Ecce Homo is the last prose work that Nietzsche wrote. It is true that the pamphlet Nietzsche contra Wagner was prepared a month later than the Autobiography; but we cannot consider this pamphlet as anything more than a compilation, seeing that it consists entirely of aphorisms drawn from such previous works as Joyful Wisdom, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, etc. Coming at the end of a year in which he had produced the Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist,

1 As it is my intention within a very short time to confront my fellow-men with the very greatest demand that has ever yet been made upon them, it seems to me above all necessary to declare here who and what I am. As a matter of fact, this ought to be pretty well known already, for I have not "held my tongue" about myself. But the disparity which obtains between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries, is revealed by the fact that people have neither heard me nor yet seen

1 The happiness of my existence, its unique character perhaps, consists in its fatefulness: to speak in a riddle, as my own father I am already dead, as my own mother I still live and grow old. This double origin, taken as it were from the highest and lowest rungs of the ladder of life, at once a decadent and a beginning, this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom from partisanship in regard to the general problem of existence, which perhaps distinguishes me. To the first indicati

TO MELANCHOLY [1] O Melancholy, be not wroth with me That I this pen should point to praise thee only, And in thy praise, with head bowed to the knee, Squat like a hermit on a tree-stump lonely. Thus oft thou saw'st me,—yesterday, at least,— Full in the morning sun and its hot beaming, While, visioning the carrion of his feast, The hungry vulture valleyward flew screaming. Yet didst thou err, foul bird, albeit I, So like a mummy 'gainst my log lay leaning! Thou couldst not see these eyes whose e