Thus spake the king on the right, and seized the hand of Zarathustra in order to kiss it; but Zarathustra checked his veneration, and stepped back frightened, fleeing as it were, silently and suddenly into the far distance. After a little while, however, he was again at home with his guests, looked at them with clear scrutinising eyes, and said:
“My guests, ye higher men, I will speak plain language and plainly with you. It is not for YOU that I have waited here in these mountains.”
(“‘Plain language and plainly?’ Good God!” said here the king on the left to himself; “one seeth he doth not know the good Occidentals, this sage out of the Orient!
But he meaneth ‘blunt language and bluntly’—well! That is not the worst taste in these days!”)
What the critics said
Ludovici holds that Zarathustra's greeting confirms his thesis that the philosophy aims to give higher men the great hope, but harshly: Nietzsche would be a hard bed to higher men, making them harder, not easing their way.