Paradise Lost as heroic poetry. There is an attempt to characterize Paradise Lost as a heroic poem. The rules of heroic poetry, as established by Pre Ren Le Bossu, state that an epic poem should have only one action, action that is the plot, motivations and general movement of the poem. The action should be a whole action, with a beginning, a middle and an end; and it should be a great action, in the sense that it should have great meaning. Paradise Lost can be compared to the Iliad and the Aeneid, both widely accepted as the two great heroic epics. Samuel Johnson takes issue with many of Paradise Lost's weaknesses. The main flaw, in his opinion, is that the reader will not be given any information about Hell, Heaven, or the basic plot of the poem, as Johnson says, "...what we knew before, we cannot learn; what It is not unexpected, it cannot be surprising." Johnson assumes that the reader of Paradise Lost will be a devout Christian, but certainly the poem can be enjoyed by non-Christians and those who are devout in their faith. For the modern reader, Paradise Lost refreshes the biblical stories and makes them new. Paradise Lost does not suffer much from this flaw, since there is a minority of devout Christians in the world today. Johnson's other flaw is that the characters are unworldly and cannot be connected to the reader. He feels that readers will not be able to identify with Adam, Eve, and the supernatural setting of the poem. This can only be seen as a minor flaw, if not a flaw at all, since many stories take place in remote and imaginative settings. The great mythologies of Greece and China are so far from the "real" world that they are more incredible than Paradise Lost, due to their displacement in time and space. Furthermore, a Christian reader will find Paradise Lost to be based on truth and not fiction, and therefore understandable. The 20th century reader has become accustomed to science fiction mythologies such as Star Trek and Star Wars, which are perhaps more distant and unfathomable than Paradise Lost. Both of these fantasies have characters that are God-like and so alien to our way of thinking that they cannot be explained, but simply accepted. Stories are about how human characters deal with their situations and are accessible because morality is always based on human models. The reader of Paradise Lost can identify with its main characters because they are "related" to us in human terms. An exception may be made to the character of God, but he is no more unfathomable than many characters in modern or ancient mythology. The reader can simply accept the rules of the story and suspend disbelief. Also, Paradise Lost is an epic that isn't so much about God as it is about Satan, Eve, and Adam, so if there's any problem with God's character, it's a minor flaw at worst.