ABSTRACT
Paradise Lost is perhaps the shortest route from the literature of England to that of Greece and Rome. It brings the reader into immediate contact with the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid while it reassesses them and lets the reader feel the energy that is constantly released by the interaction of classical source and Miltonic imitation. Since John Milton intended his poem to be read as a gloss upon these predecessors, it was necessary for him to link the opening of his epic solidly to its poetic ancestry. He did not invoke the classical epic in order to displace it, as has often been maintained, but in order to show that Satan fails to be an epic hero even by the criteria of Homer and Virgil. Milton has so immersed himself in the three major epics that one detail could strike more than one epic at the same time.
