ABSTRACT
At the end of Paradise Lost, the human fi gures walk out into the world, hand in hand, to fi nd their new home. In reality, of course, the descendants of Adam and Eve were to fi nd no such idyll of repose. Rather, what they were to encounter was a life of endless toil and labour which the world of Technē was devised to alleviate. But the idea of an eventual restoration, a return to a more innocent and more secure existence is implicit in Milton’s story of exile and loss. Paradoxically, however, it was Technē itself, the entire realm of artifi cial devices, which now acted as the equivalent to that fl aming sword brandished over the heads of Adam and Eve as they were forced to abandon Paradise. Modernity or novelty had triumphed over antiquity and tradition. No matter how much the poets and artists might struggle to recreate the Ovidian fantasy of the lost golden age, the presence of the machine would come to symbolize all that humanity had lost in losing Eden.
