CHAPTER TWO

Corinna

THE FIRST SENTENCE of the first section of The Birth of Tragedy reads as follows:

“Aesthetic science” is the oxymoron that captures the precarious sense of Nietzsche’s magnificent, mysterious early work as a whole. In this chapter I shall have to skirt the oxymoron, avoiding the troublesome question as to whether and how Nietzsche successfully mates αίσθητ⍳κή with έπ⍳στήμη, that is, whether and how Nietzsche overcomes the strict segregation of these two in the universe of Plato’s Timaeus and in the realm of subsequent Western metaphysics. Instead, I shall ask a straightforward, nontechnical question: Precisely how are Apollo and Dionysos to meet and mate, and in such a way as to give birth to tragedy? Who will be the mother of tragedy?¹

Nietzsche invokes the Schopenhauerian “mothers of Being,” Wahn, Wille und Wehe—will o’ the wisp, will, and woe. He also refers to music as the “maternal womb” of tragedy. Yet what do these “mothers” have to do with Apollo and Dionysos? These two gods are stylistic opposites. They comprise the duplicitous source of all Greek art. When they couple, the highest form of Greek art, Attic tragedy, is born. Yet each of these parents, as Nietzsche describes them in The Birth and in essays preceding The Birth, is itself duplicitous.

Apollo lends his name to the realm of oneiric visibility, pictorial image, outline and measure, limit and individuation. An artist’s Apollinian dreamplay produces what Nietzsche calls den schönen Schein, radiant semblance. Such play transforms all horror and disgust into beautiful appearance. Yet the transformation is itself duplicitous, inasmuch as a sensation of semblance as such accompanies it. Hence a form of knowledge (albeit a knowledge defined by the less-than-Apollinian term sensation, Empfindung) must at least accompany, if not help to accomplish, the transmutation of horror. Inasmuch as Nietzsche always and everywhere refers to such horror as insight (Einblick) into or knowledge (Erkenntnis) of existence, we have the odd situation whereby one kind of knowledge accompanies the semblance that was meant to obscure knowledge, accompanies it without destroying it. The duplicity of this Apollinian covering over and unveiling may be implied in the curious fact that in “The Dionysian Worldview” (1, 560; cf. 1, 36; 150) Nietzsche calls the Apollinian realm a Mittelweit, an intermediary world; the word Mittelwelt points forward to what Nietzsche will envisage ten years later in the sailing ship, a Mittelwesen hovering between life and death, but also between male and female.

Dionysos lends his name to the rapturous states of intoxicated frenzy and the ecstasy of springtime. His is the world of sounds punctuated by intense, syncopated rhythms; of the transgression of outline, limit, and measure; of the principium individuationis in tatters. Here the artist himself or herself becomes the work of art, “the costliest marble.” Yet here too we find a bewildering duplicity in play. Alongside the intense experience of ecstasis a peculiar kind of lucidity and deliberation (Besonnenheit) prevails. Yet how can such perspicuous perception accompany, without destroying, the work of art?

Each of these two duplicities involves a moment of insight or lucidity, Erkenntnis and Besonnenheit. Each implies a veiling or occluding that is seen as such. Each invokes a moment of imperturbable presence, presence as absolute propinquity. Nevertheless, these gods lend their names to distancings and removals, to transport beyond the horrific reality of existence and to seizure beyond all individuation. If we pursue the genealogies of these two gods, as Nietzsche himself traces them, we may learn more about the duplicity they share. A sharing that may help us mate them. So that we can finally see the mother.

Apollo is of course utterly Hellenic and Homeric in origin, even though the entire Homeric panoply rises in response to the wisdom of Silenus—the archaic Greek tutor of Dionysos. We recall the malevolent grin on the face of Silenus as he responds to his captor, King Midas, who demands to know what is best for man. Nietzsche’s most dramatic transcription of Silenus’ words appears in “The Birth of the Tragic Thought” (1, 588):

The wisdom of Silenus becomes no more Hellenic when we hear it in the lilting language of W. B. Yeats’s “From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ ”:

According to Nietzsche, the Apollinian dream-world of Olympus serves as a mirror by which the Hellenic world is able to confront an archaic, violent nature; confront and overcome it, subduing the Erinnyes, placating the Moirai, decapitating Medusa, arrogating the Gorgo. These figures, all of them female, provide our first cautious glimpse of the mother(s) of tragedy. Yet at a certain point in the history of Hellenism the Apollinian mirror cracks, the measure of the Apollinian style falters, and the gods on Olympus themselves grow livid at the wisdom of Silenus. Archaic violence stirs again, this time as an invasion from the mountains of Lydia. Nietzsche writes, after the manner of Hegel: “ ‘Excess’ disclosed itself as truth” (1, 565). Enter Dionysos.

Although he has a savage Greek tutor, Dionysos (as Nietzsche knows him) is wholly Lydian, Asiatic, “oriental.” His scepter is the ivy-wound thyrsos, his instrument the Pipes-of-Pan played in the Phrygian mode, allegro molto vivace. His other principal trait may be gathered from Nietzsche’s references (in section 2 of The Birth of Tragedy and section 1 of “The Dionysian Worldview”) to “the witches’ brew of voluptuousness and cruelty,” “pan-Hetaeric animal life,” “the tiger and the monkey,” and “the sexual promiscuity” of “Babylonian-Sekaean orgies.” Second glimpse of the mother(s) of tragedy.

So foreign is oriental Dionysos to the Hellenic world that even after excess has disclosed itself as truth Dionysos must be domesticated. His music must be restrained in Apollinian cadences. The sexual release associated with his ὄ⍴γ⍳α must be transmuted into something quite different, something for which Nietzsche can find no Hellenic names but only Christian ones: he refers to “festivals of world redemption” and “days of transfiguration,” Welterlösungsfeste und Verklärungstage (1, 32). The most astonishing gesture in this rite de passage for Dionysos occurs when Nietzsche’s Apollo, playing the part of Pentheus in Euripides’ The Bacchae (see 1. 495), “removes the annihilating weapon from the hand” of the Lydian god (1, 32). If that weapon be the thyrsos, the phallic wand of Dionysos and his Maenad troupe, then the Lydian god is emasculated rather than domesticated. Unless of course Dionysos’ association with all things female before his verge is taken from him makes him in some sense always already female? In which case: what would the weapon in Dionysos’ hand be? Not merely the wand and cone, but also the ivy?²

This third glimpse of the mother of tragedy is perhaps most unsettling. Is a merely emasculated god capable of becoming the mother of tragedy? If the beating heart—what Hegel would call “the upswelling heart”—of Zagreus does not survive to be borne away and harbored in the godhead, how will tragedy be engendered? Yet what can it possibly mean to emasculate a preeminently feminine god, the god with down on his cheeks? What sort of distance opens here, at the instant of emasculation, such that both “masculine” and “feminine” traits are no longer fully present to our inspection and reflection, if indeed they ever were? We no longer dare skirt the issue. We must allow ourselves one final glimpse of the mothers. To be taken with exceeding care, lest they waken.

Nietzsche’s most striking image of the fusion of Apollinian and Dionysian elements in tragedy, of radiant dream and lucid ecstasy, is a remarkable adaptation of a scene in Euripides’ The Bacchae (11. 664–774; cf. “The Birth of the Tragic Thought,” 1, 586–87). The Maenad throng, assembled on a mountain meadow at midday, have collapsed after their wild worship. In their sleep of exhaustion they dream. And what they dream is tragedy: reenactments of the fragmentation, rescue, restoration, and rebirth of the god. The oneiric rapture of these women, says Nietzsche, unites the qualities of extreme sensitivity and passionate suffering (Leiden) with “the most luminous contemplative nature and lucidity” (1, 591; cf. 31; 555–56; and 583). Such Scharfsichtigkeit and Besonnenheit, to be sure, will remain problematic throughout The Birth. What does it mean to want to bathe Dionysos in Apollinian light? To knock the weapon from the Lydian god’s hand? Do these efforts aim to suppress or to acknowledge the god’s feminine or bisexual nature? To repress or to release his/her sensuality as such? Are the incessant exchanges, communications, transports, dislocations, and proliferations of sensual love to give way to the stability and surety of pure presence, or must presence itself be postponed indefinitely?

That Nietzsche struggled relentlessly against the suppression and repression of difference and dislocation cannot be gainsaid. Ten years after the period we are discussing, in the notebook that introduces the first notes on eternal recurrence of the same, the following sentence (utterly devoid of context) appears: “Do not be one who despises voluptuousness!” (9, 547). Another five years later, four aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil (numbers 155, 120, 75, and 141) show how intense the struggle would be, and how intimately the question of tragedy was to be touched by it:

Yet one need not advance fifteen years beyond The Birth of Tragedy to see the struggles, the inconsistencies, the loose ends. Nietzsche’s early work urges us explicitly to take the way to the mothers (section 16), a way on which Dionysos alone can be our guide. Nietzsche nonetheless resists every step along that path. As befits a late Alexandrian, one who lives out the final turns of the Socratic supplement (sections 14–15), the young Nietzsche wants to show us Dionysos. We too, at the outer limit of that age when science bites its tail and recoils toward art, we too want to see how the meeting and mating of the gods takes place.

That the way to the mothers is fraught with peril is the lesson of Oedipus (section 9). For Oedipus attains the powers of insight and prophecy, the Apollinian Einblick, only after he has transcended the bounds of individuation through patricide, incest, and self-mutilation. In his notebooks Nietzsche associates the name Oedipus with two others—those of Empedocles, the philosopher of Love and Strife, and the music-practicing Socrates—in his search for “the tragic human being” who is in fact “the last philosopher.” In the same notebooks (to which we shall now turn) Nietzsche has a great deal to say about woman in Greek antiquity.

Many sketches and plans of 1870–71 (see 7, 118, 124, 138, 158, and elsewhere) indicate a far more significant role for woman in The Birth than the role she eventually receives. In the book itself woman appears, as we have seen, in the formidable guise of Medusa. Her voluptuousness and cruelty, sensuality and cunning, are taken to be un-Hellenic, “oriental,” “Asiatic.” In contrast to the Hellenic myth of heroic Prometheus, the Hebrew myth of Sin and the Fall involves “curiosity, deceitful pretense, seducibility, lust—in short, a series of preeminently female affects. . .” (1, 69; 617). In a very real sense, Nietzsche’s published writings reflect a world in which orientalism and the female ally to oppose everything Greek.³ Even in the 1886 “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” where the question “What is Dionysian?” resounds, Nietzsche criticizes his early endeavors as “sugary . . . to the point of femininity” (1, 14). “Here something like a mystical and well-nigh Maenadic soul was speaking” (1, 15). The notebooks are more candid, less abashed.

I will say nothing here of the long notes on woman in the Greek polis (7, 143–48, 170–76, and elsewhere), except to note that the appearance of these passages in The Birth was postponed indefinitely. In general, they betray a remarkable ambiguity and ambivalence. While woman is for the Greeks a creature of the night, of solace and assuagement, “eternally the same,” she is nonetheless the instigator of carnage and destruction: the Greek woman is Helen. Then again, woman is closer to nature and to god than is the male: the Maenadic sex supplies Apollo with his principal interpreters—the Pythia and Sibylla, Kassandra, Diotima, and Antigone (1, 42; 7, 137). Whereas Demeter and Dionysos remain outside the walls (7, 150–51), the priestesses of Apollo play a crucial role in the life of the city. It is Diotima (Plato, Symposium 201d) who holds in check for ten years the plague that eventually ravages Athens. Hence the “tragic philosopher” and “physician of culture” dare not ignore the question of woman. He must at all events take a stance “against the hatred of the body” (7, 542), especially the “young woman’s body of the Sphinx” which “seduces us to existence” (7, 144); he must take a stance against the fear and hatred impacted in metaphysics since its inception. A note from early 1873 (7, 517) indicates that in this matter we cannot even identify the antiquity or modernity of the tragic philosopher:

The tragic philosopher and physician of culture will have to confront problems that metaphysics itself has assiduously avoided throughout its history. In these notebooks (7, 149) Nietzsche cites the duplicity of the sexes—a duplicity that bewildered Kant—as one such problem.⁴ A problem and a question here to be postponed, however, in order that we can confront Nietzsche’s notes on the tragic philosopher of antiquity, the philosopher whose very postponements will be the pursuits of philosophers of the other dawn.

By way of prologue, an astonishing fragment from late 1872 (7, 460–61). Here the figure of Oedipus—through patricide, matrimony, and mutilation a figure of transgressions and transmutations—proves to be duplicitous in himself.

The last human being, into whose “loneliest loneliness” will come in ten years’ time the demon whispering of eternal things, here undergoes a kind of doubling. The “beloved voice” grows hushed, reducing to a whisper of amor fati the curse that would annihilate the world. Oedipus the King attends the queenly voice in him. The identification of the last human being as Oedipus is most wrenching, for it marks the end of antiquity; the identification of him or her as the erotic Socrates is most seductive, dominating as it does our own era; the identification of her or him as Empedocles is most disconcerting, for it shows us our future.

In a school essay dated October 19, 1861, the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche reports his first contact with Hölderlin’s play, The Death of Empedocles. The epistolary essay (“A letter to my friend, in which I recommend that he read my favorite poet”) praises the “abundance of thought” and “supreme ideality” in Hölderlin, warmly recommending the poet’s never-completed tragedy: “. . . this remarkably significant dramatic fragment, in whose melancholy tones resounds the future of the hapless poet, the living grave of years spent insane; resounding not as you believe in nebulous chatter but in the purest Sophoclean language and in an infinite richness of profound thought.”⁵

It is not difficult to discern why and how Hölderlin’s Der Tod des Empedokles exercised such a strong influence on the young Nietzsche. For he was already struggling—as contemporary essays and jottings of his show—to liberate himself from the oppressive constraints of his familial and cultural heritage. The following sketch from Hölderlin’s “Frankfurt Plan” for The Death of Empedocles, the very first of such plans, exhibits the dramatic power that the figure of Empedocles would come to exert on Nietzsche:

As Ritschl’s student at Leipzig, Nietzsche later found independent access to Empedocles—through Diogenes Laertius and the fragments of Empedocles’ poems. Whereas the importance of Heraclitus for the young Nietzsche is stressed on all sides, his fervor for Empedocles is obscured by the fact that Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks says so little about the Sicilian physician and magus. There are half-a-dozen references to Empedocles scattered throughout that incomplete treatise, all of them halcyon in tone; yet no discussion of his “marvelous poem” or staggering fate takes place. It is as though Nietzsche were postponing discussion of Empedocles till another time and place, perhaps for another kind of writing. For there are notes on Empedocles that could have inspired the very title Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.

In the series of notes published in the Grossoktav and Schlechta editions as Wissenschaft und Weisheit im Kampfe (see the complete text in 8, 97 ff.), Empedocles is omnipresent. The very first of Nietzsche’s parallels between philosophy and music is “Empedocles-Tragedy [—] sacred monody” (8, 100). Empedocles is in fact the philosopher best suited to exemplify Nietzsche’s own endeavors as a whole (8, 104): “My general task: to show how life, philosophy, and art can be related to one another in a more profound affinity, without the philosophy becoming banal or the philosopher’s life dishonest.” A long passage on Empedocles follows (8, 105; cf. 119):

What must be emphasized in these notes on Empedocles is the association of a profound conception of sexual love, “unadorned nature,” with Greek tragedy. Such an association is established in other notes and in Nietzsche’s later published writings as well.⁷

After noting the emphasis on sexual passion and suffering in the early Greek poets, Nietzsche lists the philosophers and their salient traits: “Empedocles—blind love and blind hate; what is profoundly irrational in the world’s most rational man” (8, 106). Such “irrationality” embraces the themes of Greek tragedy, but also touches on traditional philosophical problems such as time, conceived as actio in distans. For it is actually Empedoclean “love” and “hate” that instigate Nietzsche’s notes (7, 571) on the ostensibly Pythagorean notion of “attraction, repulsion; affinity; actio in distans.”

Among the detailed notes on Empedocles there is one (23 [34] 1872–73; 7, 553–54) that deserves to be quoted in full. It explicates the relation of Empedoclean ϕ⍳λία and Νϵκος, love and hate as actio in distans, to sexual love (see also 8, 50 and 88):

It is important to note that such dramatically Empedoclean thoughts—the preeminence of the organic, the “dual nature” of love and strife in nature, religion, and politics, and the erotic matrix of all these things—emerge once again ten years later in the notebook (M III 1) that contains Nietzsche’s first jottings toward the thought of eternal return of the same. (See especially 9, 468 and 472–73.)

Before proceeding to Nietzsche’s plans for the drama Empedocles we must take into consideration one last extended passage on that philosopher. In the following remarks, culled from the lectures on “The Pre-Platonic Philosophers” which Nietzsche delivered to his philology classes at Basel in 1872, 1873, and 1876, we find the clearest echoes of Nietzsche’s postponed drama.⁸

The descendant “of an agonal family,” Empedocles both in his person and in his doctrine appears at the acme of an entire tradition. His very appearance—the severe demeanor, the regal apparel—causes a sensation everywhere. Empedocles’ task is to convert all the Hellenes to a rigorously Pythagorean way of life. Preaching the unity of all life, and prohibiting the eating of meat and various other foodstuffs, Empedocles elevates himself to the status of an immortal god. He transforms Parmenides’ notion of the oneness of being into “the incomparably more productive” thought of the the unique soul of the world, the oneness of life. From this thought streams an intense feeling of pity or compassion for all living things—the very Mitleidsgefühl that will later prove to be Zarathustra’s “gravest temptation.” The task of human existence is thus

Empedocles’ teaching also exhibits a political dimension. Acragas finds itself on the crest of a wave of imperial splendor and luxury, yet is rent by the struggle between the new democracy, which Empedocles supports and even radicalizes, and the traditional tyranny. Here Empedocles’ talents as rhetor unfold. After reforming the stormy politics of Acragas and rejecting the proffered crown, he travels throughout Greece. In Selinunt he quells a raging plague and is celebrated by the citizens as a god—an incident that will become central to Nietzsche’s plans for an Empedoclean drama.

The death of this physician of culture also captures Nietzsche’s imagination, as it had fascinated Arnold and Hölderlin before him. Empedocles’ grave is never found, and legends abound concerning his transmutation into a god. His death is bound up with two events which, in somewhat altered form, will be important for Nietzsche’s drama, namely, the reverence shown him by the citizens of plague-ridden Selinunt and the healing of the Acragan woman, Pantheia (see p. 111, n. 11, below). Among the sundry accounts of Empedocles’ death, the “Ionian” version—his plunge into Etna—is the one that Nietzsche, following the lead of his forebears, will adopt.

A contemporary of Aeschylus, Empedocles is “the tragic philosopher” (XIX, 194). To him mortals seem to be castigated, fallen gods. “The earth is a gloomy cave, a malignant meadow, a λε⍳μών ἄτης, where dwell murder, rancor, and a band of Keres such as illness and corruption” (ibid.). Every positive quality confronts an equally powerful opposite.

The “best and noblest” drive, which Empedocles calls ϕ⍳λία, has as its most intrinsic trait a “longing for the same,” die Sehnsucht zum Gleichen. As such, the drive toward unification is an early emblem of eternal recurrence and its grand affirmation.

Although an Anaxagorean strain is visible in Empedocles’ thought, Nietzsche stresses that this philosopher—as bird, bush, fish, boy and girl alike—had little enthusiasm for . Pleasure and unpleasure, “the ultimate phenomena of life,” sufficed. His was no mechanical universe of congealed beings jerked into motion by mind, but a cosmos of drives and animations, an ordered world without goals or purposes, a world in which each element coupled with all the others, a world in which chance was the only necessity. Nietzsche is perfectly aware of the resemblance of such a universe to that of Heraclitus (XIX, 200). He is also aware of its eminently tragic pathos. While Empedocles oscillates between science and magic, neither of these ever degenerates into a facile optimism; such oscillation earmarks Empedocles as a philosopher of the future, at the closure of the Socratic supplement.

Three clusters of plans and sketches in the notebooks of 1870–71 constitute the torso of Nietzsche’s proposed drama, Empedocles. Only two of them will be important for us here, the third being no more than a draft of the play’s opening (merely introductory) scene.¹⁰ The earliest cluster originated some time between the autumn of 1870 and the first weeks of 1871 (15, 27–28). The first note of this cluster:

A number of familiar themes rise to meet us here: Plutarch’s report of the death of Pan in The Decline of the Oracles, cited also in The Birth of Tragedy, section 11, and echoed in Nietzsche’s hyperborean refrain, Alle Götter müssen sterben (7, 107 and 125); the citizens’ proffering of the crown, an essential part of Hölderlin’s play as well; the plague which in Nietzsche’s estimation did much to bring the tragic age of the Greeks to a precipitous close. Yet what of this “most beautiful woman”? Of art as the “prophetess” of mortal misery? And of “woman as nature,” das Weib als die Natur?

Ancient sources attest to the importance of an event in Empedocles’ life involving a woman who was mortally ill. We shall soon see Nietzsche varying the theme of this woman, “Pantheia”, for his own purposes.¹¹ The second fragment tells us more about Nietzsche’s variation:

Empedocles is horrified by the nature that is disclosed to him in and through woman. What does the plague-stricken lover—for it is he and no longer Pantheia who collapses—tell Empedocles? What do his words have to do with the love Empedocles suddenly feels for the dying man’s beloved?

The third and last fragment of the first cluster answers none of these questions, but it does tell us more about the hero of Nietzsche’s tragic drama:

“Bringing science to dissolution.” Here it becomes clear that Nietzsche perceives Empedocles’ situation as identical to his own—much in the way Matthew Arnold adjudges that situation typically “modern.” Whereas Empedocles comes at the end of the first stirrings of science—a science which Socrates obviously cannot have introduced—Nietzsche comes at the end of the Alexandrian Age, when science is on the threshold of its final inversion to art—the supplement of Socrates-Mousikos. Empedocles too delights in the radiant semblance of Apollinian art. Yet such delight is subverted by the experience of Dionysian excess: the sufferings of the world embodied in “woman as nature.” Nietzsche’s theme is distinctly Faustian as well (“Departure from religion, through the insight . . . ,” “Joy in artistic semblance . . . ,” “Woman as nature . . .”), although significantly altered by Hölderlin’s emphasis on the doctrine of rebirth. Finally, the reference to Empedocles’ “becoming hard,” his passion to annihilate, and his madness are disconcertingly prescient.¹²

The central cluster of Empedocles plans, composed no later than the autumn of 1872, and perhaps as early as the spring of 1871, is the most detailed and most revealing of the three. Not every word of these fragments need be reproduced here; yet a great deal is essential and merits more space than does any commentary. The first of these eight fragments:

Here tragedy rises as the Gegenmittel to fear and pity. Yet the antidote fails to contain the plague. The hero’s infection with the very pestilence he wishes to cure foreshadows, as I have already noted, Zarathustra’s ultimate temptation: pity for humankind. Yet what is the “test” to which Empedocles puts the great god of nature? Empedocles being the one who trembles to confront nature in a woman. Is science this test, a test that destroys the myths, then quails before nature’s power? And what are we to make of the sequence of events, Empedocles “enflamed,” the heroine aflame for him, he then recoiling with a shudder . . . . “The plague spreads.” Why, when the citizens flee and Empedocles is left alone with the heroine, is the physician-philosopher overcome by pity and the miasmic dream of death? What is the animal they harbor in death? Could any living thing survive the lava?

The second fragment of the central cluster:

Empedocles, a sort of Mittelwesen between Apollinian god and pitiful mortal, is driven to self-destruction. His trajectory is descensional, falling from incandescent god to creature consumed by compassion. Through neither religion nor science nor art can he alter the course of events in his city. His rage, pity, and passion engulf him.

Yet is it merely pity felt toward his corrupt and plague-ridden city that destroys him? The next fragment, which delineates the five acts of the tragedy, does not tell us; but the fourth begins by insisting that Empedocles “is free of fear and pity until the heroine’s deed,” that is, up to the moment she rushes to her stricken lover. If the fifth note communicates very little, the sixth and seventh at least tell us who this woman is. Her name is not Pantheia but Corinna.

Curt Paul Janz (I, 390) informs us that Corinna, who is present in neither Diogenes Laertius’ Lives nor Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles, is a historical figure. Corinna was a gifted Boeotian poetess. She tutored Pindar, and even defeated him in poetry competitions. We do not see her poetic talents in Nietzsche’s plans, however: she may be the most beautiful of women; she is perhaps woman as nature, implicated in some dark way in plague and fatality; but her only word is “Empedocles!” Nevertheless, one must stress that in contrast to the anemic female characters of Hölderlin’s three drafts, Nietzsche’s Corinna plays a crucial role, a role that becomes clearer as the long eighth note elaborates the plot of this five-act tragedy.

No amount of commentary or speculation will banish the many mysteries here. Let me pose several questions, nevertheless.

What is the relationship between Pausanias and Corinna, that is, between the two objects of Empedocles’ love? What is the wreath he brings her? Is it his health? Is Pausanias the stricken lover of the earlier plans? And the maiden whose fantasies on the hero are interrupted by her sudden death—does she foreshadow Corinna’s own fate? If so, why is Pausanias the one who must be assuaged? What is the “principal statement” that never crosses his lips? Is it the statement of the stricken lover, whispered earlier to Empedocles?

Again we note that fear and pity are the causes of plague, and that tragedy is to be the antidote. Yet how is the pity mentioned during the council scene related to that inspired earlier by the heroine, her love and her fate? And why the device of the tragedy within a tragedy? For all of Act III, under the heading “The Chorus,” proceeds as though the action described were the dream of exhausted Maenads on a mountain meadow at midday.

And Corinna’s shudder? Was it not Empedocles who shuddered earlier? Is Corinna’s shudder due to some impending conflict? If we may identify her as Ariadne, is Pausanias then the mortal hero, Theseus? If so, then Empedocles himself, this “Apollinian god,” would, at least on stage, become Dionysos, “ridiculously infatuated”; Corinna would then be called upon to choose between the mortal hero she has assuaged and the divinity she adores.

Yet another series of questions might be raised. Why does the proclamation of rebirth incite an ecstasy of death (Todestaumel) among the people? Are they not ready for it? As we shall see, this question will have to be raised again later, when it is a matter of recurrence rather than rebirth.

Meanwhile, Empedocles’ counterpart, the stage-Dionysos, is mooning over Corinna. Have both the hero and the god been touched to the quick by this woman who is nature? The woman who is—we recognize her, yes, no mistake—the mother of tragedy?

Who are the two murderers, and who their corpse? Is it the duplicity of Empedocles-Dionysos, which has caused the sudden demise of one maid and will soon precipitate the fiery death of another? “Empedocles feels like a murderer,” says the plan for Act V, after citing the couple, “Empedocles and Corinna.” Is the doctrine of rebirth therefore proclaimed in the spirit of mortification, Empedocles being desirous of an infinity of penitential deaths? If it is, then we may have a sense of Empedocles’ “mystic speech on pity,” of his lust for destruction—the annihilation of the drive to existence.

Yet all the questions we might pose to the fifth and final act of the Empedoclean tragedy are in some way anticipated in the plan itself. For Nietzsche’s plan ends with a question. A question placed in quotation marks, even though all the potential speakers have by now gone under. It is a question in scare quotes perhaps, posed to the tragedy as a whole. Indeed, we might wish to pick up the quotation gingerly by the hooks of these problematic marks and pose it as a question before and after The Birth of Tragedy and all its supplements.

“Flieht Dionysus vor Ariadne?”

Is it conceivable that the great god Dionysos, ostensibly accustomed to tugging mortals by their ears, is nonetheless all the while and without respite or assuagement fleeing flying bolting and retreating from or otherwise avoiding evading eluding shunning dodging not to say skirting his mate, whom all men without hesitation agree to call Ariadne? The mother of tragedy?

Pausanias, Empedocles, Corinna; Theseus, Dionysos, Ariadne. Hero, god, and mortal. The mortal in each case woman. The woman in each case nature. Nature in each case plagued. “And thus begins,” writes Janz (I, 390), “the personal symbolism that was to accompany Nietzsche his whole life long, even into madness.”

Head of Man below a Woman’s Breast, ca. 1898–1908/09. Woodcut. Oslo Kommunes Kunstsamlinger, Munch-museet.