In section 3, Nietzsche uses the ancient legend of King Midas and Silenus to highlight a certain aspect of Hellenic culture. Specifically, the origin of the Olympian gods. He introduces the myth as a way of dealing with someone who questions the morality of the Olympian beings, as it is easy to observe that these creatures did not practice asceticism, nor were good and evil important to them. How could people look to this kind of existence and perceive it as ideal? Nietzsche would instruct the inquisitor of this sort of question to turn their head to the “popular Greek wisdom” of Silenus, found in the myth. The legend recounts King Midas searching for and capturing Silenus, a wise companion of Dionysus, with the hopes of finding “the best and most excellent thing for human beings.” Silenus, according to Nietzsche, begins his response by making a fair point, calling humanity ephemeral, and brushing humans off as “children of chance and tribulation.” He then tells the king that the best thing …show more content…
Here, Nietzsche is referring to the events leading up to Zeus’s defeat of his father and powerful Titan, Kronos. He brings this up for good reason: To further his point that the Greeks must have created the gods to somehow get through existence despite knowledge of their emotional flaws, weaknesses, and ability to suffer. For Nietzsche, the only way to exist with this knowledge was to have their ideal figures suffer as well, before their time on top. This way, the gods justify human life in the fact that they embody it, only in a different kind of way. The gods suffered through evil, and in the end exist elaborately in an ideal state. For this reason, he calls this “the only satisfactory