Motif and Structure Goethe`s festival play, Des Epimenides Erwachen deals apparently with the celebration of the German liberation from Napoleon`s rule and. tries to suggest symbolically the nation`s future with regard to war and peace. In its underlying structure, however, it can not be overlooked that the writer is revealing an unmistakable warning against the people`s chauvinistic sentiment through the message of a mythical Greek sage. Epimenides and Goethe It is easily noticeable that Epimenides, the hero of this work is a transformed double of the writer himself since Goethe was then becoming a target of the radical political criticism and therefore was unable to express himself freely and directly. This symbolic quality is one of the important factors that adds to the incomprehensibility of this work, thus making it harder for the general reader to understand it. Epimenides wakes up from sleep twice: in his first awakening` he gains Wisdom to see through the Space by the means of Oracle and in his second awakening gets the power to command Time. Dual Structure If Da¨mon des Kriegs, Da¨mon der List and Da¨mon der Unterdru¨ckung are meant to stand for the pains and frustration of the German` ,people, the fairys of Liebe, Glaube and Hoffnung are the syimbols with which Goethe`s faith in patriotism and justice is expressed. Also, Catacombe symbolizes the writer`s spirit of resistance and his faith in the ultimate victory of justice. Another important message implicitly stressed in this work is the sense of people`s identity and nation`s unanimous reconcili ation. A wowan who appears in the scene IX, eine bisher verborgen gebliebene Verschleierte, is an example of this. Wisdom and Mission of an Artist Goethe`s view of world and life can be summed up in a word as Art and man`s Wisdom. He speaks of the world of harmony through art and also of the world of wisdom through sages. Harmony and wisdom of all other things are especially stressed as the indispensiable conditions for the aid of his fatherland. The first and most important factor that has enabled the German people to be treated as a culturally advanced nation in spite of their war-devastated miseries could possibly be ascribed to this Goethean Humanism. It has been Goethe`s conviction that a writer`s patriotism consists in giving up preoccupations of all kinds, enlightening the low public, and endeavoring to exhort nations sense of identity and genius.