Milton, Boccaccio, and Demogorgon

Abstract

For years scholars have realized that Demogorgon owes his existence to a misreading of demiurgus in a commentary on Statius’ Thebaid and that Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods was the most important text for establishing Demogorgon as the ancestor of the gods for the Renaissance. But the extent of scepticism about Demogorgon in Milton’s day is not widely known. In an early example of the polemical imitation that characterizes much of his mature poetry, Milton indicates his own scepticism in Prolusion I by extensively correcting Boccaccio’s account of Demogorgon and his progeny. Unlike his frighteningly powerful namesake in Boiardo, Ariosto, and Spenser, the Demogorgon of Paradise Lost is simply one member of the court of Chaos. The multivalent periphrasis—‘the dreaded name $|$ Of Demogorgon’—suggests that Boccaccio’s ancestor of the gods is nothing more than a name.