render homage to beauty, babblers and triflers,
develop the body, ugly-looking creatures,
speak clearly, stammerers,
are religious transfigurers filthy pedants,
of everyday occurrences,
are listeners and observers, quibblers and scarecrows,
have an aptitude for the unfitted for the symbolical,
symbolical,
are in full possession of ardent slaves of the State,
their freedom as men,
can look innocently out Christians in disguise,
into the world,
are the pessimists of philistines.
thought.

95

Bergk’s “History of Literature”:  Not a spark of Greek fire or Greek sense.

96

People really do compare our own age with that of Pericles, and congratulate themselves on the reawakening of the feeling of patriotism:  I remember a parody on the funeral oration of Pericles by G. Freytag,[9] in which this prim and strait-laced “poet” depicted the happiness now experienced by sixty-year-old men.—­All pure and simple caricature!  So this is the result!  And sorrow and irony and seclusion are all that remain for him who has seen more of antiquity than this.

97

If we change a single word of Lord Bacon’s we may say . infimarum Graecorum virtutum apud philologos laus est, mediarum admiratio, supremarum sensus nullus.

98

How can anyone glorify and venerate a whole people!  It is the individuals that count, even in the case of the Greeks.

99

There is a great deal of caricature even about the Greeks . for example, the careful attention devoted by the Cynics to their own happiness.

100

The only thing that interests me is the relationship of the people considered as a whole to the training of the single individuals . and in the case of the Greeks there are some factors which are very favourable to the development of the individual.  They do not, however, arise from the goodwill of the people, but from the struggle between the evil instincts.

By means of happy inventions and discoveries, we can train the individual differently and more highly than has yet been done by mere chance and accident.  There are still hopes . the breeding of superior men.

101

The Greeks are interesting and quite disproportionately important because they had such a host of great individuals.  How was that possible?  This point must be studied.

102

The history of Greece has hitherto always been written optimistically.

103

Selected points from antiquity:  the power, fire, and swing of the feeling the ancients had for music (through the first Pythian Ode), purity in their historical sense, gratitude for the blessings of culture, the fire and corn feasts.

The ennoblement of jealousy:  the Greeks the most jealous nation.

Suicide, hatred of old age, of penury.  Empedocles on sexual love.