4 Epicurean gardens and Nietzsche’s white seas Babette Babich Over tranquil seas: Hermeneutics and palimpsests For more than a century, the Kroner edition of 1913 served as the source for scholars interested in Nietzsche and classical philology, despite the mainstream judgement of the classical tradition, which had by then for more than thirty years deemed him unworthy of engagement (Nietzsche 1913). 1 I am not going to retell the disastrous history of the famously non-collegial reception of Nietzsche’s first book among his peers (and still). But the advantage of a book containing scholarly work one is not meant to read, and certainly not to cite, just as analytic philosophers read past colleagues deemed insignificant, is that one can borrow with abandon and a certain lack of rigour. Thus, Nietzsche shows up here and there in classical scholarship throughout the past century, unflagged, or, even casually, adduced. Finding such references would require inventing yet another subdiscipline of classics. Scholarly ‘ghosting’ is a thing, of course, and Nietzsche is its poster child. In that 1913 edition one can find Nietzsche’s lectures on the pre-Platonic (i.e., pre-Socratic philosophers) and a version of Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen had already appeared in 1896 (Nietzsche 1896: 1–132). Nietzsche offered his own lecture course, likewise featured in the Kroner edition, on Ritschl’s favourite disciplinary study of bio-bibliography, that is: pinakography (given Callimachus’ listing of titles in the Library of Alexandria, see Pfeiffer 1949), 2 with a course on philosophical succession (διαδοχή) in 1873–74 (Nietzsche 1913: 305). 3 Epicurus appears in Nietzsche as part of a listed array connected to Nietzsche’s earlier lectures on Plato’s dialogues concluding with a discussion of Plato’s physics, in which Nietzsche argues that the association of Epicurus with the atomists follows Diogenes Laertius who appends Epicurus afer Nausiphanes and Nausikudes (Nietzsche 1913: 310). Earlier, Nietzsche was able to begin his Democritea refecting that for a Christian (and ‘anti-cosmic’) age, the writings of both Democritus and Epicurus could be regarded as the incarnation of ‘heathendom’ (Nietzsche 1913: 327). 4 Pinakographic listings of authors and book titles and aphoristic sayings is key to any reading of Epicurus, assessed among leading ‘polygraphs’ as more than typically prolific. For the Greeks, as Nietzsche explains, the claim of excess is so common that Socrates’s well-attested writerly ascesis, writing nothing at all, stands In: Vinod Acharya and Ryan Johnson, eds., Epicurus and Nietzsche (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 52-67.