 This loyalty to the Greco-Roman tradition came into conflict with some new ideas in the mid-seventeenth century during the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. The quarrel had several phases that focused on different problems and it spanned approximately seven decades. The earliest phase began in the 1650s when a handful of authors attempted to renew the genre of epic poetry, since everyone acknowledged that the French had never created their own equivalent to the Aeneid, as the Italians had done (Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, 1581) and as the English would soon do (Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1667). To name just two examples, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin and Jean Chapelain wrote poems following epic conventions but with Christian subjects: the conversion of the first French king Clovis and the story of Joan of Arc, respectively. These poems were publicly mocked by partisans of the Ancient camp, most notably by Nicolas Boileau, a poet with powerful support at court. Whether these Christian epics failed because of their literary qualities or because Boileau’s satires were so successful in swaying public opinion, they have now been largely forgotten.