able poetic genius,
Homer--were during the pre-Wolfian period only too great, and hence
inwardly altogether empty and elusive when we now try to grasp them. If
classical philology goes back again to the same conceptions, and once
more tries to pour new wine into old bottles, it is only on the surface
that the conceptions are the same: everything has really become new;
bottle and mind, wine and word. We everywhere find traces of the fact
that philology has lived in company with poets, thinkers, and artists
for the last hundred years: whence it has now come about that the heap
of ashes formerly pointed to as classical philology is now turned into
fruitful and even rich soil.[2]

[2] Nietzsche perceived later on that this statement was,
unfortunately, not justified.--TR.

And there is a second fact which I should like to recall to the memory
of those friends of antiquity who turn their dissatisfied backs on
classical philology. You honour the immortal masterpieces of the
Hellenic mind in poetry and sculpture, and think yourselves so much more
fortunate than preceding generations, which had to do without them; but
you must not forget that this whole fairyland once lay buried under
mountains of prejudice, and that the blood and sweat and arduous labour
of innumerable followers of our science were all necessary to lift up
that world from the chasm into which it had sunk. We grant that
philology is not the creator of this world, not the composer of that
immortal music; but is it not a merit, and a great merit, to be a mere
virtuoso, and let the world for the first time hear that music which lay
so long in obscurity, despised and undecipherable? Who was Homer
previously to Wolf's brilliant investigations? A good old man, known at
best as a "natural genius," at all events the child of a barbaric age,
replete with faults against good taste and good morals. Let us hear how
a learned man of the first rank writes about Homer even so late as 1783:
"Where does the good man live? Why did he remain so long incognito?
Apropos, can't you get me a silhouette of him?"

We demand _thanks_--not in our own name, for we are but atoms--but in
the name of philology itself, which is indeed neither a Muse nor a
Grace, but a messenger of the gods: and just as the Muses descended upon
the dull and tormented Boeotian peasants, so Philology comes into a
world full of gloomy colours and pictures, full of the deepest, most
incurable woes; and speaks t