Nietzsche's position within the history of classical scholarship is peculiarly ironic. It is the subject of a story whose main stages are philological precociousness, academic scandal and disillusionment, but paradoxically lasting influence. A prime product of the educationally privileged status of Classics in the Prussian gymnasium and university system, Nietzsche attended the same school as Wilamowitz (who was four years younger than him), published his first article (on the Theognidean corpus) in Rheinisches Museum when still a student and was appointed professor at Basle in 1869, without a doctorate, at the age of only 24. Over the following decade he continued to carry out his duties as a university teacher but also published a book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which created an academic cause célèbre and led to his virtual ostracism by the rest of the profession. Partly as a consequence of those events, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the intellectual conditions of his discipline, planned a devastating critique of it in a work entitled Wir Philologen (sketched in 1874–5 as one of the Untimely Meditations but then abandoned) and eventually resigned his chair in 1879. But by that time he had already started to conceive ideas that would make him the most original philosopher of the nineteenth century.

It is one strand in the irony of Nietzsche's story that even his early years as a professional classicist have become the object of sustained academic study. The present book forms an interesting, if slightly uneven, addition to this project. Adopting a mixture of biographical, cultural and philosophical perspectives, it ranges across salient topics in Nietzsche's own scholarship, as well as attempting to probe some of the links between Nietzsche the philologist and Nietzsche the philosopher (who never, in fact, lost his fascination with antiquity nor even, indeed, his sense of remaining some kind of philologist). The book is loosely organised into five groups of chapters; my summaries are unavoidably terse.

We start with a piece by J. Latacz which gives a useful (though not error-free) overview of Nietzsche's academic ‘beginnings’ and makes a miniature case study of his work on the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, which Nietzsche was the first to trace back to an original version by Alcidamas. Latacz claims – in the teeth of many negative judgements by earlier German classicists – that Nietzsche had an ‘outstanding philological mind’. J. Porter takes a somewhat different tack. He portrays Nietzsche, as he did at greater length in his book Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (2000), as a ‘radical’ philologist who exposed the inner tensions of his subject and perpetually raised urgent questions about the relationship between antiquity and modernity. G. Most and T. Fries, in an essay first published in 1994, thought-provokingly discuss Nietzsche's lectures on rhetoric from 1872–3 and argue that they involve an unstable combination of orthodox scholarly materials (largely taken over from handbooks on the subject) with the potentially subversive idea (influenced by Gustav Gerber) of all language as ‘rhetoric’. Through a close scrutiny of Nietzsche's drafts and notebooks, T. Burnham reconstructs the gradual evolution of what became The Birth of Tragedy's idea of ‘the Apollonian’ as an aesthetic and cultural drive. Burnham presents an intricate case for the view that Nietzsche needed the category of the Apollonian in order to solve problems in his understanding of the unity of ancient Greek culture.

J. returns us to the more narrowly academic work. He summarises the development of Nietzsche's studies on the Theognidean corpus up to the time of his 1867 article on the subject in Rheinisches Museum. J. illustrates how Nietzsche's explanation of the Theognis collection was a mixture of industrious Quellenforschung and wild flights of speculation. He also observes that while Nietzsche rarely mentions Theognis after 1867, the poetry surely helped shape his later thinking about archaic aristocratic values. In a piece originally published in 1986, J. Barnes painstakingly unpicks the threads of Nietzsche's account, as set out in a series of articles in 1868–70, of the sources of Diogenes Laertius’ lives of the philosophers. Barnes diagnoses some specific flaws of historical reasoning in the theory but nevertheless concludes that the Laertian studies are ‘brilliant’ and ‘astounding’ for such a young scholar and that they opened ‘a new and important phase in the study of ancient philosophy’. A. Zhavoronkov explores Nietzsche's early views on Homer (including his inaugural lecture at Basle in 1869) and their impact on his ideas about the history of pre-Christian morality. He also identifies some affinities with Nietzsche's views on the part of scholars such as Schadewaldt and Dodds.

C. Santini examines Nietzsche's lectures of 1874–6 on the history of Greek literature and highlights their concern with the difference between a fundamentally oral culture and the emergence of ‘Leseliteratur’. In a complementary piece (though, as with most contributors, they make no reference to one another) V. Vivarelli stresses Nietzsche's marked interest in the performative dimension and the audience psychology of ancient literary genres, both poetic and rhetorical. In a contribution of lucid elegance, M. Meyer reads The Birth of Tragedy as a response to the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry identified by Socrates in Book 10 of Plato's Republic. If Nietzsche pits Socratic optimism against the pessimistic yet life-affirming nature of archaic Greek poetry, he also imagines a ‘musical Socrates’ (BT 15) – in part, a coded image for Nietzsche himself – who points symbolically to a desired resolution of the ancient quarrel in a modern rebirth of tragedy.

In the final group of papers, H. emphasises that Nietzsche was unusual not only in the degree of significance he attached to Presocratic thinkers but also in treating them as creative and challenging minds rather than mere staging posts on a teleological road to philosophical rationality. B. Babich, in a rambling and self-flaunting piece, offers a mishmash of murky assertions about Nietzsche's conception of ‘science’, ancient and modern. In the final chapter, H. Cancik (who has done more than anyone else over the years to investigate Nietzsche's place in the history of scholarship) and H. Cancik-Lindermaier undertake a well-documented analysis of the manuscript sources of Wir Philologen and draw out some of the work's major preoccupations, especially in regard to early Greek religion.

This collection succeeds in demonstrating the richness and complexity of Nietzsche's conflicted years as a professor of classical philology, as well as revealing how some of the roots of his momentous later ideas about language, culture, religion and morality lie embedded in his intense early reflections on antiquity. The overall quality seems to me less assured than that of another fairly recent collection, P. Bishop (ed.), Nietzsche and Antiquity (2004); but there is a closer focus here on Nietzsche's scholarship in its own right and most chapters do illuminate their themes in a stimulating manner. Nietzsche remains a unique test case for the modern history of Classics, a figure who still sharply divides opinion within (and outside) the discipline, but whose intellectual trajectory poses important questions about the motivations and goals of those who study Graeco-Roman antiquity.

It should be added that the book's editorial standards leave much to be desired. Misprints and inconsistencies abound, several chapters (including some of those translated from other languages) contain a great deal of unidiomatic English, and there are embarrassing errors: one contributor, for instance, is allowed to claim that Karl Reinhardt (not even born till 1886!) was a Basle student of Nietzsche's, while one of the editors thinks the terms σύμβουλος and σύμβολον are related. It is, moreover, utterly deplorable that there is no index of Nietzsche's works.