After rejecting the spectacles of Parthian military might and imperial Roman luxury, the Son of God in Milton's Paradise Regained is confronted by a subtle revision of the knowledge temptation that Adam and Eve faced in Eden. Satan recommends that Jesus “Be famous then / By wisdom; as thy Empire must extend, / So let extend thy mind o’re all the world, / In knowledge, all things in it comprehend.” Satan assumes a conflict between the universal nature of the forthcoming Kingdom of God and the Son's comparatively limited and parochial Hebrew education. “All knowledge,” he tells Jesus, “is not couch't in Moses Law, / The Pentateuch or what the Prophets wrote” (4.225–26). As if to supplement what he characterizes as deficient in Hebrew learning, Satan offers the Son the sum of pagan classical learning, symbolized by the city of “Athens the eye of Greece, Mother of Arts / And Eloquence” (4.240–41). Moreover, he does so while abandoning the temporal specificity of the earlier temptations in favor of a purely asynchronous presentation. Unlike his previous offers of Parthia and Rome, which appear contemporary to the narrative action, the “kingdom” of Athens is presented as a timeless compendium of rhetorical, philosophical, and artistic pagan glory. In Satan's vision, Homer appears as a colleague to Plato, and Socrates to Alexander. Jesus rejects Satan's offer, just as he does every other in Paradise Regained, and he disparages all of classical learning as “false, or little else but dreams, / Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm” (4.291–92).

The Son's dismissive rejection of the Athens temptation (and, by implication, the tradition of classical learning in its entirety) has provoked a history of apologetic responses by anxious Miltonists who remember all too well the Nativity Ode's apocalyptic banishment of pagan deities. Taking the ethos of that poem as a guide, these critics interpret the Jesus of Paradise Regained as the voice of the poet's always agonizingly correct superego, who constantly reminds us that what we should value is not what we would value. Elizabeth Pope deems classical learning to be “the one form of worldly activity which appealed to [Milton] most,” the “last infirmity of the noble mind.”