The Birth of Tragedy remains an enigma. As a tract on the history of Greek art it aims to draw out the philosophical motives and consequences of tragedy, and proposes that the tragic culture of the Greeks provides to us an imperative for understanding and interpreting our contemporary world. Yet while this may sound straightforward enough, the book is laden with philosophical difficulties and historical complications: for one, it is a book that censures the theoretical mode of philosophizing while at times also employing a similarly troubled mode; also, where Nietzsche calls for a revaluation of modernity, he simultaneously seems to rely on the metaphysical vocabulary and grammar of his predecessor Schopenhauer; and where scholarly certainty fears to tread, Nietzsche colours his pages with poetical accounts of the ancients, and accords this a seemingly equal weighting to established philological research. The Birth of Tragedy presents us with a Gordian knot of sorts, one that entangles antiquity and modernity, philosophy and art, and the human subject with its cultural horizons.