«Quelle scene troiane di lotte e di orrori». Nietzsche, l'"Iliade" e le rovine di Troia

Homer stands as the poet who reanimated and depicted the primal, instinctual condition of a fierce and cruel Greekness; he was the first to illuminate the irrational with the lamp of Apollonian reason, seeking to explain its allure and impulses – traits that remain ineradicable even in modern man. This is the image that emerges from Nietzsche’s writings on the author of the Iliad. The present essay seeks to ex- plore this perspective in relation to the necessity of studying the past of philosophi- cal thought as «another present», a notion Paolo Rossi derived from Giulio Preti. For this purpose, we return to the years when Nietzsche, then a young professor at the University of Basel, befriended the historian Jacob Burckhardt, aspired to visit Greece, and became intrigued by Schliemann’s excavations at Troy. This latter aspect, previously overlooked, offers a valuable perspective to the understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophical development.