“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649true valour uses the necessity of Warr and Dominion... to bring in Liberty against
Tyrants, Law and Civility among barbarous Nations... honours and hath recourse to
the aid of Eloquence, his freindliest and best supply.... when the esteem of Science
and liberal study waxes low in the Common-wealth, wee may presume that also there
all civil Vertue, and worthy action is grown as low to a decline: and then Eloquence... corrupts also and fades; at least resignes her office of relating to illiterat and frivo-
lous Historians. (39–40)
Milton tells a complex story of Rome in Britain, about an advanced nation that
conquered courageous and fiercely resisting savage inhabitants and brought them
civilization. The British equalled the Romans for “courage and warlike readiness”
in sudden onsets, but were inferior in weapons, strategy, and fortifications, and
were disadvantaged by fighting naked. They lacked skill in farming, wore skins of
beasts, painted their bodies with woad (sometimes decoratively), had only rudi-
mentary towns, constantly warred among themselves, permitted polyandry and in-
cest, and were led by “factious and ambitious” Druid priests who practiced divination
and human sacrifice. Rome “beate us into some civilitie; likely else to have continue’d
longer in a barbarous and savage manner of life” (61). But the Roman story is
complicated after Julius Caesar “tyrannously had made himself Emperor of the
Roman Commonwealth” (61). Then the corruption and tyranny of the magistrates
prompted various British tribes to uprisings and resistance, often provoked “by
heaviest sufferings” and hatred of servitude (77). Milton treats some of these upris-
ings as noble though unsuccessful efforts to regain liberty (Caractacus, Venusius,
Cassibelan), though he found Boadicea’s similar attempt wholly despicable. He
reports Titus’s impressive achievements in Britain – building houses, temples, and
seats of justice, and promoting education in the liberal arts and Latin eloquence –
but noted that the British people became degenerate through imitating Roman
“Vice, and voluptuous life... which the foolisher sort call’d civilitie, but was
indeed a secret Art to prepare them for bondage.”^108 He ends Book II with Honorius
releasing the Britons from Roman jurisdiction just before Rome fell, so that “by all
right” the government reverted to the Britons themselves, “to live after thir own
Laws.” Yet along with this opportunity came the decline of all those Roman ben-
efits: “Learning, Valour, Eloquence, History, Civility, and eev’n Language” (127).
Book III and the Digression may have been drafted during the frantic weeks after
the Second Civil War ended in late August, 1648, as Milton sought with some
urgency to apply the lessons of British history to his own time. At the beginning of
Book III he draws out parallels between the “confused Anarchy” following the
departure of the Romans from Britain and the situation of England in “this intereign”
after “the late civil broils:”
The late civil broils had cast us into a condition not much unlike to what the Britans
then were in, when the imperial jurisdiction departing hence left them to the sway of
thir own Councils; which times by comparing seriously with these later, and that