[Previous: lines 534-588]
An angelic host has armed itself, ready to rescue Christ from the cross.
Ventum erat ad cœli portas: hïc omnibus irae------------
incaluere magis, belli ut monimenta prioris [590]
sunt oculis oblata: vident nam turribus altis
pendentes currus, suspensaque postibus aera,
spiculaque, et clypeos, victis de fratribus arma
olim immane nefas cœlo crudeliter orsis,
dum frustra aspirant sceptris felicis Olympi [595]
immemores, victique animis, et vana tumentes;
quos ipsi contra steterant meliora sequuti,
aethereque expulerant certamine debellatos.
Quam pugnam in foribus quondam caelârat ahenis
artificum manus, atque operoso impresserat auro. [600]
Cernere erat liquidas cœli pendere per auras
hinc acies, atque hinc acies certamen adortas,
Nunc huc, nunc illuc, ultro, citroque volare,
aetheraque in medio venientibus obscurari
missilibus; iamiam certari comminus armis, [605]
miscerique acies; et iam, queis spicula deerant,
crinibus implicuere manus hostilibus uncas,
suspensosque comis circum per inane rotabant.
Iamque hos paulatim concedere, desuper illos
urgere aspicias; donec toto aethere versi, [610]
palantesque fugae simul hostes terga dedere,
praecipiti assimiles nimbo, atque procacibus austris.
Nam Pater omnipotens armatus fulmine dextram
deturbabat agens; flammisque sequacibus arce
sidereal, excussos Erebi domus atra recepit. [615]
They reached heaven’s gates. All were angry and------------
battle-eager, recalling former wars— [590]
their trophies could be seen, tall towers draped with
chariots, and suspended from the gates
spears, arrows shields, weapons of the lost brethren
who had—monstrous sin—cruelly risen in arms,
aspiring to conquer glad Olympus, [595]
minds and memories lost in vain ambition.
They’d been opposed by those who led better lives,
and fought them in conflicts across the ether,
wars that were now carved onto great brass doors
by craftsman, and skilfully inlaid with gold. [600]
Here could be seen, hanging in the liquid air,
battles left and battles right, fighting
now here, now there, advances and retreats,
the very heights of heaven darkening
with missiles, soldiers fighting one-on-one and [605]
skirmishing. Those who lacked spears grabbed
their enemy’s long locks in their hands and
whirled them round in a circle by their hair.
By increments one side yielded, attacked from above,
urgent fighting; til wheeling through the air, [610]
the enemy scattered and fled, all at once:
like storm-clouds rolled before fierce South wind.
The Father, a thunderbolt in his right hand
expelled them, pursuing them with fire from
heaven: Erebus’ dark house received them. [615]
The South wind in line 612 is ‘Auster’, which often crops-up in Latin poetry (it’s “frigidus” Vergil Georgics 4:261, but “vehemens” in Cicero, “turbidus,” in Horace and, most relevant to Vida's line, “nubilus”, ‘cloudy’ in Propertius 3:8:56). Erebus, in line 615, of course is Hell.
In a general sense what’s behind this episode—the War in heaven, memorialised as a bas-relief upon a great brass door in heaven—is Aeneas arriving in Carthage and weeping to see the events of the Trojan war already consigned to history as a frieze on the Carthaginian walls. The actual account of the battle is not lengthy (just lines 600-615) but it evidently sank deep into Milton’s imagination, and so reemerges in Paradise Lost.
In one sense Vida’s War in Heaven shares the problematic of Milton’s, namely: why does God the Father, who being omnipotent could end the war at any time and simply sweep the rebels away, allow his angels to charge into a battle He knows they can neither win nor lose? In Vida the issue is starker: the two armies wrestle back and forth, equally matched, until the Father intervenes with his thunderbolt—which makes one think: why not come in earlier, God? It also makes one think: all this angelic pride in their armour, their temples arrayed with trophies captured from the rebel angels and so on, is pretty misplaced—it wasn’t their victory, after all. But conceivably this is precisely Vida’s point. Earthly soldiers brag about their victories, when all success in war, or anywhere else, comes from God.
Milton takes from Vida the idea of the war in heaven as a kind of dumb-show preliminary to the real business of expelling the rebels, but swaps-out the agent in that climax from God the Father to God the Son. This introduces problems of its own, as generations of Miltonists have debated. What they haven’t discussed is what Milton takes from this passage (not so far as I can see anyway)—which is, mostly, a process of magnification. So Vida’s God takes the thunderbolt in his right hand (dextra, line 613) and blasts the rebels; Milton’s God (the son) does that and more: ‘in his right hand/Grasping ten thousand Thunders, which he sent/Before him’ [Paradise Lost 6:835-7] such that ‘they astonisht all resistance lost,/All courage.’ Ten thousand times as epic! When the rebels are pushed over the celestial edge Vida completes their story with a five-word phrase: excussos Erebi domus atra recepit (line 615): Milton expands and enlarges:
Drove them before him Thunder-struck, pursu'dOne thing Milton doesn’t pick up on is the striking little detail of those angelic combatants without spears grabbing their opponents by their long hair and whirling them around. I’m assuming he didn’t work that detail into his version because it’s … well, kind of ridiculous, really. Although there is a fair bit of whirling-stuff-around in Milton’s battle too: as they face off, angels on both sides ‘Now wav'd thir fierie Swords, and in the Aire/Made horrid Circle’ [PL 6:304-05]. There is a lot of hair in Milton, and he was writing at a time when hair-length was both potently politicised (long-haired cavaliers against short-cropped ‘roundheads’) and extensive eroticised: but Paradise Lost goes down the latter rather than the former path, with some lubricious descriptions of Eve clothed only in her flowing hair and so on. [See Stephen Dobranksi's ‘Clustering and Curling Locks: The Matter of Hair in Paradise Lost’ PMLA, 125:2 (2010), 337-353]
With terrors and with furies to the bounds
And Chrystal wall of Heav'n, which op'ning wide,
Rowld inward, and a spacious Gap disclos'd
Into the wastful Deep; the monstrous sight
Strook them with horror backward, but far worse
Urg'd them behind; headlong themselves they threw
Down from the verge of Heav'n, Eternal wrauth
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit. [Paradise Lost 6:858-66]
As to the problematic, or (if we prefer) ridiculousness, of Milton's War in Heaven I've always been quite persuaded by Harry Berger's argument [in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (California 1988)]: ‘The very absurdity of the war in Heaven implies the great gap between visual symbol and spiritual referent and shows the need of the new symbolic relations developed in the second half of the poem.’ That's another way in which, frankly, Milton is simply superior to Vida as a poet.
[Next: lines 616-647]
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