ABSTRACT
In Acts and Colossians the thing blotted is not the offending “name,” but sin and the condemnatory power of the law respectively, so that the sequence of allusions corresponds to the change in perspective between the beginning and the end of the epic. Regardless of who held the pen, however, there is more than a casual resemblance between the secondary or substitute code that Moses presents to the people in Exodus and the factitious naming in Book I of Paradise Lost. Both replace a blotted or broken original. John Milton’s text is possessed by these blotted names, which, although in the “original” language, are not the true or proper names. From the perspective of the inmost bower, the view of the catalogue in Book I as transuming Homer is perhaps inverted; for the dramatic, the epic, and the elegiac all live in Milton’s pages thanks to the blotted book.
