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and of the best, wantonest humour? Finally, who would
venture on a German translation of Petronius, who, more
than any great musician hitherto, was a master of PRES-
TO in invention, ideas, and words? What matter in the end
about the swamps of the sick, evil world, or of the ‘ancient
world,’ when like him, one has the feet of a wind, the rush,
the breath, the emancipating scorn of a wind, which makes
everything healthy, by making everything RUN! And with
regard to Aristophanes—that transfiguring, complementa-
ry genius, for whose sake one PARDONS all Hellenism for
having existed, provided one has understood in its full pro-
fundity ALL that there requires pardon and transfiguration;
there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on
PLATO’S secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily
preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed
there was found no ‘Bible,’ nor anything Egyptian, Pythag-
orean, or Platonic—but a book of Aristophanes. How could
even Plato have endured life—a Greek life which he repudi-
ated—without an Aristophanes!
- It is the business of the very few to be independent; it
is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even
with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so,
proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring
beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a
thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings
with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how
and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn
piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such