Dionysus. He thinks that even when Prometheus and Œdipus appear on the stage, they are only a kind of mask for the original divine hero. I will not go further into details. The essential point in Nietzsche's interpretation is that the suffering and triumphing God (or world, or man—at bottom all are the same) is seen in vision and becomes a subject of art. The art, however, quite differs from the epos or any form of Apollinic art. The rhapsodist, equally with the painter and sculptor, sees his images outside himself. But in Dionysiac art, the artist and even the spectators of the drama imaginatively identify themselves with, and become a part of, that which they see. All are for the moment participants in the divine drama spread out before their eyes.
In these ways, then, according to Nietzsche, the Greeks were helped to live, in face of the tragic facts of the world. One kind of art projected existence in a picture—and there came not only relief, but happiness in contemplating it. Another more daring kind led men, as it were, to live existence over again, to reaffirm even the tragedy in it—change, suffering, death—as a part of the eternal round. This was the most powerful and moving kind of art—in it the Greek found his supreme redemption from practical pessimism. Under the shadow of the Olympian deities, in the presence of great works of plastic art, but above all under the influence of the Dionysian festival and the tragic drama, the pain of existence was transcended, and life ennobled.
