How Faust, Part Two drew on The Odyssey
A documented line of influence: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe demonstrably engaged Homer’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Odyssey
Homer · c. 725 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Faust, Part Two
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1832
RomanticismRelevance
5/10
On Faust, Part Two’s page
- The Sparta of Act III is Homer's Sparta — Menelaus's halls, where the Odyssey's Book 4 sets Helen back among the living after Troy
- Goethe steeped himself in the Odyssey (he tried to turn its Nausikaa episode into a play of his own), and that reading shapes Faust's journey toward Helen and into Hades
- Read the homecoming books first and Act III stops feeling like a detour — it's Goethe answering Homer
On The Odyssey’s page
- Goethe's Homer was above all the Odyssey — in Sicily he found it suddenly "realistic" and began an unfinished Nausikaa drawn straight from it
- That obsession surfaces in Faust, Part Two: Act III opens at Menelaus's Sparta, the same post-war kingdom where Helen reappears in Book 4 of the Odyssey
- Faust's later descent after Helen's shade rhymes with Homer's land of the dead — the Odyssey is the architecture Goethe is building on