Friedrich Nietzsche was born in October, 1844 in Röcken, a small village in Prussian Saxony. He was the son of a Lutheran minister, who died when Nietzsche was not yet five, prompting the family to move to the town of Naumburg. In 1858, Nietzsche was offered a scholarship at Schulpforte (or 'Pforta'), a prestigious nearby boarding school. At Schulpforte, Nietzsche began to excel academically for the first time. In general, his lessons were intensively focused on Latin and Greek. They left him with an unrivalled classical education.As James Porter notes (in his essay in this volume), Nietzsche always thought of the ancients via the moderns, and always thought of the moderns via the ancients. His final essay at Pforta was a sixty-four page dissertation on the Greek poet, Theognis, written in Latin.In addition to the Latin and Greek texts which formed the backbone of his education, Nietzsche read some of the modern authors who would retain significance for him throughout his lifeamong them Shakespeare and Emerson.Nietzsche's religious faith began to wane at Pforta, but this did not prevent him from choosing to read theology in addition to philology at the University of Bonn, where he began in 1864. At Bonn, he studied with the classicist Friedrich Ritschl. After just two semesters, he transferred to Leipzig, where he studied philology (now without theology). Nietzsche had moved to Leipzig, in part, because Ritschl had moved there and, indeed, Ritschl soon began to take particular interest in Nietzsche's studies. In addition to Ritschl's guidance, Leipzig saw three important developments. First, shortly after his arrival in 1865, Nietzsche bought and read Arthur Schopenhauer's 1