Reading Nietzsche

Themes · Aesthetics and Form

Greatness, Friendship, and the Agon

Cluster Aesthetics and Form Writing period 1872–1888 First encounter 6 readings

A young philologist argues that the Greeks kept envy and the wish to destroy from wrecking their culture by building institutions in which those impulses produced poets, athletes and lawgivers instead. The claim is specific, it is historical, and almost everything on this page depends on whether it can bear the weight later placed on it.

The agon is the formalized contest: games, dramatic competitions, ostracism, the rivalry of one poet with another. In "Homer's Contest" — an unpublished 1872 essay — Nietzsche reads it as a solution to a problem. Greek culture, on his account, was not serene: it contained cruelty, the appetite for destruction, and an envy the Greeks themselves named and treated as ordinary. The contest does not remove those impulses. It gives them an object, a rule and an audience, and in doing so makes them productive. The mechanism is competitive and the outcome is cultural.

Two features of the argument are worth holding onto from the start. The contest requires a rough equality of powers: it works because the rivals can plausibly threaten each other, which is why the essay treats the removal of a rival — by ostracism, or by there being no one left to compete with — as a danger rather than a victory. And it is an argument about institutions, not about character. What makes envy productive is the frame it is put in, and nothing in the essay suggests that a person who competes is thereby improved.

That second point is what keeps this page from becoming a page about ambition. Nietzsche's later writing does have a good deal to say about greatness, rank and the noble type, and some of it grows out of the early essay. But "greatness" in Beyond Good and Evil is measured by what a person can bear rather than by whom they have beaten, and the Genealogy's noble is described by a relation to enemies rather than by success in contests. Whether the late material is the agon's descendant or a different idea that has absorbed its vocabulary is a real question, and this page keeps it open.

Essential first encounter

Six assignments, read in order and in date order: 1872, 1874, 1883, 1886, 1887, 1888. The first two are the Greek argument and an early warning about how it can be misused. The last four are the places where a later vocabulary of nobility and rank takes over, and the question to carry through them is whether the contest is still doing any work.

  1. Core · 1872, unpublished

    Homer's Contest 1872, unpublished

    Envy given an institution

    Free edition: Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays, trans. Maximilian A. Mügge. This collection has no single matching Kaufmann or Hollingdale edition; check the individual essay title in any modern anthology.

    Question: The essay says the Greeks had two goddesses of strife and thought one of them good. What has to be true of a society for that distinction to hold?

    Why it belongs: The theme's founding text and its most concentrated statement. Nietzsche begins from the cruelty in Greek life rather than from Greek serenity, distinguishes a strife that destroys from a strife that drives people to work, and reads the contest as the institution that keeps the second alive. The argument about ostracism is the sharpest part: a city removes its outstanding man not out of resentment but to keep the contest going, because a rivalry with no possible rival has stopped being a contest. Note three things about its status. Nietzsche did not publish it. It is a classicist's essay written for a particular scholarly quarrel. And its account of what the Greeks were like is an interpretation, not a report — see the section below.

    Read alongside: The Greek State; Untimely Meditations II §2.

    Online edition: Homer's Contest (trans. Maximilian A. Mügge) · Edition guidance.

  2. Complication · 1874

    Untimely Meditations II, "On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life" §2

    The past as a gallery of rivals, and what that does to the living

    Free edition: Thoughts Out of Season, Part II, trans. Adrian Collins, where the essay appears as "The Use and Abuse of History." Preferred translation: R. J. Hollingdale.

    Question: Monumental history is supposed to encourage. Nietzsche says it also deceives. Which of the two effects can a reader detect in themselves?

    Why it belongs: The section describes the person who looks to past greatness for the assurance that greatness is possible, and treats that as the agonistic relation extended backwards in time — the dead as competitors. It is assigned here because Nietzsche immediately turns on it. Monumental history, he argues, has to smooth away the particular causes that made a past achievement possible in order to present it as repeatable; it can inspire the wrong people; and it can be used to prevent the present from producing anything by insisting that everything worth doing is already done. This is the earliest and most useful check on the whole theme, and it is Nietzsche's own.

    Read alongside: Untimely Meditations III §§3, 6; Genealogy as method.

    Online edition: "The Use and Abuse of History" §2 (trans. Adrian Collins) · Preferred edition.

  3. Development · 1883

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra Part I, "On the Friend"

    The contest brought inside a relationship

    Common: "The Friend." The free edition is Thus Spake Zarathustra.

    Question: Zarathustra wants the friend to be the best enemy. Is that a description of friendship or a demand that most friendships could not meet?

    Why it belongs: The chapter transfers the agonistic structure from an institution to a private relation: the friend is the one before whom one may not relax, who should be approached in one's best condition rather than one's most comfortable, and who serves as an opponent worth having. It is the most attractive thing on this page and the place to be most careful. The chapter also contains dismissive remarks about what women are supposedly capable of in friendship, which are part of the text and are examined on the women, marriage, and gender page. Read the whole speech rather than the memorable lines.

    Read alongside: Zarathustra I, "On the Way of the Creator"; Genealogy I §§10–11.

    Online edition: Part I, "The Friend" (trans. Thomas Common) · Preferred edition.

  4. Core · 1886

    Beyond Good and Evil §§259, 260, 265, 287

    Rank, and a kind of greatness that is not a contest

    Part IX, "What Is Noble?" Section numbers run continuously from 1 to 296 across the book's nine parts.

    Question: None of these four sections mentions a contest. What, if anything, has replaced it?

    Why it belongs: The late account of nobility, and the point at which this theme becomes genuinely difficult. §259 generalizes exploitation into a claim about life itself — the most contestable move in the book, and one this site does not endorse. §260 sets out the two types of morality. §265 describes the noble's assumption of its own priority, in a form most readers will find repellent. §287 asks what makes a person noble and answers with an inner relation to oneself rather than with any achievement or victory. Read the four in sequence and notice what has changed since 1872: rivalry has been replaced by rank, the institutional argument by a typology of persons, and the claim about what produces culture by a claim about who is entitled to what. That is a large change, and whether it is a development or a substitution is the question this page leaves open.

    Read alongside: §257; Master and slave morality.

    Online edition: Part IX (trans. Helen Zimmern; use Find for the section numbers) · Preferred edition.

  5. Core · 1887

    On the Genealogy of Morals Essay I, §§10–11

    Two ways of having an enemy

    Free edition trans. Horace B. Samuel; the Preface and each of the three essays are numbered separately.

    Question: Nietzsche says the noble seeks out an enemy worth having. How would that look different, from outside, from ordinary aggression?

    Why it belongs: The closest the late work comes to an analysis of the agonistic relation. §10 contrasts a valuation that begins from itself and treats its opponent as an occasion with one that begins from an enemy and needs him to remain hateful; the first is described as able to let go of an injury, the second as storing it. §11 is where respect for an opponent is presented as characteristic of the first type. It is also the passage in which Nietzsche writes about the predatory violence of noble societies in terms that are deliberately shocking and are examined on the master and slave morality page. Assigned here for the distinction between two relations to an opponent, not as an endorsement of the type described.

    Read alongside: Genealogy II §17; Master and slave morality.

    Online edition: Essay I §§10–11 (trans. Horace B. Samuel) · Preferred edition.

  6. Development · 1888

    Ecce Homo "Why I Am So Wise" §7

    Four rules for picking a fight

    Free edition trans. Anthony M. Ludovici. Written in 1888; first published in 1908.

    Question: The rules are restrictive — attack only what is strong, only when one stands alone, never for personal reasons. Does Nietzsche's own late polemic obey them?

    Why it belongs: Nietzsche sets out what he calls his practice in war as a small number of explicit rules: to attack only causes that are winning, only where he would find no allies, never with a personal motive behind the public quarrel, and to take on only what is strong enough to make the attack worth making. It is the agonistic structure restated as a personal discipline, and it is the best evidence that he still held the early insight in 1888 — the value of an opponent depends on the opponent being formidable. It is also, written in the same months as The Case of Wagner and The Antichrist, a claim about his own conduct that a reader can test against the books.

    Read alongside: "Why I Am a Destiny" §1; Wagner and decadence.

    Online edition: "Why I Am So Wise" (trans. Anthony M. Ludovici; use Find for §7) · Preferred edition.

What the agon is not

The early essay is unusually easy to convert into advice, and the conversion loses the argument. Five things it does not say:

It is not a claim that competition is good
The argument is about a particular institutional arrangement in a particular society: rules, an audience, a recognized field, roughly matched rivals, and a culture that treated the outcome as a public good. Remove any of those and the mechanism is not present. Nothing in "Homer's Contest" suggests that competition as such produces anything worth having.
It is not a psychology of motivation
Nietzsche is not saying that rivalry makes individuals better people or that ambition is healthy. He is saying that a society which has to deal with envy and destructiveness can build a frame in which those impulses generate poems and statues rather than feuds. The claim is about the frame.
It is not a defence of winning
The ostracism argument runs the other way. A contest that has produced a permanent victor has destroyed itself, because the point was the continued striving of several and not the elevation of one. Read that way, the essay is closer to an argument for plurality than for supremacy.
It is not the late doctrine of rank
Beyond Good and Evil's order of rank is a claim about kinds of person and what they may demand of each other. The agon is a claim about how a society channels an impulse. The second can be true while the first is false, and treating the early essay as an early version of the later politics reads a continuity into the corpus rather than out of it.
It is not an account of modern institutions
Nietzsche is describing games, drama festivals and civic practices in an ancient slave society, and in "The Greek State" he says explicitly that he thinks the culture rested on that slavery. Applying the model to a workplace, a market or a school is an extension a reader may want to make, and it is theirs to defend, not his.

Fuller route: tests and complications

Four investigations to take after the first encounter. Each assignment opens its full explanation and reading links in the work survey below.

1. The Greek argument, and what it costs

The early essays belong together, and the least comfortable of them is the one that says what the contest was supposed to rest on.

  1. Homer's Contest
    Two kinds of strife, and the ostracism argument.
  2. The Greek State
    The same culture, with its material conditions stated without euphemism.
  3. The Birth of Tragedy — §§7–9
    Greek art treated as an achievement over terror rather than an expression of calm.
  4. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
    The pre-Socratics read as rivals rather than as a sequence of approximations.

2. Nietzsche's own warnings

Before extending the model, read the places where he limits it.

  1. Untimely Meditations — II §2
    Monumental history as encouragement and as deception.
  2. Untimely Meditations — III §§3, 6
    What an exemplary figure is for, and what it is not.
  3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, "On the Way of the Creator"
    Solitude and self-opposition, where there is no rival to measure against.
  4. Ecce Homo — "Why I Am So Wise" §7
    Restrictions on whom one may attack, stated as rules.

3. Having an enemy

The late analysis of what a relation to an opponent can be, and of what it becomes when the opponent is needed rather than chosen.

  1. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay I §§10–11
    Two valuations, distinguished by their relation to an enemy.
  2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, "On the Friend"
    The friend as the opponent one does not want to defeat.
  3. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay II §17
    Founders of states described without any contest at all.
  4. Twilight of the Idols — "Skirmishes" §38
    Freedom measured by resistance overcome, in the late polemical register.

4. What "greatness" comes to mean

Follow the word away from the contest and ask, at each step, what would count as evidence for the claim being made.

  1. Beyond Good and Evil — §257
    Distance as the precondition of rank, stated as a historical thesis.
  2. Beyond Good and Evil — §§259, 260, 265, 287
    Nobility described from inside, and greatness detached from victory.
  3. Twilight of the Idols — "Skirmishes" §49
    One person offered as the whole argument, in a single portrait.
  4. Ecce Homo — "Why I Am a Destiny" §1
    The agonistic vocabulary turned on an entire civilization.

Keep these distinctions in view

Contest and rivalry
A rivalry is a relation between two people. A contest is an institution with rules, a field and an audience that makes the rivalry legible and repeatable. "Homer's Contest" is about the second, and the whole causal claim depends on the frame rather than on the feelings of the competitors.
Envy and ressentiment
The essay's envy is an open impulse with a named object: one wants to do what the other has done. What the Genealogy calls ressentiment is a blocked, inward and concealed relation to an enemy who is needed for one's own self-description. Nietzsche keeps them apart, and collapsing them makes both arguments unintelligible.
Excellence and victory
What the contest is supposed to produce is achievement — a poem, a statue, a law. Winning is the occasion, not the product, and the ostracism argument exists to say that a permanent winner has broken the mechanism. Readings that make Nietzsche an advocate of dominance have inverted the essay.
Rank and hierarchy
The late order of rank is a claim about kinds of person and their entitlements. The agon is compatible with a rough equality among competitors and in fact requires one. These are different structures, and the late work does not derive the second from the first.
Cultural production and personal improvement
The early argument is that a society gets art and law out of an arrangement. It says nothing about whether the individuals inside it flourish, and the material conditions Nietzsche names in "The Greek State" suggest he thought most of them did not.
The early essay and the late greatness
By 1886 greatness is measured by how much a person can bear, by the distance they can sustain from others, and by an inner relation to themselves. The contest has dropped out. Whether that is the agon internalized or a different idea using the same words is genuinely contested, and this page does not resolve it.
Nietzsche's Greeks and Greek history
Every historical claim on this page is Nietzsche's. The reconstruction of an agonistic culture is an interpretation built from selected sources by a young classicist arguing with the scholarship of his day. See the section below.

Nietzsche's Greeks

This page assigns a great deal of material in which Nietzsche makes claims about what the Greeks were like: that their culture was built on cruelty as much as on measure, that envy was openly acknowledged among them, that the contest was a deliberate cultural instrument, that ostracism was designed to preserve rivalry. These are claims about the past, and they are his.

Three things follow for reading. They were arguments, made against a prevailing nineteenth-century image of Greek serenity that Nietzsche thought sentimental, and they were contested by other classicists at the time — his first book provoked exactly that response. They are built on a selection of sources: Hesiod, Homer, a handful of anecdotes about ostracism and the contests, read with a strong thesis already in view. And they are inseparable from a polemical purpose, since the Greeks are being used throughout as a measure against which Nietzsche's own century is found wanting.

The site's practice is to present these as Nietzsche's claims and to say so where it matters, rather than to certify or refute them. A reader who wants to know what classical scholarship now holds about archaic Greek competition, ostracism or the social place of the games will need to go to that scholarship; this page does not stand in for it, and the passages assigned here are not evidence about ancient Greece independent of Nietzsche's reading of it.

One consequence is practical. Where the argument on this page is strongest — the analysis of two relations to an opponent in Genealogy I §§10–11, the rules in Ecce Homo, the warning about monumental history — it does not depend on the historical reconstruction being correct. Where it depends most heavily on the Greeks, it is most exposed. Keeping track of which is which is the most useful discipline the theme offers.

Explore by work

Eighteen assignments across seven works and three early unpublished essays, including the six starting readings. Core identifies the first encounter; development adds a setting or a second formulation; complication tests an apparent answer; extension follows a related question. The survey follows publication chronology, and unpublished pieces are marked as such.

The early essays4 reading assignments

Three unpublished pieces from 1872–73 and the first published book. The unpublished essays are collected in a free volume translated by Maximilian A. Mügge; there is no single matching Kaufmann or Hollingdale edition for that collection, so check individual titles when using a modern anthology.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Untimely Meditations2 reading assignments

The second and third essays. Note the free volumes: Thoughts Out of Season, Part II (trans. Adrian Collins) carries these two; the first and fourth essays are in Part I, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. Preferred translation: R. J. Hollingdale.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Thus Spoke Zarathustra3 reading assignments

Three Part I speeches. Free edition trans. Thomas Common; its Roman numerals number chapters continuously, so match references by part and chapter title.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Beyond Good and Evil2 reading assignments

Part IX, "What Is Noble?", is where the late vocabulary of rank is concentrated. Section numbers run continuously from 1 to 296 across the book's nine parts. Much of this material is anti-egalitarian in a way the site states rather than softens; the master and slave morality page carries the main analysis.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

On the Genealogy of Morals2 reading assignments

The free edition numbers the Preface and each of the three essays separately, and includes Nietzsche's closing Note after Essay I §17.

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Twilight of the Idols3 reading assignments

Section numbers restart in each chapter, and the free edition (trans. Anthony M. Ludovici) uses different chapter titles, given below.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Ecce Homo2 reading assignments

Written in 1888, published in 1908. Free edition trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, which titles the last chapter "Why I Am a Fatality."

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

A note on the notebooks

This page carries no notebook route. The 1872–73 essays at the centre of the theme are unpublished but they are finished pieces of writing that Nietzsche completed and set aside, which is a different thing from a notebook entry; they are labelled as unpublished wherever they are assigned.

The late notebooks do contain material on rank and on the cultivation of a higher type, and it is treated where the published arguments it bears on are set out — chiefly on master and slave morality, which carries the relevant entries with the standard caution. Repeating them here would add length without adding evidence, and on this theme the published books are where the argument actually happens.

The sitewide caution applies if you follow that material: The Will to Power is a posthumous arrangement of notebook entries, its numbering is editorial rather than Nietzsche's, and it brings together notes written at different dates. See the edition guidance, and for the notebooks as written rather than as arranged, Nietzsche Source's critical edition.

Related extensions: what might follow?

Choose these after the central questions, according to the direction your reading takes. They return to assignments already explained in the survey.

Connections

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