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"Paradise Lost" and the commented epic
Abstract
From the beginning to the end of Paradise Lost, Milton continually writes against traditional epic commentary, which interpreted the epic as a genre that legitimizes aristocracy, empire, and Catholicism. Milton transforms the epic into a Protestant and republican genre. Milton's use of Vergilian models in his construction of Pandemonium and the infernal privycouncil parallels Augustine's use of Vergil in his critique of classical civilization in the first ten books of the City of God. Satan's journey from Hell to Eden inverts the common allegorizations of Odysseus's and Aeneas's wanderings as educative. Milton constructs prelapsarian Eden in light of commentary which interpreted Homer's Phaiakaa and Vergil's Carthage as allegories of the active, contemplative, and voluptuous lives. Milton reconfigures the tropological reading from Catholic and aristocratic to a Protestant, republican one that emphasizes the unity of the three lives. Milton constructs Raphael in light of Spondanus's identification of Homer's Hermes with the Raphael of the Book of Tobit, and the tropological interpretations of Hermes and Vergil's Mercury. Raphael's mission to Adam and Eve parallels the commentators's allegorizations of Hermes's mission to Odysseus and Mercury's mission to Aeneas. Milton fashions Abdiel on the basis of Homer's Thersites episode. He transforms the episode from a defense of aristocratic hierarchy to both an attack on aristocratic presumption and a defense of meritocracy and individual conscience. Adam's visions in PL 11 and 12 are compared with allegorizations of Aeneas's journey to the underworld in Aeneid 6, which interpreted Aeneas's descent as a revelation of Christian truth in the guise of temporal, pagan empire. Milton, however, underscores the contradictions implicit between the vision of community based on authoritarianism and the vision of individual, spiritual freedom. Thus Milton ends his epic as he began it. He takes up the epic as a genre interpreted as Catholic and aristocratic and separates it from both its pagan letter and the authoritarian spirit in which it had been read. Thus, he recreates the epic as a paean to the Protestantism, republicanism and individual freedom to which he had earlier dedicated his political life.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature|Comparative literature|Classical studies
Recommended Citation
Brooks, Dennis Scott, ""Paradise Lost" and the commented epic" (1991). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9208101.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9208101