Throughout his literary career, from the publication of the immensely popular novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) – a text which found fans all over Europe – to his monumental autobiographical work, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From My Life: Poetry and Truth, 1811‑1833), an account in which he fashioned himself as a singular personality, the famous classic author Johann Wolfgang Goethe was worshipped – in a most literal, religious sense. He was considered to be a supreme being, a true idol, a god.

Indeed, a pilgrimage to Goethe's house on Weimar's Frauenplan Square was an indispensable rite de passage for any young man with cultural interests during the first half of the nineteenth century. Looking back on his first meeting with Goethe, the poet and critic Heinrich Heine wrote:

An eagle, lightning, Greek as his mother tongue – here, Heine obviously suggests that Goethe is another Jupiter, the god of the sky and thunder in ancient mythology, generally regarded as the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Zeus, ruler of Mount Olympus.

The association of Goethe with ‘great Jupiter’, which Heine also notes explicitly in the sentence that precedes the comparison quoted above, is far from coincidental. Since the early 1800s, the epithet ‘Olympian’, applied by Homer to Zeus in the epic Iliad, was used to evoke the classical author in contemporary letters, diary entries, prologues, poetry, festivals (‘Festspielen’), and journal articles. Goethe also made sure himself that he was associated with Jupiter and Zeus. In fact, as I argue throughout this chapter, the iconic image of Jupiter shaped Goethe's celebrity persona. My analysis focuses on two dimensions of the fashioning of Goethe's authorial image through the ‘medium’ of myth.