ORCID
- Timothy Windsor: 0000-0001-8598-1220
Abstract
Catabasis, the hero’s descent and return from the underworld, was the supreme heroic feat in classical myth and literature because it represented the accomplishment of the impossible: the conquest of death. Two out of three of the great ancient epics, Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, therefore, set the catabasis at the centre of the poem to mark its distinction. Previous scholarship has argued that Milton removed catabasis from the centre to outlying sections of Paradise Lost. My published work charts a new path in Milton studies, arguing that, by accommodating the action of his War in Heaven to the three-day pattern of Christ’s death and Resurrection, and setting the event in book 6 of a twelve-book epic (the book consecrated by Virgil to catabasis), Milton marked the episode as his epic’s main catabasis. There is little question that Milton’s setting of his catabasis in book 6 of a twelve-book epic is, firstly, Virgilian in reference. With regard, however, to the dramatic and social setting of the episode, there are aspects, I have argued, where the Homeric influence predominates, the method, for instance, by which Raphael relates the story of the War of Heaven in book 6, embedded narrative, is also how Homer tells the story of his hero’s catabasis in the Odyssey. Two of my articles also tie this allusive parallel to Milton’s re-working of the Homeric hospitality code called xenia.Much has been said in Milton criticism about Milton’s Hell, little, however, about God’s creation thereof. Within the space of the Son’s two-day absence from the three-day War in Heaven, my published work argues, the Son descends to Chaos and creates Hell, returning on ‘the third sacred morn’ when ‘he . . . rose’ (6.748, 746) to drive the rebel-angels to that a new, hitherto uncreated, netherworld realm, Hell. This sheds light on two longstanding, yet seldom pursued, mysteries of the War in Heaven: the Son’s whereabouts during days one and two, and ‘the timing and circumstances of Hell’s creation’. This also informs the episode’s classical catabatic character by adding a distinctly physical descent and return from a netherworld region to the equation.Previous scholarship has noted the numerological significance of the book-division numbers of the four-book Paradise Regained and the twelve-book 1674 Paradise Lost to the Virgilian triadic career, respectively, to the Georgics and the Aeneid. By tying the ten-division structure of the 1667 Paradise Lost to the ten-division Eclogues, my published work completes the picture of the distinctive 10, 4, 12 symbolic Virgilian signature with which Milton crowned his career.In the midst of this symbolic Virgilian triadic progression, Paradise Regained, this integrative summary also discusses, Milton delivers his most scathing denunciation of colonial imperialism. The imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi) is the highest moral imperative of Christianity. By placing this rebuke in the mouth of Christ himself, therefore, Milton holds up anti-imperialism/colonialism as something not just worthy, but worthiest of imitation. Milton’s classicism, therefore, helps us appreciate the depth of his anti-imperialism, especially when read in connection with his poems’ biblical frames of reference. The study of the nature of the interplay of Milton’s biblical and classical frames of reference, therefore, has much to teach that matters today about Milton’s poetry, his world, and ours.
Keywords
Milton, Paradise Lost, Classical, Biblical, Epic, Virgil, Homer, Aeneid, Odyssey
Document Type
Thesis
Publication Date
2025
Embargo Period
2025-04-07
Recommended Citation
Windsor, T. (2025) The Nature of the Interplay of Classical and Biblical Intertexts in Milton's Poetry. Thesis. University of Plymouth. Retrieved from https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/sc-theses/85
