In Milton’s essay Of Education we learn that if only we should teach children, in addition to the usual arts and sciences, ‘the helpful experience of hunters, fowlers, fisherman, shepherds, gardners, apothecaries,’ then ‘those poets which are now counted most hard will be both facile and pleasant: Orpheus, Hesiod, Theocritus, Aratus, Nicander, Oppian, Dionysius, and in Latin, Lucretius, Manilius, and the rural part of Virgil.’
It comes as no surprise then when we find Nicander creeping up in book X of Paradise Lost. Satan has returned triumphantly to Hell and makes a self-congratulatory speech which doesn’t go over quite so well. Note, particularly, the list of snakes, which even includes a scorpion, from verses 524-529:
- So having said, awhile he stood expecting
- Their universal shout and high applause
- To fill his ear; when, contrary, he hears
- On all sides from innumerable tongues
- A dismal universal hiss, the sound
- Of public scorn. He wonder’d, but not long
- Had leisure, wond’ring at himself now more:
- His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare,
- His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining
- Each other till, supplanted, down he fell
- A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,
- Reluctant but in vain: a greater power
- Now rul’d him, punish’d in the shape he sinn’d,
- According to his doom. He would have spoke,
- But hiss for hiss return’d with forked tongue
- To forked tongue; for now were all transform’d
- Alike, to serpents all, as accessories
- To his bold riot. Dreadful was the din
- Of hissing through the hall, thick-swarming now
- With complicated monsters, head and tail:
- Scorpion and asp and amphisbaena dire,
- Cerastes horn’d, hydrus, and ellops drear,
- And dipsas (not so thick swarm’d once the soil
- Bedropp’d with blood of Gorgon, or the isle
- Ophiusa); but still greatest he, the midst,
- Now dragon grown, larger than whom the sun
- Engender’d in the Pythian vale on slime,
- Huge Python; and his power no less he seem’d
- Above the rest still to retain. They all
- Him follow’d, issuing forth to th’ open field,
- Where all yet left of that revolted rout,
- Heav’n-fall’n, in station stood or just array,
- Sublime with expectation when to see
- In triumph issuing forth their glorious Chief.
- They saw, but other sight instead–a crowd
- Of ugly serpents. Horror on them fell,
- And horrid sympathy; for what they saw
- They felt themselves now changing. Down their arms,
- Down fell both spear and shield, down they as fast;
- And the dire hiss renew’d, and the dire form
- Catch’d by contagion, like in punishment
- As in their crime. Thus was th’ applause they meant
- Turn’d to exploding hiss, triumph to shame
- Cast on themselves from their own mouths. There stood
- A grove hard by, sprung up with this their change
- (His will who reigns above) to aggravate
- Their penance, laden with fair fruit, like that
- Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve
- Us’d by the Tempter. …
Milton has clearly read Apollonius, Nicander, and Lucan.
If only more of us had been educated in his manner, we’d more easily see the allusion.