"Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books": Essays on the 1667 First Edition

Poetic Justice: Plato’s Republic in Paradise Lost (1667)

8 Poetic Justice Plato’s Republic in Paradise Lost (1667) PHILLIP J. DONNELLY Next to Homer and the inspired Hebrew poets, no author exercised a more powerful influence on the congenial sublimity of Milton’s genius than Plato. —Benjamin Jowett, “The Genius of Plato” Irony has always been a contour within the metaphysical (what did Plato believe?). The will to power is only a story, perhaps, but so is every metaphysics; and even as a story, its plot has often a poignantly dialectical logic. —David B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite Readers of Paradise Lost have long observed that the shift to a twelve-book structure in the 1674 edition suggests a more direct engagement of Virgil’s Aeneid; critical discussions of the initial tenbook structure of Milton’s epic have tended, however, to emphasize numerological theories, rather than consider specific intertextual engagements that such a structure might afford.1 In considering “why Milton ever chose ten Books” in the first place, John Hale casts doubt on such numerological readings and seems to give ultimate primacy to accidents of the writing process: “each book came forth first at the length compelled by the throes of composition—by a blind man, remember, who could compose only in the early morning and only in winter months.” On this basis, Hale contends, for example, 159 160 Phillip J. Donnelly that only after writing book 10 (of the 1667 edition) did Milton realize its disproportionate length and decide to divide it in half in the 1674 edition.2 Such an explanation does not, however, consider why Milton ever imagined that book of the epic initially as a single unit and as the final book in a set of ten. By contrast, David Norbrook proposes that “the original ten-book structure of Paradise Lost formed a parallel with [Lucan’s] Pharsalia.”3 Norbrook’s argument cites various political and poetic similarities between the two epics, similarities that generally would be reinforced by having the same number of books. Such similarities do not, of course, entail that specific points of intersection between the two works are parallel in their arrangement. I contend that the ten-book edition of Paradise Lost does, however, offer a direct structurally symmetrical engagement of a different ancient text: Plato’s Republic. Reading the 1667 Paradise Lost in conjunction with Plato’s Republic addresses numerous questions simply as a matter of course. Why narrate the Fall specifically in book 8 of the first edition?4 How does the extended educational digression in books 5 through 7 relate to the ostensible topic of divine justice? Why does the apparently Virgilian vision of the future appear at the end rather than the middle of the epic, as in the case of the Aeneid? Although Milton begins with an apparently Dantean descent into hell, why does the narrative seem to peak metaphysically, as it were, in book 6, rather than at the end?5 Similarly, why does the main narrative treatment of hell occupy exactly the first two books, no more nor less? All such questions are, of course, susceptible to multiple complementary answers, but I contend that the sustained engagement of Plato’s Republic reveals an important part of the answer to each of them. In offering such an interpretation of Milton’s epic, we need not presume that the Republic is any less aporetic than Paradise Lost. Nor should we imagine that simply identifying an intertext constitutes, in itself, an elucidation of Milton’s poem, as though Milton were not capable of ironic appropriation of a text that already suggested ironic readings. Reserving a fuller comparison of the ultimate rhetorical aims of these two texts for a larger study, the main purpose of the argument here is to prove the existence of such a sustained intertextual engagement and to offer some characterization of how that engagement Plato’s Republic in Paradise Lost (1667) 161 unfolds. By demonstrating such architectonic symmetries, the argument here does not imply that Paradise Lost is reducible to such intertextual connections. Rather, the arguments of the Republic constitute a major recurrent thematic portion of the weave (textus) that Milton subsumes and transforms in his own epic. Taking as a point of departure some general consideration of Milton’s relation to Platonic texts, we can then trace the symmetrical development of the arguments in these two texts. I shall give sustained attention to their first and final...