Paradise Lost-Satan

After reading the first five-hundred lines of Paradise Lost Book 9, I started thinking of the mental state Milton must have been in to write this depressing work. I think it says a lot about the time period that Milton would pick Satan as a type of epic hero for his work. After reading Molly's post about Satan as another villain, I couldn't agree more. The descriptions of him wanting to cause misery and suffering for others is obviously a villainous trait but the disturbing part, to me, was the amount of time and detail Milton put into describing Satan. This type of familiarity with such evil could be representative of the time period in that the people (Milton included) feel so deprived and depressed that they can almost sympathize with Satan himself.