Immediately before Milton's God turns the course of the War in Heaven, Raphael presents the state of play for his human audience as follows: ‘war seemed a civil game / To this uproar’. This chapter is in part an extended exegesis of this pivotal clause that concatenates four concepts central to the poetics of Paradise Lost: war, civil war in particular, games, and the relation of seeming. It is a complex textual and intertextual moment. Raphael, accommodating his account of celestial events to human apprehension, evokes the ostensibly legible domain of terrestrial warfare but unmoors it rhetorically. In fact, Raphael's narration is Adam and Eve's introduction to the concept of war: war will dominate much of Michael's presentation to Adam in the final books, but it is not part of their prelapsarian experience. The intensification of destruction and horror implied by ‘war seemed a civil game / To this uproar’ challenges not only the innocent imaginations of the Edenic pair, but also the historical imagination of the poem's readers: compared to the uproar of the War in Heaven, the catastrophe of human warfare appears a polite interlude. This characteristically Miltonic tripartite comparison disorients with its play of scale, like Satan's spear (1.292-1.294) or the universe seen ‘in bigness as a star / Of smallest magnitude close by the moon’ (2.1052-2.1053). But the ‘civil game’ figure dizzies with involution as well as scale: the placement of the loaded term ‘civil’ worries the rhetorical structure, the more so for containing an allusion to the famous comparative by which Lucan announces his epic theme as bella […] plus quam civilia (‘war worse than civil’).