Two-Handed Engine

Among the cruxes of Milton’s Lycidas is the image of the “two-handed” engine that the apostle Peter threatens against the false shepherds of the seventeenth-century church.  Milton writes,

“Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw

Daily devours apace, and nothing sed,

But that two-handed engine at the door,

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.”

In a 1947 article, E. S. de Beer thinks he figured it out, or figured it out as well as anyone could:

“The weapon is plainly directed against the bad shepherds.  The most important passage in the Bible concerned with the smiting of shepherds is that in which Christ repeats Zechariah’s prophecy: ‘For it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad’ (S. Matthew, xxvI. 31; also in S. Mark, xIV. 27). Here the weapon is not stated, but Zechariah is explicit: ‘Awake, O sword, against my shepherd . . . smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered’ (XIII. 7). Here it is the Lord’s shepherd who is to be smitten, but Zechariah also gives the sword as the weapon which is to punish the bad shepherd: ’Woe to the idol shepherd that leaveth the flock! the sword shall be upon his arm and upon his right eye: his arm shall be clean dried up, and his right eye shall be utterly darkened’ (xi. I7; Sir Charles Firth refers to this verse in a note to his edition of Johnson’s Life of Milton, 1921, p. 131). I have not found any seventeenth-century commentary or work on Jewish antiquities that gives a description of the Jewish sword, or any representation of it in the art of this period; but until it is definitely disproved the sword has a strong claim to be the particular weapon to which Milton refers.”