Faust, Part Two

• The Iliad by Homer. Faust, Part Two built on it. - The woman at the center of the Helen act is Homer's Helen of Troy — the prize and the cause of the war the *Iliad* sings - Goethe, who memorized Homer young, threads the work with Homeric allusion and stages Helen's return from Troy to Sparta - Read the *Iliad* first and you arrive at Faust's marriage to Helen knowing exactly what she has already cost the world
• Metamorphoses by Ovid. Faust, Part Two built on it. - 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
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Faust, Part Two built on it. - The heavenward finale — the choir of souls rising through celestial spheres, Gretchen as intercessor before the Mater Gloriosa — is Goethe modeling the close of *Faust* on Dante's *Paradiso* - That last line about the Eternal Feminine is held to be reminiscent of the *Comedy*'s final lines: the love that moves the sun and the stars - Read the *Paradiso* first and Faust's salvation stops being a surprise and becomes the answer to a five-century-old question about how a striving soul gets carried up
• The Odyssey by Homer. Faust, Part Two built on it. - 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
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. Faust, Part Two shaped it. - Goethe was Nietzsche's near-*Übermensch* — the figure he revered above all others in German culture - *Faust, Part Two* ends "the Eternal Feminine draws us upward"; Nietzsche takes that very line and turns its pull back toward the earth - *Zarathustra* alludes to *Faust* throughout — Nietzsche named the two works as the closest German literature has
• Middlemarch by George Eliot. Faust, Part Two shaped it. - George Eliot was one of Goethe's great English readers — she translated German and spent months in Weimar helping G. H. Lewes research his *Life of Goethe* (1855) - That immersion carried Goethe's moral seriousness into her own novels; *Middlemarch* breathes the same air, even if its closest structural debt is to *Wilhelm Meister* rather than *Faust*

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