To argue means to quarrel, to fight, to struggle. This is well known. However, it is not widely known that to argue is synonymous with to strive and to challenge. In the Homeric epics, Eris was the goddess of strife - sister and companion of Ares, while Hesiod considers her the daughter of Night and distinguishes two kinds of strife: the bad one, mother of all evils (Pain, Forgetfulness, Murder, etc.) and the good one (noble competition). Could strife be a virtue and a driving force for the birth of ancient Greek philosophy, the democracy of sports (Olympic games), and generally of Greek and consequently Western civilization?

In 1870, Nietzsche wrote to the lawyer Karl von Gersdorff: “I attend his weekly lectures at the University on the study of history and I believe I am the only one among the sixty listeners who perceives the deep course of his thought with all its curious descriptions and abrupt pauses, where the subject approaches the ambiguous. For the first time in my life, I enjoy a lecture and moreover, it is the kind of lecture that I will be able to give when I am older.” He was referring to the great Swiss art and cultural historian, Jacob Burckhardt.

Burckhardt rejected the determinism of the Hegelian school of historiography and played a crucial role in shaping a new form of history, which became known in German as kulturgeschichte, “cultural history.” Cultural history recorded and interpreted the events of the past through their social, cultural, and political contexts as well as through the art and behaviors - traditions of each culture.

However, the problem with the study of festivals, customs, behavioral patterns, and other forms of folk expression was that the findings, techniques, and technology required for such studies were not always available, especially during Burckhardt's time. Thus, the study of a culture often depended on its elites and the assumption that this culture was fully conscious and recorded in the literature and art of the period.

Until Burckhardt, the methods of understanding, recounting, and narrating the past were dominated by the form of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (or Hegel). Subsequently, the Marxist - materialist - approach (which is based on the Hegelian) established itself as a more convincing explanation of the meaning of historical events. However, Marxist historical materialism failed to erase the allure that history has spiritual/intellectual dimensions. Nevertheless, history during the era of 19th-century historicism played the same role as sociology and anthropology do today.
Historicism approaches the explanation of social and political phenomena (including ideas and beliefs) through the study of the process/history from which they emerged. Historicism is a useful tool in creating contextual theories and narratives, to understand how social and cultural phenomena arose. However, it does not take into account folk traditions, beliefs, prejudices, superstitions, etc.
Thus, history replaced philosophy as the basis for the study of human nature and the explanation of human societies until Nietzsche came and challenged the assumptions of historicism. And in this attack by Nietzsche on historicism, the views of Jacob Burckhardt played a role.

Nietzsche was influenced by this great historian. The two shared the belief that competition - the desire for primacy and excellence - was at the center of the worldview of the ancient Greeks. Nietzsche likely arrived at this conclusion on his own, and Burckhardt simply confirmed or organized it for him. However, from a certain point onward, it seems that each contributed to the other's thinking.

The concept of the ancient Greek "struggle" is omnipresent in all of Nietzsche's works, playing the role of a compass in his worldview.