ABSTRACT
I AS a typical romantic, isolated in the world in which he lived, Nietzsche looked for an escape both in the future and in the past. In his compensation-myth of Zarathustra he conjured up a wishful image of the future. And as for the past, he found an escape in ancient Greece: not in the Periclean and Socratic Greece, but in that of the sixth century B.C.—a fact which, after all, was less strange than it may seem. Apart from his intimate personal urges in this direction, there were two special reasons responsible for such a course. His concern about European culture was one of them; the traditional interest of so many German scholars in classical Greece was the other.
