 The first successful humanist attempt to do so, these poems set a precedent for epic treatments of religious subjects as diverse as Jacopo Sannazaro's "De partu virginis" and John Milton's "Paradise Lost".It is on the basis of Mantuan’s hagiographic epics that Desiderius Erasmus made his pronouncement that as a “Christian Virgil" the Italian poet would eventually be seen as a greater writer than Virgil.Mantuan’s greatest success and most influential work was his "Adulescentia".