And Nietzsche’s idea is the masters, the aristocrats, the superior warriors define themselves in terms of a whole series of virtues – strength, health, honesty – and what they then see as bad is everything that’s the opposite. So essentially, the value standard of strength versus weakness. And this is the standard of warrior culture. It’s what you see in The Iliad, for example. It’s what makes someone a hero: is he strong? And Nietzsche’s very controversial, but I think very insightful, theory is that Christian ethics results from an inversion of this: that the Christians take what the ancient pagans thought of as good and they make that evil, and they take what they thought of – the ancients thought of bad. and make that good, by which I mean this: The greatest evil, the greatest sin for Christians, is pride and, in general, aggressiveness. And the definition of evil is the behavior of warriors. And what the warriors looked upon as a vice now is elevated to a virtue – meekness, humility. As I like to put it, in the ancient world it was “the Greek shall inherit the earth.” For the Christians it was, “the meek shall inherit the earth.” When you teach, you have to come up with slogans like this – KRISTOL: That’s good. That’s good. Yeah. CANTOR: – to make it stick. But and, Shakespeare shows that. He hadn’t read Nietzsche – though this is in Machiavelli. KRISTOL: Right. CANTOR: Machiavelli’s Discourses – KRISTOL: And was Nietzsche – had Nietzsche read Shakespeare much? CANTOR: He had, but – KRISTOL: Well, Shakespeare was popular in Germany, right? CANTOR: Yes. I mean this is amazing. Nietzsche studied Julius Caesar in high school. KRISTOL: There you go. CANTOR: Like every one of us, and we have his high school essay on Julius Caesar. KRISTOL: Is that right? CANTOR: Yes. You can read it. And it’s all about the friendship of Brutus and Cassius. It’s all about friendship. There is no evidence that he read Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. He mentions 18 of the plays. We know that he read 18 of the plays and, you know, we have letters and conversations. He played the part of Hotspur in Henry IV at his high school. Can you imagine that? KRISTOL: No. CANTOR: Seeing Nietzsche playing the part of Hotspur? I mean – and according to his friend, he overacted. - conversationswithbillkristol.org