How Paradise Lost drew on The Aeneid
A documented line of influence: John Milton demonstrably engaged Virgil’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Aeneid
Virgil · 19 BCE
Ancient RomeThe influenced
Paradise Lost
John Milton · 1667
RenaissanceRelevance
9/10
On Paradise Lost’s page
- Paradise Lost is the Aeneid recast for Heaven and Hell — Milton took Virgil's twelve-book architecture and his every epic convention
- The invocation, the start in the middle of the action, the towering similes: all Virgilian inheritance, working in English
- Read the Aeneid first and you see the classical scaffolding Milton raised his fallen angels upon
On The Aeneid’s page
- Milton built his English epic on Virgil's frame — even rearranging Paradise Lost into twelve books in deliberate imitation of the Aeneid
- The Virgilian apparatus is all here first: the invocation of the muse, the plunge in medias res, the great unspooling epic similes
- Virgil gave the Christian epic its classical bones