Nietzsche, a twenty-seven-year-old classics professor, argued that Greek tragedy arose from the tension between Apollo and Dionysus, between form and frenzy, and that Socratic rationalism killed it. The book scandalized his academic colleagues, who found it insufficiently scholarly. Nietzsche was right about them, and possibly about the Greeks. The prose is rhapsodic, the argument sweeping. Wagner loved it; their friendship was already forming. The book launched Nietzsche's philosophical career and introduced concepts that would shape modernism. The Dionysian has never left us.