How Faust, Part Two drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe demonstrably engaged Ovid’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeThe influenced
Faust, Part Two
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1832
RomanticismRelevance
7/10
On Faust, Part Two’s page
- The old couple Philemon and Baucis in Act V come straight out of Ovid's Metamorphoses — Goethe learned the poem by heart as a boy and carried it to the end of his life
- He keeps Ovid's names and their humble cottage, then twists the ancient parable of welcomed strangers into Faust's modernizing crime
- Reading Ovid's gentle Book VIII version first makes Goethe's betrayal of it land — same couple, opposite fate
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Goethe said he learned Ovid's Metamorphoses by heart as a child — and it surfaces, decades later, at the close of his life's work
- Act V of Faust, Part Two dramatizes Philemon and Baucis, the old couple of Metamorphoses Book VIII — names, cottage, and all, carried straight across
- Where Ovid rewarded their hospitality, Goethe darkens the tale into murder: the couple is sacrificed to Faust's modernizing land-grab