implications of GdT, or at least to pretend to do so,
by reducing the work to a (bad) piece of classical scholarship.
Even so, what this last set of considerations shows, if they are right, is that
Wilamowitz’s critique, for all its seeming wantonness, was nevertheless operat-
ing on several levels at once. Wilamowitz was sensitive to the ruses of presenta-
tion, and so, perhaps to an even greater extent than he imagined, was Nietzsche.
But that is not the only point of convergence between these two towering figures
from the nineteenth century. For in his tendency to blend his own authorial
voice with that of Nietzsche and in his immixture of high-strung emotion, his
theatricalization of the voice, his casting of his writing as pseudo- and specious
quotations (in an exaggerated and critical ventriloquizing of his opponent), and
his rampant ad hominem polemicizing, Wilamowitz was anticipating a style that
Nietzsche would later perfect in his own writings, for instance, in his attacks on
Wagner, but not only there. In this respect, as in so many others, Wilamowitz
shows himself to be more closely affined with Nietzsche than either he or subse-
quent generations of readers have been willing to allow.54 Even in his desire to
commune directly with the sources of classical scholarship, by passing over the
heads of his peers in the present, Wilamowitz was aligning himself with one of the
features of Nietzsche’s approach—and one that Wilamowitz had faulted him for
in GdT. Nietzsche after all was prepared to invoke a direct intuition of antiquity
in preference to one mediated by science. He, too, preferred to commune with
the blood of the ghosts of the ancients directly. At least, this was his overt posture

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90 James I. Porter
in GdT, even if it was not his ultimate stance.55 All these factors go to suggest that
behind the rivalry between these two baby Titans of German classical philology
around 1872 lay a sibling familiarity that far outweighed any clash of opposites;
and it was Wilamowitz’s recognition of this, his sense of his and Nietzsche’s all
too close proximity, that led him to publish his two pamphlets against Nietzsche
in the way that he did and later to wish that he had not: “I ought never to have
published my piece. The orthography alone, which I took on board from Jakob
Grimm, must have appeared grotesque. And the reader must have gotten an
entirely false idea of my cockiness. I was a foolish lad and utterly blind to how
pretentious my behavior looked. But I have no reasons for regret; I was follow-
ing my daemon, […] [all] for the sake of my discipline [Wissenschaft], which
I believed to be in danger.”56 So reads Wilamowitz’s apology, three decades after
Nietzsche’s death and two years before his own. It is a brave confession that puts
a final punctuation mark on one of the more tumultuous episodes in the modern
history of classical philology, even if the struggle between these two great minds
would never truly come to a final resolution. It never could, not least because the
surrounding institutional forces would never permit such extremes to partner,
for all their troubling proximity. The loss was philology’s.
University of California, Irvine

[email protected]
Appendixes
List of Quotational Discrepancies in Zukünftsphilologie! 1872 and 1873:

Alleged Quotations of Nietzsche and Rohde by Wilamowitz but Not Found in
Die Geburt der Tragödie or in Afterphilologie
In what follows, references to both texts and to GdT are by page, and all quota-
tion marks from Zu1 and Zu2 are reproduced as they appear in each text. No
quotation marks are given to passages from GdT in order to mark its originality
(unless Nietzsche placed them there himself ). Where nothing follows the quota-
tions from Zu, there are no corresponding originals in GdT. More or less close
approximations are given where they appear and are relevant, sometimes intro-
duced by “cf.” (but approximations are not the equivalent of exact quotations).
Underscorings mark deviations; other deviations are explained parenthetically.
I will not be tracking all minor deviations; for instance, rephrasings like those
at Zu1 48: “führen […] reden” for GdT 55: “sprechen nur […] Reden”; or inver-
sions, such as at Zu1 42, which reflect careless freedoms taken with the original:
“schmachvoll oder lächerlich”; GdT 35: “lächerlich oder schmachvoll.” Nor am
I concerned with changes that result from the insertion of a quotation into a

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new syntactical flow, which in German can require a reordering of verbs or their

recasting in the subjunctive mood. Wilamowitz regularly ignores Nietzsche’s
original punctuation.
Appendix A: Zukünftsphilologie! (1872)

28: ‘Wie verändert sich plötzlich die wildniss unsrer ermüdeten cultur[’]; cf.
GdT 117: Aber wie verändert sich plötzlich jene eben so düstere geschilderte
Wildniss unserer ermüdeten Cultur
29 n. 2: ‘in dionysischer verzückung verlernt der mensch gehen und spre-
chen’; cf. GdT 5: er hat das Gehen und das Sprechen verlernt; and cf. GdT 35:
Die Verzückung des dionysischen Zustandes
30: ‘neuer Lykurgos’; the “Edonerkönig Lykurgos” is mentioned at GdT 69
30: ‘mit lichtvoller klarheit’; GdT 93: mit lichtvoller Bestimmtheit
31: ‘gänzliches verkennen der altertumsstudien’ (twice on that page); for
“verkennen” GdT 115 reads Verkehrung (the difference between “misrecogni-
tion” and “perversion” is substantive)
32: ‘weltsymbolik des urschmerzes des ureinen’. This has no correlate in GdT,
the closest candidate being GdT 29: Der Weltsymbolik der Musik ist […] mit der
Sprache auf keine Weise erschöpfend beizukommen, weil sie sich auf den […]
Urschmerz im Herzen des Ur-Einen symbolisch bezieht
32: ‘freude an der dissonanz’
32: ‘auffällige degeneration des hellenischen geist’
32: schwingen lässt; cf. GdT 8: entgegenhalten. Cf. also below on Zu1 41, where
Wilamowitz again insists on substituting “schwingen” for “entgegenhalten.” And
see p. 79–80 above for Nietzsche’s complaints about these misrepresentations.
33: ‘heros der pessimistischen tragödie’
33: ‘verschemelzen sie sich zur geburt der tragödie’; cf. GdT 1: zu gemeinsamer
Erzeugung des Kunstwerkes der attischen Tragödie verschmolzen erscheinen
34: ‘der höhern wahrheit des traumes gegenüber der lückenhaft verständlichen
tageswirklichkeit’; GdT 3: Die höhere Wahrheit, die Vollkommenheit dieser
Zustände im Gegensatz zu der lückenhaft verständlichen Tageswirklichkeit
35: ‘schönheitsspiegelungen und illusionen’; “Schönheitspiegelungen”
appears on GdT 14 and 99; “Illusionen” appears on GdT 14 (at some remove
from “Schönheitspiegelungen”) and in two other places
35: zum sieger gemacht’ (no open quote marks given); cf. GdT 14: Sieger
geworden sein muss
36: eines … ‘tiefen blicks in die schrecknisse der natur’; cf. GdT 92: wir
werden gezwungen in die Schrecken der Individualexistenz hineinzublicken
37: ‘erzene kunstperiode’;57 GdT 18: ‘erzenen’ Zeitalter
37–38: ‘mit schneidendem blicke mitten in das vernichtungstreiben der
sogenannten weltgeschichte wie in die grausamkeit der natur geschaut hat’; cf.

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92 James I. Porter
GdT 34: mit schneidigem Blicke mitten in das furchtbare Vernichtungstreiben der
sogenannten Weltgeschichte, eben so wie in die Grausamkeit der Natur geschaut hat
38: ‘farbenprächtigen gaukelspiel’
38: ‘die griechische geschichte von ihm erzählt’; cf. GdT 25: Von Archilochus
sagt uns die griechische Geschichte, dass
39: ‘abguss der welt in der musik’; “Abguss” is used on GdT 21
40: ‘das dionysische, mit seiner selbst am schmerz participierten urlust ist der
gemeinsame mutterschoss der musik und des tragischen mythos’; for “participie-
rten” GdT 140 reads: percipirten (a substantive difference); for “mutterschoss”
GdT 140 reads Geburtsschooss
40: ‘die sprache des absolut unaesthetischen’; and: ‘28 [nennt er] den willen
das absolut unaesthetische’; cf. GdT 28: der Wille ist das an sich Unästhetische
41: freilich hat Apollon zuerst ‘gegen das andringende dionysische das
medusenhaupt geschwungen’; cf. GdT 8: Apollo, der das Medusenhaupt
keiner gefährlicheren Macht entgegenhalten konnte als dieser fratzenhaft ung-
eschlachten dionysischen
41: ‘es erschien ja das dionysische dem apollinischen Griechen titanenhaft und
barbarisch’; GdT 17: ‘Titanenhaft’ und ‘barbarisch’ dünkte dem apollinischen
Griechen auch die Wirkung
43: ‘die frucht der aussöhnung der beiden widerstrebenden kunstgottheiten’
43: ‘volkskrankheiten dionysischer verzückungen[’], etc. A close quote mark
is missing, hence it is unclear whether only the term ‘Volkskranheiten’ is being
quoted or a paraphrase is being adduced in the form of a spurious quotation, as is
often the case elsewhere. “Volkskrankheiten” occurs (in scare quotes) at GdT 5;
“Die Verzückung des dionysischen Zustandes” appears at GdT35.
45: doch er weiss 75 zu sagen, dass die tragödie alle früheren kunstgat-
tungen aufgesaugt habe, während doch in Athen ausser dem dithyrambos auch
die elegie blühte, und der iambos doch wol von der komödie aufgesaugt’ war.
(Only the bold-faced portion appears in Nietzsche’s text.)
45: ‘verherlicht in diesem kinde, das Antigone und Kasandra zugleich
ist[’]; GdT 19: sich in einem solchen Kinde—das zugleich Antigone und
Kassandra ist—verherrlicht hat
46: ‘freude am urwiderspruch’ (no doubt, Wilamowitz coins the phrase out
of pure Schadenfreude)
46: ‘eben so unanfechtbar, wie dass längere zeit Dionysos der einzige held
des griechischen dramas war, ist es (51) dass niemals bis auf Euripides Dionysos
aufgehört hat der tragische held zu sein’; corresponds loosely to GdT 51: Es ist
eine unanfechtbare Ueberlieferung, dass […] der längere Zeit hindurch einzig
vorhandene Bühnenheld eben Dionysus war. Aber mit der gleichen Sicherheit
darf behauptet werden, dass niemals bis auf Euripides Dionysus aufgehört hat,
der tragische Held zu sein
46: ‘einen so befremdlich tiefen blick in das wesen der antiken tragödie
gestatteten’; GdT 4: so thun wir einen Blick in das Wesen des Dionysischen

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46 n. 34: ‘zwischen publicum und chor eigentlich keinen unterschied’;

GdT 38: dass es im Grunde keinen Gegensatz von Publicum und Chor gab
46 n. 34: die ‘rätselfhaftigkeit der orchestra bis auf hrn. N.’ (a bizarre “quote,”
to say the least!)
47 n. 36: ‘die Sprache der komödie’; GdT 57: in der Komödie […] den
Sprachcharakter
48: ‘von allen kunstrichtern zum drachen gemacht sei’; GdT 64: von den
Kunstrichtern aller Zeiten in einen Drachen verwandelt worden ist—
52: ‘erfinder des romans’: GdT 75: Vorbild des Roman’s
53: ‘[…] hätte man ihn über die grenze bringen sollen’: GdT 73: […] hätte
man ihn über die Grenze weisen dürfen
54: einer ‘metaphysisch tröstenden’ tragödie; a calque on der metaphysische
Trost, as at GdT 34
54: ‘soll lehren, dass die Moira als ewige gerechtigkeit über den göttern
thront’; GdT 47: [die äschyleischen Weltbetrachtung,] die über Göttern und
Menschen die Moira als ewige Gerechtigkeit thronen sieht
54: ‘das ist eine welt, das ist deine welt!’; GdT 50: Das ist deine Welt! Das
heisst eine Welt!—
55: ‘ein metaphysisches trostmittel’ (see 54)
55: die ‘höhere realität der traumwelt[’]; “Traumwelt” occurs four times
in GdT (p. 2: der schöne Schein der Traumwelten; p. 3: den schönen Schein
der Traumwelt; p. 43: in der apollinischen Traumwelt der Scene; p. 77: die
Traumwelt eines dionysischen Rausches); “höchsten Realität” appears on p. 102
55: ‘ein r e c h t wol zu missendes schellengeklingel’; GdT iv: ein auch wohl
zu missendes Schellengeklingel
Appendix B: Zukünftsphilologie! Zweites Stück (1873)

114: zur stempelung als ewige wahrheit;58 cf. GdT 134: den Stempel des
Ewigen
117: gegenseitige beräucherung bis zur narkotischen betäubung
117: umkehr; Aft 72: Umkehrung
118: ein weg, der zum buddhismus; GdT 118: ein Weg, der Weg zum indischen
Buddhaismus
118: über zeit, raum und individuum erhebenden ekstatischen zuständen der
buddhisten: cf. GdT 118: jener seltnen ekstatischen Zustände mit ihrer Erhebung
über Raum, Zeit und Individuum
118: welterlösungstage; GdT 9: Welterlösungsfesten
118: sehnsucht nach nirvâna
118: es unbeschreiblich albern sei, die im theater sitzenden zuschauer mit
schwärmenden bacchen, die gestalten der skene mit einem i m t a l e leuchtenden
wolkenbild zu vergleichen; GdT 39: Die Form des griechischen Theaters erri-
nert an ein einsames Gebirgsthal: die Architektur der Scene erscheint wie ein

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94 James I. Porter
leuchtendes Wolkenbild, welches die im Gebirge herumschwärmenden Bacchen

von der Höhe aus erblicken
119: reliefähnlicher scenenfolge; cf. GdT 7: Reliefs ähnelnde Folge der
Scenen
119: mit bewusster fälschung; Aft 81: mit offenbarer Fälschung
120: die aus dem apollinischen schönheitstriebe entwickelte homerische welt;
GdT 18: sich unter dem Walten des apollinischen Schönheitstriebes, die hom-
erische Welt entwickelt
120: r e i c h (a quotation? nothing corresponds to this in GdT)
120: r e g i e r e n (a quotation? nothing corresponds to this in GdT)
120: die olympische götterordnung der freude durch den apollinischen schön-
heitstrieb aus der ursprünglichen titanischen götterordnung des schreckens her-
vorgehen liess; cf. GdT 12: dass aus der ursprünglichen titanischen Götterordnung
des Schreckens durch jenen apollinischen Schönheitstrieb in langsamen
Uebergängen die olympische Götterordnung der Freude entwickelt wurde
121: völlig aus der luft gegriffne behauptungen; Aft 81: [einer] v o l l s t ä n d i g
a u s d e r L u f t g e g r i f f e n e n Behauptung
121: a quotation that takes up six lines in Zu2 is presented as a single quote,
but is in fact a pastiche of selections from GdT 28, 29, 108, 107–8, plus a con-
nective that is found nowhere in GdT: dagegen ist es
122: geburten, zu denen sich Apollon und Dionysos reizen; GdT 1: Apollo und
Dionysus […] sich gegenseitig zu immer neuen kräftigeren Geburten reizend
122–23: den schläfer in der mittagssonne, den ein schlag mit dem
Apollinischen lorber weckt; cf. GdT 21: wir sehen den berauschten Schwärmer
Archilochus zum Schlafe niedergesunken–wie ihn uns Euripides in den
Bacchen beschreibt, den Schlaf auf hoher Alpentrift, in der Mittagssonne–:
und jetzt tritt Apollo an ihn heran und berührt ihn mit dem Lorbeer
125: berichtet: GdT 25: sagt uns; cf. on Zu1 38 above
126: in einen ganzen abgrund von unwissenheit zu blicken; Aft 84: lässt in
einen ganzen Abgrund des Unverstandes und falschen Wissens blicken
126: freude am urwiderspruch (Wilamowitz here is quoting himself; see Zu1
46; cited above)
126: wundervollen Entdeckungen; is this meant to be a quotation from Aft
79?: wichtige Entdeckungen
127: maske des Sokrates (the alleged quotation appears twice on this page)
130: eine schar von verwandelten, zu dienern des gottes verzauberten:
GdT 40: ein Chor von Verwandelten; ibid.: Diener ihres Gottes geworden.
(“Schaar” appears on GdT 37; “Verzauberten” on GdT 38; “Verzauberung”
on GdT 40)

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Notes
Many thanks go to Bob Fowler and Jessica Berry for comments on earlier drafts of this article and
to Christa Acampora for careful editorial supervision.
1. I use abbreviations for the German editions of certain works, including:
Aft = Erwin Rohde, Afterphilologie: Zur Beleuchtung des von dem Dr. phil. Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Möllendorff herausgegebenen Pamphlets: “Zukunftsphilologie!” Sendschreiben eines
Philologen an Richard Wagner (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1872); reprinted in K. Gründer, ed., Der
Streit um Nietzsches “Geburt der Tragödie” (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), 65–111.
GdT = Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (Leipzig:
E. W. Fritzsch, 1872). When citing this text, I follow the practice of referring to the section rather
than page number. Exceptions to this practice are clearly marked in the main text; references in
the appendixes are to the original publication’s page numbers.
Zu1 = Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Zukünftsphilologie! Eine Erwidrung auf
Friedrich Nietzsches Ord. Professors der classischen Philologie zu Basel “Geburt der Tragödie”
(Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1872); reprinted in K. Gründer, ed., Der Streit um Nietzsches
“Geburt der Tragödie” (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), 27–55.
Zu2 = Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Zukünftsphilologie! Zweites Stück: Eine
Erwidrung auf die Rettungsversuche für Fr. Nietzsches “Geburt der Tragödie” (Berlin: Gebrüder
Borntraeger, 1873); reprinted in K. Gründer, ed., Der Streit um Nietzsches “Geburt der Tragödie”
(Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), 113–35.
2. Jacob Bernays, Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristoteles über Wirkung der
Tragödie (Breslau: Eduard Trewendt, 1857; repr. with an introduction by Karlfried Gründer,
Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970). Bernays would famously later complain that Nietzsche
had taken over his theory of catharsis without acknowledging his work (Nietzsche, letter to
Erwin Rohde, December 7, 1872 [KSB 4, no. 277]; see further William M. Calder III, “The
Wilamowitz–Nietzsche Struggle: New Documents and a Reappraisal,” Nietzsche-Studien
12 [1983]: 214–54, at 249). Ironically, it was Bernays, the Jewish outsider to the German
philological establishment, whom Nietzsche had earlier dubbed his paradigm for a “philology
of the future” (see James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future [Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000], 250).
3. See Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 262–65. Two further instances, and
indeed direct sources for Nietzsche, that I missed there are K. O. Müller, Aeschylos, Eumeniden:
Griechisch und Deutsch mit erläuternden Abhandlungen über die äussere Darstellung und über
den Inhalt und die Composition dieser Tragödie (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1833); and Bernays,
Grundzüge.
4. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, letter to Carl Ludwig Peter, his beloved rector from Schulpforta,
April 3, 1872, in Calder, “Wilamowitz–Nietzsche Struggle,” 227 with notes. This and the next
letter by Wilamowitz to be quoted below are precious documents of the period, and both first
appeared in Calder, “Wilamowitz–Nietzsche Struggle.”
5. Ibid., 224.
6. Ibid., 227.
7. Ibid.
8. The 1872 edition of Zukunftsphilologie! now exists in a useful but in places imperfect
English version: “Future Philology! A Reply to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ordinarius Professor of
Classical Philology at Basel ‘birth of tragedy’” trans. Gertrude Postl, with annotations by Babette
E. Babich, New Nietzsche Studies 4, nos. 1–2 (2000): 1–32, see 29/3. References by page divided
by a forward slash are to the pagination of the reprint of Zu1 in Gründer, ed., Der Streit um

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96 James I. Porter
Nietzsches “Geburt der Tragödie” and then to this English translation, with frequent adaptations.
Here and below I have preserved Wilamowitz’s unusual orthography (‘Kleinschreibung,’ or
avoidance of majuscules), on which see Wilamowitz’s own regrets, quoted at n. 56.
9. Zu1 29/3.
10. See GdT 1. Translations of GdT are from Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy” and
“The Case of Wagner,” trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). Wilamowitz
glosses the term, or the concept, Anschauung with the German word “intuition” at Zu1 29.
11. Letter to Rohde, August 4, 1871 (KSB 3, no. 149), replying to Rohde’s letters from
July 17 and August 1, 1871.
12. See next note.
13. Another, more common, albeit more disparaging, term for this academic tendency is
Anmerkungwissenschaft. On the general importance of footnotes to scholarship, and especially to
classical philology, see Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
14. Steve Nimis, “Fussnoten: Das Fundament der Wissenschaft,” Arethusa 17, no. 2 (1984):
105–34.
15. Wagner’s letter appeared in the Norddeutscher Allgemeine Zeitung on June 23, 1872;
Rohde’s appeared (anonymously) as a Sendschreiben in pamphlet form in summer 1872, in the
same house that printed GdT. The title was the handiwork of Franz Overbeck and was suggested to
Rohde by Nietzsche in a letter of July 16, 1872 (KSB 4, no. 239). In this letter, Nietzsche carefully
staged the proposed counterdocument, down to the placement of Rohde’s signature: “You will
then place your name beneath the letter, i.e., at the end (but written out in full, with pride!). In your
envoi you can cheerfully address Wilamowitz a few more times as an ‘after-philologist […].’”
Rohde did not have the courage to sign his name to the document, as Wilamowitz observed (see
n. 45 below). All four pamphlets are reprinted in Gründer’s Der Streit um Nietzsches “Geburt der
Tragödie,” along with a few other pertinent documents. References to these works hereafter will
be by page number to Gründer’s edition.
16. “Meine waffen” (Zu1 55/24).
17. Tone is of the upmost importance in Wilamowitz’s mind once more in his exchange with
Rohde, as is shown by a letter to his parents from January 5, 1873, though he might as well
have been talking about the first essay (unless he was): “Because now I too assume a high tone
especially at the end [of the essay] and, as it were, declare my faith and belief in scholarship [mein
wissenschaftliches Glaubensbekenntnis ablege], as one only can when one is vindicating a place
for oneself in scholarship, I am only going to make even more enemies yet” (unpublished letter,
in Calder, “Wilamowitz–Nietzsche Struggle,” 250 n. 264).
18. Letter of mid-March 1872, in Calder, “Wilamowitz–Nietzsche Struggle,” 224.
19. Similarly, the words “with the unique and eternal insight that only the favor of the Muses
promises” are adapted from the preceding two verses from Goethe’s poem.
20. That is, unless Wilamowitz is ironically misquoting Goethe, though I have to confess that
if this is so, then the point or the irony eludes me. Is Wilamowitz claiming bragging rights to
knowing Goethe so well as to be able to invert him at will? Another possibility is that Wilamowitz
is indeed working from memory or even unwittingly citing a culturally transmitted inversion
of the original. See the identical misquotation of Goethe by Karl Schram in Schiller-Album zur
hundertjährigen Feier der Geburt des Dichters: Eine Festgabe der Freunde Schiller’s in der neuen
Welt (Philadelphia: Schäfer u. Koradi, 1859), 32; and later by Theodor Lessing in Nachtkritiken:
Kleine Schriften 1906–1907, ed. Rainer Marwedel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 286.
21. See n. 15 above.
22. See Aft 73, concerning the alleged allusion to Nirvana: “[E]ither these words are spoken
vainly into the wind, or else they are directed against Schopenhauer’s view” but not Nietzsche’s
(emphasis in original); Aft 90, taking Wilamowitz to task for riding roughshod over “the clear
language of our friend” and putting words in his mouth (ditto Aft 93 n. *; see also Aft 86–87,

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n. **; cf. Zu1 43, where a citation by page from GdT is used to anchor the allegation in question);
and Aft 102: “I look everywhere in vain to locate a passage where my friend says this or something
like it. Did the author of this diatribe imagine that none of his readers would notice the falsehood of
his claim?” In Aft 103 (along with an accompanying note) Rohde addresses another instance of a
“false accusation of our friend” and a “palpable misinterpretation of [a] statement” and explicitly
rules out the excuse of “nocturnal forgetfulness.”
23. See Aft 81, 87 n. **, 94 n. *, 102, 103; cf. 107: Wilamowitz has produced a Zerrbild
(caricature) of critical philological method through his “intentional misunderstandings” of
Nietzsche’s meanings.
24. This crucial statement (or rather, footnote) and its accompanying page reference (which
is embedded in the body of the text) are not rendered in Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, “Future
Philology!”; instead they are silently replaced with an updated reference to KGW in an endnote
(26 n. 1). The effect of the substitution is to efface the fact that the reference to Nietzsche’s
pagination originated with Wilamowitz and not with the editors of the English edition.
25. The published English version obscures Wilamowitz’s alterations twice over, and
inconsistently at that, by posting an ellipsis at the start of the sentence (rather than reproducing the
original “But” from Nietzsche’s text) and by filling in the words from the original that are silently
dropped from Wilamowitz’s quotation.
26. The comma is Wilamowitz’s; GdT has a final stop.
27. GdT 20, p. 117.
28. Wilamowitz’s first footnote appears here.
29. Continuation of the previous sentence from GdT.
30. A typographical error for “118”?
31. The English translation in Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, “Future Philology!” silently emends
the punctuation that is lacking in Zu1.
32. Or nearly so (assuming a typographical error lies behind the one inconsistency noted
above in n. 30).
33. This is true even if Wilamowitz composed a draft of the first pamphlet while he was
home in Markowitz and away from his library during March 1872, and then added further
quotations and citations, presumably taken from primary ancient materials, when he returned to
Berlin in April 1872 (see the two letters by Wilamowitz published for the first time in Calder,
“Wilamowitz–Nietzsche Struggle,” 222–28, esp. 224 and 227). He surely had a copy of GdT to
hand while he penned the rough first draft—and when he penned the second installment as well,
as is shown by the quite careful control he could exercise over his quotations when he wished to
in both documents. For example, at one point during the later heated exchange, a play is made
on Nietzsche’s original image of staring pleasurably into Dionysian abysses (“in die dionysischen
Abgründe mit Wohlgefallen zu Schauen” [GdT, p. 73]). Rohde lobs the image at Wilamowitz,
whose own abyssal ignorance is on display, Rohde holds, throughout his critique of Nietzsche:
“[Er] lässt in einen ganzen Abgrund des Unverstandes und falschen Wissens blicken” (Aft 83–84).
Wilamowitz turns the charge back against Rohde: Rohde’s defense merely allows readers “in einen
ganzen abgrund von unwissenheit zu blicken” (Zu2 126). Then he fires back that it is his two
opponents who are the ones who are gazing stupidly but delightedly into the deepest abysses of
ignorance, by reverting to the original from which Rohde drew his imagery, namely, Nietzsche’s
book: “die herren blicken eben mit wolgefallen in abgründe, nicht bloss dionysische […]” (ibid.),
where the words set off in italics in his text are direct quotations from GdT, p. 73. Wilamowitz
obviously spotted the allusion by Rohde to GdT. More than that, he is demonstrating his keen
facility in operating on several levels of textual allusion and with a high degree of accuracy—when
he feels the need to do so.
34. In places, Wilamowitz is using dated editions that no longer agree with modern ones, as
in his two quotations from Euripides’s Iphigenia Among the Taurians at Zu1 34 (where I have
not been able to check his texts against the edition he used, which is not signaled). Elsewhere,

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98 James I. Porter
the Greek looks to be fairly flawless. I have not checked Wilamowitz’s multiple references to
ancient loci: It is verbal quotations that are of greatest interest to me here. For his later famous
remark about the blood of the ghosts, see Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Greek Historical
Writing and Apollo: Two Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford June 3 and 4, 1908,
trans. Gilbert Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 25. On its origins in Nietzsche, see Porter,
Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 411 n. 209.
35. As has been noted before (e.g., Robert L. Fowler, review of W. M. Calder III et al.,
Wilamowitz nach 50 Jahren [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985], Classical
Journal 82, no. 1 [1986]: 67–72, at 70–71).
36. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, “Die megarische Komödie,” Hermes 9 (1875):
319–41, at 328 n. 1, 375 n. 2.
37. Ibid., 322 n. 1, 323 n. 1.
38. E.g., “This [idea] is frequently heard, but it is one of the completely untenable hypotheses
that are found in Bergk (comm. crit. in com. [= Theodor Bergk, Commentationum de reliquiis
comoediae Atticae antiquae libri duo (Leipzig: F. Koehler, 1838),] 54 ff.)” (Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, “Erklärung,” Hermes 12, no. 2 [1877]: 255–56, 330 n. 7); or “I take
Kirchhoff’s results on the origins of Herodotus’ work to be, on the whole and indeed in nearly all
their particulars, the irrefutable truth” (ibid., 331 n. 11).
39. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, “Memoriae obliterae,” Hermes 11 (1876): 291–304,
at 292 n. 1 = Johannes Classen, Thucydides, 2nd ed., 8 vols. in 3 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1873), vol. 1:
xv and vol. 1: xxiv (the latter is either misprinted or else wrongly given as “xxii” in Wilamowitz’s
citation).
40. Ibid., 299 n. 1: “dicit p. 42 [sic] die Thatsache, dass der Ehrenbeschluss für Kleon von
Kleänetos ausging” = R. Schöll, “Die Speisung im Prytaneion zu Athen,” Hermes 6 (1872): 14–54,
at 44 n. 1: “die Thatsache, dass die Ehrenbeschlüsse für Kleon von Kleainetos, für Demosthenes
von dem Schwestersohn Demochares und für diesen von dem Sohne Laches ausgingen.” For a
correct use of the ellipsis (in a faultless quotation), see Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, “Erklärung,”
256: “in dessen Vorrede er sagt schedas ab Hauptio acceptas H. Nohlius […]. olim mihi
commodavit. descriptas anno 1872 Romae versans iterum hic illic contuli” (quoting Emil
Baehrens, ed., P. Papinii Statii Silvae [Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1876], vii).
41. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, “Die Thukydideslegende,” Hermes 12 (1877):
326–67, at 344. The Vita is now thought to be a compilation in several hands dating, in its current
form, to anywhere between the sixth and tenth centuries ce.
42. Johannes Classen, Thucydides, 2nd ed., 8 vols. in 3 (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung,
1862), 1:x–xi n. 3.
43. See n. 40 above on this quotation.
44. He does credit Hermann Sauppe with having treated the passage in some convincing if
unspecified way, and he does mention a long tradition of scholarship that had been misled by
Marcellinus’s confusion. Nevertheless, a year later, R. Schöll (“Zur Thukydides-Biographie,”
Hermes 13, no. 4 [1878]: 433–51, at 445 n. 2) would credit Wilamowitz alone with having laid
the blame for the textual corruption on the “stupidity” of Marcellinus and not on some copyist. It
looks like Wilamowitz’s authority had indeed prevailed.
45. Zu2 114 (the first page): “[H]e signed his initials, E. R.” This is false, as Rohde nowhere
discloses his identity in Aft, so we might want to add this to the list of misquotations, though as
they say, all is fair in love and war. Subsequently, Wilamowitz addresses Rohde by his full name.
Wilamowitz was evidently privy to the rumor mill.
46. “Ein Hülfsbuchlein zur Belehrung wissenschaftlich Unmündiger” (Aft 87).
47. Even later on, looking back on the whole sordid affair, Wilamowitz would suggest that
Nietzsche drew whatever inspiration he had had about Dionysus from Rohde, whom Wilamowitz

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regarded as an “outstanding scholar” (Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Erinnerungen

1848–1914 [Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1928], 129–30). Rohde, for his part, would never forgive
Wilamowitz (Calder, “Wilamowitz–Nietzsche Struggle,” 246 n. 235).
48. See also Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 272.
49. Letter to Otto Ribbeck, November 5, 1872, in Calder, “Wilamowitz–Nietzsche Struggle,”
244; emphasis in original. The solution to the “anti-philosophical” demeanor of the age is,
naturally, Nietzsche’s “artistic-philological” antidote (ibid.).
50. Aft 109–10.
51. See James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on “The Birth of Tragedy”
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), and Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future for
Nietzsche’s positions on these issues.
52. Jonathan Barnes, “Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius,” Nietzsche-Studien 15 (1986): 16–40;
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Erinnerungen, 129.
53. For the argument that it was, see Porter, Invention of Dionysus, esp. 148–63.
54. For this point about underlying affinities, see Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the
Future, 271 n. 198, 273 n. 208, 382 n. 184, and 411 n. 209. See also Calder, “Wilamowitz–
Nietzsche Struggle,” 229–31.
55. See Porter, Invention of Dionysus, 41–43, 158.
56. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Erinnerungen, 130. The orthography, of course, did appear
grotesque. See Rohde’s complaints at Aft 68 n. *: He finds the lowercasing of all nouns “pedantic,”
“affected,” and old-fashioned.
57. Interestingly corrected at Zu2 121.
58. Direct quotations in Zu2 are no longer signaled by Wilamowitz through inverted commas,
as in Zu1, but through italics, which I have preserved. No page references are supplied in Zu2, in
marked contrast to Zu1, with the exception of Zu2 127, which quotes and cites a two-word phrase
from GdT 62 and then a longer passage from GdT 76 (and fairly accurately, though not perfectly
so). In a few uncertain cases, Sperrung may be being used by Wilamowitz in place of italics to
mark a quotation (or paraphrase), rather than emphasis. And once, on p. 116, Wilamowitz appears
to use italics to quote the churnings of his own mind rather than the language of his opponents.

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“Don't Quote Me on That!

”:: Wilamowitz Contra Nietzsche in 1872 and 1873

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I. Wilamowitz Contra Nietzsche

W hen Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931) set out to critique

JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 42, 2011.

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no pretensions to philology? What if, as Wilamowitz states in the opening

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or a quotation from some ancient text or testimony) or indirectly (by way of

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There is something disingenuous in the demand that Nietzsche should be

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So ends the first of Wilamowitz’s dyspeptic scholarly discharges against

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display, Wilamowitz’s slippery use of quotation in his polemic takes on a

II. Quotation as a Weapon

In the remainder of this essay, I want to document Wilamowitz’s quotational

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No wonder Nietzsche is puzzled. Not only is Wilamowitz willfully ­misconstruing

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So runs Wilamowitz’s rendition of Nietzsche, in effect offering an encapsula-

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appendix also includes a handful of misquotations from Afterphilologie for

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Additional proof, if it is needed, may be found in Wilamowitz’s treatment of

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IV. Sibling Familiarities

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University of California, Irvine

List of Quotational Discrepancies in Zukünftsphilologie! 1872 and 1873:

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new ­syntactical flow, which in German can require a reordering of verbs or their

Appendix A: Zukünftsphilologie! (1872)

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No wonder Nietzsche is puzzled. Not only is Wilamowitz willfully misconstruing

new syntactical flow, which in German can require a reordering of verbs or their