# Nietzsche's Apollo

Nietzsche's Apollo
Author(s): Nickolas Pappas

Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 2014), pp. 43-53
Published by: Penn State University Press
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Nietzsche’s Apollo
Nickolas Pappas
Abstract: Nietzsche’s account of Apollo and the Apollinian in The Birth of

Tragedy contains underappreciated distortions. Apollinian moments in some
tragedies are described as Dionysian. The Apollo seen in BT fails to interpret
dreams (indeed this book renders dreams impervious to interpretation) and
scarcely prophesies. Most important, Nietzsche’s vision of the Apollinian as
surface and bounded plane image denies Greek uses of sculpture in just the
opposite way, namely to effect communication between the visible and invisible
realms. It is improbable to suppose that Nietzsche is ignorant of such a prominent
aspect of Greek culture, or that he simply wants to keep his aesthetic categories
neatly demarcated. More likely, he represses the communicative Apollo in a ges-
ture against modern Europe’s nostalgic treatment of antiquity. Thus the familiar
question of BT’s accuracy sheds unexpected light on the familiar question of its
relationship to nostalgia.
Keywords: Nietzsche, Apollo, sculpture, tragedy, nostalgia
The Problem of Identifying Apollo
T wo great evaluative questions about The Birth of Tragedy ask how accurate
the book is about Greece’s “tragic age,” and how nostalgic it is for that age.
Wilamowitz raised the question of accuracy as soon as the book was published,
and the issue has never gone away. As for nostalgia, even without accepting
extreme versions of the charge, you can still worry that BT portrays Socrates as
such a calamity—a monstrosity, and therefore a freakish birth, something that
did not have to happen—as to invite the pious wish that he had never come along,
and that the tragic age of Greece could have lived a little longer.
Both evaluative questions are implicated in a perennial interpretive question:
who is Nietzsche’s god Apollo? It is a difficult question to treat productively.
One wants to begin with the contrast between Apollo and Dionysus, but Nietzsche
treats the two so differently that the comparison is never symmetrical. In the case
of Dionysus, the reader has numerous passages to hunt through, early and late
and down to the last line that Nietzsche approved for publication, “Dionysus
against the Crucified” (EH “Destiny” 9).1 Figuring out who Apollo is calls for
JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2014.

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
43
JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 43 21/02/14 7:52 PM

44 Nickolas Pappas
reconstruction on the basis of few references, and he risks being taken for no
more than his little brother’s foil. As Tracy Strong says, the question “What is
the Apollinian?” is rarely asked.2 For Strong that question matters because he
finds the Apollinian relevant to Nietzsche’s much later concept of the will to
power. But even if we keep our focus on BT, it is worth pressing Strong’s ques-
tion as a fresh strategy for addressing the scholarship on BT and the nostalgia
that may or may not occupy the book—for beginning to ask how BT treats its
own opportunities for nostalgia.
A Standard Reading of Apollo
In BT, as in Greek religion generally, Apollo’s domain is culture in the broad

sense. Along with Dionysus he is a god of the fine arts—also, as no one else
is, a god of sculpture. Apollo also represents a moral dimension that might
seem unrelated to his sponsorship of the arts, though Nietzsche goes a long
way toward unifying the moral and the artistic in his portrayal of Apollo.
The measured restraint (BT 1) that the Greeks called sôphrosunê (BT 15), the
sense of a limit to the individual (BT 4) and boundaries between individuals
(BT 9), all result from the Apollinian Schein that Walter Kaufmann sometimes
translates as appearance and sometimes as illusion (BT 1).3 The yearning
after form that leads to “forceful and pleasurable illusions” (BT 3), that finds
satisfaction in lucid dreaming (BT 1) and “phantasm” (BT 3), and in what BT
mock-Platonically calls “mere appearance of mere appearance” (BT 4) and the
“mirror of illusion” (BT 5): This disciplined sensuality and impulse toward
beautiful appearance permits appearances to work as a boundary, most of all
as a boundary between individuals and their Dionysian insight into chaos and
horror. This is why the Apollinian article of clothing is the veil; it is what you
look at but also what stops you from looking further, not to mention that it is
a disciplinary vestment and strikes modern taste as prudish.
The question about Nietzsche’s Apollo will concern this disciplinarian side
of the god that keeps Dionysian cults out of the Doric Peloponnese and stops
the sensualist’s eye from penetrating into Dionysian depths. Another linking of
attributes has already taken place before this move from appearances to restraint,
when BT 1 unites dreaming and sculpture. It is quite a paradox that dreams,
made of nothing, should belong together with statues made of marble. What
does the experience so private that Nietzsche says Greek dreams are unavail-
able to moderns have to do with the durable public artifacts that signify ancient
Greece in museums today?4 In both phenomena, Nietzsche finds the Schein that
lets him call Apollo the god of illusions—which means god of the protective
illusion (BT 3, 5, 9, 17).

Nietzsche’s Apollo 45
In moving from dream to sculpture by way of illusion, Nietzsche has l iterary

evidence on his side. Passages in two of the best-known Greek tragedies,
Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Euripides’s Alcestis, compress the same three
phenomena together; and both times Apollo is the main god at work. Early in
the Agamemnon, its chorus speaks of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, sitting
bitterly in the palace from which his wife has run off with Paris. Three kinds
of visitation keep reminding Menelaus of Helen: (1) his dreams of her, (2) the
phantoms that rule their palace, and (3) the figurines or statues that he sees in
their home and that conjure up the absent Helen: “A phantom [phasma] will seem
to govern their home, and the grace of well-formed kolossoi is repugnant to the
husband.”5 Then, he says, “Dream-visions will seem to appear, bearing an empty
grace.”6 The sculpture, the phantasm, and the dream all evoke that “smile of
Helen” that BT treats as an emblem of Apollinian comfort and s ensuality (BT 3).7
Apollo belongs behind this particular play, in light of his role in Cassandra’s
life. And Cassandra, who arrives in Argos alongside Agamemnon, helps to seal
his fate—proof of his disrespect for their marriage, Clytemnestra says. Of course
Cassandra’s misgivings could not have stopped Agamemnon from returning
home to his death, because no one believes Cassandra. That is Apollo’s doing
too, his curse when she refused his advances. And as the play approaches its
hopeless outcome, Cassandra prays to Apollo, repeating his name.8 Thanks to
the prophetic powers she received from Apollo in the first place, Cassandra
understands that he has brought about the explosion of violence that will destroy
her together with Agamemnon, and whose aftershocks will continue in the next
generation.
The story behind the Alcestis is even more Apollo’s story. He debates Death
in the prologue. He made it possible for Admetus to postpone his death if anyone
volunteered to die in his place, and Alcestis did volunteer, which is why she is
dying. In the passage relevant to BT, a dying Alcestis asks Admetus not to take
another wife. He says he will mourn even better than that: no entertainment in
the house, no women for him. With luck, he will see Alcestis in his dreams, in
images she sends to him from Hades. There will be “phantoms [phantasmata].”
He will have his cleverest craftsmen make a “figure [demas]” of Alcestis to lay
in their matrimonial bed. Admetus will throw his arms around this figure and
call it Alcestis. This will be a “chilly delight [psuchron terpsis],” but it will tide
him over until they meet again in Hades.9
No doubt facilitated by Aeschylus’s influence on Euripides,10 this passage
reinforces the cooperation among these Apollinian traits. Admetus speaks as
if sculptural figures and dreams belong together in the category of phantoms
or illusions, as the Agamemnon’s chorus grouped them together for Menelaus.
Nietzsche speaks with these tragedies when he glides between dreams and
statues.

46 Nickolas Pappas
Where Nietzsche Misrepresents Apollo
Here, however, is the catch: BT shows how conscious Nietzsche is of the two
plays in question, and yet he sees both as illustrations of the Dionysian. When
Nietzsche calls Attic tragedy “at once Antigone and Cassandra” (BT 4) he
means the genre is both Apollinian and Dionysian, with Apollo represented by
Sophocles’s Antigone and Dionysus by the Cassandra of the Agamemnon.11
Cassandra is Apollo’s priestess, and Apollo is the god to whom she dies praying.
How can BT turn her into the representative of Dionysus?
As for the Alcestis, Nietzsche alludes to it at some length, recollecting how
Admetus felt as he mourned his wife’s passing, “consuming himself in her
spiritual contemplation, when suddenly”—as Nietzsche tells it—“a similarly
formed, similarly walking woman’s figure is led toward him.” Nietzsche treats
this as an image of Dionysian experience, “an analogy with what the spectator
felt in his Dionysian excitement when he saw the approach on the stage of the
god” (BT 8). It is strange: here is Apollo’s friend watching his wife come back
across the border from death thanks to Apollo’s intercessions—and Nietzsche
reads him as Dionysian.
Something is either blocking Nietzsche from seeing Apollo in these tragic
passages, or else blocking him from acknowledging that he sees Apollo. And
what filters Apollo out of his literary readings seems also to be at work when
Nietzsche addresses other Greek cultural phenomena. For example, Nietzsche
introduces Apollo as the god of dreams and plays down dream interpretation,
although to Greeks in the tragic age dreams meant communications from the
gods more than they meant anything else.12 BT conceives of dreaming as lucid
dreaming, all surface and no thought of interpretation. This is more or less what
Jocasta tells Oedipus that young boys’ Oedipal dreams are like, but Sophocles
does not treat Jocasta’s theory of lucid dreaming as a possibility worth consider-
ing. The possibility of dreams unconnected with reality is a hope to which she
clings vainly, as vainly as the uncle of Xerxes in Herodotus scoffs at his nephew’s
dreams. Dreams often do no more than distill the preceding day’s thoughts,
Artabanus says to Xerxes, until a dream makes him recant this skepticism.13 The
story resolves itself in the direction of dreams’ meaningfulness and not with the
visual appeal of meaningless dream sights. The dreamer wants to go on dreaming,
but only because the dream brings a truth. You see yourself sleeping with your
mother, and you know you will return to Athens.14 For Nietzsche to define the
Apollinian in terms of entertaining images is to defy the Greek understanding
of Apollo and every ancient tradition pertaining to dreams.
BT also nearly omits Apollo’s most famous role in Greek life, as oracle. The
word ‘Orakel’ occurs three times in BT, but never in proximity to Apollo’s name.
Where Nietzsche does mean the Delphic oracle he attributes to the oracle the
act of praise rather than communication about the future; the oracle at Delphi
honored Archilochus (BT 5) and called Socrates the wisest man (BT 13). The
third occurrence of the word in BT denies Apollo outright. The satyr chorus of

tragedy speaks with “oracles and wise sayings [Orakel- und Weisheitssprüche]”
(literally, “wise and oracular words”) (BT 8). Dionysus’s effect on the chorus is
to usurp Apollo’s oracular power.15
In general BT casts Apollo in the role of barrier or obstacle, not only between
individuals but also between any one individual and the truth of things. Section 1
does call Apollo the “soothsaying god” (BT 1), and in German as in English the
word for soothsaying (wahrsagende) contains the word for truth. But in spite
of this concession, Apollinian appearance stands in truth’s way. Thanks to the
(Apollinian) image of Olympian gods, the wisdom of Silenus is “withdrawn from
sight” (BT 3). Nietzsche says that “the world of the day [die Welt des Tages]” is
veiled in the Apollinian dream state (BT 8); he opposes the Apollinian picture of
tragedy, as a story experienced by humans, to the “truth [Wahrheit]” that Dionysus
is tragedy’s hero (BT 10). Other passages imply the same opposition. To be able
to dream with Apollinian joy, the dreamer “must have completely lost sight of the
waking reality”—or in flatter, more literal language, “must have fully forgotten
the day [den Tag [. . .] völlig vergessen haben müssen]” (BT 4). The Apollinian
artist is characterized by “the pure contemplation of images [das reine Anschauen
der Bilder]”; such an artist “lives in these images and only in them” (BT 5).
The readers of Nietzsche who take issue with his portrayal of Apollo have
tended to downplay his emphasis on superficial image. Silk and Stern say that
Nietzsche distorts both Apollo and Dionysus, but they dwell on Apollo the mor-
alizing god, and the “prophetic and ecstatic Apolline cult” that contradicts the
serenity in Nietzsche’s description.16 Marcel Detienne problematizes the image
of a morally “pure” Apollo by foregrounding associations between the god and
acts of slaughter.17 Such replies miss the opportunity to examine Apollo qua
alleged god of the beautiful surface. As James Porter has said, “Apollinian art is .
. . ignorant of any dimension of reality beyond the immediately visible”; and this
characterization of Apollo, as Porter sees it, rather than the god’s discipline and
calm, defines him for Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory in BT.18 The sense of Apollo’s
superficiality is also the greatest distortion in BT because it denies the commu-
nicative dimension of Apollo’s persona. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, to pick one
example, the priestess of Apollo calls him “examiner of omens [teraskopos],” the
one who interprets marvelous events.19 Pindar describes divination as “hearing the
voice [phônan akouein]”—in this context Apollo’s voice—“that does not know
how to lie [pseudeôn agnôston].”20
Apollo and the Communicative Sculpture
Of course Nietzsche is talking about art, not about dreams or oracles. Apollo
most matters to his argument as a god of statuary. But this is the domain in which
BT reinterprets Apollo’s attributes the most radically. The book links Apollo
with statues and never mentions the communication that statues were thought
to make possible between the living and the dead.

48 Nickolas Pappas
Take the kolossoi that torment Menelaus in the Agamemnon and the demas
with which Admetus says he will mourn Alcestis. These are Apollinian by every
criterion, but not artifacts of beguiling surface whose appearance arrests the
viewer. They belong in the category of eidôla, presentations of someone absent
and promises of communication with the absent person. They are, in Charles
Picard’s words and as analyzed by Jean-Pierre Vernant, “replacement-figurines,”
go-betweens at work in instances of death and disappearance.21 Vernant’s defin-
ing example of such statuary is the kolossos, not a large sculpture but one that
is fixed in the earth and upright, an effigy set up as a grave marker or as the
surrogate corpse for a missing body. Without even resembling the lost person
this marker stood in the person’s place. A lost play by Euripides dramatizes the
magical workings of these figurines. Protesilaus dies at Troy, and his widow
Laodamia makes a little wax effigy; the gods pity her and let the effigy come
to life, so that Laodamia can enjoy visits from her husband. This Apollinian
sculpture does not separate individual beings from one another but brings them
back together.22
These sculptures in myth belong in the same conceptual universe that informs
the Greeks’ everyday treatment of their graveyard sculptures, such as the marble
stêlai that marked graves. The stêlai could be simple upright rectangles, but
often they were engraved with figures in high relief, sometimes with freestand-
ing sculptural forms. They could be treated as if the stone itself were the dead
person. The stêlê was washed and rubbed with oil on the festival of the dead.23
Ancient drawings depict mourners symbolically dressing a stêlê with woolen
ribbons that they wound around the stone. Tellingly in some of those drawings the
deceased is standing nearby (denoted by a tiny soul overhead)24 to demonstrate
the success of the connection that this wrapping effects between the living and
the dead. Dress the stone and the dead feel themselves addressed.
Food and drink were brought to the stêlê. Iphigenia in Tauris describes a
drink offering being poured onto a grave as “soothing for the dead [nekrois
thelktêria].”25 Mourners left olive oil by graves in flasks. From the other side
the stones communicated replies. One woman’s headstone instructs her husband,
“Kiss my family for me.”26 The dead could use the words on their marker to
tell passersby what happened to them. Thus one inscription of a young woman
says, “The sêma [sign] of Phrasikleia. I will be called korê [maiden] forever.”27
The word sêma is telling. While typically it means “sign,” it also carries the
meaning “tomb.” Plato plays with this ambiguity in the Cratylus, when Socrates
calls the “body [sôma]” both the grave that the soul is in and the sign of the soul,
that by which “the soul signifies what it signifies”—as if what proves that the
soul lies buried inside the body is not that the body stands there expressionless
but rather that it serves as the medium for the soul’s communications.28 Sign
language is already seen to be the language of the grave and by means of grave
markers. Phrasikleia speaks in sign language just as Apollo does, especially if

you believe Heraclitus’s account of him (an account you might have expected
Nietzsche to trust): “The king whose oracle is at Delphi neither says [legei] nor
hides [kruptei] but signifies [sêmainei].”29
Nietzsche’s Apollo seems to have lost his ability to sponsor sculptural commu-
nication, just as he lost his oracular power. “Apollo” does signify impenetrable
screens and impenetrable self-control, and he is indeed the “far-away” god
compared to his brother Dionysus who forever says, “I’m coming.” But Apollo
also marks that grand distance between gods and mortals with his own move-
ment through it: benevolently when he communicates through oracles, otherwise
when he unquivers his arrows to send a communicable disease out of nowhere.
The movement does not contradict Apollo’s faraway distance but presupposes it,
and in the tradition the distance is regularly accompanied by movement through
the distance. Thus Solon, securely archaic (predating tragedy), says in one poem
that Apollo, “who works from afar,” can make a man a seer; “and if the gods are
with him,” Solon goes on to say, “he sees a distant evil coming.”30
How Nietzsche Uses the Apollo of Surfaces
For Nietzsche’s very partial Apollo to be a mistake, Nietzsche would have to have
forgotten or never noticed Apollo’s preeminence in Agamemnon and Alcestis,
forgotten that Apollo spoke through the oracle, never noticed that Greek dreams
called for interpretation as divine communiqués. He would have to have failed
to know that Greek history, tragedy, and painting all attest to ancient uses of
statuary not as pure visibility and apparition as such but as signs of invisible
forces behind appearance.
Even if nothing more powerful than ignorance explained why Nietzsche
excluded meanings from his conception of Apollo, that exclusion would still
be worth identifying. Commentaries on BT that ask only whether Apollo was
really the serene god of Nietzsche’s imagining, and not whether he was patron
of the illusionistic surface, are neglecting the attribute of the Nietzschean Apollo
that matters most to the book. But suppose ignorance is not the cause. Suppose
Nietzsche makes his false Apollo despite what he knows rather than on the basis
of what he does not know. In that case, he has some special need for a god of
statues that one looks at and not into or through. The omissions must be doing
some work for Nietzsche, repressing a practice or fantasy made possible by the
Apollo who communicates.
One fantasy about Apollo might be the one that begins among the relics
that survive in modern Europe and that function as tombstones of a lost age.
Nietzsche knows that nothing says “ancient Greece” like white marble statues,
marble temples, and the inscriptions on them. He has already seen more than
enough of the Apollo who inspires rituals of dressing and anointing the ancient

50 Nickolas Pappas
stones in the hope of hearing from a lost antiquity. The pleasure that BT resists is
specifically the pleasure of mourning and of reaching out to touch Greece’s lost
soul through its Apollinian treasures. After all it is against nostalgic fantasies,
cemetery daydreams, that Nietzsche invokes the energy that is not Apollinian,
emphasizes the boundedness and restraint in Apollo and the veiling surface of
Apollinian sculpture, and cautions how much remains unknown about the past
and will never be communicated. First of all, the Apollinian cannot be the whole
story of antiquity. This dominant theme in BT turns the modern mourner away
from the sepulcher. Even where the surviving white marbles date to a time before
tragedy, Nietzsche sees them as reactive and secondary, responding to a deeper
and earlier Dionysian experience. It follows that the students of antiquity have
been seeking antiquity in the wrong place.
Nietzsche wards off nostalgia most in the passages that refuse to let Greek
remains work as replacement figurines, for instance when he denies the hope that
motivated modern opera. With its music lost, Nietzsche says, tragedy “presents
itself to us only as word-drama” (BT 17). Opera extrapolates from the Apollinian
dialogue in ancient tragedy to what it merely imagines to have been the ancient
reality of tragedy. This must be seen as no more than imagining. And again
on the last page of the book the nostalgic impulse resembles an Apollinian
mourning that reads the gravestones of Greece as signs. Nietzsche hypothesizes
someone picturing himself back in tragic Greece (BT 25). This time traveler
sees (presumably whitened) Ionic columns and talks about the Olympic gods;
the scene takes place “in a dream.” In other words, the nostalgic moment is
Apollinian, only it is not a lucid dream aware of its own illusoriness. This is the
nineteenth century’s would-be trip to the past.
The scene ends with a wise Aeschylus figure cutting off the nostalgia. This old
man invites the curious stranger to “sacrifice with me in the temple,” suggesting
that sacrifice is an alternative to dreamy nostalgia. Sacrifice is active engagement
as opposed to mere fantasies about the past. And with something like this same
pair of alternatives, séance and sacrifice, Nietzsche rejects the nostalgic variety
of remembrance in a later meditation, dating to 1879. Speaking of the music
and art from earlier times, he says that art works from the past “only can survive
through this, that we give them our soul; only our blood makes them talk to us.
Actual ‘historical’ discourse would talk spectrally to specters [gespenstisch zu
Gespenstern]” (AOM 126, emphases original).31
Talking spectrally to specters keeps the conversation in the graveyard. That
talk, historians’ nostalgia, is communication through the tombstone: how
Admetus plans to talk to Alcestis, how Helen’s smile haunts Menelaus as he
haunts his own palace. The sacrificial alternative sounds more like intoxication
anyway; it begins with heavy drinking. (What is a heavier drink than blood?) It
is sacrifice in the service of living music and Dionysian communion rather than
Apollinian communication. Less metaphorically, giving your blood to the shades

of the past means recognizing that you are coming to them with a modern agenda
and questions, not deluding yourself into the thought that ancient Greece stands
waiting as a tourist attraction, perhaps for those who have merely wearied of
the present. Other dangers will threaten the inquirers who pour their own blood
out (the danger of becoming unscientific, for instance). But at least this is not
nostalgia. It is not modern Europe revering the whitened marbles of antiquity
and laying them in bed to call them by their forgotten names in sign language.
City College and the Graduate Center

City University of New York
npappas@ccny.cuny.edu
Notes
An earlier version of this article was presented at a meeting of the North American Nietzsche
Society in San Francisco (March 2010). Thanks go to the other participants at that session, Joel E.
Mann and Wilson Shearin, and to its chair, R. Lanier Anderson. Special thanks to Daniel McIntosh
for his conversation and encouragement.
1. Translations from Nietzsche’s works other than BT are my own. Quotations from BT
come from Walter Kaufmann’s translation (New York: Random House, 1967). Translations from
ancient sources are my own unless otherwise indicated, and references to specific passages use
the standard scholarly notation for a given work (e.g., Stephanus pages for Plato, line numbers
for tragedies, section and subsection numbers for Herodotus, Plutarch, Suetonius, etc.). On
the preparation and printing of Ecce Homo, see William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon:
A Publication History and Bibliography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 180–85.
2. Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, expanded ed.
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 234.
3. See Kaufmann’s comment on this practice in his note to BT 1, p. 34 n. 4.
4. “In spite of all the dream literature and the numerous dream anecdotes of the Greeks, we
can speak of their dreams only conjecturally” (BT 2, emphasis original).
5. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 415–17; translation adapted from Deborah Steiner, “Eyeless in
Argos: A Reading of Agamemnon 416–19,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 115.1 (1995): 175–82.
Steiner leaves phasma untranslated; I find “phantom” a natural equivalent.
6. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 420–21. On translating these and subsequent lines, see Mary C.
Stieber, “A Note on A. Ag. 410–28 and E. Alc. 247–56,” Mnemosyne 52.2 (1999): 150–58. This
part of the discussion has been fruitfully shaped by both Stieber and Steiner, “Eyeless in Argos.”
7. For that matter, see Euripides’s Helen (705, 1219), in which—in Apollinian style—the
word agalma (“statue”) is stretched until it also applies to cloud formations and phantoms,
reinforcing the association between statuary and shades. Cf. Charles Segal, “The Two Worlds of
Euripides’ Helen,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 102.1
(1971): 569 n. 51. Segal explores the word eidôlon in Helen in ways that bring that wordplay to
bear on the issues of death and communications between visible and invisible realms.
8. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1438–47 (Clytemnestra justifies killing Cassandra as insult to
their marital bed); 1202–12 (Cassandra’s refusal of Apollo and his replying curse); 1073, 1080,
1085 (Cassandra chanting Apollo’s name); see also 1257, 1269 (references to Apollo). It has been
plausibly suggested that when Cassandra prays to Apollo in this final scene she is addressing an
effigy of the god mounted on an altar on stage (Joe Park Poe, “The Altar in the Fifth-Century
Theater,” Classical Antiquity 8.1 [1989]: 135).

52 Nickolas Pappas
9. Euripides, Alcestis 348–56 (how Admetus will mourn); 363–68 (their future burial
together and home in Hades). For text and accurate translation, see Stieber, “A Note on A. Ag.
410–28 and E. Alc. 247–56,” 151.
10. On parallels between the passages and especially the conjunction of statues with dreams,
see Stieber, “A Note on A. Ag. 410–28 and E. Alc. 247–56,” 156–58.
11. See Kaufmann’s note to BT 4, p. 47 n. 4.
12. It is significant that skeptics about dreams had to argue against treating them as divine
messages: a sign of how typically they were treated that way. See the Hippocratic On Regimen and
Aristotle’s On Divination in Dreams.
13. Herodotus, Histories 7.16.
14. Hippias dreamed of sexual relations with his mother and concluded that he would return
to Athens to rule again. Though his hopes for regaining his rule came to nothing, he technically
reached Athenian land again (Herodotus, Histories 6.107). Return home, especially to rule, is a
reading of the incest dream that holds steady through Greek and Roman antiquity. Artemidorus
explains the general rule (Oneirocritus I.79). On Caesar’s incestuous dream, see Plutarch, Life of
Caesar 32.6 and Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars 1.7.
15. There is a tradition according to which Dionysus ran the Delphic oracle during winter
months (Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1985], 224). Nietzsche gives no sign of having in mind such a close brotherhood between
the gods. Instead this looks like one of the passages in which Dionysus takes over Apollinian
functions. Thus the Dionysian molds “the noblest clay, the most costly marble, man” (BT 1);
modern poetry without music is called “the statue of a god without a head” (BT 5)—as if
Dionysian music could function as the most Apollinian part of that sculpture.
16. M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 166 (distortions in Nietzsche’s gods), 168–69 (Apollo and morality), 183 (the prophetic
and ecstatic cult).
17. Marcel Detienne, “Apollo’s Slaughterhouse,” trans. Anne Doueihi, Diacritics 16.2
(1986): 46–53.
18. James Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001), 72.
19. Aeschylus, Eumenides 61–63.
20. Pindar, Olympian Odes 6.66–67. On this voice being Apollo’s, see Michael Attyah Flower,
The Seer in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 39 n. 48. Indirect
agreement with Pindar comes from Jocasta in Oedipus Tyrannus, when she voices an attack on
Apollo’s oracle stronger than any comparable sentiment in Greek tragedy. Jocasta wants to deny
the prediction from Delphi that her son would kill Laius; she cannot go so far as to reject Apollo’s
truthfulness, so she attributes the mendacity to “Apollo’s servants” at the oracle (Oedipus Tyrannus
707–25); Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, 136–37.
21. Vernant’s two main articles on the subject appeared in French in 1965, in Mythe et pensée
chez les grecques. In English they are Jean-Pierre Vernant, “The Figuration of the Invisible and
the Psychological Category of the Double: The Kolossos,” in Myth and Thought among the
Greeks, trans. Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 321–32; and “From the
‘Presentification’ of the Invisible to the Imitation of Appearance,” in Myth and Thought among
the Greeks, 333–49. For more recent discussion of kolossoi in burial practices, see Christopher
A. Faraone, “Binding and Burying the Forces of Evil: The Defensive Use of ‘Voodoo Dolls’ in
Ancient Greece,” Classical Antiquity 10.2 (1991): 165–220; and Georges Roux, “Qu’est-ce qu’un
Kolossos?,” Revue des Études Anciennes 62 (1960): 5–40. Vernant takes the phrase “replacement-
figurines [figurines de remplacement]” from Charles Picard, “Le Cénotaphe de Midéa et les
‘Colosses’ de Ménélas,” Revue de Philologie 59 (1933): 343–54.
22. Protesilaus is known only through surviving remarks about the play and later tellings
of the story, most famously Ovid, Heroides 13. It is not certain that the Euripidean version
has Protesilaus’s soul coming back to animate the effigy of him. On the story independent of

Euripides, see Laurel Fulkerson, “(Un)sympathetic Magic: A Study of Heroides 13,” American
Journal of Philology 123.1 (2002): 61–87. Eduard Fraenkel argues that the Protesilaus is the
source for the description of the effigy in the Alcestis (Aeschylus “Agamemnon,” vol. 2 [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1950], 219–20). See Stieber, “A Note on A. Ag. 410–28 and E. Alc.
247–56,” 150 n. 2.
23. Burkert, Greek Religion, 193–94; cf. Derek Collins, “Nature, Cause, and Agency in Greek
Magic,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 133.1 (2003): 38. Collins cites
Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.24.6, on the stone at Delphi that Pausanias observed being
treated this way (“Nature, Cause, and Agency,” 38 n. 94).
24. One Athenian oil flask in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has such a drawing
on its side (1989.281.72). Thanks to Natalie Bell for noticing this lekuthos and photographing it.
25. Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris 166; see Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 118.
26. Garland, Greek Way of Death, 3.
27. For discussion of the form and source of this utterance (is the girl speaking, or the stone
on her behalf?), see Deborah Steiner, Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek
Literature and Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 257–59.
28. Plato, Cratylus 400c. Thanks to Daniel McIntosh for pointing out the Platonic plays on
sôma and sêma.
29. Heraclitus, frag. B93, quoted in Plutarch, On the Pythian Oracle 404d. For a rendition and
discussion of this passage, see Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition
of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), 123–24.
30. Quoted in Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, 82.
31. On this passage see Silk and Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, 102–3; Porter, Nietzsche and the
Philology of the Future, 41 n. 209.

# Nietzsche&#39;s Apollo

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# Nietzsche&#39;s Apollo

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Nietzsche's Apollo

Author(s): Nickolas Pappas

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Abstract: Nietzsche’s account of Apollo and the Apollinian in The Birth of

Keywords: Nietzsche, Apollo, sculpture, tragedy, nostalgia

The Problem of Identifying Apollo

JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2014.

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 43 21/02/14 7:52 PM

A Standard Reading of Apollo

In BT, as in Greek religion generally, Apollo’s domain is culture in the broad

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 44 21/02/14 7:52 PM

In moving from dream to sculpture by way of illusion, Nietzsche has l­ iterary

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 45 21/02/14 7:52 PM

Where Nietzsche Misrepresents Apollo

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 46 21/02/14 7:52 PM

Apollo and the Communicative Sculpture

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 47 21/02/14 7:52 PM

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 48 21/02/14 7:52 PM

How Nietzsche Uses the Apollo of Surfaces

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 49 21/02/14 7:52 PM

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 50 21/02/14 7:52 PM

City College and the Graduate Center

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 51 21/02/14 7:52 PM

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 52 21/02/14 7:52 PM

JNS 45.1_06_Pappas.indd 53 21/02/14 7:52 PM

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# Nietzsche's Apollo

# Nietzsche's Apollo

In moving from dream to sculpture by way of illusion, Nietzsche has l iterary