ABSTRACT
In 1869, the twenty-four-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche accepted the chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel and, as the law required, acquired Swiss papers. Shortly thereafter he met Richard Wagner for the first time and over the course of that and subsequent years often visited Wagner and his wife, Cosima, in their villa at Tribschen on Lake Lucerne. Nietzsche framed the lectures around a supposed return trip to a clearing in the woods near the Rhine that he, or the narrator, made with a student friend. While there, practicing with pistols, the friends are interrupted by an old man, said to be a philosopher, and his younger companion, who has forsaken the life of teaching to which the old man introduced him for a life of solitary nonsocial contemplation. Nietzsche proposed in the Birth a new understanding of the origins of tragedy, and by implication a new understanding of Greek history and identity.
