of beings as a whole. The πόλις is the essence of the place [Ort], or, as we say, it is the settlement [Ort-schaft] of the historical dwelling of Greek humanity. Because the πόλις lets the totality of beings come in this or that way into the unconcealedness of its condition, the πόλις is therefore essentially related to the Being of beings. Between πόλις and "Being" there is a primordial relation.
This word πόλις is. in its root, identical with the ancient Greek word for "to be," πέλειν: "to emerge, to rise up into the unconcealed" (Cf. Sophocles, Antigone, πολλὰ τὰ δεινά ... πέλει).1 The πόλις is neither city nor state and definitely not the fatal mixture of these two inappropriate characterizations. Hence the πόλις is not the notorious "city-state" but is, rather, the settling of the place of the history of Greek humanity—neither city nor state but indeed the abode of the essence of this humanity. This essential abode gathers originally the unity of everything which, as the unconcealed, comes to man and is dispensed to him as that to which he is assigned in his Being. The πόλις is the abode, gathered into itself, of the unconcealedness of beings. If now, however, as the word indicates, ἀλήθεια possesses a conflictual essence, which appears also in the oppositional forms of distortion and oblivion, then in the πόλις as the essential abode of man there has to hold sway all the most extreme counter-essences, and therein all excesses, to the unconcealed and to beings, i.e., counter-beings in the multiplicity of their counter-essence. Here lies concealed the primordial ground of that feature Jacob Burckhardt presented for the first time in its full bearing and manifoldness: the frightfulness, the horribleness, the atrociousness of the Greek πόλις. Such is the rise and the fall of man in his historical abode of essence—ὐψίπολις—ἄπολις—far exceeding abodes, homeless, as Sophocles (Antigone) calls man. It is not by chance that man is spoken of in this way in Greek tragedy. For the possibility, and the necessity, of "tragedy" itself has its single source in the conflictual essence of ἀλήθεια.
There is only Greek tragedy and no other besides it. Only the essence of Being as experienced by the Greeks has this primordial character that "the tragic" becomes a necessity there. In the introduction to his lectures on the "history of Greek culture," Jacob Burckhardt knowingly inserts a thesis he heard as a student from his teacher in classical philology at Berlin. Bockh, and it runs as follows: "the Hellenes were more unhappy than most people think." Burckhardt's presentation of the Greeks, which he often repeated in his lectures at Basel from 1872 on, was constructed entirely on this insight, or, rather, surmise. Nietzsche had in his possession an auditor's transcript of these lectures, and he cherished the manuscript as his most precious treasure. Thus
1. Antigone, verse 332f ["There are many strange things"—Tr]