Milton’s Book of Numbers: Book 1 and Its Catalog
A great deal and nothing happens in the first book of Paradise Lost. Satan and his fellow fallen angels rise from the burning lake of hell and assemble into what appears to be the greatest army ever summoned up by epic poetry. In full battle array, what do these devils do? Having already been defeated in the War in Heaven by an army that was, in fact, twice their own size and that possessed a secret weapon that God finally unleashed in the exploits of the Son, the fallen angels know better than to try again. The devils decide to talk things over, and construct a council hall for that purpose in Pandaemonium. Milton has pointedly reversed his epic model in the second book of the Iliad. The council of the Greeks, in which Odysseus dissuades Agamemnon from giving up the war against Troy, comes first and is then succeeded by Agamemnon’s calling for a troop review to boost morale before marching on the city, the occasion, in turn, for Homer’s famous catalog of the ships. In Paradise Lost the catalog of leading devils is followed by the troop muster and the promise of military action, a promise that fizzles out into talk and the ensuing council of book 2. Milton goes so far in this pattern of reversal as to place Homer’s simile of the bees, which comes early in book 2 of the Iliad, describing the Greeks coming together for the council at verses 87–95, near the end, in verses 768–775, of book 1 of Paradise Lost. The order of Iliad 2—bee simile, assembly in council, muster, catalog—is repeated backward in Paradise Lost 1: catalog, muster, assembly in council, bee simile. Breaking their martial ranks, the fallen angels settle in to discuss their situation.
The anticlimax of Milton’s book 1 suggests that the great speeches of Satan that run through it, pledging immortal hate and eternal war, will only lead to more speeches, that the devils are all talk. No sooner has Satan marshaled and counted up his troops than he dismisses the option of battle. Recalling their defeat in the War in Heaven, he asserts that God
Put forth at full, but still his strength concealed,
Which tempted our attempt, and wrought our fall.
Henceforth his might we know, and know our own
So as not either to provoke, or dread
New war, provoked; our better part remains
To work in close design, by fraud or guile
What force effected not: that he no less
At length from us may find, who overcomes
By force, hath overcome but half his foe.
Space may produce new worlds; whereof so rife
There went a fame in heaven that he ere long
Intended to create, and therein plant
A generation, whom his choice regard
Should favour equal to the sons of heaven:
Thither, if but to pry, shall be perhaps
Our first eruption, thither or elsewhere:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But these thoughts
Full counsel must mature: peace is despaired,
For who can think submission? War then, war
Open or understood must be resolved.
(1.640–56, 1.659–62)
As Satan spells out the subsequent plot of Milton’s epic, he lets the air out of the preceding action that has raised up and mustered the “myriads of immortal spirits” (1.622) and “puissant legions” (1.632) whom he addresses.1 From its very beginning Paradise Lost moves away from the epic of Iliadic warfare, which, we will find out subsequently in books 5 and 6, has already been staged in the War in Heaven and is over and done with before the action of the poem begins. Whereas in his first speech to Beelzebub Satan had seemed to consider the options of “force or guile” (1.121), he in fact already knows that force will not work: in spite of his protestations here, the devils do have something to dread from new war, as Belial will argue in book 2: “this would be worse” (2.186). For his post-Iliadic situation, Satan revises his earlier formulation and proposes instead the epic of Odyssean “fraud or guile”—which, of course, are not alternatives despite the “or,” but the same thing.2 It is a fraud, moreover, that Satan characteristically justifies by attributing it first to God, who he claims tricked the bad angels by holding the Son and his war chariot in reserve: Satan will fight fraud with fraud. The council in book 2 may debate whether this war is to be “Open or understood,” but, in fact, Satan has already made his choice for the latter. It is Odysseus, the lying master of words, whom, as the next chapter demonstrates, Satan will repeatedly play in the pattern that unifies book 2. By dressing up his devils for battle and then giving them no place to go, Milton at once imitates the representations of earthly military power in earlier epics and satirically belittles them: by the end of the book, the devils will have shrunk to the size of bees and fairy elves. He also redefines the nature of the epic that is to follow: all epic poems are, in the final analysis, wars of words, wars, that is, made up of the words we read on the page, but this one will be explicitly, self-consciously so, a battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. Action in this epic will be verbal, and conversely its poetry is a form of action.
The catalog of the chief demons from verses 376 to 521 at the center of the book illustrates this shift. It may appear to motivate the military muster that follows in the action, but, in fact, the weapons of these devils are not martial but the “falsities and lies” (1.367) by which they corrupted mankind to fall into idolatry. It is a catalog, not, as in earlier epics, of soldiers but of so many Odyssean liars. What had been the function of the traditional epic catalog, to number and measure the strength of contending armies and to give the epic poem its sense of grandeur, is taken up instead by the celebrated similes of book 1, which invoke vast military forces—the giants who warred on Jove, the Memphian chivalry of Pharaoh, the barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire, the armies of earlier epics and chivalric romances. The relationship of the similes is thus ironic to this catalog-which-is-not-a-catalog, a roll call of lying, noncombatant devils. Yet Milton also exploits the sense in which the ordering of the troops in the traditional epic catalog constitutes a miniature version of the epic poem’s larger attempt to give form and intelligibility to the violence of war, where battle makes ordered ranks fall quickly into disarray. His centrally placed catalog corresponds to and determines much of the action of book 1, as well as the landscape of hell, both in Milton’s physical descriptions and in the similes. It further controls the overall logic and sequence of these similes. The following discussion demonstrates the extraordinary symbolic unity of book 1, organized around its catalog, and of which the catalog, as an inset, organized unit, is a model and epitome. It suggests how the catalog of demons, whose idolatrous shrines abutted upon or even entered into the Jerusalem temple, relates to the construction of Pandaemonium, the temple-capital of the fallen angels built through music and poetry that is an anti-version of the poetic edifice of Paradise Lost itself. The book that gets the epic started is thus very much about its own writing: the Satan who first lifts himself and then his companions off the burning lake darkly mirrors his literary creator. In its consistent metapoetic argument, Milton’s representation of the devils at once demystifies and may itself be complicit with the human making of idols.
The Shape of the Catalog
Demonstrating the spectrum of diabolic evil, the catalog, in fact, possesses its own intricate structure and logic.3 “Say, Muse, their names then known, who first, who last” (1.376), the poet asks, and draws our attention specifically, self-consciously, to who stands first and last at either end of the catalog. It first lists “prime in order and in might” (1.506), beginning with Moloch and ending with Belial, the pagan gods of the ancient Near East who have biblical associations. They are followed almost as an afterthought by the classical Greek and Roman gods. The catalog thus ends twice: the first time with Belial, the second time with “Saturn old,” who fled first to Italy and then, it seems, all the way to England, the “utmost isles.” The analysis that follows considers different implications of the catalog’s inner pairing of Moloch-Belial and its outer pairing of Moloch-Saturn.
MOLOCH AND BELIAL 1
The pairing of Moloch and Belial will be repeated in the council scene of book 2, where the two demons will propose the diametrically opposite courses of open war and possible self-annihilation on the one hand and ignoble ease and getting accustomed to hell on the other. (These alternatives will also be played out in the activities of the devils that Satan leaves behind in hell later in the book, between those who go mad with “vast Typhoean rage” [2.539], and the “others more mild” [2.546] who build a civilization of poetry and philosophy.) The opposition between Moloch and Belial, between a demon who demands human sacrifice in the form of children and a demon “than whom a spirit more lewd / Fell not from heaven” (1.490–91) and who is responsible for the demands to rape guests in Sodom and Gibeah, pits violence against lust, though the difference may disappear when we consider that the matron exposed at Gibeah (Judges 19) was raped to death.4 This same opposition appears in the initial pairing of Moloch and Chemos, the Moabite god who was worshipped by “lustful orgies” (1.415). Chemos is, in fact, to be identified with Milton’s old friend, the seducer Comus, as he is by Gerhard Vossius; Jerome identified Chemos as well with Priapus and thus made his lascivious nature clear.5 His shrine in Jerusalem was, the poem tells us, next to “the grove / Of Moloch homicide, lust hard by hate” (1.416–17).
Chemos and Belial are also linked geographically, for the first extended his cult “to the Asphaltic Pool” (1.411), while the second was associated with Sodom: both, that is, are linked to the desolate region of the Dead Sea. This is one of the identities of the burning lake on which Satan is first discovered “Prone on the flood, extended long and large / Lay floating many a rood” (1.195–96). The “fiery deluge” (1.68) and “sulphurous hail” (1.171) that fall in hell recall the rain of fire and brimstone that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:23–28) beside the Dead Sea. The saline Dead Sea was famous for keeping objects buoyant on its surface, and this is why Satan and his cohorts lie floating, “covering the flood” (1.312) of the lake of hell instead of sinking beneath its waves.
The contrast of Moloch to Belial as first and last of the prime devils is succeeded by the contrast of Moloch to the last of the pagan gods, the Roman Saturn, the beginning and end of the entire catalog.
First Moloch, horrid king besmeared with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of drums and timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that passed through fire
To his grim idol.
(1.392–96)
Moloch was a god of Carthage, the Phoenician deity Baal-Hammon, whose cult was brought by Punic colonists to the North African city. The ritual sacrifice to Moloch of children, immolated in fire, elicited horror among Greek and Roman writers.6 The worship of this cruel god was also introduced, Milton goes on to record, into Israel under Solomon, then suppressed by Josiah (2 Kings 23:10): “And he defiled the Topheth, which is the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech.”7 This cult site, “Tophet thence / And black Gehenna called,” Milton comments was “the type of hell” itself (1.404–5), and we may understand the flames of hell as one giant holocaust to Moloch prepared for humanity. It is appropriate that Moloch comes foremost in the catalog.
The Saturn who is mentioned twice in verses 512 and 519 appears, by contrast, to have been a beneficent pagan deity.
who with Saturn old
Fled over Adria to the Hesperian fields,
And o’er the Celtic roamed the utmost isles.
(1.519–21)
The lines refer to Virgil’s double version of Italian-Roman origins in the Aeneid: the Italian king Latinus is the descendant of Saturn in book 7 (45–49), while in book 8, in the passage primarily recalled here, Evander recounts to Aeneas how Saturn came as a fugitive to Italy, civilized its peoples, and founded a golden age (8.319–58). We are reminded of the glorious future Rome of its new founder Augustus, who, Anchises had predicted in the underworld of book 6, would establish a golden age again in place of Saturn: “aurea condet / saecula qui rursus latio regnata per arua / Saturno quondam” (6.792–94).
Is the evil, child-immolating Carthaginian god at the begining of the catalog thus contrasted to a civilizing, peaceful founding god of Rome at its end? No: whatever their appearances, everyone in this catalog is a devil, and these two are in fact identical. Saturn was also Cronos, the god who devoured his children, and it was the name that the Romans themselves gave to Moloch. The historian Quintus Curtius writes that during the siege of Tyre by Alexander the Great, the Punic citizens considered “offering a freeborn boy to Saturn—this sacrilege rather than sacrifice, handed down from their fathers, the Carthaginians are said to have performed until the destruction of their city” (4.3.32).8 Lactantius similarly pours down Christian indignation in the Institutes: “Or what will they do in profane places who commit the most extreme crimes around the altars of the gods? Pescennius Festus in his books of history recounts fully how ‘the Carthaginians were accustomed to immolate human victims to Saturn, and when they were conquered by Agathocles, King of the Sicilians, they thought the god was angry with them; and so that they might more diligently make atonement, they immolated 200 of the sons of the nobles.’ ”9 In a passage of the City of God that Milton appears explicitly to have in mind here, Augustine similarly identifies Saturn with the child-devouring Carthaginian god (7.26) while he cites Evander’s speech in Aeneid 8 (7.27).10 Moloch and Saturn are thus one and the same horrifying deity/devil. By lending his catalog the shape of a ring composition with Moloch and Saturn at either end, Milton suggests that there is little to choose between the great opponents of antiquity, Carthage and Rome, whose conflict is enshrined in the Aeneid. In this respect, he may have been anticipated by the Aeneid itself, for the first “Saturnia” we encounter there (1.23) is Juno, the patroness of Carthage; already in Virgil’s poem it is difficult to determine the meaning of Rome’s Saturnian inheritance.
MOLOCH AND SATURN 2: A MINIATURE AENEID
This conflation of Moloch and Saturn, of Carthage and Rome, governs or reflects the way that the topography and action of book 1 rewrites the opening of the Aeneid. As critics have pointed out, the scene that begins Milton’s epic in medias res—its discovery of Satan and his fellow fallen angels dispersed on the storm-tossed burning lake of hell and seeking in the words of the archfiend to “tend / From off the tossing of these fiery waves / There rest, if any rest can harbour there” (1.183–85)—recalls the begining of the Aeneid, the storm sent by Juno and the finding by Aeneas and his Trojan followers of a harbor, “portum” (Aen. 1.159), near Carthage.11 Like Aeneas struggling to the Punic shore, Satan manages to arrive at the “beach / Of that inflamed sea” (299–300). The hot sands of the Libyan desert, moreover, are suggested by the “burning marl” and “torrid clime” (1.296–97), the “burnt soil” of hell over which the devils march with “painful steps” (1.562), not so much marching as hotfooting it in a comic slap at their soldierly dignity. What ensues in book 1 is an Aeneid in miniature: by its end, the Aeneas-like Satan and the other devils have built their destined city Pandaemonium. Milton is probably making a joke on the proverb that “Rome was not built in one day.” Putting to shame the builders “Of Babel, and the works of Memphian kings,” his epic protagonists raise their city “in an hour / What in an age they with incessant toil / And hands innumerable scarce perform” (1.694, 1.697–99). The allusion to the Tower of Babel and to the pyramids, repeated at lines 717–18, “Not Babylon, / Nor great Alcairo,” also identifies Pandaemonium with Rome: the biblical Rome as the Whore of Babylon of Revelation 17 accompanied by her seven-headed beast. This Rome was a new Babylon, as the Babylon that held the Israelites captive was another Egypt. It is the great city of Revelation 11:8, “which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt,” and thus it brings together the three locales of earthly sin that define the geography of Milton’s hell. Satan and his cohorts have built a version of Rome where at the end of the book they will hold both a “consult” (1.798), a meeting of the ancient Roman senate, and a “conclave” (795), an assembly in modern, papal Rome. The Geneva Bible comments on the beast and the Whore of Babylon, “The Beast signifieth the ancient Rome: the woman that sitteth thereon, the new Rome which is the Papistrie, whose crueltie and blood sheding is declared by skarlat.”12 It has been suggested that the pilasters, pillars, and golden architrave of Pandaemonium recall the new Saint Peter’s in Rome.13 In this little Aeneid, the Church of Rome has been built in one day.
Just as Saturn and Moloch are one and the same, the demonic capital Pandaemonium conflates Virgil’s Rome with his Carthage, the demonized double and opponent of Rome in the Aeneid—“Italiam contra Tiberinaque longe / ostia” (Aen. 1.13–14; cf. PL 2.296–98)—and makes the two indistinguishable.14 Its roof of “fretted gold” (1.717) and the “starry lamps and blazing cressets” (7.728) that hang from it recall Virgil’s description of the palace of Dido: “dependent lychni laquearibus aureis / incensi et noctem flammis funalia uincunt” (Aen. 1.726–27). The swarming of Milton’s devils into their newly built capital, compared in simile to bees, evokes not only Homer’s simile in Iliad 2 but recalls as well the famous simile in Aeneid 1 that compares the Carthaginians to bees when they are building their new city (430–36); how happy, Aeneas exclaims in the next line, are those whose city walls are already rising, wishing that he were already founding his own city. In Paradise Lost, however, Rome is being built in Pandaemonium simultaneously and inextricably with its enemy twin, Carthage, the city that lost out in history and was repeatedly defeated and sacked. But the Roman Empire celebrated by Virgil also fell, and the suggestion is that this infernal city and its newly hatched empire will be destroyed, too, in the long run: Pandaemonium delendum est. The point is brought home in a simile that compares the fallen angels to the barbarians who descended upon the Roman Empire, hordes that “Came like a deluge on the south, and spread / Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands” (1.354–55). The devils seem to be the destroyers of the very Rome they are about to build, and the barbarians end up in Libya to destroy Carthage as well, sacked still another time by the Vandals in 439; the devils appear to be their own worst enemies. Later the devils constitute an army greater than any ever assembled in classical or chivalric epic, and here, too, the final figures alluded to return us to Libya: those “whom Biserta sent from Afric shore / When Charlemain with all his peerage fell / By Fontarabbia” (1.585–87). Milton refers to the doomed invasion of France by the Libyan king Agramante in Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso; his capital, Biserta, is sacked in the latter epic (OF 40.32–34). In this revised version of the story, the war also results in the fall of another Roman emperor, the Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne, an updating into Renaissance epic’s fantasy Middle Ages of Virgil’s opposition of Carthage and Rome. Once again, the destruction is shared and, in this case, mutual.
MOLOCH AND BELIAL 2: LIBYA AND SODOM
Let us return to the inner catalog, which begins with Moloch and ends with Belial. The pairing of Carthaginian Libya, represented by Moloch, with Sodom, represented by Belial, will return to describe our final vision of hell in book 10. Here Satan returns to Pandaemonium, invisible for a while before he appears to his followers “as from a cloud” (10.449) recalling the cloud that surrounded Homer’s Odysseus when he entered into the city of Phaeacia, more pointedly, the cloud that concealed Virgil’s Aeneas before he appeared to Dido in Carthage in book 1 of the Aeneid, and, perhaps most pointedly, the cloud that surrounds the Turkish sultan Solimano in canto 10 of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, when he enters invisibly into the royal council hall inside Muslim-held Jerusalem (GL 10.16–49): Satan finds his “great consulting peers, / Raised from their dark divan” (10.456–57) to congratulate him on his return. Satan comes back as an “emperor” (10.429) to his waiting “legions” (427), and anticipates a Roman-style triumph that would imitate the triumph of the Son after his victory in the War in Heaven. Instead, he and his fellow devils are transformed into serpents. “Not so thick swarmed once the soil / Bedropped with blood of Gorgon” (10.526–27), the poem tells us, referring to the Libyan desert described by Lucan in the De bello civile (9.619–937), where the snakes born from the blood of the Gorgon Medusa wreak gruesome havoc on the soldiers of Cato on their harrowing march across its sands. Satan and his now fellow serpents are constrained to reenact the original sin in Eden, and to eat and spit out a parodic form of the forbidden fruit that tastes of bitter ashes, “like that which grew / Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed” (10.561–62). Our last glimpse of Satan finds him in a hell that is a combination of Sodom and Libya.
But this will also be our last vision of Eden. The archangel Michael takes the lingering Adam and Eve by their hands and leads them out of Eden (12.637–38), in an action that recalls the angels who led the lingering Lot and his wife and daughters out of Sodom (Genesis 19:16), for God is destroying Eden much as he destroyed Sodom, turning it into a torrid, uninhabitable area.15
The brandished sword of God before them blazed
Fierce as a comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the Libyan air adust,
Began to parch that temperate clime.
(12.633–36)
It is a very dark moment in the poem. Paradise is not only being lost; it is being transformed by human sin and divine anger into the landscape of hell, a hell that is part city of the plain, part Libyan desert in the region of a fallen Carthage.
EGYPT
Halfway through the catalog come the Egyptian gods Osiris, Isis, and Orus (1.478); these deities took the monstrous shapes of animals, the “birds, fourfooted beasts, and creeping things” described by Paul in his definition of idolatry in Romans (1:23), a text that Milton paraphrases in verses 367–72. These bestial Egyptian gods had already aroused the skepticism of Cicero in his De natura deorum (3.19): “Then if the traditional gods we worship are really divine, what reason can you give why we should not include Serapis and Isis in the same category … We shall therefore have to admit to the list of gods cattle and horses, ibises, hawks, asps, crocodiles, fishes, gods, wolves, cats and many beasts besides.”16 The cattle that Cicero mentions first are connected to his naming of Serapis, the incarnation of Osiris as a bull, whose “lowings loud” Milton describes in On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (215); Milton will further mention Serapis by name when comparing Pandaemonium to the pyramids and other grandiose buildings of ancient Egypt (1.720). John Selden links this Egyptian cult to the golden calf in the Exodus story and Milton goes on in the catalog to make a similar connection of Osiris to this first lapse of the Hebrews into idolatry, “the calf in Oreb” (1.484).17 In another evocation of the Exodus, the poem relates how, in the last of the plagues visited on the Egyptians, the angel of death slew the firstborn not only of their children but also of their cattle (Exodus 12:29), and thus dispatched those of their “bleating gods” that the fifth plague (Exodus 9:6) had spared.
These Egyptian deities and their associations with the Exodus and its plagues correspond to the third symbolic complex that, in addition to Sodom and to Carthage/Rome, governs the geography of Milton’s hell and the similes of book 1. Still another burning desert, and one neighboring the burning sands of Libya, Egypt was, in the words of Deuteronomy (4:20) and Jeremiah (11:4) a “furnace of iron,” from which God delivered Israel, and hell is introduced to us from the very beginning, through the eyes of the fallen Satan, “As one great furnace” (1.62). When Satan manages to rise from the burning lake, and “on each hand the flames / Driven backward slope their pointing spires, and rolled / In billows leave i’ the midst a horrid vale” (1.222–24), the scene suggests an infernal crossing through the Red Sea, where the “children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry land” (Exodus 14:22) and as the Song of Moses in Exodus 15:8 recounts, the “floods stood upright as an heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea.” The poem already puts in place the scenario of the Exodus that Satan will subsequently parody in book 2, casting him as a diabolic Moses who promises his companions “Deliverance” (2.465) from their Egyptian-like bondage in hell and who crosses the wilderness of Chaos to the Promised Land of God’s newly created earth and Eden.18
This Mosaic association is evoked, however, only to be belied by two similes of book 1 that, in rapid succession, compare the devils first to sedge afloat the Red Sea where the Pharaoh and his army once drowned as they pursued the fleeing Israelites, and implicitly to the Egyptians’ own “floating carcasses” strewn on the waves (1.304–11), then, in the second simile, to the plague of locusts that Moses summoned against the same Egyptians (1.338–43). The devils are identified not with the delivered Israelites but with their Egyptian oppressors, and the combination of similes suggests that they are a plague upon themselves.19 As is the case where the devils are depicted as Carthaginians, as the Carthaginians’ mortal enemies, the Romans, and as the barbarians who sacked both Rome and Carthage, the poem also indicates here the self-defeating nature of their sin. The locusts anticipate the plagues of Egypt mentioned in the catalog, and through the prophet Joel they will represent in Revelation 9 the apocalyptic armies of Satan—in Hebrew Abaddon, in Greek Apollyon—who will rise out of the smoke of the bottomless pit, “as the smoke of a great furnace” (9:2). These same armies will be cast back again into “the lake of fire and brimstone” at the end of time in Revelation 20:9–10. In addition to resembling the Dead Sea and the stormy waves outside of Virgil’s Carthage, Milton’s lake is a kind of Red Sea from which Satan and his crew may make a temporary exodus, but to which they are destined to make a final return, like Pharaoh’s army: “The depths have covered them: they sank into the bottom as a stone” (Exodus 15:5).
The Catalog and Pandaemonium
Papal apologists proclaimed that Saint Peter’s Basilica on Vatican Hill was the successor and true version of Solomon’s temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem; this may partly explain why Pandaemonium, “Built like a temple” (1.713), with its “gates / And porches wide” (1.761–62) and its “infernal court” (1.792) bears a parodic resemblance to the Jerusalem temple.20 But here, too, the catalog is closely connected to the action of book 1 and the ensuing construction of Pandaemonium. It lists the neighboring gods of the Israelites whose cults were introduced into Jerusalem itself. They
durst fix
Their seats long after next the seat of God,
Their altars by his altar, gods adored
Among the nations round, and durst abide
Jehovah thundering out of Sion, throned
Between the cherubim; yea, often placed
Within his sanctuary itself their shrines,
Abominations; and with cursed things
His holy rites, and solemn feasts profaned.
(1.382–90)
Moloch’s temple was introduced by Solomon himself “right against the temple of God” (1.402) and the same “uxorious king” (1.444) built a temple of Astarte for his foreign wives (1 Kings 11:5–7). In one of his visions, Ezekiel sees women weeping for Thammuz “in the sacred porch” (1.454) of the temple (Ezek. 8:14) and views the abominations (Ezek. 8:17) taking place in its inner court. King Ahaz put up an altar to Rimmon in the temple (2 Kings 16:14–15), “God’s altar to disparage and displace / For one of Syrian mode” (1.473–74).
The fallen angels thus build in Pandaemonium an already profane version of the Jerusalem temple that the devils of the catalog will later infiltrate and defile. The ending of the catalog with Belial is again particulaly significant, for Belial, who lacks a temple, represents the spirit of ecclesiastical corruption itself.
to him no temple stood
Or altar smoked; yet who more oft than he
In temples and at altars, when the priest
Turns atheist, as did Ely’s sons, who filled
With lust and violence the house of God.
In courts and palaces he also reigns
And in luxurious cities …
(1.492–98)
In Pandaemonium, both temple and city, Milton intimates not merely his revulsion at the Roman church, but his distrust of any and all established churches, too easily contaminated by pagan, carnal influences, by the world of kings and cities; his distrust, especially, of the physical buildings that house such churches. Paradise Lost begins by calling on the Spirit, “that dost prefer / Before all temples the upright heart and pure” (1.17–18), already replacing the earlier invoked “Sion hill” (1.10) before the ensuing fiction of book 1 builds the devils’ temple. In book 11, Michael tells Adam that “God attributes to place / No sanctity” (11.836–37), as he shows him in a vision the washing away by the Flood of the mount of Paradise, which earlier in the same book he remarks might have been “Perhaps thy capital seat,” a Jerusalem or a Rome with a temple at its center.21
As the capital of hell, Pandaemonium is to be contrasted to Milton’s heaven, where the angels described by Raphael in book 5 dwell camped in “pavilions” and “tabernacles” (5.653; 5.654) on the vast plain around the mountain of God, evoking the scenery of the wilderness around Sinai.22 The contrast is scripturally inspired by Stephen’s diatribe in Acts 7 against the temple after he has been accused of prophesying its destruction (Acts 6:14), the speech that earns him martyrdom. After mentioning the golden calf (7:41) and the tabernacle of Moloch (7:43), Stephen suggests the continuity of these idolatrous cults with the temple itself, opposing the worship of the Israelites in the wilderness to the subsequent cult center in Jerusalem.
44. Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, as he had appointed, speaking unto Moses, that he should make it according to the fashion that he had seen.
47. But Solomon built him an house.
48. Howbeit the moste High dwelleth not in temples made with hands, as saith the prophet.
The Geneva Bible comments on verse 44, “They oght to have bene content with this couenant onely, & not to haue gone after their lewd fantasies,” and on verse 48, “He reproveth the grosse dulnes of the people who abused the power of God in that they wolde haue conteined it within the temple.”23 Calvin’s own commentary on Acts, translated into English by Christopher Fetherstone in 1585, notes that “This was almost a common error in all ages, because men thought that cold ceremonies were sufficient enough for the worship of God. The reason is, because forasmuch as they are carnal, and wholly set upon the world, they imagine that God is like to them.”24 The pastoral layout of Milton’s heaven and the building project of Pandaemonium contrast the sojourn in the wilderness that the Israelites experienced close to their God to the institutionalization of their worship in the temple in Jerusalem, a temple that seems to have been already unsanctified by ritual religion and pomp before the devils cataloged by Milton would have their idolatrous cults placed alongside and within its spaces. The building of Pandaemonium is the beginning of priestcraft.
The Logic of the Similes in Book 1
The catalog at the center of the book also governs the sequential logic of Milton’s similes in book 1. Milton’s catalog, we have seen, is an anti-catalog that describes the spiritual force of falsities, lies, and idolatry, but it nonetheless bears the imprint of the traditional epic catalog that lists the size and strength of the contending army, and it thus feels connected to the ensuing muster of the devils who march in formation before their leader, Satan.
he through the armed files
Darts his experienced eye, and soon traverse
The whole battalion views, their order due,
Their visage and stature as of gods,
Their number last he sums. And now his heart
Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength
Glories: for never since created man,
Met such embodied force, as named with these
Could merit more than that small infantry
Warred on by cranes:
(1.567–76)
Much of the ensuing epic will depict the progressive hardening of Satan’s heart, which here takes pride in the “embodied force,” the sheer physical violence that is at his disposal in this review of his troops. He first looks at their stature and then counts them up, and it appears to be this second act, his numbering them, that makes his heart swell. In so doing, Satan imitates—and the poem again self-consciously points to—the shape and sequence of book 1 itself. Its similes first look at how big the devils are, and then describe how many they are.
This army, the passage tells us, makes all human forces look like pygmies, whose war with the cranes is recorded by Homer in the Iliad (3.537). But book 1, which begins by comparing Satan to a Titan or a giant, and then to a sleeping whale (1.196–208), will end by likening the devils, who have shrunk themselves to fit into Pandaemonium, to those very pygmies or to fairy elves (1.780–88). Milton belittles the fallen angels—he allows us to watch them belittle themselves. But this change in his reader’s perception of them is prepared for and integral to his book’s moving from the question of “monstrous size” (1.197) to the question of number.
The distinction becomes clear in the similes that rapidly succeed one another between verses 287 and 311. Milton has continued the gigantism of his description of Satan by comparing his shield to the moon seen through Galileo’s telescope and his spear, which would make a shipmast look like a mere “wand” (294), similes that also, as Harold Bloom has pointed out, seek to diminish earlier epics—Homer had compared the shield of Achilles to the moon and insisted on the weight of his spear that no other hero could handle (Iliad 19.374–88)—much as Satan’s forces will later be said to dwarf those of Milton’s epic predecessors, beginning with the giants of Claudian’s Gigantomachy (576–87).25 But then Satan calls on his fallen companions, and the perspective shifts from size to quantity, and the similes that follow compare them to “autumnal leaves” and the “sedge” of the Red Sea. I am less interested in how the first of these similes reaches back through the epic tradition to Dante, Virgil, and Homer than in the way in which they both suddenly diminish the size of the devils.26
When we think in numbers, and when the individual becomes a number without a name, the units become very small: leaves or sedges. The same thing happens in the ensuing simile that compares the fallen angels who rise and fly above the burning lake to a swarm of locusts: “So numberless were those bad angels seen” (1.344). The devils have, in fact, lost their individual identities through their sin: “Though of their names in heavenly records now / Be no memorial blotted out and razed / By their rebellion” (1.361–63). Evil is ontologically privative, and the devils neither have names nor, as Satan will learn, a recognizable “shape” (4.835), and they are last seen in the poem in a state of metamorphosis in book 10. The catalog that follows in book 1 puts a literally human face upon them as they inhabit the idols that men and women have made. But the same diminishment returns in the book when the “multitude” (1.730) comes to pay a tourist visit to the newly completed Pandaemonium—“they anon / With hundreds and with thousands trooping” (1.759–60)—and are now compared to bees. When the devils, already shrunken to insects in the simile, now shrink themselves in order that all may fit “without number” (1.791) into Pandaemonium, the action comments metapoetically upon the poem’s own procedure and logic. At the same time, the poem itself self-consciously comments: “they but now who seemed / In bigness to surpass Earth’s giant sons / Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room / Throng numberless” (1.777–80). Milton made the devils big five hundred lines earlier, and now he makes them little, as if one has to think small in order to make the numberless fit into the confines of the imagination. The very greatness in numbers that the traditional epic catalog counts up and celebrates only miniaturizes the devils, a sardonic enough deflation of the military subject of previous epic: “Wars, hitherto the only argument / Heroic deemed” (9.28–29). These devils, as we have noted, are not going to fight in any case: their shrinking to get into the council hall goes hand in hand with, and is the image of, their unheroic abandonment of force for fraud. But even in their former battle on the plains of heaven, the poem suggests here, the vastness of their army had already diminished them. The infinite become the infinitesimal.
These issues, in fact, crop up again during Raphael’s retrospective narration of the War in Heaven, at the very center of the poem in its original ten-book version of 1667. Raphael suggests the difficulty of retelling feats performed by “Army against army numberless” (6.224); he states that “deeds of eternal fame / Were done, but infinite” (6.240–41), and thus acknowledges that the modern massed warfare of Milton’s time, armed with the canonry whose satanic invention Raphael will subsequently recount, cannot be narrated in terms of individual heroes. It will take the Son’s entrance into the battle on its third day, wielding a different kind of power, to end this melee and to reintroduce a kind of epic heroism: “Number to this day’s work is not ordained / Nor multitude” (6.809–10), the Son tells the loyal angels.27
More pointedly, the Son’s prowess has already been anticipated at the end of book 5 by the zealous witness borne by the lowly Abdiel against his aristocratic angelic betters and their vast numbers in Satan’s camp:
Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number, nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind
Though single.
(5.897–903)
Abdiel’s keeping his faith in spite of the massive pressure of his peers has individuated him and earned him a place in the story, and in the ensuing book 6 he will be acclaimed by God himself: “well hast thou fought / The better fight, who single hast maintained / Against revolted multitudes the cause / Of truth, in word mightier than they in arms” (6.29–32). Here, too, verbal combat, in this case the words of reasoned truth triumphing over devilish fraud, replaces traditional epic warfare. Abdiel’s fight is a very Miltonic combat in which the captain of the debate club triumphs over the football team. It is, nonetheless, the spiritual equivalent of the Son’s victory and may be said to explain its true nature.
The poem parallels the two acts and places them at the end of their respective books, lending the 1667 Paradise Lost two centers. Abdiel separates himself from the “revolted multitudes”; the Son separates and drives those multitudes out of heaven. In many respects, Abdiel’s feat is more impressive, since he is not fitted out with the Chariot of Paternal Deity, and Abdiel, in fact, occupies and hinges the very center of the poem’s original version, defeating Satan in debate at the end of book 5, striking Satan to his knees at the beginning of hostilities in book 6 (111–98): his spiritual heroism is paralleled not only to the Son’s military heroism but to his own battlefield heroism as well. But it is the first kind of heroism, the spiritual one available to every man, that counts in this epic: the war of words and the interiorized, reasoned choice of faith, a choice that is necessarily individual and that resists being incorporated into the numbers of the epic catalog.
Raising Devils
Reduced to numbers without names, diminished in size, the devils become unreal in the final simile of book 1, a simile that makes them very little, into the little people, the fairies, just as the book’s first simile had made them very big, like a sleeping whale, and perhaps no more real. The two similes frame the fiction and are meant to be paired and compared, “who first, who last.”
or that sea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream:
Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam
The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff,
Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,
With fixed anchor in his scaly rind,
Moors by his side under the lea, while night
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays:
(1.200–208)
or faerie elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear:
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.
(1.781–88)
The best readings of these similes, by Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker, emphasize their slowing down of the action and the figure of the onlooker, the pilot or the belated peasant, whose fate is suspended.28 Will the dawn come up in time for the pilot to get his anchor out of the whale he mistakes for an island, or will the whale wake up first, dive, founder his ship, and drown him? Will the peasant be made a lunatic by his vision of the fairies? This suspense corresponds to the larger plot of the epic as it approaches the Fall of Adam and Eve, which it presents as anything but inevitable; at any moment their human choices might have turned out differently.
The onlooker, to push those readings further, is also a figure of Milton’s reader confronting the satanic evil the poem represents. In both similes, the whale and the fairies are minding their own business, the former asleep, the latter “on their mirth and dance / Intent.” The drama takes place in the onlooker’s reaction: the failure to recognize the threat in the motionless, dormant whale; the potential fascination with the dancing fairy elves.
The similes have an additional dimension of demystification. The first is a sailor’s yarn (“as seamen tell”), the second is a fairy tale, and possibly a dream; both are staged in the darkness and uncertainty of night. Framing book 1, the similes call into question the very reality of the devils it depicts—perhaps not the existence of the devil per se, attested to in scripture, but of the forms in which the human imagination has clothed him: the names by which the fallen angels now go in the catalog at the book’s center.29 The example of the myth of Mulciber—“Men called him Mulciber” (1.740)—which seems to contain its own etiological explanation of how a falling star might have been erringly converted by fable into a falling deity, fits into this pattern.
Book 1 already provides a generic home for the devils as make-believe fairies by means of two similes in its later section that evoke the romances of chivalry. The first, in verses 579–87, passes from epic precedents (Claudian, Statius, Homer, Virgil) to invoke “what resounds / In fable or romance” (1.579–80) and refers to Arthur, “Uther’s son” (1.580), as well as to the heroes of Carolingian romance who “Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban / Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond” (1.583–84); the second, in verses 763–66, picks up both this tournament figure and its switch between verses from Christian to pagan (Muslim) locales, and compares the spacious hall of Pandaemonium to “a covered field, where champions bold / Wont ride in armed, and at the soldan’s chair / Defied the best of paynim chivalry / To mortal combat or career with lance.” These are the “gorgeous knights / At joust and tournament” (9.36–37) that Milton, again conflating epic with romance, will reject as a heroic subject in his calling upon his Muse in book 9, the stuff of the poem on King Arthur he had himself once considered writing. Of course, there was already such a poem in English, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and fairies such as Morgan le Fay were protagonists of the chivalric legends. By the end of the book, the devils and their world seem to be consigned not only to the pagan, rather than Christian side of the romances, “at the soldan’s chair,” but to the romances themselves into which the book’s epic fiction seems to be turning, or from which it may have never indeed been distinct: to the popular genre that Renaissance literary theorists routinely disparaged for its mere fictionality—“fabled knights / In battles feigned” (9.30–31), Milton dismissively comments.30
The final comparison of the devils to dancing fairies is an instance, moreover, of Miltonic self-citation. The ode On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Milton’s first major poem that opens the Poems of 1645, describes how the new light of truth at the birth of Christ drives out the pagan gods from their shrines and oracles. All but one are gods who reappear in the catalog of book 1, which is consciously rewriting the earlier poem. The Nativity Ode similarly concludes with the diminishment of these gods to fairies: “the yellow-skirted fays, / Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze” (1.235–36). If there is something elegiac in Milton’s vanishing fairies, whose maze refers to the patterns of their dance and the rings it leaves behind in the fields, they are not entirely innocuous, for they are part of a folk belief that Reformers tied to Catholicism. So the Anglican bishop and poet Richard Corbet (1582–1635) wrote in his ballad, “The Faeryes Farewell,” which describes an expulsion similar to the one carried out in the Nativity Ode, and contains a similar hint of elegy or, in this case, nostalgia.
Witnesse those Rings & Roundelayes
Of theirs, which yet remaine,
Were footed in Queene Maries dayes
On many a Grassy Playne;
But, since of late Elizabeth
And later Iames, came in,
They never daunc’d on any heath
By which we note the Faries
Were of the old Profession;
Theyre Songs were Ave Maryes,
Their Daunces were Procession.
But now, alas, they all are dead,
Or gone beyond the Seas,
Or Farther for Religion fled,
Or elce they take theyre Ease.
(25–40)31
Milton’s dancing fairy elves in Paradise Lost may thus carry with them the remnants of Catholic ritual and of the idolatry of the demonic pagan gods listed in the catalog with their “gay religions full of pomp and gold” (1.372). Their music could be associated with the same gods in the Nativity Ode—with the “dismal dance” around the idol of Moloch (210), the “anthems dark” that accompany the worshippers of Osiris (219)—as well as with the crypto-Catholic “rites” of Comus and of his “foundation” in Milton’s Comus: “And on the tawny sands and shelves / Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves” (117–18).
These associations with paganism or with a paganizing popery notwithstanding, the predominant idea of the endings both of book 1 of Paradise Lost and of the Nativity Ode seems to be the reduction of the face of the demonic to the level of fairies, that is, to unreal figments of the human imagination at its most vulgar level of ignorance and superstition. At this level, the fairies—precisely because they are make-believe—nonetheless have their charm: they are the stuff of poetry. “I may never believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys,” says Shakespeare’s rationalist Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.2–3), as he goes on to discuss how the poet gives “airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” (5.1.16–17), turning airy into fairy.
The fairy elves of the last simile thus offer a final, skeptical comment on Milton’s own fiction-making in book 1. The contrast between the inert whale of the first simile and these elves dancing to their jocund music adds another layer to this metapoetic argument. The action of the book has raised Satan and his fellow devils into action from their chains and immmobility. The poem has similarly animated them, and it has done so through the music of its verse. Beelzebub tells Satan that the fallen angels will respond to their leader’s “voice, their liveliest pledge / Of hope in fears and dangers” (1.274–75), and it is in answer to “their general’s voice” (1.337), reminiscent of the war-shouts of Agamemnon and Achilles in the Iliad, which calls on them to “Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen” (1.330), that the host of demons swarm up out of the burning lake; this invocation closely parallels the poet’s own calling upon his Muse to catalog the chief devils, “Roused from the slumber” (1.377), those whose names have been “razed” (1.362) from heavenly memory, but who rise again here. The diabolic army begins to move through music, first when the imperial ensign is displayed “at the warlike sound / Of trumpets loud and clarions” (1.531–32), which occasions a collective “shout” (1.542), then “to the Dorian mood / Of flutes and soft recorders; such as raised / To highth of noblest temper heroes old” (1.550–52). We are told of “the soft pipes that charmed / Their painful steps o’er the burnt soil” (1.562–63): the commonplace Latinate pun on “charm” and “carmen,” suggests that this music that propels them is a kind of poetry, perhaps identical to Milton’s own poem that we are reading. Similarly, Pandaemonium is built to the sound of music: it “Rose like an exhalation, with the sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet” (1.711–12), and this recollection of the lyre of the poet Amphion that built Thebes also directs attention to the poem itself and its self-conscious fiction-making. The simile of the dancing fairies who “charm” the ear of the peasant onlooker completes and glances back upon the book’s procedures: the power of its words and music has raised the devils into motion and raised their capital city, a poetic creation that parodies the work of Milton’s Spirit-Muse, who is asked “what is low raise and support” (1.23) in the poet, and who taught Moses the story of the Creation itself: “how the heavens and earth / Rose out of chaos” (1.9–10).
Book 1 of Paradise Lost thus dramatizes the part its own poetry plays in creating the devils it places before the reader and suggests how idolatry itself is a kind of poetry. The demons of the catalog were “wandering o’er the earth” (1.365) before they became fixed in their cult sites as pagan gods, and the “falsities and lies” by which they corrupted the greatest part of mankind have originated as much with mankind as with them. The same chapter of the City of God in which Augustine discusses Virgil’s Saturn concludes with his judgment that the whole of pagan polytheism “is occupied in inventing means for attracting wicked and most impure spirits, inviting them to visit senseless images, and through these to take possession of stupid hearts” (7.27).32 The idea here seems to be that man proposes and the devil disposes: that real demons rush in when human belief creates imaginary gods. It is a critical take on the Middle Platonism expressed in such works as the Hermetic Asclepius, which Augustine cites and criticizes in the following book 8 of The City of God. The Asclepius piously describes how the Egyptian priests were able to attract benign demons to inhabit the statues of their gods: “they added a supernatural force whereby the images might have power to work good or hurt, and combined it with a material substance, that is to say, being unable to make souls, they invoked the souls of daemons, and implanted them in the statues by means of holy and sacred rites” (37).33 Augustine seems to agree that the pagan idols were indeed animated, but by unholy devils who took advantage of human superstition and led it still further away from the true God: “For although man made gods, it did not follow that he who made them was not held captive by them, when, by worshipping them, he was drawn into fellowship with them—into the fellowship not of stolid idols, but of cunning demons” (8.24).34 Milton’s self-conscious poetic animation of his fictional devils points historically forward to, and seeks to denounce, the future inspiriting by real devils of the equally fictive human idols listed in the catalog, but the two are troublingly related: the imagination is the potential entry point for the diabolical into human experience.
Accordingly, Milton at once gives and denies a local habitation and a name to the devils of book 1. The insistent metapoetic reflection of the book reminds us that the face we put on the devil is our own, a fiction projected by the mythmaking, human mind, and that the devils are similarly the product of the words of the poem itself. Milton must summon the devils into poetic being in order to warn a reader who, in the first simile of the pilot on the Norway foam, is figured as unaware of them. But he runs the risk of fascinating the reader with that very poetic creation, as the charmed peasant onlooker of the last simile attests: of making an idol that the devil can, in fact, inhabit. Milton shows himself aware of the difficulty of destroying idols, even or especially those that he has set up in order to pull down, aware that he may produce and perpetuate the very superstition, pagan and Catholic, he is trying to dispel. The raising of the devils of book 1 through the music of poetry is an object lesson in the origins of idolatry, but the power of Milton’s poetry may nevertheless exceed its admonitory, demystifying purpose. In the peasant onlooker’s heart, joy and fear redound together, but the joy of the fairy elves’ charming music may outweigh the salutary fear that this music can lead to lunacy or demonic possession. Once raised, these devils are hard to put to rest or to return to airy nothing: back to the words on the page. For if Paradise Lost self-consciously reduces to a war of words, Milton’s own words are at war with themselves.
Book 1 acknowledges that we really have no idea what the devil looks like, though the evidence of evil may be everywhere in the world. It thereby labels the fiction about Satan that follows in Paradise Lost as a fiction, a matter, we might say, of suspended belief. That the devils may not finally be reduced to poetry and written off, however, is suggested at the book’s close. For all of its belittlement of Satan and the fallen angels, some residual part of them remains undiminished.35
But far within
And in their own dimensions like themselves
The great seraphic lords and cherubim
In close recess and secret conclave sat
A thousand demigods on golden seats,
Frequent and full. After short silence then
And summons read, the great consult began.
(1.792–98)
The deliberately short-circuited description, “in their own dimensions like themselves,” gives no information about the shape or size of these devils, and they occupy the inner sanctum of this desanctified version of the Jerusalem temple where nothing was to be found behind the temple veil.36 The book’s skeptical wavering about the reality of its devils here seems to admit the possible existence—behind human fictions easy enough to expose if not entirely to strip away—of a demonic force that exists outside of mythopoesis itself, in the silence when its music stops. The silence is short-lived, quickly erased by enjambment. Then the poem’s words begin again.
Appendix: Demonic Swashbucklers
The satirical depiction in book 1 of the fallen angels, mustered into arms only to settle down in council, is reinforced in verses 663–79, immediately preceding the building of Pandaemonium. Satan has just resolved on war, “Open or understood” (1.662), and his companions give a rousing cheer.
He spake: and to confirm his words, out flew
Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs
Of mighty cherubim; the sudden blaze
Far round illumined hell: highly they raged
Against the highest, and fierce with grasped arms
Clashed on their sounding shields the din of war,
Hurling defiance toward the vault of heaven.
(1.663–69)
The devils thump their shields with their swords, and Milton’s remarkable ear allows him to suggest a series of rhymes to match the din they make—grasped/clashed, arms/war, thighs/mighty/high/highest—as well as the snide put-down in his describing them raging highly against the highest divinity they cannot possibly affect. Their answer to Satan’s words with their rhyming swords, as if it were now time to move from speeches to the real action of battle, will be belied by the book’s ensuing action. But even here the swords are not put into combat use, but, as an extension of their leader’s words, to make so much blustering, hollow noise, the “din” that in Paradise Lost will repeatedly characterize the reduction of language—and hence of the possibility of poetry itself—to nonsense: the din of Chaos (2.1040), the din of the War in Heaven (6.408), the din of the confused tongues of Babel (12.61), and the din of the hissing that Satan and his companions make in the last vision we have of them, transformed into serpents, in the halls of the Pandaemonium (10.521) they are here about to build.37
The devils’ clashing of their swords against their shields invites, in fact, a double interpretation. Roman soldiers went into battle striking their spears or swords against their shields in order to frighten their enemy: so Polybius reports of the soldiers of Scipio Africanus in their victory over Carthage at the battle of Zama: “the Roman troops charged the enemy uttering their war-cry and clashing their shields as is their custom” (15.12).38 Roman legions also clashed shields in approval of a commander: given Satan’s identification as “the apostate angel” (1.125; see also 5.852 and 6.100), Milton may have in mind the response of the soldiers of the emperor Julian the Apostate to his speech urging them into combat against the Alamanni: “The soldiers did not allow him to finish what he was saying, but gnashed and ground their teeth and showed their eagerness for battle by striking their spears and shields together, and besought him that they might be led against an enemy who was already in sight.”39 The fallen angels similarly appear to confirm Satan’s call for war and to be spoiling for a fight.
But clashing one’s sword against one’s shield had acquired a different possible meaning between Roman times and Milton’s own. In his The History of the Worthies of England, published in 1662, Thomas Fuller explains the saying, “He is only fit for Ruffian’s Hall.”
A Ruffian is the same with a Swaggerer, so called because endeavoring to make that Side to swag or weigh down, whereon he engageth. The same also with Swash-Buckler, that from swashing, or making a noise on Bucklers. West-Smith-field (now the Horse-Markets) was formerly called Ruffian-Hall, where such men met casually and otherwise, to try Masteries with the Sword and Buckler. More were frighted than hurt, hurt than killed therewith, it being accounted unmanly to strike beneath the Knee, because in effect it was as one armed against a naked man. But since that desperate Traitor Rowland Yorke first used thrusting with Rapiers, Swords and Bucklers are disused, and the Proverb only appliable to quarrelsome people (not tame, but wild garetters) who delight in brawls and blows.40
The swordplay at Smithfield of heavy broadswords against equally heavy shields is now out of use, Fuller notes, and it always was swordplay, a relatively harmless kind of fray that was more noise than real fighting. Indeed, it is not clear whether Fuller’s swashbuckler is beating the shields of opponents or upon his own shield—as an empty boaster and bully. The latter idea seems to be what we are to infer when Shakespeare’s Justice Shallow refers to himself in 2 Henry IV as having been one of a company of “swinge-bucklers” (2 Henry IV, 3.2.22), two scenes after the play introduces its “swaggerer,” Ancient Pistol (2.4.70–211), the lower class, cowardly miles gloriosus. Nowadays, Fuller notes, this brawling behavior has migrated down to the lower stratum of society, to dwellers in garrets, and Shakespeare’s Hotspur in 1 Henry IV had sneered at Prince Hal consorting with such urban commoners as “that same sword-and-buckler prince,” and implied that Hal lacked any real martial deeds (1 Henry IV, 1.3.228). Such figures, less harmless than Pistol, Milton wrote in Eikonoklastes, had accompanied King Charles when in 1642 he tried to arrest the five members of the House of Commons: “whose very dore he besett with Swords and Pistols cocked and menac’d in the hands of about three hundred Swaggerers and Ruffians, who but expected, nay audibly call’d for, the word of onset to beginn a slaughter” (CPW 3:377).
The joke is on Milton’s fallen angels. As they clash their shields in book 1, they may look like Roman soldiers roused to battle, but they equally look ridiculous: like so many swashbuckling braggarts sounding defiance against a deity whom they, in fact, dare not fight. So the rest of the book will confirm. It makes a last sardonic comment on the draining away of the devils’ fighting spirit in the simile that compares their next move, the building of Pandaemonium.
As when bands
Of pioneers with spade and pickaxe armed
Forerun the royal camp, to trench a field,
Or cast a rampart.
(1.675–78)
A vestige of military identity lingers in this image of army engineers setting out to prepare a battlefield. They are still armed, if only with their shovels. (We note, too, that these are royalist soldiers.) The simile recalls the epic actions of the Iliad (7.433–41), where the Greeks build ramparts to protect their ships, and of the Aeneid (7.157–59), which recalls the Iliad passage when Aeneas builds a Roman-style camp on the Italian coastline. The devils, however, are not building fortifications, but a council hall: talking and fraud, not fighting and force, are the order of the day.