Nietzsche Fragments - Dionysus

"Socrates was plebs."

One can imagine the Socratic response to Nietzsche, "Drink, so that I may see what of Dionysus is in you." But this is an excess, its law is already contained in the original, "Speak, that I may see you." Intoxication is in the very countenance of the highest spirits, it is an outpouring, the Dionysian revelry disappears into the night, into the East where it will not too soon find morning. The Dionsyian physiognomy is that of a wellspring in the forest, watering every path, trying to wake the recovering, still-besotted centaurs. This is why Socrates becomes the center of the Symposium, yet "no human being had ever seen Socrates drunk" – by nature he is beyond the Dionysian prohibition. He is the exact opposite to the server in the Carmina Burana, "whom everyone scolds, and thus we are destitute."

Nietzsche is the destitute, he arrives to revelry at the eleventh hour.