Milton was a committed Puritan who served in Oliver Cromwell’s government, going blind in his forties and dictating Paradise Lost (1667) to his daughters. The poem retells the story of Satan’s rebellion, Adam and Eve’s temptation, and the loss of Eden, with the stated purpose of justifying “the ways of God to men” — making it explicitly a theodicy in epic form. What Milton did not entirely control was his Satan: proud, eloquent, and magnificently self-deceiving, the character proved so compelling that Blake and Shelley concluded Milton was secretly on Satan’s side. Paradise Lost is simultaneously theodicy, epic, and meditation on free will — and the problem of evil runs through every book of it.