"A Goddess armed
Out of thy head I sprung! Amazement seized
All the' Host of Heav'n. Back they recoiled afraid
At first and called me Sin, and for a sign
Portentous held me." (2.757-61)

After a stint in prison for political reasons, Milton penned this epic. Wait, we guess he dictated it—dude was blind at the time. Anyway, Paradise Lost is an allegory deeply concerned with sin and free will.

In it, Sin-personified talks about how she was born from Satan's head. Heavy. Fascinating. Epic. All you could want and more.

Milton casts Sin as a character—as a goddess, in fact—in this epic. But she is born from Satan. That little tidbit of personal history is significant because it plays with the various concerns religious folk had about the nature of sin and its origins back in the Renaissance.

During that era, people were especially concerned with Original Sin. You know, how Adam and Eve got kicked out of Eden because they ate the forbidden fruit. And all that jazz. So the question Paradise Lost raises is: if Sin is born of Satan, did Adam and Eve ever even have a chance to "do the right thing"?

Milton's pulling out the big guns here. He enlists both personification and allusion to bring his epic themes to the fore. See, Sin's birth from Satan's brain is borrowed directly from Greek myth; Athena, too, sprung from Zeus's head.

Here's the cool and complicated bit about this allusion: Athena is the goddess of wisdom, and wisdom generally keeps you out of mischief. Like sin. So what's Milton getting at here?

We think that the allusion to Greek myth functions to both supplant Mr. Milton's mythological predecessors—to set him apart as an even more masterful writer—and to emulate them. Dude had some serious literary daddy issues. Zeus and Cronus-style.