—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, “HOMER’S CONTEST” In the brilliant and unsettling fragment “Homer’s Contest,” found among Nietzsche’s unpublished writings after his death in 1900, the philosopher returns to obsessive themes originally explored in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872): namely, that contrary to the reigning morality of his time—a Protestant-Christian morality, at least officially—it is not “natural” not to fight; it is not “natural” not to fight to the death, in the service of “allowing…hatred to flow forth fully” indeed, a “noble culture” is one that, like the ancient Greek culture, arises from “the altar of the expiation of murder.” Far from being barbaric, the stylized Greek, or Homeric, contest gives a crucial ritualistic form to mankind’s most murderous instincts, in this way containing the horror of anarchic violence: not brutality per se but the brutality of chaos is the true horror of humankind. In the Homeric world—the world of stylized art—we encounter “artistic deception”
