Scott Jenkins - What Does Nietzsche Owe Thucydides

What Does Nietzsche Owe Thucydides?
Author(s): Scott Jenkins

Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1, Special Issue Nietzsche's Ancient History (
Autumn 2011), pp. 32-50
Published by: Penn State University Press
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What Does Nietzsche Owe Thucydides?
Scott Jenkins
Abstract: Thucydides was one of Nietzsche’s most important intellectual

influences, but the extent of Nietzsche’s debt to Thucydides has not been fully
grasped. Here I consider the accounts of particular passages of Thucydides’s
History of the Peloponnesian War that appear in Nietzsche’s published writings. I
argue that while the views on justice that Nietzsche claims to find in Thucydides
differ somewhat from the doctrine of the History, Thucydides’s views in moral
psychology likely had a significant effect on Nietzsche’s accounts of wishful
thinking and “idealism” in philosophy. I then show how the virtues of factuality
and intellectual courage that Nietzsche ascribes to Thucydides in Twilight of the
Idols can be understood through appeal to the psychological theories found in
Thucydides’s History. I conclude by discussing Nietzsche’s virtue epistemology
and the ideal of the magnanimous philosopher that appears in the first section
of On the Genealogy of Morals.
I n the concluding section of Twilight of the Idols, entitled “What I Owe the
Ancients,” Nietzsche tells us that his debt to the Greeks has little to do with Greek
philosophy. Plato is portrayed as simply a step toward Christian moralism, and
Nietzsche states more generally that “the philosophers are the decadents of Greek
culture” (TI “Ancients” 3).1 In contrast, he remarks that “my recreation, my prefer-
ence, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides” (TI “Ancients” 2).
This esteem for Thucydides is found throughout Nietzsche’s published works and
notes, without the counterbalance of even a single critical remark.2
But what exactly does Nietzsche owe Thucydides? Some elements of that debt
are clear enough. When he asks, in Daybreak, “What is it I love in Thucydides,
why do I honor him more highly than Plato?” Nietzsche responds that Thucydides
delights in the existence of diverse types of persons, each possessing some “good
sense” (D 168). As Nietzsche makes clear in later writings, appreciating the
range of human psychological types is an essential part of his own “immoralism”
(TI “Morality” 6). Similarly, when Nietzsche praises Thucydides by saying that
“there are few thinkers who say so much between the lines,” he is surely drawing
attention to a feature of his own writing as well (TI “Ancients” 2).
Individual passages of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War
suggest additional points of contact, so we might approach the question of
Nietzsche’s debt to Thucydides from the other direction as well.3 For example,
JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 42, 2011.

Copyright © 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
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What Does Nietzsche Owe Thucydides? 33
Thucydides describes Athenian envoys to Melos as maintaining that “it is a

general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can” (5.105), and it is
easy to imagine Nietzsche finding in this remark a forerunner of his own theory
of life as will to power.4 Consider as well Thucydides’s account of how Athenian
despair early in the war leads to anger directed at Pericles and a desire to hold
Pericles responsible for Athens’s woes (2.59). This is just the process Nietzsche
describes in On the Genealogy of Morals: “[E]very sufferer instinctively seeks
a cause for his suffering: more exactly, an agent; still more specifically, a guilty
agent who is susceptible to suffering” (GM III:15). The fact that Pericles is
eventually forced by his fellow citizens to pay a fine, despite the fact that he
has done nothing wrong, could be evidence in favor of Nietzsche’s theory—or,
one may claim, evidence that Nietzsche’s theory is borrowed from Thucydides.
Approaching Nietzsche’s debt to Thucydides in this way is bound to be specu-
lative. Affinities between their writings are easy enough to identify, but affinities
alone cannot answer the question of why, near the end of his productive life,
Nietzsche gives such a prominent position to Thucydides in his account of what
he owes the ancients. Here I aim to illuminate a central element of Nietzsche’s
late discussion of Thucydides—his ascription to Thucydides of a “strong, severe,
hard factuality which was instinctive in the older Hellenes” (TI “Ancients” 2)—
using as background Nietzsche’s few accounts of individual passages of the
History. I will argue that this virtue of factuality, which is closely connected with
Nietzsche’s extensive praise in the late writings of science, intellectual honesty,
and truthfulness, has its origins in Nietzsche’s reading of the History. Nietzsche
returns to Thucydides, then, because he comes to hold this Thucydidean virtue
in the highest regard.
Using Nietzsche’s discussions of the History to understand his late praise of
Thucydides might also appear objectionably speculative. The majority of these
discussions are found in Nietzsche’s middle-period writings, which means that
they were written around ten years before the praise of Thucydides in TI. On the
other hand, when Nietzsche discusses Thucydides, either in his notes or in his
published writings, he consistently returns to the same passages of the History
(especially the Melian Dialogue and Pericles’s funeral oration). This makes it
reasonable to approach Nietzsche’s more general praise of Thucydides through
his few published analyses of these passages.5
I begin by examining Nietzsche’s discussions of justice in Thucydides. Here
I show that while Nietzsche’s views on justice differ from those of Thucydides,
perhaps in ways that Nietzsche did not notice, there is agreement concerning the
historical origin of justice in prudential considerations. I then turn to Nietzsche’s
account of Pericles’s funeral oration as an “optimistic illusion,” with the aim
of drawing out further agreement between Thucydides and Nietzsche on the
role of falsehood or illusion in producing effective action in the typical agent.
Underlying this agreement is a picture of psychological obstacles to effective

34 Scott Jenkins
agency that underwrites Thucydides’s views on the perils of hope. It is this

model of agency, I argue, that Nietzsche employs in distinguishing Thucydides’s
factuality and realism from Plato’s idealism. Thus Nietzsche’s portrait of the
cognitive or “philological” virtue of factuality and his epistemological views
more generally are strongly indebted to Thucydides’s account of effective
agency. I conclude with a brief discussion of Thucydidean factuality in GM
and its connection with Nietzsche’s ideal of the magnanimous theorist (GM I:1).
I. The Origin and Nature of Justice
When Nietzsche considers the origin and nature of justice in Human, All Too
Human, he turns to Thucydides: “Origin of justice.—Justice (fairness) originates
between parties of approximately equal power, as Thucydides correctly grasped
(in the terrible dialogue between the Athenian and Melian ambassadors): where
there is no clearly recognizable superiority of force and a contest would result
in mutual injury producing no decisive outcome the idea arises of coming to an
understanding and negotiating over one another’s demands: the characteristic of
exchange is the original characteristic of justice” (HH 92; see also HH 451). It
is easy to identify the passages that Nietzsche has in mind. Early in the Melian
Dialogue, the Athenian ambassadors to Melos assert that the Melians ought to
submit to Athens and accept slavery because this is the best outcome they can
reasonably expect to achieve; their only alternative is death and destruction at
the hands of a superior power. The Athenians present just these two options
because they think it would be unreasonable for the Melians to demand just
treatment: “We recommend that you should try to get what it is possible for you
to get, taking into consideration what we both really do think; since you know
as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the
standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact
the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they
have to accept” (5.89). Because there is no equality of power between Athens
and Melos, the Athenians find inappropriate any talk of justice or rights, which
they earlier dismiss as “fine phrases.”6 The Melians recognize this inequality of
power and agree to forgo any appeal to justice, attempting instead to persuade
the Athenians that permitting Melos to remain independent is actually in the
interest of both parties (5.98).
Nietzsche reads this exchange as the expression of a long-forgotten truth
concerning the nature of justice: “Justice goes back naturally to the viewpoint of
enlightened self-preservation” (HH 92). He is maintaining that justice originates
in prudential considerations that exist between equals and that talk of justice,
or an appeal to rights, serves only to pick out a complicated sort of prudential
consideration. This reading of the Melian Dialogue is not obviously the correct

one. When the Melians say to the Athenians, “[Y]ou force us to leave justice
out of account and to confine ourselves to self-interest” (5.90), they could be
taking justice to be a distinct sort of consideration that simply does not apply
to present circumstances.7 On the other hand, many passages in the History do
support this view of justice as good sense or prudence, and this is the reading that
Nietzsche obviously prefers.8 In forgoing an appeal to justice, the Melians are
(on this reading) taking on the burden of “cashing out” justice talk by showing
that leaving Melos alone is in the interest of Athens.
Nietzsche’s account of justice in the middle works contains three additional
elements. First, he explains how this set of norms governing relations between
equals came to be regarded as applicable to all persons: “[F]or the sake of their
security, men have founded the community on the basis of positing themselves
as being equal to one another” (WS 31). Nietzsche provides no details concerning
this original positing of an artificial equality, but such a positing accords with
his belief concerning the origins of justice. A posited, artificial equality between
persons ensures that the norms of justice may apply to all. Second, in order to
explain the fact that justice now appears to be something quite different from
prudence, Nietzsche postulates a process of “forgetting” that separates us from
the truth concerning the origin and nature of justice.9 Through this process, “it
has gradually come to appear that a just action is an unegoistic one” (HH 92).
Just actions thereby seem to possess a distinctive sort of value, and over time,
Nietzsche maintains, their degree of value also appears to increase: “[T]his high
value is, moreover, continually increasing, as all valuations do: for something
highly valued is striven for, imitated, multiplied through sacrifice, and grows
as the worth of the toil and zeal expended by each individual is added to the
worth of the valued thing” (HH 92). This is the third and final step in Nietzsche’s
explanation of an illusion that benefits most people, that of moral realism, or
universal human rights. He concludes, “How little moral would the world appear
without forgetfulness! A poet could say that God has placed forgetfulness as a
doorkeeper on the threshold of the temple of human dignity” (HH 92). In his
account of the Melian Dialogue, then, Nietzsche is presenting both parties as
somehow overcoming this forgetfulness concerning the true nature of justice.
There do exist reminders. Nietzsche later suggests that the illusion that justice
is a distinctive sort of consideration can remain strong only when the conventions
of justice are respected and a community enjoys peace. Here again he turns to
Thucydides in order to describe the conditions under which it becomes evident
that “there exists neither a natural right nor a natural wrong” (WS 31). In his
famous description of civil war in Corcyra, Thucydides describes the chaos that
resulted from the conflict between democrats and the oligarchic party—there
was “death in every shape and form,” “fathers who killed their sons,” “men
[who] were dragged from the temples or butchered on the very altars,” and so on
(3.81). Commenting on these events, Thucydides states: “In times of peace and

36 Scott Jenkins
prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are
not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But
war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their
daily wants, it brings most people’s minds down to the level of their actual cir-
cumstances” (3.82). Nietzsche likely has this remark in mind when he states that if
“communality collapses completely and everything dissolves into anarchy, then
there at once breaks through that condition of unreflecting, ruthless inequality that
constitutes the state of nature: as, according to the report of Thucydides, happened
on Corcyra” (WS 31). The inequality described here is the actual inequality of
power that exists between persons, which is usually concealed behind the artifice
of equality that grounds the system of justice in a community. Thus Nietzsche
is describing both the Athenian conquest of Melos and the actions of citizens in
Corcyra as instances of agents ignoring considerations of justice in conditions
of unequal power. When he states that there exist no natural rights, he likely
has two claims in mind. First, all justice is artificial, insofar as it arises out of an
agreement between equals, grounded in enlightened self-interest (HH 92; see also
GM II:8). Second, respect for justice and consistent just action in a diverse com-
munity requires the additional positing of the equality of unequals and the long
process of forgetting through which this prudential relation of justice gradually
appears to be something else entirely. For Nietzsche, then, one lesson we ought
to learn from Thucydides is that relations of justice require either real equality
or artificial equality combined with illusions of a certain sort.
This is not obviously a debunking account of justice. Nietzsche actually
emphasizes that the original postulation of an artificial equality occurs for
the sake of the security of the community, and the illusion of natural right he
describes does provide additional security from harm, as well as a feeling of
dignity. But artificial equality does not benefit all persons. Nietzsche’s account
of civil war in Corcyra appears in a section entitled “Vanity as an offshoot of
the antisocial,” in which he describes social vanity in manner, dress, or speech
as arising out of an “ancient drive to domination” that senses real inequalities
underlying the artifice of equality and aims to express power over others. This
occurs, he says, because the notion that all persons are equal is “at bottom
repugnant to the nature of the individual and something imposed upon him”
(WS 31).10 While a stable society surely benefits all, the flourishing of some is
limited by the illusion of equality.11 Nietzsche appears to make a more radical
point in the political realm, namely, that in its wartime interactions with Melos,
Athens is correct to regard the standard of justice as irrelevant and to seek its
own maximum benefit at the expense of the sovereignty of Melos. For Athens,
justice would only benefit another.12
While it is reasonable to read the History as advocating an extreme form
of political realism, this approach fails to capture some nuances of the work.
Thucydides concludes his account of the civil war in Corcyra with this significant
remark: “It is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon
themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity

which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead
of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time
when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection” (3.84). When
war, the “stern teacher,” brings people’s minds down to the level of their actual
circumstances, it is actually leading them to ignore those considerations that
demonstrate the imprudence of their ruthless actions.13 War limits our ability
to use good judgment and to engage in foresight, thus obscuring the “general
laws of humanity” that forbid such actions.14 In short, what appears prudent to a
person in the “actual circumstances” of war is not really prudent in the long run.
The Melians make the same point when they note that by slaughtering them, the
Athenians would make enemies of other independent states and would likely find
themselves in immediate conflict with Spartan forces as well (5.98, 5.106).15
In the end the Athenians are not persuaded, decide to act on their advantage in
the actual circumstances of their interactions with Melos, and put to death all
men in Melos (5.116). The imprudence of that decision later becomes clear
when Athens enters into armed conflict with other city-states, suggesting that
the Melians were in fact articulating a general law of humanity in their dialogue
with Athens—the law of enlightened self-interest.
This reading of the History suggests that Athens and Melos are equal in power
in a manner relevant to the applicability of the standards of justice. Neither is
so powerful that it can ensure its own well-being in a war with multiple city-
states. This is, of course, the kind of real equality important for Thucydides’s
most famous translator, Hobbes. If this reading of Thucydides is correct (as I
will assume from this point onward), for him the right and the wrong are nothing
more than the prudent and the imprudent, though things appear otherwise once
one’s judgment has been clouded by wartime conditions.
What has this examination of Thucydides and Nietzsche on justice revealed?
While they agree on the origins of justice, they disagree concerning the foun-
dations of justice within a state. For Thucydides, justice is a “general law of
humanity” grounded on prudence and the real equality of persons. For Nietzsche,
justice depends upon “posited” artificial equality and is thus properly felt by
some persons as a constraint. But there is agreement on one important point. Just
as Nietzsche believes that most people suffer a serious harm when the illusion
of universal rights and the unique authority of justice disintegrates, Thucydides
thinks that action not in accordance with this general law of humanity leads to
ruin, both for individuals and for states.
II. The Transfiguring Glow of Pericles’s Funeral Oration
The only other passage from the History that Nietzsche discusses in his published
works is Pericles’s famous funeral oration. I will argue that Nietzsche’s brief
remarks about the speech exhibit awareness of a further affinity between his
views on justice and Thucydides’s, namely, their agreement concerning the

38 Scott Jenkins
role of illusion or falsehood in producing action in accordance with the general

laws of humanity. Here is what Nietzsche says of the funeral oration:16 “It is
no more than a grand, optimistic illusion as to the supposedly necessary con-
nection between the polis and Athenian culture; immediately before the night
descends on Athens (the plague and the rupture of tradition), Thucydides makes
it rise resplendent once again, like a transfiguring evening glow in whose light
the evil day that preceded it could be forgotten” (HH 474). While Pericles’s
speech has the stated purpose of honoring those who have died in the war, it is
actually a celebration of Athens itself. Nietzsche is certainly correct to say that
it describes a supposedly necessary connection between Athens and the culture
it has created—a culture Pericles describes as unique (2.40). Throughout the
speech Pericles ties the character and cultural practices of his fellow Athenians
to the institutions of their government. But on Nietzsche’s view, this is a con-
nection that Thucydides knows to be nonexistent.
Two points support Nietzsche’s view. The first concerns Athenians’ rela-
tions to their fellow citizens. Pericles begins his praise of Athenian institu-
tions by drawing attention to its democracy: “[O]ur constitution is called a
democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole
people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal
before the law” (2.37). This celebrated equality before the law (isonomia) is
described as the source of Athenians’ tolerance of others in their private lives
and their deep respect for the law in their public lives. But this connection is
quickly shown to be illusory. Immediately after describing the funeral oration,
Thucydides turns his attention to the indifference “to every rule of religion
or law” that emerged once the plague hit Athens in 430 bce (2.52). Once it
came to appear improbable that misdeeds would result in trial and punishment,
no one sacrificed his own immediate interests for the sake of the city or his
fellow citizens.
The second point in favor of Nietzsche’s reading concerns Pericles’s attribu-
tion to the Athenians of a unique capacity for foresight. He states that while the
bravery of others is grounded in ignorance of what lies ahead, Athenians are
capable of “taking risks and estimating them beforehand” (2.40). This feature
of the national character is claimed to be a product of a citizen’s engagement in
politics, which requires that he participate in discussions concerning the long-
range effects of various policies. Again, though, the Athenians prove themselves
to be unexceptional. In the state of general lawlessness that results from the
plague, they commit “acts of self-indulgence which before then they used to
keep dark” and come to agree that the only things of value are “the pleasure of
the moment and everything that might conceivably contribute to that pleasure”
(2.53). Despite the long history of democracy in Athens, the plague quickly
reduces its citizens’ view to their immediate, actual circumstances, just as civil
war corrupts the practical deliberations of the Corcyreans.

This contrast between Pericles’s fine words and the reality revealed by plague
and war is clearly intended by Thucydides (and may motivate Nietzsche’s remark
that he says a lot “between the lines”). Shortly after describing the plague,
Thucydides describes Pericles’s relation to his fellow citizens as follows: “When
he saw that they were going too far in a mood of over-confidence, he would
bring back to them a sense of their dangers; and when they were discouraged for
no good reason he would restore their confidence. So, in what was nominally a
democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen” (2.65). It is hard to
overstate the importance of this remark for Nietzsche’s claim that Thucydides’s
account of the funeral oration presents Athens in a “transfiguring glow.” Not
only is the necessary connection postulated between Athenian practices and
Athenian national character completely nonexistent—Pericles himself knows
this to be so! If Pericles did not see that the Athenians in truth lack a distinctive
regard for their fellow citizens, and are also unexceptional when it comes to
estimating the significance of future risks, he would not find it necessary to
correct overconfidence or instill confidence. But Thucydides emphasizes this
feature of Pericles’s leadership throughout the History, often describing him as
speaking to reassure others or remaining silent when he knows that his words
would only inflame passions and lead others astray (2.59, 2.65). The foresight
that Pericles ascribes to his fellow Athenians is actually his alone.17
Because the choices made by the citizens of Athens are largely the product of
its “first citizen,” Pericles, Thucydides draws the conclusion that Athens is only
nominally a democracy. But Pericles must know this as well, since he himself
aims to determine the political activity of the state. This fact yields a further
dimension to Nietzsche’s charge that the funeral oration actually presents a
“grand, optimistic illusion.” Thucydides is portraying Pericles as misleading his
fellow citizens about the very nature of the state in which they live. Rule by the
people does not really exist in Athens, while political power and responsibility
for the well-being of the state lie in the hands of its exceptional ruler, who rules
by denying this fact.
The illusion that Pericles creates is a useful one, and not just for himself as a
ruler interested in retaining political power. Thucydides is arguing that Athens
is great not because its distinctive practices create exceptional political agents
but (in part) because the fallacious stories Pericles tells about those practices
motivate unexceptional agents, prone to act imprudently, to perform actions that
are good for the polis and thus good for themselves. To put the point bluntly,
misplaced respect for Athenian democracy counteracts unfortunate motivational
tendencies in the common person. The practice of taking all to be equal before
the law does not actually change people, but it has the useful effect in normal
circumstances of ensuring that a typical agent acts in his own interests. The
connection with Nietzsche’s remarks on justice in Thucydides should be clear.
Just as Nietzsche maintains that the artifice of equality benefits the typical

40 Scott Jenkins
person, Thucydides shows how misplaced respect for democracy and equality
before the law benefits the citizens of Athens. And just as Nietzsche reads the
events in Corcyra as the disintegration of the artifice of equality, Thucydides
presents the plague in Athens as a case in which respect for the state ceases to
influence behavior.
III. Thucydides on Motivation and the Grounds of Hope
These accounts of behavior in Thucydides suggest a position in moral psychol-

ogy. Very roughly, he believes that in conditions of social breakdown, typical
agents’ passions lead to inaccurate judgments concerning their best interests.18
Take the example of civil war in Corcyra. In these conditions, people attend
to their actual circumstances because they see tempting opportunities to act on
their hatred of others or their greed (3.81). Overcome by these passions, which
are inflamed by the opportunities to indulge them, the Corcyreans no longer
judge respect for the general laws of humanity to be in their best interest. They
focus on the benefits of indulging these passions and the present means of doing
so. Nietzsche’s remarks in HH on the benefits of justice are at least compat-
ible with this picture, though of course he understands these weaker forces as
artifice and illusion.
Thucydides provides a second example of passion clouding one’s ability
to engage in effective prudential reasoning in his multiple discussions of the
ruinous effects of hope.19 Perhaps the best example from the History concerns
the Melian Dialogue, which begins with the Athenians imploring the Melians
to “look the facts in the face and on the basis of these facts to consider how you
can save your city from destruction” (5.87). The Melians resist the suggestion
that they ought to surrender, stating that to do so would be to give up all hope.
Perhaps the Spartans will save them, they say, or maybe Sparta will send others
(5.106, 5.111). The Athenians reply that hope is merely a comforter in situations
of danger and thus a “risky commodity” that serves primarily to separate one
from the real circumstances of action (5.103). When the Melians continue the
exchange by appealing to various future events that they hope will occur, the
Athenians get impatient, stating, “[Y]ou have said absolutely nothing which
could justify a man in thinking that he could be preserved” (5.111). Of course,
the Melians do not relent in the face of this appeal to the facts, decide not to
submit to the Athenians, and are eventually destroyed. The Athenians also have
the final word in the dialogue: “Well, at any rate, judging from this decision
of yours, you seem to us quite unique in your ability to consider the future as
something more certain than what is before your eyes, and to see uncertainties
as realities, simply because you would like them to be so. As you have staked
most on and trust most in Spartans, luck, and hopes, so in all these you will find

yourselves most completely deluded” (5.113). The differences between hopeful

inaction and ruthless action guided only by one’s immediate circumstances obvi-
ously concern both the passions that are stimulated and the temporal focus of
the beliefs they create. The Melians are in a state of despair once the Athenians
offer them a choice between slavery and death. Slavery would mean accepting
without a fight the end of their distinctive culture in a free state, while fighting
Athens to the death purchases the dignity of refusing to surrender only at the
highest possible price. Faced with two horrible alternatives, the Melians imagine
a third that is much more agreeable—salvation through the assistance of other
nations—and let that imagined scenario guide their deliberation. Despair thus
brings about beliefs concerning the future that, as the Athenians point out, cannot
be justified through appeal to the facts. These beliefs do alleviate psychological
distress, but because they also guide deliberation and action they ensure that the
Melians get slaughtered. This is the principal hazard of wishful thinking. By
forming beliefs that answer to a need for psychological comfort, and not to the
facts, agents fail to act effectively. At best, they are harmed by their inability
to engage in decisive action, as the Athenians are earlier in the war when they
hear that the Mytilenians are unifying Lesbos against Athens, feel terrible fear in
the face of this prospect, and then decide that it simply could not be true (3.3).20
In sum, then, Thucydides explains action in part through appeal to the effects
of situations on the passions. Outside the context of war or oppression, agents
tend to act prudently because their passions are not inflamed. They act on the
judgment that living in accordance with the general laws of humanity is best.
In a context of crisis that presents opportunities, agents tend to act imprudently
because their greed or hatred gives rise to the judgment that ruthless action is
wise. And in a context of oppression, ineffective action arises from despair and
the hopeful beliefs it creates. Ruthless agents discount the future in relation to
present opportunities, while despairing agents discount the present context of
action in relation to the imagined future.
On this picture, Pericles is exceptional in a couple of ways. First, he acts pru-
dently even though he has many opportunities to indulge his desires. Thucydides
emphasizes Pericles’s excellence by contrasting him with the tyrants who ruled
following his death, saying that they “were more on a level with each other and
each […] aimed at occupying the first place, [and] adopted methods of dema-
gogy” (2.65). Unlike these figures, Pericles sees his situation clearly and discerns
the proper course of action. It is also striking that Thucydides never describes
him as indulging in hope, in contrast with Nicias, the general partly responsible
for the Athenian defeat at Syracuse. Nicias urges his troops to continue on in
hope, stating that because their enemies have recently had good fortune, “it is
now reasonable for us to hope that the gods will be kinder to us, since by now we
deserve their pity rather than their jealousy” (7.77).21 This appeal to groundless
hope, in combination with a hint of the gambler’s fallacy, works about as well

42 Scott Jenkins
for Nicias as it does for the typical roulette player. Nicias’s military strategy
suffers, and he is soon captured and put to death.
Looking at this range of cases, we can attribute to Thucydides the view that
the exceptional agent is one whose passions do not lead to errors in practical
judgment, even in circumstances that inflame the passions of the typical person.
The exceptional agent is effective due to a state of his soul. I will argue that this
idea is a very large part of Nietzsche’s debt to Thucydides. To state the view all
at once, Nietzsche maintains that knowing the truth in this world of suffering
and frustration (and thus, perhaps, living well in this world) requires the same
abilities as seeing one’s situation and acting effectively within a context of
oppression and despair. The wishful thinking characteristic of Platonism and
Christianity leads a person away from the truth (and thus, perhaps, away from
the good life), just as hope misleads the Melians.22
IV. Thucydides’s Hard Factuality
Nietzsche’s late statement of his preference for Thucydides over Plato empha-
sizes the ability to remain in touch with the facts: “Greek philosophy: the
decadence of the Greek instinct. Thucydides: the great sum, the last revelation
of that strong, severe, hard factuality [Thatsächlichkeit] which was instinctive
with the older Hellenes. In the end, it is courage [Muth] in the face of reality that
distinguishes a man like Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward before reality,
consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control of himself [hat sich
in der Gewalt], consequently he also maintains control of things” (TI “Ancients”
2). We have already encountered something like this virtue of factuality in
Thucydides’s account of the Athenians imploring the Melians to “look the facts
in the face” and avoid the temptation of hope. Nietzsche’s attribution of this
virtue to Thucydides himself surely rests in part on his insightful accounts of
justice, democracy, and human psychology and in part on the principles that
guide the construction of the History. For example, Thucydides refuses to appeal
to the intervention of gods in human affairs. He also states that unlike some who
investigate the past—Herodotus is clearly in mind here—he will not “accept
all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way” (1.20). And unlike the poets,
who are “less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their
public, whose authorities cannot be checked, [etc.],” Thucydides will rely on the
“plainest evidence” in reaching his conclusions (1.21). But Thucydides does not
assume that any source of evidence is completely reliable. He not only refuses to
accept every story he hears but also treats eyewitness accounts and even his own
impressions as standing in need of verification. Memory is unreliable, he tells
us, and political affiliations can cloud one’s judgment of what is the case (1.22).
Thucydides’s method is on clear display in his account of the plague. He refuses

to speculate concerning the plague’s origins, nature, or efficacy—leaving such

activities to “other writers, with or without medical experience”—and instead
provides detailed descriptions of its symptoms for the sake of enabling others
to reidentify the disease (2.48). He also calmly notes the source of this informa-
tion: “I had the disease myself and saw others suffering from it” (2.48). Such
accounts of events appear throughout the History.
In TI Nietzsche is not concerned with the details of Thucydides’s methodol-
ogy or with the question of exactly how one ought to provide an account of
something as complex as a war. He focuses instead on Thucydides’s original
ability to employ a method that explains events through appeal to the facts, no
matter how distressing those facts may be. This “hard factuality” is described as
a matter of having “courage in the face of reality.” We can understand this ability
through appeal to the psychological picture above, which explains ungrounded,
hopeful beliefs as the result of a certain process of wishful thinking. Nietzsche
attributes to Thucydides an exceptional ability to avoid such beliefs and to face
up to disturbing facts. Of course, the individual facts that Thucydides discov-
ers are in part the result of particular methodological commitments, such as
his refusal to explain events through appeal to supernatural forces. But it takes
courage to embrace this naturalistic worldview, and this courage enables him
to gain further knowledge through disclosing facts that improve his inquiry into
the war. For example, Thucydides’s observations of how others are misled by
testimony, or believe in accordance with their political affiliations, provide him
with further insight into the proper method for his own investigation (1.20–22).
On Nietzsche’s view, all of this depends on an original “courage” that he iden-
tifies as the self-control of an agent or theorist whose beliefs do not answer to
individual passions. Having oneself under control in this way is the condition
of keeping in touch with the facts. The factuality that Nietzsche admires in
Thucydides is, then, a matter of exercising an ability to control one’s needs and
desires within the process of forming beliefs.23
Consider the contrasting case. Plato is a “coward before reality, consequently
he flees into the ideal.” Nietzsche is claiming that Plato’s metaphysical and
ethical views, with their pure forms, immortal souls, and ideal cities, are the
product of an inability or unwillingness to face the facts concerning the nature
of his existence. Like the Melians, who find intolerable both courses of action
open to them and for this reason vividly imagine a third, Plato cannot tolerate
the facts of his situation and proceeds to deny them by positing another world.
The same is true of Christian thought—“Platonism for ‘the people’” (BGE
P). Thus Nietzsche is understanding “otherworldly” philosophical positions as
instances of ungrounded hope writ large. When despair has as its occasioning
object one’s contingent situation, hope may take the form of this-worldly salva-
tion (e.g., Spartan forces or the lottery). But when one despairs in the face of
immutable features of human existence, hope must involve the postulation of

44 Scott Jenkins
another world that is (presently) unobservable. Nietzsche is maintaining that

because Platonists and Christians lack self-control and believe in accordance
with their needs, they lose touch with features of existence that determine the
context for all human action. This is why their theoretical activity exerts a
corrupting influence on philosophy, insofar as philosophy is concerned with
questions relevant to life.
V. Nietzsche’s Virtue Epistemology
At this point it is possible to bring out one of the distinctive features of Nietzsche’s
views in epistemology, which he at least shares with Thucydides. Neither
Thucydides nor Nietzsche has much of a theory of knowledge, if by that we
mean an account of what knowledge is and an explanation of how knowledge
is possible for beings such as ourselves. Rather, they assume that we can come
in contact with the facts, and they seek to explain systematic failures to do so
through appeal to deficiencies in character. To use contemporary terminology,
they are virtue epistemologists who emphasize virtues such as courage and aim
to understand those traits in terms of a relation between parts of the soul.
This position is not well developed in Thucydides, though he does ascribe
to Pericles the thought that to “face calamity with a mind as unclouded as
may be […] is real strength” (2.65). Nietzsche’s explanation of cognitive fail-
ures through appeal to character follows this model.24 In Ecce Homo he states,
“[E]rror (faith in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice. Every attainment,
every step forward for knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against
oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself” (EH P:3). This talk of courage,
hardness, and cleanliness as the conditions of knowledge appears throughout
Nietzsche’s late writings. In his famous discussion of present-day knowers who
possess a “will to truth,” and thus an “intellectual conscience,” he describes such
persons as “hard, severe, abstinent, heroic spirits” (GM III:24).25 Knowing is a
kind of abstinence because, as Nietzsche later states, “at every step one has to
wrestle for truth; one has had to surrender for it almost everything to which the
heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise” (A 50; see also BGE
230). So, the hardness and severity required for knowledge are relations to the
“heart”—that is, to the grounds of affection for those aspects of existence as we
see it that appeal to us and enable us to continue on through the obstacles and
sufferings that are constitutive of life.
We take up this “severe” relation to the heart when we aim to determine
which pleasing aspects of our worldview are mere projections of our needs
and desires. In this way, we limit our tendencies toward wishful thinking, an
act that Nietzsche classifies as a lie to oneself: “[B]y lie I mean: wishing not to
see something that one does see; wishing not to see something as one sees it”
(A 55). Presumably, one lies in this way, or embraces the “higher swindle” of

Platonism (TI “Ancients” 2), when what is seen is not a possible object of love.
Thus knowing requires the self-mastery of resisting the cognitive drift toward
believing in accordance with the heart whenever one is confronted by troubling
features of existence. In the end, then, we could sum up Nietzsche’s views on
truthfulness through his claim that it “requires greatness of soul” (A 50). This
emphasis on the psychology of the knower largely explains the absence of any
rules for truth-seeking in Nietzsche’s works. No set of rules can ultimately com-
pensate for a lack of ability rooted in the state of one’s soul. While Nietzsche
would surely claim that many truths are accessible to anyone who exerts some
effort, or devotes enough time to studying a particular scholarly topic (BGE 6),
the truths that are important for life and threaten to undermine our love of life
show up to just a few, great-souled individuals.
Approaching Nietzsche as a virtue epistemologist of this sort sheds light on
the notion of realism he employs in TI. Nietzsche states that with Thucydides,
“the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean the culture of the realists, reaches
its perfect expression—this inestimable movement amid the moralistic and
idealistic swindle set loose on all sides by the Socratic schools” (TI “Ancients” 2).
The realism that Nietzsche mentions here is not a metaphysical realism of
some sort or another but, rather, a generally methodological commitment of
the great-souled agent or scholar. That Nietzsche’s sort of realism is divorced
from any particular metaphysical view is clear from his remark just a few pages
earlier that “in the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a
convinced realist” (TI “Skirmishes” 49). What Goethe and Thucydides have
in common is a commitment to overcoming the unreal, idealistic tendencies
of their times—an overcoming that Nietzsche sometimes terms “naturalizing”
(GS 109) or simply “science” (A 47)26—and not at all any particular theoretical
position.27
Nietzsche’s understanding of realism follows his account of truthfulness as
overcoming a tendency to lie. Realism is a commitment to overcoming idealism.
We might sum up this opposition using the key notion of Nietzsche’s early
account of justice, namely, forgetting. This process is a motivated drift away
from the facts, toward the ideal—in this particular case, a picture of justice as
a system of unique, overriding reasons completely separated from any particu-
lar historical origin. Coming to know the truth about justice is just a matter
of overcoming this forgetfulness. On Nietzsche’s view, this can occur either
through greatness of soul alone or though catching a partial glimpse of how
things truly are (as occurred during the civil war in Corcyra). In the latter case,
real knowledge rarely emerges, and the agent slips back into the ideal. But
when this process of recollection occurs as a result of the realism of the coura-
geous, great-souled person, the world comes into view as it is—complex, all-
too-human, and filled with distressing facts. The courage required to keep the
world in view separates a mere idealist like Plato from a potential philosopher
such as Thucydides.

46 Scott Jenkins
VI. Thucydides’s Factuality as the Ideal of On the Genealogy of

Morals
So far I have focused on how Nietzsche’s reading of Thucydides can guide our
understanding of the virtue of factuality that Nietzsche attributes to Thucydides.
The further question of what role this virtue plays within Nietzsche’s thought
more generally is tied up with a number of complex issues, including questions
concerning the principles of Nietzsche’s revaluation of values, and more general
questions concerning his relationship to his predecessors. In place of even a
provisional account of these issues, I will conclude with some brief remarks on
the role that this virtue of factuality plays in GM, with an eye toward uncovering
one final element in Nietzsche’s debt to Thucydides.
The contrast between the great-souled realist and the cowardly idealist sheds
light on an interesting passage at the beginning of GM, where Nietzsche is con-
cerned with unnamed “English psychologists” and their views on the origins of
morality. Nietzsche’s judgment comes quickly—“they have bungled their moral
genealogy,” he claims, because they have attempted to justify the notion of moral
goodness through appeal to an original assessment of the utility of the actions
now termed “good” (GM II:2). Not only is this story of origins implausible, on
Nietzsche’s view, it also provides decisive evidence that what he terms “the
historical spirit” is lacking in these psychologists. Instead of actually looking at
the evidence concerning the origins of the concept “good,” they simply project
into the past a story that would establish the present authority of moral concepts.
They are idealists with no concern for the facts.28
Interestingly, these facts about the English psychologists frustrate what
Nietzsche describes as his own hope:
I am told that [the English psychologists] are simply old, cold, and tedious frogs,
creeping around men and into men as if in their own proper element, that is, in a
swamp. I rebel at that idea: more, I do not believe it; and if one may be allowed to
hope [wünschen] when one does not know, then I hope from my heart they may
be the reverse of this—that these investigators and microscopists of the soul may
be fundamentally brave, proud, and magnanimous [grossmüthige] animals, who
know how to keep their hearts as well as their sufferings in bounds and have trained
themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh,
ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth.—For such truths do exist. (GM I:1)
Nietzsche expresses hope that his fellow theorists are great-souled animals
whose self-control enables them to discover even the most unnerving truths,
but that hope is immediately frustrated. In the very next section of GM it is
revealed that the “English psychologists” engage in a process of wishful thinking
through which their beliefs about the past conform to their need for security in
their moral practice. Why, we must ask, does Nietzsche begin GM by presenting
himself as engaging in an unreasonable hope by refusing to believe those who
say that his peers are just “tedious frogs”?

A partial answer to this question concerns the psychology of the philosopher

or “knower,” which is introduced as a theme of GM when Nietzsche opens his
preface with the claim that we knowers are unknown to ourselves (GM P:1). This
theme reemerges in the expansion of self-knowledge that occurs at the end of the
third essay, where Nietzsche describes various affinities between the scientific
pursuit of truth and modern moral practice. Presenting the English psychologists
as wishful thinkers thus anticipates the conclusion of the work by connecting
them with Christians whose hopes concerning the next world ground their lives
(perhaps this is why Nietzsche states that unlike their books, these psychologists
are themselves “interesting” [GM I:1]). But this connection extends to Nietzsche
himself, who as author of GM presents himself as susceptible to believing what
he wishes to be true concerning his peers. The reader thus sees in this frustrated
wish a vivid example of the temptation to drift away from the facts, a temptation
that Nietzsche describes as arising from his “heart.”29
Nietzsche’s other reason for presenting the frustration of his hope concerns
the content of that hope—the ideal of the philosopher as a great-souled realist.
This strange opening to GM enables Nietzsche to contrast his ideal with the
unfortunate reality of his time and thereby introduce his reader to an ideal that
will likely appear foreign. Nietzsche’s concern with the visibility of this ideal
in modern times is evident in his earlier account of Thucydides as “the last
glorious flower” of what Nietzsche terms the “culture of the most impartial
knowledge of the world,” the culture of the Sophists (D 168).30 He claims that
this culture has become “pale and ungraspable to us,” as is clear from the fact
that “we suspect that it must have been a very immoral [unsittlich] culture, since
a Plato and all the Socratic schools fought against it!” (D 168). This common,
mistaken suspicion results from the emergence of Christian-Platonic thought,
which obscures what came before it (perhaps as the “slave revolt” in morality
becomes invisible because of its victory [GM I:7]).31 Nietzsche presents this
emergence as, in reality, a decline in which the needs and tendencies of lesser
persons find philosophical expression—this is at least part of the sense of the
claim that “philosophers are the decadents of Greek culture” (TI “Ancients”
3) or that Socrates was an agent of “plebeian ressentiment” (TI “Socrates” 7).
On Nietzsche’s view, then, we have overlooked true Hellenic culture and char-
acter because we are heirs to the idealism that followed. As philologists or
philosophers, we find in Greece only what we want to find (beautiful souls,
a golden mean, or the Platonic tendencies that are “an aberration from all the
basic instincts of the Hellene” [TI “Ancients” 3]) and thereby overlook the
seeds of an alternate ideal. This passage in GM serves as a reminder. It also
sets the stage for Nietzsche’s later account of what is perhaps his greatest debt
to the Greeks, the Dionysian notion of saying ‘yes’ to life “even in its strangest
and hardest problems” (TI “Ancients” 5), which has as its condition the hard-
ness against one’s heart that is necessary for those problems to come to light
(TI “Ancients” 2; see also EH “BT” 2).

48 Scott Jenkins
As important as this ideal of realism is within Nietzsche’s later thought,

when he states, “[M]y recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism
has always been Thucydides” (TI “Ancients” 2), he cannot have in mind only
the historical details and theoretical elements of the History.32 Nietzsche was
troubled by the thought of living his life among “tedious frogs,” within a Christian
culture he regarded as decadent. No wonder he often felt a personal need for
a curative vacation. Thucydides’s work provided that cure, and Thucydides as
author served as an inspiring model of intellectual courage. Perhaps Nietzsche
also saw elements of his life in Thucydides’s exile from Athens after the fall of
Amphipolis, which Thucydides describes as the condition of his production of
the History: “I saw what was being done on both sides […] because of my exile,
and this leisure gave me rather exceptional facilities for looking into things”
(5.26). Nietzsche takes just the same attitude toward his life as a nomadic former
professor capable of seeing his world from a variety of perspectives (EH “Wise”
2–3). If he did recognize elements of his life in Thucydides’s, Nietzsche would
have one more, very personal reason to take Thucydides as his model of great
intellectual activity in a context that could elicit only despair, hope, and idealism.
University of Kansas
jenkinss@ku.edu
Notes
An early version of this article was presented at the University of Kansas, and I am grateful to
members of the audience for their comments and questions. Jessica Berry and Jack Bricke also
provided valuable critical remarks.
1. Translations of works by Nietzsche cited in this article include: Beyond Good and Evil,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966); “On the Genealogy of Morals” and
“Ecce Homo,” trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1969);
The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking
Press, 1968); “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Daybreak, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Human, All Too Human: A
Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
2. Nietzsche’s engagement with Thucydides very likely began during his student years at
Pforta, and he often taught Thucydides while in Basel. Thomas Brobjer discusses Nietzsche’s
readings of Thucydides in “Nietzsche’s Relation to the Greek Sophists,” Nietzsche-Studien
34 (2005): 256–77, at 264–65.
3. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London: Penguin, 1972);
hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
4. See especially BGE 259.
5. While I put very little weight on Nietzsche’s remarks in his notebooks, it is worth noting
that those remarks are at least consistent with the analysis I offer here.
6. Compare Nietzsche’s remarks on terminology that “swells one’s pride” (BGE 230) and
“pomp-and-virtue names” (BGE 295).

7. John Zumbrunnen discusses and dismisses this approach in “‘Courage in the Face of
Reality’: Nietzsche’s Admiration for Thucydides,” Polity 35, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 237–63, at 248.
8. C. D. C. Reeve argues for this approach to Thucydides in “Thucydides on Human Nature,”
Political Theory 27, no. 4 (August 1999): 435–46.
9. Here I must skip over the question of how this discussion of forgetting relates to quite
different treatments at D 126, GM I:2, and GM II:1.
10. Compare HH 474, where Nietzsche claims that the polis encourages a competition for
distinction that ultimately undermines the polis.
11. This discussion anticipates the later account of morality as leading some persons to
misjudge their own good. For an account of this later view, see Brian Leiter, “Nietzsche and the
Morality Critics,” Ethics 107, no. 2 (January 1997): 250–85.
12. In HH 93 Nietzsche describes a different sort of postulation of equality (Gleichstellung)
that would ground rights between a master and slave. Nietzsche’s choice of a “besieged town” as
an example of an entity that would occupy the position of the slave could indicate that Nietzsche
thinks the Melians should have accepted slavery once the Athenians judged that ignoring the
standard of justice was in their interest.
13. Reeve (“Thucydides on Human Nature,” 439–441) presents and defends an alternate
translation of the “war is a stern teacher” passage (3.82). I follow Reeve in reading Thucydides
as claiming that war “assimilates most people’s passions to their conditions,” or circumstances.
14. Cane notes that a close connection between moderate behavior and enlightened self-
interest appears already in Herodotus and Sophocles. See Gregory Cane, Thucydides and the
Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), 239–40.
15. Diodotus makes a similar claim in the Mytilenian Debate (3.46).
16. Nietzsche makes unrelated comments on the funeral oration in BT P:4 and GM I:11. In
other contexts he alludes to Pericles’s notorious remarks on women.
17. Reeve (“Thucydides on Human Nature,” 443) provides a very good account of Pericles’s
exceptional character.
18. For further discussion of these views, see Reeve, “Thucydides on Human Nature,” 440.
19. Hope is also a central theme in Raymond Geuss’s account of Nietzsche’s debt to
Thucydides in his “Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,” in Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 219–33.
20. Athenians are again described as refusing to face unnerving facts following the defeat at
Syracuse (8.1).
21. See Geuss, “Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,” 224, for further discussion of this case.
22. Nietzsche’s published writings do not mention the role of hope in the History, but it is
highly unlikely that Thucydides’s account of hope escaped Nietzsche’s attention during the years
that he studied and taught the History. Nietzsche’s account of oppressed Christians’ hopeful belief
in the next world (GM I:15) also fits this account exactly.
23. Controlling one’s interests is not at all a matter of minimizing their influence on the
process of belief formation. Nietzsche strongly opposes the Schopenhauerian view that we see
the world as it truly is only once our cognition has torn itself free from the will. Objectivity, for
Nietzsche, is a result of deploying one’s Pro and Con in the correct manner (GM III:12), which
means that it is a product of the wills and drives that underlie our interests.
24. Geuss (“Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,” 220) underestimates Thucydides’s
possible influence on Nietzsche when he presents explanations through appeal to weakness
as Nietzsche’s own contribution to his account, in TI, of the difference between Plato and
Thucydides. Nietzsche’s discussion of this difference is at the same time a Thucydidean analysis
of Plato.

50 Scott Jenkins
25. I discuss Nietzsche’s notion of a will to truth, and its connection with intellectual
conscience and wishful thinking, in “Nietzsche’s Questions Concerning the Will to Truth,”
forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Philosophy.
26. This opposition between “science” and “morality,” and its connection with Thucydides, is
especially clear in the notebooks. See KSA 11:36[11] and 13:14[147].
27. At most, Goethe and Thucydides are both committed to what Leiter terms “M-naturalism”
in his Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002).
28. That the unobservable features of the world intended to justify present behavior lie in the
past, and not in the beyond, does not affect the role they can play in justifying behavior. This sort
of idealization of the past is Nietzsche’s target in his account of monumental history in HL, where
he claims that such history tends toward free poetic invention in which the past itself suffers harm
(HL §2).
29. For a detailed discussion of how the narrator of GM exhibits the various tendencies of
modern “knowers,” see Elijah Millgram, “Who Was Nietzsche’s Genealogist?” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 75, no. 1 (July 2007): 92–110.
30. Nietzsche’s remarks in GM might be read as the presentation of a more theoretical
Aristotelian megalopsychos—a notion that would be more recognizable to his readers—but the
similarities between this passage and the later discussion of Thucydides (TI “Ancients” 2) are
certainly striking. For a very good discussion of Nietzsche’s relation to Aristotle (which concludes
with the judgment that Aristotle was too modern for Nietzsche’s taste), see Thomas Brobjer,
Nietzsche’s Ethics of Character (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1995), 240–62.
31. Here I disagree with Mann’s reading of D 168 as expressing Nietzsche’s own judgment that
Sophist culture must have been unsittlich. See Joel Mann, “Nietzsche’s Interest and Enthusiasm
for the Greek Sophists,” Nietzsche-Studien 32 (2003): 406–38, at 411–12.
32. Zumbrunnen (“‘Courage in the Face of Reality,’” 241–42) provides evidence that in
speaking of a “cure” from Platonism, Nietzsche may have in mind Thucydides’s effect on him
as a student at Pforta. I find it unlikely, though, that Nietzsche’s talk of a cure is merely an
extension of notions of physical health to Nietzsche’s intellectual life (Zumbrunnen, “‘Courage
in the Face of Reality,’” 240). As I have shown, Nietzsche regards a certain sort of self-control
as a condition of effective intellectual activity, and Thucydides’s example furthers his pursuit of
this healthy psychic state.

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What Does Nietzsche Owe Thucydides?

Author(s): Scott Jenkins

Abstract: Thucydides was one of Nietzsche’s most important intellectual

JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 42, 2011.

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Thucydides describes Athenian envoys to Melos as maintaining that “it is a

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agency that underwrites Thucydides’s views on the perils of hope. It is this

I. The Origin and Nature of Justice

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JNS 42_05_Jenkins.indd 35 9/23/11 12:37 PM

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II. The Transfiguring Glow of Pericles’s Funeral Oration

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role of illusion or falsehood in producing action in accordance with the general

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III. Thucydides on Motivation and the Grounds of Hope

These accounts of behavior in Thucydides suggest a position in moral psychol-

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yourselves most completely deluded” (5.113). The differences between hopeful

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IV. Thucydides’s Hard Factuality

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to speculate concerning the plague’s origins, nature, or efficacy—leaving such

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another world that is (presently) unobservable. Nietzsche is maintaining that

V. Nietzsche’s Virtue Epistemology

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VI. Thucydides’s Factuality as the Ideal of On the Genealogy of

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A partial answer to this question concerns the psychology of the philosopher

JNS 42_05_Jenkins.indd 47 9/23/11 12:37 PM

As important as this ideal of realism is within Nietzsche’s later thought,

JNS 42_05_Jenkins.indd 48 9/23/11 12:37 PM

JNS 42_05_Jenkins.indd 49 9/23/11 12:37 PM

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