Zarathustra’ is my brother’s most personal function; it’s the background of his most specific encounters, of his friendships, ideals, raptures, bitterest disappointments and sorrows. Above it all, nevertheless, there soars, transfiguring it, the picture of his biggest hopes and remotest seeks. My brother experienced the shape of Zarathustra in his mind from his extremely earliest youth: he once explained that even as a child he had dreamt of him. At different intervals in his life, he would call this haunter of his about Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Publication for many and non-e dreams by different brands; ‘but in the end,’ he declares in an email on the subject, ‘I had to do a PERSIAN the honour of determining him with this creature of my fancy. Persians were the first to take a wide and comprehensive view of history. Every group of evolutions, according to them, was presided over by a prophet; and every prophet got his ‘Hazar,’-his dynasty of one thousand years.’

All Zarathustra’s sights, as also his personality, were early conceptions of my brother’s brain. Whoever reads his posthumously published writings for the years 1869-82 with care, will constantly meet with passages suggestive of Zarathustra’s thoughts and doctrines. For example, the ideal from the Superman is help with quite clearly in all his writings through the years 1873-75; and in ‘We Philologists’, the following remarkable observations occur:-

‘How can one compliment and glorify a country all together?-Actually among the Greeks, it was the INDIVIDUALS that counted.’