200

The man from an age of dissolution, which mixes the races all together, such a man has an inheritance of a multiple ancestry in his body, that is, conflicting and frequently not merely conflicting drives and standards of value which war among themselves and rarely give each other rest - such a man of late culture and disturbed lights will typically be a weaker man. His most basic demand is that the war which constitutes him should finally end. Happiness seems to him, in accordance with a calming medicine and way of thinking (for example, Epicurean or Christian), principally as the happiness of resting, of having no interruptions, of surfeit, of the final unity, as the "Sabbath of Sabbaths," to use the words of the saintly rhetorician Augustine, who was himself such a man. But if the opposition and war in such a nature work like one more charm or thrill in life - and bring along, in addition to this nature's powerful and irreconcilable drives, also the real mastery and refinement in waging war with itself, and thus transmit and cultivate self-ruling and outwitting of the self, then arise those delightfully amazing and unimaginable people, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and temptation, whose most beautiful expressions are Alcibiades and Caesar (- in their company I'd like to place the first European, according to my taste, the Hohenstaufer Frederick II), and, among artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci.8 They appear precisely in the same ages when that weaker type, with its demands for quiet, steps into the foreground: both types belong with one another and arise from the same causes.

 
8. . . . Alcibiades : (450-404 BC), charismatic Athenian politician and general.
Caesar: Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), prominent Roman politician and general.
Frederick II (1194-1250), Holy Roman Emperor of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, an extraordinarily gifted and powerful medieval figure.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), an Italian painter, engineer, and inventor, one of the most amazing geniuses of the Renaissance.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Part V - Aphorism # 200

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