According to Nietzsche in the opening chapters of The Birth of Tragedy ,the Greeks found expression in their arts, with two of their Olympian gods holding key positions: Apollo and Dionysus.
Nietzsche sees two important poles in Greek life, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, not as the artistic faculty of a fixed and abstract contrast, but rather as the productive interaction of a faculty that already begins as a duplicity. The Dionysian, the intoxicating and the natural is the primordial will that shows itself to the point of licentiousness, as it is also expressed in music. The Apollonian is the creative force of harmony and the fine arts. The Apollonian is moderately limited and representative of processes of experience and design that have been established and stabilized by structures.
"Our knowledge is linked to their two art deities, Apollo and Dionysus, that in the Greek world there is a tremendous contrast, in terms of origin and goals, between the art of the sculptor, the Apollonian, and the non-figurative art of music, such as that of Dionysus: Both instincts, which are so different, go side by side, mostly in open conflict with each other and stimulating each other to ever new stronger births in order to perpetuate the struggle of that antithesis in them which the common word “art” only apparently bridges; until they finally appear paired with each other through a metaphysical miracle act of the Hellenic “will” and in this pairing finally produce the equally Dionysian and Apollonian work of art of Attic tragedy"
