ABSTRACT
John Milton has led the reader from the degenerate classicism of Satan, a biblical figure who became classicized, to the purified classicism of Michael, an Anchises who has become Christianized and who opens the heroic era of Greece and Rome for Adam and Eve. At the same time, the reader has been led from the epic conventions almost in their bald state, the descent and the council, to a synthesis of classical ideals that are not at variance with those of Christianity. The epic, through the addition of Christian values, has become less the epic of death and more the epic of life and the creative power of God are extended by the creative power that God placed in man, the power to change and develop. The struggle between the old epic and the new seems almost at times the struggle between life and death: Adam must die the old death before he can attain the new life.
