What is the seal of having become free’? – No longer to be ashamed before oneself.
1 Group of philosophers in the early fifth century BC who argued that the world of change was a mere appearance of an underlying unchanging being
2 The German word ‘Recht’ is usually ambiguous, meaning both ‘right’ and ‘law’. In this case it seems best to render it as ‘justice’.
3 Ariston lived in the third century BC. This is fragment number 359 in Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, ed. von Arnim.
4 Two stoic philosophers: Seneca (first century AD) was a wealthy member of the Roman ruling class. Epictetus (late first/early second century) was a freed Greek slave.
5 The Reflections of La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) contain a wealth of exceptionally astute and disillusioned observations about human action and motivation.
6 ‘the love which is pleasure’
7 ‘the love which is vanity’. Nietzsche takes the distinction between amour-plaisir and amour-vanité from Stendhal (see above, Book 11, footnote 42, p. 92) who actually distinguishes four kinds of love; see his De l’amour, chapter I.
8 Originally Giovanni de’ Medici (1475–1521), elected to the Papacy in 1513; very active patron of the arts
9 Minor Italian humanist (1472–1518)
10 ‘Grant God eternal rest.’ A transformation of that part of the service for the dead which reads ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis [scilicet, mortuis], Domine’ (‘Lord, grant them [the dead] eternal rest’)
11 See Schopenhauer, ‘Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde’ (1813).
12 This is a formula which adepts repeat in certain forms of Buddhist meditation as a help to attaining spiritual enlightenment. The literal meaning seems to be something like: ‘You [Buddha] the centre of the lotus-flower’.
13 The god of a monotheistic Hindu cult centred in Benares
14 One of the major gods of the Hindu pantheon
15 This passage in Luther’s work has not been located.
16 The Roman legal code contained a provision for punishing a crime called crimen laesae maiestatis which originally seems to have meant denigrating or insulting the honour and dignity of the Roman people. The phrase Nietzsche uses would mean: ‘crime of insulting the dignity of god’.
17 Demi-god who is said to have stolen fire from the gods and to have given it to humans, thereby initiating the process of civilization. An extant tragedy ascribed to Aeschylus treats the punishment of Prometheus for this crime: he was fettered to a rock in the Caucasus while an eagle fed on his liver. See above, Book I, footnote 1, p. 29 and also below, § 300, p. 170.
18 Because of a slight to his standing as a warrior, Ajax went mad and killed a large number of cattle, deludedly thinking they were the Greek leaders who had wronged him. Sophocles treats this subject in his tragedy Ajax.
19 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, Book IV, chapter 9; Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book III, chapter 14
20 Translation of the Old Testament into Greek for the use of Greek-speaking Jews, produced between the third century BC and the beginning of the Christian era
21 A fourth-century (AD) Gothic bishop who is responsible for the translation of the Bible into Gothic. Nietzsche is claiming that the German word for ‘German’ (deutsch) is etymologically related to the Gothic word thuida (‘people’), and that Ulfilas used this word to render the Greek ‘xa in the Septuagint which originally just meant ‘nations’, but came to be used by Christians to refer specifically to ‘heathens’. Nietzsche discusses this paragraph of the text in his letter to Peter Gast of 30 July 1882.
22 Probably apocryphal reply Luther is said to have given at the Diet of Worms (18 April 1521) to the demand that he recant
23 See above, Book II, footnote 23, p. 84.
24 See above, Book II, footnote 25, p. 84.
25 Orphism was an obscure but powerful religious movement that seems to have originated in the sixth century BC. It was often associated with the view that the soul could live on after death.
26 In his ‘Uber Religion’ in Parerga und Paralipomena, vol. 11, chapter 15
27 ‘The human being as poet’
28 Ars poetica, 189ff.
29 ‘to lie’ (Latin); etymologically related to mens (‘mind’) and memini (‘bear in mind’, ‘remember’)
30 French general (1767–1815). Nietzsche takes the anecdote from his usual source about Napoleon, the Mémoires of Madame de Rémusat (see above, Book I, footnote 16, p. 49).
31 ‘sovereigns rank with parvenus’
32 In Goethe’s drama Faust, Mephistopheles is a ‘spirit who always says “no”’ (Act I, line 1338); Faust seeks for an experience so satisfying that he will wish time to stand still so that he can hold on to it (Act I, lines 1675–1706).
33 ‘This takes place according to the rule.’
34 ‘A dangerous man, this one’ (literally ‘This one is black’); Horace, Satires 4,85
35 Gospel according to Mark 16.16
36 Three-headed dog who guarded the gates to hell. It was thought that he could sometimes be mollified by being given a honey-cake.
37 ‘To each his own’. Definition of justice found, for instance, in Cicero, De ojficiis 1.15
38 ‘if you allow me to use this word’
39 ‘from the point of view of eternity’ 151
40 This is a slightly truncated version of a famous passage from a victory-ode by the early fifth-century (BC) poet Pindar, his Second Pythian Victory-Ode (line 73). The original Pindar passage reads: ‘Become who you are through knowing’ . The implication is that the ode should inform the victorious young aristocrat of the great deeds of his ancestors and thereby inspire him to live up to them. For Nietzsche the saying had deeper implications of self-discovery and self-realization: ‘How one becomes what one is’ is the sub-title of Ecce Homo, his reflection on his own work, which was written in 1888.