At the climax of his speech he asks a rhetorical question:

What was that snaky-headed Gorgon shield
That wise Minerva wore, unconquered virgin,
Wherewith she freezed her foes to cóngealed stone?
But rigid looks of chaste austerity,
And noble grace that dashed brute violence
With sudden adoration, and blank awe. (447–52)

Merritt Hughes and John Carey both cite Natali Conti’s Mythologiae IV v as the source for this allegorical interpretation of Minerva’s shield. According to Conti, Minerva ‘wore the Gorgon’s head on her breast, because no one can turn his eyes against the light of the sun or against wisdom and remain unharmed’. One can see why editors would cite this reassuring analogue – even though ‘wisdom’ is something different from ‘chaste austerity’. But the Elder Brother’s rhetorical question invites more than one answer. The Elder Brother never names Medusa, but her story is immediately relevant both to Minerva’s shield and to the debate between the two brothers. In Metamorphoses iv 790–803 Ovid relates that Medusa was a lovely maiden with beautiful hair until Neptune raped her in Minerva’s temple. Outraged at the sacrilege, Minerva transformed Medusa into a Gorgon. The Elder Brother could hardly have chosen a less propitious mythical analogue. In the same breath that he mentions Medusa’s shield, the Elder Brother mentions Diana’s bow. He assumes that both weapons guarantee the inviolability of chaste persons, but a seventeenth-century reader might recall that in Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae ii 204–8 the combined forces of Minerva’s shield and Diana’s bow failed to deter Pluto from ravishing Proserpine.

These analogues are of interest because they open the possibility that Milton might not have shared the Elder Brother’s idealistic but naive views (views that are forgivable, even likeable, in an eleven-year-old boy, but alarming in a twenty-five-year-old man). Even if we prefer to see them as a subtext that infiltrates A Masque in Milton’s despite, the analogues from Ovid and Claudian are still worth an editor’s attention. They open possibilities, and invite critical questions, that are pre-empted if an editor hedges Milton’s text with safe analogues drawn from such pedestrian sources as Conti.

Even when the traditional analogues are far from dull, they can present a one-sided perspective. Satan utters the following lines in a soliloquy when he first sees Adam and Eve:

                          Hell shall unfold,
To entertain you two, her widest gates,
And send forth all her kings; there will be room,
Not like these narrow limits, to receive
Your numerous offspring.        (iv 381–5)

Most critics assume that Satan in these lines is being cruelly ironic. Editors usually (and quite rightly) note the suggestive echo of Isaiah’s prophecy of the fall of Babylon:

Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. (Isa. 14–9)

This analogue does make Satan sound malevolent, but ironic statements (as William Empson always maintained) have no point unless they are true, to some degree, in both senses. Empson notoriously believed that Satan was sincere in offering Adam and Eve high honour in Hell.4 Empson points out that the devils are able to live ‘comfortably’ in Hell, so Satan might not know that Hell will be a place of excruciating torture for human beings. Empson concludes that the irony in Satan’s lines ‘belongs only to the God who made Hell’ (68).

Miltonists usually dismiss Empson’s reading, but his intuition draws some support from a second possible allusion – one that editors have not noted. Satan echoes Isaiah, but he also echoes Pluto in Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae. As Pluto carries Proserpine off in his chariot, he tries to console her by describing the honours that await her in Hades. He tells her not to miss the earth, for Hades is roomy (immensum), and even has its own sun and stars. This is close to Satan’s contrast between earth’s ‘narrow limits’ and Hell’s ‘room’. Pluto concludes: ‘sub tua purpurei venient vestigia reges’, ‘To thy feet shall come purple-robed kings’ (ii 300). The resemblance between this line and ‘send forth all her kings’ is just about as close as that between Milton and Isaiah. Both analogues are appropriate to the moment, but they call forth different responses. The biblical echo makes Satan seem cruel; the classical one complicates the feeling because it suggests that Satan is capable of finer feelings even when he knowingly commits a wrong.

The Claudian analogue is not far-fetched. Only one hundred lines earlier Milton had likened Paradise to

                         that fair field
Of Enna, where Prosérpine gath’ring flow’rs
Herself a fairer flow’r by gloomy Dis
Was gathered.                           (iv 268–71)

After this beautiful and memorable simile, it takes only a nudge to make us see Satan as Pluto (Dis), and Eve as Proserpine. Empson pushes Satan’s soliloquy too far in the direction of generosity, but there is real insight in his intuition. Certainly, we cheapen the poem if we write Satan’s speech off as mere ‘sarcasm’.

From the foregoing examples it should be clear that the noting of analogues is a difficult and delicate task.