Only Once

We were playing an amiable conversation game around the TG dinner table last night when I faced the question: is there something that you have done only once in your life that you would like to do again (I quote from memory)?

At first I said:  no, sorry, nothing, I don't think that way.  Might be an age thing. Lots of things I'm glad to have done, would enjoy doing some over, hope to do new things.  But no.

Then on second thought:  well, now, for example Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew, in the San Luigi die Francesi, just off the Piazza Navona in Rome.  I'd love to go see it again. Wait, but you've done it before more than once (half a dozen times, I would guess).  So you can't say you've seen it only once.   Yes, but I did it only once for the first time, and what I'd really like is to do it again for the first time.

You can see where I'm going here.  Good as it was, it will never get any better.  Now that I think of it, I suppose there are a thousand things in my life--maybe tens of thousands, to  which I would give the same treatment.

Update:  but then, one of my co-conversationalists asked: you've been to Rome more than once?  Oh yes, I love Rome.  When you went the second time, did it seem like the first?  Actually no, it was quite different.  So even though not the first time, it was the first second time, not so?  And we wandered off happily arm and in arm into the vale of infinite regress.

Rome as Forager

Just about everything this guy writes is worth a stop, but this one is really good.

Turchin on Sallust on Luxuria

The Roman historian Sallust blamed the decline of the republic on luxuria and licentia--luxury and licentiousness. Peter Turchin thinks he had it only half right:

[L]uxury has two components, one physical--creature comforts--and the other social--conspicuous consumption. It is clear that the first aspect of luxury, personal comfort, should have no effect on collective solidarity. For example, the wealthy Romans spent even more money on beautifying their dwellings than on the banquets. They constructed private baths, complete with warm, hot, and cold pools, and lavished money on formal gardens. Why should baths and gardens be "enervating"? One could actually argue the opposite, by pointing to the health benefits of such "luxuries." Why should cultivating asparagus--a monstrous piece of gluttony, according to Pliny--soften the moral fiber of the Roman aristocracy?

If we define "luxury" as conspicuous consumption, however, the argument begins to make more sense. The main point of conspicuous consumption is to signal to others high status, power, or wealth. ... Conspicuous consumption is inherently divisive because it draws boundaries between the haves and the have-nots. It elicits envy and weakens solidarity. But it is even more important as a symptom of deeper processes--growing inequality and within-group competition for resources and power that gradually undermine group solidarity.

--Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War 293 (2006)

There's an interesting argument around here somewhere, although I'd say Turchin has rather muddled it up. He is, for starters, quite right to draw the distinction between wealth and ease per se on the one hand, as against inequality and invidious display on the other. He is probably right that invidious display--conspicuous consumption--reduces a sense of social solidarity.

But in talking about baths and gardens, he seems to have picked a poor example. For one thing, if these baths and gardens are in private homes, they are not at all the best index of "display," insofar as their very privacy is going to keep them out of the face of the have-nots. More damaging, he seems not to realize that a Roman bath was in large measure a public institution, available to a broad swath of the populace--a leveller, not an excluder.

But set aside the matter of conspicuous consumption. Social solidarity, or the decay thereof, is not the only factor in determining the success or failure of a population. For even if everyone in Rome had access to baths and gardens, stuffed dormice and pickled oysters, still there was a whole uncountable multitude on the outside looking in who weren't part of the solidarity equation at all. They just wanted the swag. The insiders, even if they are well fed and well equipped for battle, will nonetheless be reluctant to leave their life of ease.

Gilleland Reads Syme so We Don't Have To

Well actually, I did read Ronald Syme's Roman Revolution a couple of years back with profit and a somewhat qualified pleasure. Syme is shrewd and sardonic and on occasion witty. But he carpet-bombs you with detail, as if to say: hey, I really know what I am talking about.

I believe, I believe. But we are lucky to have the services of that great benefactor to humankind, Michael Gilleland, who has shelled all the black Symean walnuts and pried out the meat. I could copy them, but go read them in their natural habitat here.

Tax-Based to Land-Based

Chris Wickham identifies what he sees as a critical juncture in the transition away from the Roman Empire--the shift from what he calls a "tax based" to a "land based" system of finance:

Tax-raising states re much richer than most land-based ones, for property taxes are generally collected form very many more people than pay rent to a ruler from his public land. ... [T]ax-raising states have a fasr greater overall control over their territories, partly because of the constant presence of tax-assessors and collectors, partly because state dependants (both officials and soldiers) are salaried. Rulers can stop paying salaries, and have greater control over their personnel as a result. But if armies are based on landowning, they are harder to control. Generals may be disloyal unless they are given more land, which reduces the amount of land the ruler has; and, if they fire disloyal, they keep control of their land unless they are expelled y force, often a difficult task. Land-based states risk breaking up, in fact, for their outlying territories are hard to dominate in depth, and may secede altogether.

--Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome (2009)

Comment: Wickham isn't quite as clear as he might be here, but I suppose his point is that the Roman Empire (and other entities of that ilk) was a free-standing self-sustaining entity with, as it were, a life of its own and an army of its own, capable of extracting wealth from just about anybody. Later "land-based" entities are essentially private deals where the superior and the subordinate agree to club together for a particular spasm of pillage (however long or short) and to split the proceeds.

Off Again

Boy, we take a lot of vacations. But give us this: at our age, there is no putting off to tomorrow--at our age this is tomorrow.

Anyway, we're off to the Mediterranean again, this time to Cyprus (where we've never visited), thence to Crete and Santorini, venue of our last footloose backpack trip--many years ago. And finally, to what may be my mostest favoritist city in the whole world, Rome. We'll be back at the end of the month. Till then, a few snippets, but mostly dark.

Walker's Paradise

I suppose the only reason to create a list like this one is to start an argument, but on the whole, I'd say that this particular instance is actually pretty anodyne. Still, if the second best walk in San Francisco is the Financial District, we are on notice with a scandalous truth--that is: San Francisco, whatever its charms, is not that-all great a walker's city. Okay: some of the neighborhoods have their charm, but they tend to be isolated, a bit hard to access, and on the whole not as exciting or charming as you might guess for all the hype (and let's not talk about hills). Market Street is a slum, and if you must have a slum, there is a far more interesting slum on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley across the Bay (even without Cody's). Indeed, it's hard to think of any American city--okay, I will grant you Manhattan--that has the persistent seductive appeal of Rome (my #1) or Paris (#2) or Prague (#3) or Florence (#4)--at least if you find those moments when they are not inundated with others such as yourself trying to enjoy their walker-charms.

Nice to see Portland so justly well represented, although I never realized before that this is called "Hosford" (if it is). Years ago, one of my students (an ex-Reedie) pointed out that Portland was one of the best cities in America to be poor in. After the depredations of a generation of high-tech wealth, this insight surely isn't as true as it used to be. Still, I'd say Portland persists in conveying more in the way of scruffy, grass-roots elegance than any other city in America.

Provence Travel Note: Roman Ruins

Another France travel note: before Paris, we spent some time tromping the Roman ruins in Provence. Executive summary: on the off chance that you're looking for a place to get started on Roman ruins,I'd say this might be the place. Granted, it's not Rome and it doesn't have a Coliseum, but it's got an elegant sample of just about every type of building you might want. I give the prize to the aqueduct at Pont du Gard. You've always heard that the Romans were great builders, but you don't really believe it until you stand under these arches and recognize how they built these things to transport the water over miles and miles, all gravity powered, and enough to support great cities. I've never been anywhere near so close before, and it is a wonder to behold. Mrs. B might vote for the theater at Orange and I can't quarrel: surely the most completely preserved I've ever seen.

And that is just the head of the hit parade. You've got baths and an amphitheater at Arles; also the hint of a forum, some bits of a city wall, and more than a hint of circus. You've got another amphitheater at Nîmes. You've got a pretty well laid out community at Glanim, and a couple of upscale villas at Vaison. Several good archaeological museums, including a wonderful marine museum at Marseilles.

And the surroundings are easy to handle (at least in May; I bet it miserable in the August heat, or the winter winds). Communities are pleasant and prosperous (though I read somewhere lately that the Czech Republic now his a higher per capita income than all of France excluding Paris). Worth a visit, as Michelin would say; hey, worth a side trip.

Restaurant: Reveillon at Marseilles. Down-homey, good on codfish and duck.

Claudius? Is it You?

HBO’s Rome played to great acclaim lately on the big screen at Il Teatro Buce, so we decided we’d take a flutter on “the rest of the story”—I Claudius¸ first aired on PBS back in 1976. Mrs. B says she saw a few episodes in the first run; I had never seen it at all.

And? Well, have you ever heard the insight that historical novels date more quickly than others because when you are reaching to depict another time, you always load up on unconscious anachronisms that are more glaring than they would be when you were just trying to be yourself? Think George Eliot’s Romola—a pretty good novel, actually, once you get past the Victorian tracery that obscures her best efforts to display Renaissance Florence, but very near comic if you let the tracery get in your way. So here: Derek Jacoby survives pretty well as Claudius, the dictator with the speech defect and the limp. But the rest of the cast sounds like nothing so much as a vintage sitcom. Think The Honeymooners, think The Flintstones—heck, think he Simpsons, the sitcom’s sitcom par excellence. It’s the dialog, partly—these Romans talk back to each other, they banter, they do all the things the sitcom writers used to do to beguile the odd half hour. And the casting: Rome’s Augustus was lean, and mostly mean. In Claudius, he sounds like nobody so much as Barney Rubble, or Ralph Kramden himself (“one of these days, Livia, pow, right in the kisser!”).

Claudius has another problem, pitted against Rome: it looks cheap. No wonder: they say Rome cost $100 million. I haven’t any idea what Claudius cost, but it pretty clearly wasn’t in the same league. Virtually all the sets are indoors. When they want to do what might laughingly be described as a “crowd scene”—well, early on, there is a bit where Livia chooses to face down “the Roman mob.” The “mob” turns out to be a couple of dozen guys with their backs to the cameras, yelling and flailing while camped in between two walls about 15 feet apart, so as to create the illusion of too many people for the space. It’s a stitch. So also the “gladiator” scene in a later episode. Livia delivers a queenly lecture to a dozen or so guys with hangdown manners and swords. Then she repairs to her throne and gets on with her royal conversation, while we listen to an offstage chorus of clank, clank.

For all of this, Claudius actually turns out to be good fun. The writers obviously worked over their Suetonius and Tacitus with great care, and have done their best to tease out the naughty bits (though inevitably, more prim and restrained than we we would expect today). Strong, crude plot line; plenty of intrigue and betrayal, and a camp hoot. I just hate to think what Rome will look like to the critic of 2040.

HBO: The Failed State Network

The Wire, The Sopranos, Rome--has everybody but me noticed how the three hottest shows on HBO are about state failure? I concede they do it in different ways: on The Sopranos, aside from Tony and the gang,there is the FBI, and they might even win--though what, exactly, you win by turning the game over to a bunch of guys in polyester behind Steelcase desks probably does not bear thinking about. Rome--yeh, funny about Rome, so admired by the founders, but it turns out there never was much res publica there to begin with. I've seen less of The Wire than the other two, but I don't think it's a model your high school civics teacher would enjoy. In all three we seem to lack what Ed Banfield (I think) called "the luxury of politics." This is the sort of stuff we were supposed to have put behind us a long time ago, not so?

Plutarch on Kindness

As I get older, I tend to admire brilliance less and kindness more. This may be just selfishness: I am less and less likely to be brilliant (if I ever was likely to be) and I probably find (or expect to find) myself more in need of kindness.

One person who shared a taste for kindness was Plutarch, the essayist and biographer, so beloved of Shakespeare for his unerring skill at identifying a good story. Plutarch wrote in the corrupt post-Augustan period of the Roman Empire. There’s a certain “twilight” quality much of his work work. It’s as if he can look back on a long life in an aging civilization, and identify so many things he might wish could have gone differently.

You see a remarkable instance of Plutarch’s instinct in his discussion of Cato the Elder. Cato was the archetypical “old republican”—hard-working, thrifty, honest and just. Plutarch thought Cato a good man in so many ways, but he does notice one odd or unexpected quirk. When Cato’s slaves “became too old to work,” Plutarch says, “he felt it his duty to sell them rather than feed so many useless mouths.” Plutarch sees fit to pause and reflect on the point:

For my own part I regard his conduct towards his slaves in treating them like beasts of burden, exploiting them to the limits of their strength, and then, when they were old, driving them off and selling them, as the mark of a thoroughly ungenerous nature, which cannot recognize any bond between man and man but that of necessity. And yet we see that kindness possesses a far wider sphere of action than justice, for it is in the nature of things that law and justice are confined to our dealings with our fellow men, whereas kindness and charity, which often flow from a gentle nature like water form an abundant spring, may be extended even to dumb animals. A kindly man will take good care of his horses even when they are worn out in his service, and will look after his dogs not only when they are puppies, but when they need special treatment.

For my part, I would not sell even my draught ox simply because of his age, far less turn out an old man from the home and the way of life to which he has grown accustomed for the sake of a few paltry coins, especially since he would be of no more use to the buyer than he was to the seller.

—Plutarch, “Cato the Elder” in Makers of Rome 119-151,
125-6 (Penguin Paperback ed. 1965)

I suppose it scarcely needs mention it seems never to occur to Plutarch to question slavery per se, and that he tops off his argument from principle with a fairly straightforward argument from practice (who would buy these guys anyway?). He concludes by saying that whether this attitude counts as “greatness or pettiness of spirit is a question which the reader must decide for himself.” Maybe, but I’d say it’s pretty clear that Plutarch has made his own decision.

Fn.: Spotted on the exercycle this morning: Karen Armstrong, speaking of Confucious, remarks on "his kindness and brilliance--an unusual combination." See Karen Armstrong, The Great Trnsformation 241 (Anchor Paperback ed. 2007).

Who Is It?

Who is it?

He was one of those men whom it is an honour to meet, in whom Nature seems to have achieved a masterpiece, not so rare as might be supposed, but who rise to eminence but rarely, since neither men nor circumstances conspire to make their value felt. Their strength of character, firm and lofty convictions, fine generosity and nobility of spirit shine out all the more resplendent because those connected with their history, beginning with their illustrious foe, display a mediocre, shriveled spirit, with a selfish outlook.

No, he’s not a candidate this year, and no, he is not alive. Mrs. Buce guessed “Aaron Burr?” which was either daringly imaginative or a crude attempt at mockery. No, the correct answer is (drum roll) Vercingetorix, chieftain of the Arveni who led the Gauls in their unsuccessful war against Julius Caesar. It’s quoted from A History of Gaul (p. 102, Barnes & Noble ed. 1993), authored by on Fr. Funck-Brentano, unknown to me but if you ask my friend Gail to recommend a history of Gaul, this is what you will get (I assume he is this guy). Vercingetorix is also, I assume, the progenitor of all those “ix” names in that greatest of all story comics, Asterix the Gaul. (Obelix, Getafix, Doubleosix, etc. etc. etc.). He surfaces in two episodes of HBO's Rome, played by Giovanni Calcagno.

This is as good a time as any to recall the only song I know about Caesar’s Gallic Wars. It has been rattling around in my head for a little more than 50 years now. I have it on good authority (but don’t ask me to explain) that this was written for the class musical show at Hunter College High School in 1955, and if the author wants to surface and claim credit, I will gladly accord recognition. It’s to the tune of “Mountain Greenery":

Caesar fought in Gallia,
Heduans et alia
Thought that he was Edward R. Murrow.

Could be Caesar’s rhetoric
Stumped poor Vercingetorix,
That’s what gave my forehead this furrow.

He spent his life
In civil strife
And got the knife
Outside the Se-nate.

While Caesar held his battle line,
Cicero fought Catiline—
Bless our mountain greenery, Rome!

That’s it. Resume normal idling.

Ronald Syme, and HBO's Rome

Having caught a bit of HBO’s Rome (on DVD), I hauled out my old copy of The Roman Revolution by Sir Ronald Syme. First published in 1939, it’s apparently still in print, which is no small achievement for an academic history of any density, not to say one whose footnotes are mostly in Latin. Even aside from the footnotes, it’s not an easy read—not, at any rate for a reader unblessed by a classical education: Syme pretty much presumes you know the outlines of the story already, and he is not going to insult your intelligence by retailing the supermarket-tabloid stuff. Also, perhaps inevitably for an academic history of this date, Syme taken a fair amount of abuse from later scholarship—the canonical response is Erich Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (1974).

Yet that is the odd thing about some historical writing: people still read Tacitus and Gibbon on Rome, without entertaining any illusion that they speak the last word on their subject. Indeed, if they capture any zeitgeist, it is that of their own time, not of their subject’s.

I don’t suppose Syme is a Tacitus (or even a Gibbon) but I think he deserves a place at the table. His style is compact, aphoristic—Tacitean. And his general pessimism about the fortunes of free institutions is bound to find an audience in the current market.

Executive summary of Syme: the Roman Republic was corrupt and in decay; a revolution was inevitable and in a sense, even necessary. Executive summary of Gruen: not so, the Republic was durable, and could have endured. It’s a cop-out to say that there is “probably truth on both sides,” but history is a complex business, so the chances are that there is truth on both sides—or at least enough truth in Syme to help sustain his appeal. Some fragments:

On “the assassins”—Brutus, Cassius and company:

They stood, not merely for the traditions and institutions of the Free State, but very precisely for the dignity and the interests of their own order. Liberty and the laws are high-sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interest.

—Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution 59 (Oxford U Paperback 1960)

On the young Octavian, later Augustus:

Exuberant ambition mated with political maturity is not enough to explain the ascension of Octvianus A sceptic about all else, Caesar the Dictator had faith in hs own star. The fortune of Caesar survived his fall. On no rational forecast of events would his adopted son have succeeded in playing off the Republican cause against the Caesarian leaders, survived the War of Perusia and lived to prevail over Antonius in the end.

—Id,., 114

On the legend of Actium, as a public relations triumph:

Of the ability of Cleopatra there is no doubt: her importance in history, apart from literature, is another matter. … Created belief turned the scale of of history. The policy and ambitions of Antonius or of Cleopatra were not the true cause of the War of Actium; they were a pretext in the strife for power, the magnificent lie upon which was built the supremacy of Caesar’s heir and the resurgent nation of Italy. Yet, for all that, the contest soon assumed the august and solemn form of a war of ideas and a war between East and West. Antonius and Cleopatra seem merely pawns in the game of destiny. The weapon forged to destroy Antonius changed the shape of the whole world.

—Id,., 274-5

A footnote: HBO’s Rome in the end tracks Syme rather well. Syme doesn’t give you the horndoggery or the torture porn, but for the general political structure, somebody on the writing team must have had a copy of Syme near at hand.

"Nothing Sacred" Redux

I guess I’m in debunking mode this week. Anyway, factoid: topic is the seven hills of Rome. Apparently the Romans themselves did not know which seven they were; there were at least eight contenders.

Source: Susanna Braund, in her Ipod lectures on Virgil’s Aeneid, findable on the Stanford page at Ipod U (I guess I join the general amusement that this stuff pops up on your gadget as a "song").

Back in Louisville, there was a radio station that used to claim to be the third largest in the city. I think there were seven contenders for second.

A Find: Evelyn Waugh's Helena

I picked up my copy of Evelyn Waugh's Helena -- I don't know where, probably in Palookaville's premier used bookshop. I guess I thought it was a leftover, an afterthought. I assumed it was out of print. Silly me. First off, it is in print (link). Second, apparently it was Waugh's own favorite.

I guess I can understand why: Waugh was a Catholic of the take-no-prisoners variety. Helena here is the mother of Constantine, she of the True Cross. Waugh here working hard at the top of his game and he must have assumed he had achieved a triumph of apologetics.

Thing is though, he is far too good a novelist to let mere apologetics get in the way. What he has produced is a swift, entertaining--and in its own way, deeply perceptive--little jeu d'esprit.

As a character, Helena of Helena is more or less cardboard. But no matter, Waugh's strength lies elsewhere. He's a satirist, of course, and more generally, a great comic. But he is best understood as a political novelist: Black Mischief ranks as one of the great political novels of all time; Officers and Gentlemen is best read in the same vein, and Scoop is not far behind. The great virtue of Helena is the way it captures the temper of its time--the great tectonic shift from the ancient world to the medieval.

Waugh is second of all a master of the elegaic---think Brideshead Revisited--and his knack for here succeeds in completing the historical framework. Helena does, indeed, get to Jerusalem and she does (or does not) find the true cross. But she's past 80 in the novel (as indeed, apparently she was in real life). It's a few pages at the end, and it's about the only place where Waugh really lays on the Christianity with a trowel. In terms of structure, they provide a fit conclusion, but the truth is that for sheer enjoyment, you'd be almost as well off if somebody tore those last pages off and threw them away.

Helena is at her best as a hot-blooded young tomboy on the Britannic frontier, as an enduring wife and a resourceful castoff in the provinces; and late in life, as a baffled matriarch in the snakes and ladders of political Rome. Here as a taste is Waugh's Helena in mid-career, left behind in Dalmatia while her husband pursues a life of action:

For thirteen years Helena lived alone. Her hair lost its fierce colour and, scorning dyes, she wore it always wound in a silk shawl. She thickened in limb and body, held herself firmer, moved more resolutely, spoke with authority and decision, took careful count of her possessions, gave orders and saw them obeyed. She had moved, on Constantius's elevation,from Government House to his villa, purchased and enclosed a large estate and made it thrive. She knew every man and beast on the place and the yield of each plantation; her wine commanded a high price in the market at Salona. Westward in the rough sea-face of the sheltering islands the great waves struck and splattered; eastward, in winter, the high Dinaric forests were torn by blizzards which the people on the plain never heard; nor saw save as a smudge of indigo on the moutain crests and in the wreckage which drifted on the tideless channel and lay there, barely stirring, for the boys to pick. Here among oleander and myrtle, lizard and cicada, Helena gently laid down the load of her womanhood. Here, it seemed, far from home, she would in full time die.

Evelyn Waugh, Helena 70 (Penguin Books ed. 1963)

Now, if only could find my copy of Jacob Burkhardt's Age of Constantine the Great.

Postscript: Haven't found Burkhardt, but I did find my copy of Waugh's letters. I checked to see if he wrote much about Helena. He wrote a bit, of which this from a letter dated 15 January 1946, to Penelope Benjamin (wife of John) is perhaps the most interesting:

I describe her as hunting in the morning after her wedding night feeling the saddle as comforting her wounded maidenhead. Is that O.K.?

Penelope must have approved; it's in the book.

"The Great Pan is Dead"

Epitherses ... said that designing a voyage to Italy, he embarked himself on a vessel well laden both with goods and passengers. About the evening the vessel was becalmed about the Isles Echinades, whereupon their ship drove with the tide till it was carried near the Isles of Paxi; when immediately a voice was heard by most of the passengers (who were then awake, and taking a cup after supper) calling unto one Thamus, and that with so loud a voice as made all the company amazed; which Thamus was a mariner of Egypt, whose name was scarcely known in the ship. He returned no answer to the first calls; but at the third he replied, Here! here! I am the man. Then the voice said aloud to him, When you are arrived at Palodes, take care to make it known that the God Pan is dead. Epitherses told us, this voice did much astonish all that heard it, and caused much arguing whether this voice was to be obeyed or slighted. Thamus, for his part, was resolved, if the wind permitted, to sail by the place without saying a word; but if the wind ceased and there ensued a calm, to speak and cry out as loud as he was able what he was enjoined. Being come to Palodes, there was no wind stirring, and the sea was as smooth as glass. Whereupon Thamus standing on the deck, with his face towards the land, uttered with a loud voice his message, saying, The great Pan is dead. He had no sooner said this, but they heard a dreadful noise, not only of one, but of several, who, to their thinking, groaned and lamented with a kind of astonishment. And there being many persons in the ship, an account of this was soon spread over Rome, which made Tiberius the Emperor send for Thamus; and he seemed to give such heed to what he told him, that he earnestly enquired who this Pan was; and the learned men about him gave in their judgments, that it was the son of Mercury by Penelope.

--Plutarch, Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers
(R. Midgley, trans., 1870,
reprinted in R. Stoneman, A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece 25-6 (Penguin , 1984)

I have been trying to find out more about the great Pan and his story. So far, the best I can do is a the poem, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity by John Milton (1629). Stanza XIX reads:

The Oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.

Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.

No nightly trance, or breathed spell,
Inspires the pale-ey'd Priest from the prophetic cell.

In his complete Milton, Merritt Y. Hughes says "Many details of the flight of the pagan gods seemed to A. S.Cook to come from the Apotheosis of Prudentius or the Parthenicae (III, i) of Mantuan." See M. Hughes, John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose 48 (1957). Are there other references?