60 Nietzsche
meeting Wagner, he discovered that the theme had been right in front of
his nose all along. It was Greek tragedy. Even before his encounter with
Wagner, Nietzsche had dealt with this topic, but only now did he dis-
cover the "vortex of being" that it offered, as he stated in a draft of a
preface to The Birth of Tragedy (7,351).
Nietzsche wrote this first book while still beholden to the philologi-
cal profession and wanting to vindicate his premature academic appoint-
ment, when he had neither doctorate nor postdoctoral thesis in hand,
with a dazzling publication. Later, in his "Attempt at Self-Criticism,"
written in 1886, he put these motives behind him. In retrospect,
Nietzsche described himself as a "disciple of an as yet 'unknown God,' "
who, under the "cloak of the scholar," had nothing in mind but seeking
"fellow revelers and luring them into new secret alleys and dance floors"
(1,14; ^"Attempt at Self-Criticism" § 3).
Greek tragedy became a dance floor on which one could be pulled
into the "vortex of being."
The individual stages of The Birth of Tragedy can be readily distin-
guished. First came two public lectures, "Greek Music Drama," which
was delivered on January 18, 1870, and "Socrates and Tragedy," on
February 1,1870.
In the first of these two lectures, Nietzsche developed his thesis that
Greek tragedy originated in Dionysian festivals. This lecture remained
entirely within the framework of contemporary classical philology
Nietzsche had borrowed a standard work on Greek tragedy, Karl
Otfried Müller's Geschichte der griechischen Literatur (History of Greek
Literature, 1857) from the university library in Basel. Müller's book
referred to the cult of Dionysus as the germ cell of Greek drama. His
book provided many revealing details concerning the dancers' goat and
deer hide costumes, their masks, and their "need to emerge from them-
selves and become alien to themselves" (Latacz 38). Nietzsche, however,
wished to move well beyond the typical parameters of classical philolo-
gy, which kept a strict distance from its subject matter, and to immerse
himself in the delirium of these festivals. The "impediment" of schol-