The Diversions of Milton’s Fallen Angels
The Diversions of Milton’s Fallen Angels
A Curious Section of Paradise Lost
One topic I keep returning to in my humanities studies is the question of “what do humans do with their lives?” Which of our pursuits suit our happiness? What do certain of our distinctive activities, such as worship, festivity, dance, politics, love, and games, tell us about ourselves? What do the “ways of life” said to partake of greatness, such as those of the hero, the statesman, and the poet, also tell us? What are the activities that constitute “the Good Life,” or “human flourishing,” as a score of Aristotle-recommenders put it? Or, if instructed by Blaise Pascal, what are the activities that we most use as “diversions” from thinking about our inherent misery?
Oddly, a passage most useful for thinking about these kinds of questions, is one about what the fallen angels, aka the demons, do with some free time which lands in their laps, in book II of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Our Provo Great Books Club recently reread this, and I appreciated it more than previously, thanks to our leisurely pace and my reading an excellent secondary work, C.S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost. Among other works of epic poetry I’ve read, I still enjoy Paradise Lost less than the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, but Lewis helped me understand certain effects Milton was aiming at, which has gotten me past a puzzled discomfort I at one time felt with aspects of the poem, and past some major criticisms of its style from T.S. Eliot.
But even when I wasn’t as impressed by Paradise Lost as I am now, I was fascinated by the section in question here, Book II, 506-628.
A few words about the entire epic, for those unfamiliar. It begins in media res, with Satan and the other rebel angels recovering from their downfall to Hell, just after their battlefield defeat in Heaven. There are then some debates among them about what they should do now—some are for lying low, others for another frontal attack upon God and the loyal angels, but Satan convinces them to instead aim for revenge by winning Mankind, God’s newest creation, over to rebellion. This requires stealth, however, so Satan gets the devils to agree that he alone should undertake the perilous journey to escape the hell-prison, to cross over wide Chaos in search of our universe and Earth, and once there, to elude angel guardians and persuade man.
Books I-VIII of Paradise Lost portray the hatching and first parts of Satan’s mission, interspersing this with information about God’s overall plan, about the devils’ initial rebellion and war in Heaven, about the realms of the total Cosmos—Heaven, Hell, Chaos, and our Universe—, and about Adam and Eve’s happy pre-Fall life in Eden. And then, books IX-XII portray the Fall itself and its consequences.
In order to think about our passage, we should also understand that the poem mentions four eras for the fallen angels: first, a time in Heaven prior to rebellion; second, the era most-portrayed in Paradise Lost, a temporary detention in Hell within which they have freedom of movement; third, their career from the Fall down to the Second Coming, of plaguing and tempting mankind, allowed by their access to Earth due to a gates-opened Hell and a pathway across Chaos(X, 471-475); fourth, from Judgment Day through eternity, again locked in Hell, but this time with no possibility of escape (III, 332-333), and subject to a more painful punishment.
Our section occurs in the second era. Since they have delegated Satan with the execution of their plan, they have some time on their hands:
Thence more at ease thir minds and somwhat rais'd
By false presumptuous hope, the ranged powers
Disband, and wandring, each his several way
Pursues, as inclination or sad choice
Leads him perplext, where he may likeliest find
Truce to his restless thoughts, and entertain
The irksom hours, till his great Chief return. (II, 520-527)
These pursuits of “several way” turn out to be four main ones:
Sports, (528-545) like the funeral games in the Iliad and Aeneid, though ones that emphasize practice-battles above all other events.
Songs, (546-555) and Milton emphasizes that it is aesthetically excellent song.
Philosophizing, (556-569) much of it, to our surprise, on topics associated with theology.
Exploring, (570-628) out of the motivations of “bold adventure,” and of learning whether any part of Hell “might yield them easier habitation.” Milton takes the longest to describe this one of the four activities, because it affords him a chance to describe, in a few score lines of friendly competition with Virgil and Dante, his Hell, which turns out to include, in addition to what we’ve seen in book I, areas of ice, swamp, and perpetual storm.
The fallen angels’ desire for “easier” habitation reminds us that even in this more tolerable era Hell is still a place of torment. We first see them stunned amid a lake of fire, and being urged by Satan to scramble onto the island amid it, which nonetheless is itself so hot that it singes the soles of their feet. (I, 228-38)
Clearly, with this group of four activities, Milton is presenting several major human ones, or ways of life, namely, those of the 1) warrior, 2) poet (including the poetic-artist) 3) philosopher, and 4) explorer. Thus, a fallen-angel Achilles, Hector, or Spartan, would join the first group, a fallen-angel Homer, Michelangelo, Handel, Wordsworth, Armstrong, or Dylan the second, a fallen-angel Socrates, Aquinas, Kant, Barth, or Strauss the third, and a fallen-angel Columbus, or a Ulysses-of-Dante’s-account,1 the fourth. Milton shows how the four activities are ones angelic beings might be imagined to do, and, how each activity could fit into a rebellion against God. Thus, the passage points both to questions which come up in angel-ology, i.e., ones addressed in works such as the fourth treatise of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, and to ones of my cherished humanities studies about our characteristic activities. The passage weaves meditations on angel-ology and human nature together, and probably more for the sake of knowledge of the latter than of the former. So when Milton scholar Dustin Griffin says
Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the poem, we find images of the painfulness of the fallen condition. The devils’ predicament is recognizably our general human predicament...2
we should largely agree, though I do think we should still attend to the angelology-issues which do come up.
Given all this, I believe the best approach to this passage will be to a.) examine the four major activities of the fallen angels in turn, b.) consider a special interpretation of them suggested by the overall structure of book II, c.) consider which major human activities are not pursued by the fallen angels, d.) see whether Milton hints at any hierarchy of all such activities, and finally, e.) to consider the section in the light of Pascal’s teachings about diversion. Big tasks, so past the first one, a close reading which will take up all of this post, they will have to be done in an abbreviated way.
The Four Pursuits Examined: Sports
Here are most of the lines on Sports:
Part on the Plain, or in the Air sublime
Upon the wing, or in swift Race contend,
As at th' Olympian Games or Pythian fields;
Part curb thir fierie Steeds, or shun the Goal
With rapid wheels, or fronted Brigads form.
…before each Van
Prick forth the Aerie Knights, and couch thir Spears
Till thickest Legions close; with feats of Arms…
The expected variety of game-events, such as is portrayed in the comparable sections of the classical epics, is absent here, since only a few race-events are mentioned as happening alongside the main ones, which are the mocked or real3 clashing of “Brigads,” whether in the air or on the land.
Milton is continuing here an association of the fallen angels with the heroic warriors of ancient times which he had developed all through books I and II, such as at I, 549-567, where we see them “move in perfect Phalanx to the Dorian mood of Flutes and soft Recorders” with “deliberate valour breathe’d.” The classical-heroic attributes given the demons in books I and II are later somewhat diminished in book VI, when Raphael describes their performance in the battle against the unfallen angels, but at this point, Milton seems to want us to associate the devils with celebrated warriors of old, parallel to the way he invites us to associate Satan’s speeches (e.g., I, 242-270) with the most stirring war-speeches of old.
Still, even though we notice several associations of these fallen-angel sports to classical order, we also notice that these are a bit undermined—Griffin detects a “compulsive quality” in the sports, and some of the demons pursue them as a way to indulge an inner rage. Consider lines 539-541:
Others with vast Typhœan rage more fell
Rend up both Rocks and Hills, and ride the Air
In whirlwind; Hell scarce holds the wilde uproar.
Are we to imagine that next to where the organized events are occurring, there is a section of the ‘field’ where these ones can indulge their fits? Or are we to imagine that their fury is catching, so that most of the demon-athletes join in the “uproar?” In any case, these ragers are not being compared to flattering examples like Achilles’ comrades or the Spartans, but to the cosmos-rending opponent of Zeus, Typhon, and, in a following passage, 542-544, to Heracles (“Alcides”), but only in his inglorious last moments as a mortal, when he is writhing in pain and striking out at all, due to his having put on an “envenom’d robe.”[543] Typhon raged because he was the monster-god inherently opposed to Olympian order, and Heracles only did so due to torture.4 And so, we are prodded to notice that some of the fallen angels are choosing such lives of rage, and perhaps also to conclude, since these lines finish the sports-section, that the thumos-emphasizing life of the warrior/athlete, if taken up amid rebellion against God, tends to lead to the dead-end of crazed violence-indulgence.
It’s a passage our present-day enthusiasts for Bronze-Age manliness would do well to meditate upon.
The Four Pursuits Examined: Song
Here are all the lines on “Song”:
…Others more milde,
Retreated in a silent valley, sing
With notes Angelical to many a Harp
Thir own Heroic deeds and hapless fall
By doom of Battel; and complain that Fate
Free Vertue should enthrall to Force or Chance.
Thir Song was partial, but the harmony
(What could it less when Spirits immortal sing?)
Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment
The thronging audience.
The music of this Song is so beautiful, that Hell’s pain and gloom is forgotten; it is as if the angels singing and their “thronging” angel listeners step back into their pre-fallen heavenly life. Milton reminds us in a number of ways that the demons of his poem are still angels, and this interlude of “harmony” is the most vivid of these.
Whereas we should probably assume that the songs sang prior to the angelic rebellion had the praise of God and His works as their main object, here, as with Homer and the epic tradition, the highest object of song is the celebration of heroism. There is no mention of love songs, introspective poems, or comic songs. On that last omission, compare Tolkien’s elves, who if they might sing hero-songs more often, also enjoy comic ones. Or compare Homer himself, who penned the lost comic work Margites.(Arist., Poetics, 1448b 37)
Not only does the Song of the fallen angels celebrate epic deeds, ones they apparently love for illustrating “Free Vertue,” it singles out those of their own heroism. Compare Homer’s Achilles, who when feeling musical, sings songs of the previous era’s heroes.(Il. IX, 185-191) Further, while Achilles’ “wrath” is connected to his outrage at the tragic character of his fate, in which he will die young if he continues to strive for heroic glory, it would be a stretch to say he is whiny about that fate; by contrast, it would be no stretch to say that about Milton’s fallen angels: in significant part their song consists of laments that their deserved victory was snatched from them by “doom,” “Fate,” “Force,” and “chance.” So, it’s beautiful music, but tiresome lyrics.
The Four Pursuits Examined: Philosophizing
Here are the lines:
In discourse more sweet
(For Eloquence the Soul, Song charms the Sense,)
Others apart sat on a Hill retir'd,
In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,
Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandring mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argu'd then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and Apathie, and glory and shame,
Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophie:
Yet with a pleasing sorcerie could charm
Pain for a while or anguish, and excite
Fallacious hope, or arm th' obdured brest
With stubborn patience as with triple steel.
If I label this pursuit “philosophizing,” the section begins by calling it “Eloquence” and winds up labelling it “False philosophie.” By contrast, while Milton says the fallen angels’ Song is “partial,” and we noticed its rather limited range of theme/mode, he still calls it “Song,” and highlights its basic excellence. Similarly, while we also detect a truncated range of, and disorder within, the athletic activities, Milton does not call them “false sports.” Moreover, at IV, 551, he will confirm the core goodness of sports, by mentioning that the unfallen angels also engage in such “Heroic Games.”
Regarding the philosophy-like activity, we are told a) that though it might seem to have a degree of “Wisdom,” it is “vain,” and thus can hardly be wisdom in any real sense; b) it concerns “thoughts more elevate”; c) it involves an Eloquence that appeals to the soul; and d) it has a “pleasing sorcerie” as diverting from “pain” or “anguish” as Song can be. Also, we are given eleven words or phrases to describe its topics, namely:
1) Providence, 2) Foreknowledge, 3) Will, 4) Fate, 5) Fixt Fate, 6) Free Will, 7) Foreknowledge Absolute, 8) good and evil, 9) Happiness and final misery, 10) Passion and Apathie, and 11) glory and shame.
These could be numbered differently if we decided some of the first topics listed were meant to go together, or that the latter pairings ought to be divided, but two things are quite clear: first, there’s a break b/t the ‘singular’ topics 1-7 and the ‘paired’ topics 8-11; second, and more importantly, those first seven topics are more ones of Christian theological dispute than of philosophy proper. A more strictly philosophic list would highlight Platonic topics like “justice,” “virtue,” and “knowledge,” Aristotelian topics like “substance,” “essence,” and “cause,” and so on.
What is more, the first seven topics belong to merely one area of theological debate, the one centered upon predestination and free-will. Milton seems to be suggesting that with this area in particular, theological and philosophical debate is largely fruitless (“in wandring mazes lost”), and may be convincingly done by persons in outright rebellion against God. We must of course remember he was a serious (if on some points heterodox) Puritan Christian who was not hostile to mental labor over fine theological and creedal points, but at the very least, he is here reminding his readers that just as the ‘Devil can quote scripture,’ the demons can do theology.
As for the other (8-11) topics listed, three of the terms within the four pairs, “glory,” “shame,” and “final misery,” describe topics which likewise do not belong to philosophy proper. I believe they are here because they are especially on the fallen angels’ minds: they wanted glory, but are beginning to grasp the shame of their situation and to ruminate upon the likelihood of their eternal punishment.(II, 178-185)
So in all these ways, Milton indicates that the demons’ philosophy is not quite the real item, and presents philosophizing as an activity not just diminished and perverted by rebellion, but one not even realizable within it. Unlike the other three main activities, it seems the standards necessary to achieve even the basic practice of it are dauntingly high. Milton does single out this group as special, “elevate” in mind, more soul-attuned than sense-attuned in the way they seek pleasure, and drawn to a “Hill retir’d,” but unlike the other groups, the angels of this one never arrive at the basic level of achievement. And there is one other way this pursuit sticks out: it especially lends itself to remaining in rebellion, for it strengthens “fallacious hopes,” and increases the “stubborn patience” of the “obdured brest.”
The Four Pursuits Examined: Exploration
We’ll quote about three-quarters of this part:
Another part in Squadrons and gross Bands, [ 570 ]
On bold adventure to discover wide
That dismal world, if any Clime perhaps
Might yield them easier habitation, bend
Four ways thir flying March, along the Banks
of four infernal Rivers…
Milton then describes the famed rivers of hell, and adds a fifth, the Lethe.
…Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
Beyond this flood a frozen Continent
Lies dark and wilde, beat with perpetual storms…
More description of these icy regions is then given, and the idea that punishment is increased by exposing the damned to both extremes of temperature is explained, in passing indicating that hell will not remain a realm its prisoners may roam about in at will:
…cold performs th' effect of Fire. [ 595 ]
Thither by harpy-footed Furies hail'd,
At certain revolutions all the damn'd
Are brought: and feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extreams…
But soon the poem returns to the Lethe, and comes to a summing up:
They ferry over this Lethean Sound
Both to and fro, thir sorrow to augment, [ 605 ]
And wish and struggle, as they pass, to reach
The tempting stream, with one small drop to loose
In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe,
All in one moment, and so neer the brink;
But fate withstands, and to oppose th' attempt [ 610 ]
Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards
The Ford, and of it self the water flies
All taste of living wight, as once it fled
The lip of Tantalus. Thus roving on
In confus'd march forlorn, th' adventrous Bands [ 615 ]
With shuddring horror pale, and eyes agast
View'd first thir lamentable lot, and found
No rest: through many a dark and drearie Vaile
They pass'd, and many a Region dolorous,
O'er many a Frozen, many a fierie Alpe, [ 620 ]
Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death,
A Universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, [ 625 ]
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Then Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd,
Gorgons and Hydra's, and Chimera's dire.
The summary moment here is the “found no rest” statement. As for the finale-like character of the last sentence (which begins at line 614!), it is a fine example of Milton’s power when he gets one of his ‘long periods’ rolling.
A few notes about this picture of hell, before we discuss the activity of exploration. Milton shifts back and forth from description of how these fallen angels see hell during this special second era, to description of how it is to be through eternity, in which “all the damn’d,” which will include the fallen angels, will be driven here and there within it, the better to increase their pain. Popular conceptions of hell, supported by some Cantos of Dante’s Inferno, have the demons as the main tormentors, and thus often picture them as the comrades of any other hell-monsters there may be. But the monsters Milton’s demon explorers see appall them. They perhaps dimly intuit what they were created for—their punishment--, and, since we have seen they do have an appreciation for beauty, it makes sense that they also have an aversion to the monstruous. If nothing else, the monsters make the regions of Hell that much more unsuitable for “easier habitation.”
Milton’s shifting of the time being described also means we don’t have reason to think that the explorers attempt to drink of the Lethe at this point. Why does he mention its presence, then? Moments in the three speeches from the beginning of book II reveal that some of the fallen angels are thinking about whether annihilation, if it were possible for them, might not be better than eternal punishment.(eg. 145-154) So Milton is saying that anyone undergoing such punishment would reach out for the Lethe—but of course, that is only going to happen much later. But also, we know that a narcotic forgetting of life’s misery can be the most powerful of diversions for us on earth, despite all it has in common with outright suicide. That is, there are many men and women who in all their searching find, like these fallen angels, “no rest” in any place or pursuit, and turn to the self-forgetting possible in our equivalents of Lethe-drinking. Alas, we see it everywhere in our streets.
Now let us consider exploration as a way of life. Should it be regarded as akin to the classic ones of the warrior, poet, and philosopher? Or should it be seen as a mainly modern model, as I recently said? The primary examples from ancient and medieval times suggest we could classify the explorer as a special type of the hero (e.g., Jason—he goes for the Golden Fleece), the philosopher (e.g., Herodotus—he goes for knowledge), or the money-maker (e.g., Marco Polo—he goes for commercial contacts).
There also seems to be, continuing our peering outside of Milton, something of a distinction between the traveler explorer, who goes to civilized peoples like Herodotus, Marco Polo, and Alexis de Tocqueville, and the pure explorer, who like Dante’s Ulysses speaks (ftnt. 1) of wanting to know “the world where no-one lives,” i.e., to go into the ‘blank parts’ of the map, and/or to have encounters with savage peoples.5 Milton lived during the latter part of the age of Exploration, and the accounts of the scores of bold journeys to Africa, the Americas, and Asia, whether by conquerors, traders, settlement-seekers, missionaries, scientific types, or combinations thereof, available in our day in the Hakluyt series, were widely read in his time.
I’m prompting us to think about the activity of exploration because I think we should note when Milton departs from classical understandings of things, and, because we need some kind of handle on why he gives his explorer demons a dual motivation.
Again, the dual motivation is on one hand, a desire for “bold adventure”; on the other, for finding an “easier habitation.” If their main motivation is the former, it makes them like the Ulysses of Dante, the 20th-century progressives, and most of the technophiles of today, in feeling that the worst thing for humanity would be to lack a ‘frontier.’ Of course, many of these types even more strongly feel that such a lack would be the worst thing for themselves, as scores of songs, poems, and sayings about the need to keep on movin’ on attest.
But if the main motivation of Milton’s explorers is “easier habitation,” it makes them like Francis Bacon’s scientific ‘relievers of the human estate.’ (It would also make them like Milton’s demon named “Mammon,” as we will detail in a moment.) We might even say that when exploration of new lands is undertaken in this spirit, it is not different in kind, though it is riskier and more arduous, from the innovation-seeking which can be undertaken in any of the crafts and practical sciences. Now, when we consider this latter class of activity, which we might label as that of the inventor, we of course must admit that the element of honor-seeking is often mixed into it, but that hardly alters the main point I’m making here, that the innovator could think of himself as an “explorer” of new techniques, and, that this could apply in all kinds of arts, such as mining, architecture, agriculture, medicine, computing, supply-chain management, etc.
In book I (670-757) we see the demons engage in some quick mining and building operations, resulting in a grandiose city named Pandemonium, built for the purpose of holding their “great consult.” Thus, Mammon can argue in his speech at this assembly, against Moloch’s advice of renewed war, that the expelled angels should now
Live to our selves, though in this vast recess [hell]…
…Our greatness will appeer
Then most conspicuous, when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse
We can create, and in what place so e're [ 260 ]
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and indurance.
…cannot we his Light
Imitate when we please? This Desart soile [ 270 ]
Wants not her hidden lustre, Gemms and Gold;
Nor want we skill or Art, from whence to raise
Magnificence…
There is as much of ‘Babel’ in this as of ‘Bacon,’ but the main thing to notice is that since the demons can so readily build their city out of the “Desart soil” available in the vicinity of the lake of fire, they naturally think they could build more comfortable settlements once they have more fully explored hell’s regions. But, as we saw, the explorers found no place suitable.
One could respond to all of my pondering here about the dual motivation of the demon explorers by just saying that both are equally at work. However, my sense is that they are more deeply effected by the first one, that of curiosity and adventure, and of the allure of the Beyond, but, that they use the excuse of better habitation to justify their expeditions, just as Columbus and the other modern explorers used the excuse of mercantile gain for Portugal, Spain, etc., to win the backing for their voyages.
I adopt this interpretation, because otherwise, the valuing of greater “ease” and the desire for exploration don’t quite fit together, and they especially don’t if we consider human explorers, and not demon ones suffering from some degree of pain wherever they go in hell. Further, this interpretation better works with the summary fact that the explorers illustrate what happens with all the pursuits: as they “found no rest,” neither did any of the other three groups. Each demon, we were told at the beginning of the passage, did not merely pursue his respective activity as a diversion from hell’s pain, but also and more fundamentally, to “find, Truce to his restless thoughts.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, a regular reader of Blaise Pascal, and as we have seen (ftnt. # 5), himself a traveler who felt both Herodotus- and Ulysses- like motivations, famously described “the restlessness of the Americans.” He saw it in their relentless pursuit of “material well-being,” their frenetic travelling across the large bounds of their nation, their regular career-switching, and in the man who labored hard to build a home where he could rest, but then could not abide remaining in it once he had finished it.(Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Pt. II, chap. 13) He also observed that “the Americans put a sort of heroism into their manner of doing commerce,” using the example of the unmatched speed with which their traders crossed great oceans, speed obtained via personal hardship, so as to be able to sell consumer goods at a slightly lower price than competitors.6
“Ah!” we might sniff, “How contrary is this American-businessman’s way, to the true spirit of the Explorer! Racing by, he is missing the Experiences, the Quest, the Frontier!!!” But let us remember that we encounter Dante’s Ulysses, his unforgettable exemplar of a man ever-yearning for exploration, and in a way directly contrary to married life, in hell. Perhaps the American businessman unknowingly keeps his soul more open to reflection, repentance, and God, or at least to the humbling benefits of domestic life, through his pruning of the explorer’s instinct down to a mere race for profitable innovation? Perhaps Ken Kesey and crew had it wrong when they festooned their Invention-of-the-Hippie bus with the slogan Further? I’m not saying I know, if those are the only two choices, which life would be better! Both are very American. But as for Pascal, the Christian thinker whom Tocqueville especially attended to, he included travel among the class of activities usually done for diversion’s sake, and added this:
Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it; in other words, we would never travel by sea if it meant never talking about it...(Pensées, no. 77)
Initial Conclusions:
Believe it or not, there is a good deal more to say about this little section of Paradise Lost! In the list of analytic tasks I set above, we have only gone through task a), so that b) through e) remain. We’ll tackle all of them in part II of this.
Nonetheless, we’ve already learned quite a bit. Milton is aware of what I call the “Five Wonderful Lives of the Ancient World,” as well as the deepest kind of Christian critique of their wonderfulness. He sees how the classically admired lives of fitness/war-heroism, of song/artistry, and of philosophizing, while admirable in themselves, could be integrated into a rebellion against God, and thus serve to divert us from thinking about our true estate. And, he also gets us thinking that in the explorer, and perhaps also in the closely-related inventor, we encounter a distinctly modern kind of celebrated life, but one that all the more vividly points to our inherent unhappiness when seeking to live apart from God. With each of the four examples, he shows how that attempt, that rebellion, fatally undermines our most glorious activities.
Ulysses is the Latin form of the Greek name Odysseus. Homer’s Odysseus vows in the end to remain in Ithaca and cease his wandering: though we’ve come to associate his very name with journeying, by the end of the Odyssey he has put his wanderlust aside, and is the only one of Trojan-war heroes who has achieved a real nostos, or homecoming, in addition to winning the fame of a hero, the kleos. But Dante’s Ulysses is a reworked character. He is encountered in Hell, (Inferno, XXVI—Hollander trans.) and could not remain at home:
not tenderness for a son, nor filial duty
toward my aged father, nor the love I owed
Penelope that would have made her glad,
Could overcome the fervor that was mine
to gain experience of the world
and learn about man’s vices, and his worth.
And so I set forth on the open deep
with but a single ship and that handful
of shipmates who had not deserted me.
This is a new voyage—a second ‘Odyssey.’ At a certain point in it, he urges his aging ship-mates to press on by saying
do not deny yourselves he chance to know—
following the sun—the world where no-one lives.
But of course, Dante is presenting all this as hubris—his Ulysses will retrospectively call this voyage a “mad flight,” and sure enough, when the crew, having sailed out into the Atlantic and well south of the Equator, catch sight of the island-mountain of Purgatory, God sends a storm which drowns them all.
Dustin Griffin, “Milton’s Hell: Perspectives of the Fallen,” Milton Studies, 1979.
We later learn, book VI, that the angels are never killed when they battle, but only suffer some kind of pain, so perhaps the game-battles here are as real as any the angels ever fight.
Viz. Hesiod, Theogony; Sophocles, Women of Trachis
This distinction can blur in certain cases. While in America Tocqueville also took a special trip into the Michigan Territory to get beyond the boundaries of civilization and encounter the Indians. See Tocqueville, “A Fortnight in the Wilderness.”
DA, Vol. 1, Pt. II, chap. 10, sect. 5; pg. 385-87 in Mansfield & Winthrop trans.