“By force or fraud / Weening to prosper”: Milton's Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism

Abstract

History is a bath of blood.The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed.(James 163) Milton's rigorous application of the terminology of fraud and force in reference to Satan's methods, his "guile/Stirrd up with Envy and Revenge" (PL 1.34-35), has not escaped critical notice.Irene Samuel's comparative study of Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost records how, just as Dante allots force and fraud to the seventh and eighth circles of hell respectively, situating perpetrators of force within the walled City of Dis and perpetrators of fraud below Dis within the ten trenches of Malebolge, Milton's Satan deploys force and fraud to accomplish his objectives (94-104).1 James Freeman's Milton and the Martial Muse documents the strategies of fraud and force as the insistent preserve of martial epic, the histories of ancient Roman triumphs, and the artes militares of late Renaissance war writers, well before the fraud-force collocation entered Milton's Paradise Lost and came to color Satan's rhetoric and shape his contrivances and methods.Freeman's study chronicles the dyad in such seminal texts as Homer's Odyssey (9.406), Hesiod's Theogony, Virgil's Aeneid (2.390), Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (5.858), Ovid's Metamorphoses (1.127-32), the orations of Cicero, the histories of Livy and Silius Italicus, and the works of the early modern war writers Richard Bernard and Henry Hexham (156-77).To Freeman's catalogue one might add the forceful and fraudulent tactics of Herodotus's Persian King Cambyses and General Amasis (3: 65, 4: 201); the advice of Torquato Tasso's Satan to his consistory of fiends "or la forza s'adopri ed or l'inganno," that is, "to adopt either force or deceit" (4.16.8, cf.8.3.3);Edmund Spenser's pairing of the "slie shiftes and wiles" of Dolon (FQ 5.6.32),whose speaking name means "Guile" (Eng.dole; Gr. dóloς; Lat.dolus), with the guerilla warfare of "bold and stout" Malengin (FQ 5.9.4); and the Discourses Concerning Government, in which Algernon Sidney chronicles how the early Christians "did with the utmost vigor defend both their civil and religious Rights against all the Powers of Earth and Hell, who by force and fraud endeavored to destroy them" (282). 2 Freeman traces these two "most important categories of thought in our Western tradition" (157) and concludes, "Milton is so intent upon exploding the damnable respectability his generation imputed to force and guile that he mentions them repeatedly" (172).Samuel and Freeman limit their studies, though, to Paradise Lost alone.Force and fraud, I am arguing, can be seen to relate to the Satanic heroic mode across Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as a pejorative revaluation of both the ancient heroic code-as ancient epic is arguably foundational for the fraud-force collocation-and the Renaissance political philosophies of Machiavelli and Milton's contemporary,Thomas Hobbes.Set against the Satanic 18

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