Dearest Herr Friedrich,
Last evening I read aloud your treatise to our friend. After finishing it, I had the greatest difficulty in quieting her, as she found that you had treated the awe-inspiring names of the great Athenians in a surprisingly modern manner. I was obliged to remind her that the entire character of public address and the present-day elegant manner of book-writing had influenced the traditional style hitherto used in the discussion of the great antique ideals, and that thereby this had been lowered to the niveau of the methods employed in disposing of transitory modern phenomena. (Mommsen's Cicero as feuilletonist occurred to me as I was speaking.) This idea was quickly grasped and accepted as an explanation of the weakness of our age. For my own part, I was terrified by the boldness with which you launched so new an idea, and the concise and categorical manner in which you imparted this idea to a public which has but little inclination for culture. I warn you that you will have to reckon upon a complete misunderstanding from this quarter.
Even those who are initiated in my ideas will undoubtedly be frightened upon finding your ideas coming into conflict with their established belief in Socrates and even Aeschylus. But as for me—I call out to you: It is true! You have hit upon the right idea, and the real issue is so sharply characterized that I can only await with a feeling of admiration your further efforts to convert persons of ordinary dogmatic convictions. At the same time I am deeply concerned about you and from the bottom of my heart I hope that you will not injure your career. Therefore, I should like to advise you not to touch upon such incredible views in dissertations written with the intention of producing an immediate effect, but to concentrate your efforts for a larger and more comprehensive work on this subject, if, as I believe, you are thoroughly convinced of the correctness of these ideas.
When that time comes, you will undoubtedly find the right words for the divine errors of Socrates and Plato, both of whom were creative natures of such overwhelming power that even in turning away from them, we are compelled to worship them.
O friend! Where shall one find adequate words of praise in looking back from our world upon these incomparably harmonious natures? And on the other hand, what high hopes and aspirations we may cherish for ourselves, if we realize fully and clearly that we can and must achieve something that was denied them.
Above all things, I hope that I have left you in no doubt as to my own opinion of your Socrates and the others, in what I have just written you about your work.
Source: The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, trans. Caroline V. Kerr (Boni and Liveright, 1921), No. 8