We cannot understand the relation of Socratic philosophy to ancient Greek religion unless we first distinguish between the natural religion of the philosophers, the mythic religion of the poets, and the civic religion of the polis. These are not three religions but three differing interpretations of Greek religion. The Socratic philosophers attack the religion of the poets in order to reform the civic religion in the light of natural religion. All three kinds of Greek religion are focused on the relations between gods and humans and on the question of whether a person can traverse the chasm between human and divine. In Greek mythology and cult, some heroic human beings, like Heracles, were able to become gods. For the Socratics, philosophers are the new Greek heroes, able to divinize themselves by dint of rational discipline.

Socrates often said that he was merely a human being with no share in divine wisdom or virtue; but Socrates himself lived a life of superhuman self-control, wisdom, and virtue. There is an ironic contrast between his verbal professions of humility and the commanding power of his own heroic life. For example, despite his avowals of ignorance, Socrates also claimed to receive personal admonitions directly from the gods. My portrait of Socrates is based on the contrast between how he saw himself (in the Apology of Plato) and how he was viewed by his students (in Alcibiades’ memoir in Plato’s Symposium). Socrates presents himself as all-too-human, but his students saw him as quasi-divine. Despite his verbal modesty in the face of divine wisdom, Socrates’s own life and death became the very paradigm of how a human being can become godlike by means of rational discipline.

This chapter explores the cultural, intellectual, and sociopolitical context surrounding Strauss’s operas based on Greek mythology: Elektra, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die ägyptische Helena, Daphne, and Die Liebe der Danae. Offering an overview of Germany’s cultural obsession with ancient Greece from the Enlightenment through the Third Reich, it highlights the changing nature of this engagement while pointing to ways in which German Hellenism informs an understanding of Strauss’s Greek-inspired operas. These works reflect broader cultural debates related to shifting German views of ancient Greece that range from a sunnier and more idealized portrait of the Greeks to a darker, more irrational one. This fundamental opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses behind Greek tragedy plays out in these operas to one degree or another, while those composed during the Third Reich resonate with views of classical antiquity shaped by the Nazis' increasing focus on issues of race, ethnicity, and biological superiority that were tied to German identity.