Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s writing, which is distinguished by a wide variety of forms and ongoing beginnings, bears an unmistakable imprint of Plato’s writing-in-becoming. The work begins with the area of correspondence, primarily from the philologist Erwin Rohde’s recognition of Plato as a model for Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but also from Nietzsche’s testimony that his Zarathustra is platonizing, the work points to the motif of death as a place where Plato’s and Nietzsche’s poetics meet, given their transformations of the Homeric idea of the hero’s fate. The illuminating power of the atmosphere of death also points to Aesop’s character as a foundation upon which Plato bases his Socrates, which directs this paper toward demonstrating that Nietzsche’s assessment of Plato’s writing as an “infinitely accentuated Aesopian fable” turns out to be a self-assessment.