Apollo & Dionysus I: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche was not the first to refer to what is known as the Apollonian and the Dionysian (I believe that distinction belongs to the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann) — but Nietzsche was responsible for popularising the terms in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. According to Nietzsche, ‘the two art deities of the Greeks’, Apollo and Dionysus, represent antagonistic energies — the…