This collection of papers arose from the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, on the theme of “Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition,” held at the University of Glasgow in September 2002. The theme of Nietzsche's reaction and response to the world of Antiquity and to the concept of classicism—primarily Greek, as well as German—goes right to the core of his works. Nietzsche may have been a “modernist”; he may even have been a “postmodernist”; but in the nineteenth century, as far as the University of Basel was concerned, he was a “classicist”—or, more precisely, a philologist.

To be even more precise, he was a professor of philology. For in April 1869 Nietzsche, just twenty-four years old, began his appointment as Extraordinary Professor of classical philology as Basel University. On 28 May he gave his inaugural lecture, a discussion of the identity of Homer, which made a favorable impression on his audience. Or at least so he told his university friend, Erwin Rohde, and his mother, Franziska Nietzsche, in his letters to them of 29 May and mid-June: “Because of this inaugural lecture the people here have been convinced about a number of things, and with it my position, as I can clearly see, has been secured” (KSB 3, 15; cf. 13). Nietzsche's colleagues at Basel included the philologists Jacob Mähly and Hermann Usener and the ethnologist Johann Jakob Bachofen, as well as the historian Jacob Burckhardt and the theologian Franz Overbeck.