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Theognis appears as a finely formed nobleman who has fallen on bad times, with the passions of a nobleman such as his time loved, full of fatal hatred toward the upward striving masses, tossed about by a sad fate that wore him down and made him milder in many respects. He is a characteristic image of that old, ingenious somewhat spoiled and no longer firmly rooted blood nobility, placed at the boundary of an old and a new era, a distorted Janus-head, since what is past seems so beautiful and enviable, that which is coming — something that basically has an equal entitlement — seems disgusting and repulsive; a typical head for all those noble figures who represent the aristocracy prior to a popular revolution and who struggle for the existence of the class of nobles as for their individual existence.
--
Friedrich Nietzsche, as quoted in Friedrich Nietzsche (1978) by Curt Paul Janz, quoted and translated in On the Genealogy of Morality : A Polemic (1998) by Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen, p. 133.

 

Theognis of Megara

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