Then, there was the day job. For fifty years, Goethe served as an adviser to Karl August, Grand Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, the sovereign of one of the many tiny polities that made up Germany. Together, they stabilized the ducal budget, opened silver mines outside Erfurt, staffed the University of Jena, drank, and chased women. Goethe’s achievements may have been Olympian, but his personality was all too human. Magnetic, moody, arrogant, and frequently lovesick in his youth, he aged into conservatism. Late-eighteenth-century visitors to the court of Weimar could have listened to Goethe lament the French Revolution in Alexandrines or watched him dissect moth wings under a microscope. They could have saluted him as he tried to assemble a coalition against the French revolutionaries, and, after Bonaparte came to power, could have gossiped about Goethe’s audience with the Emperor, who claimed to have read “Werther” seven times and beseeched Goethe to become his propagandist. By 1875, it was possible for Goethe’s first English biographer, George Henry Lewes, to declare that Goethe’s “influence on his nation has been greater than that of any man since Luther.”