28

wantonest humour? Finally, who would venture on a German translation of Petronius, who, more than any great musician hitherto, was a master of presto in invention, ideas, and words? What matter in the end about the swamps of the sick, evil world, or of the “ancient world,” when like him, one has the feet of a wind, the rush, the breath, the emancipating scorn of a wind, which makes everything healthy, by making everything run ! And with regard to Aristophanes⁠—that transfiguring, complementary genius, for whose sake one pardons all Hellenism for having existed, provided one has understood in its full profundity all that there requires pardon and transfiguration; there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato’s secrecy and sphinxlike nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his deathbed there was found no Bible, nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic⁠—but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life⁠—a Greek life which he repudiated⁠—without an Aristophanes!