Nietzsche was brought up by pious female relatives. During the Franco-Prussian was he served briefly as a medical orderly with the Prussian army. He diagnosed in it human beings as subject to unconscious, involuntary, overwhelmingly self-destructive Dionysian instincts. According to Nietzsche, against this tendency the Greeks erected the sober, rational, and active Apollonian principle. Apollinian power is associated with the creation of illusion - the plastic arts deny the actuality of becoming with the illusion of timeless beauty.
Dionysian frenzy threatens to destroy all forms and codes.
Only the Apollinian power of the Greeks was able to control the Dionysian flood. Nietzsche saw that the loss of Apollinian spell will make the return to Dionysian actuality even more painful. But it must be noted, that the Dionysus whom Nietzsche celenbrated in his later writings, was the synthesis of the two forces and represented passion controlled. In the earlier work he favored perhaps more Apollo. His thesis, however, was, that it took both to make possible the birth of tragedy.