Comus personifies indulgent celebration. In poetry, he symbolises excess and temptation, often contrasted with virtue and restraint.

Comus represents the spirit of revelry, festivity, and nocturnal merrymaking in later Greek tradition, though his appearance in classical sources remains limited. He gained greater prominence in Hellenistic and Roman periods, personifying the joyous disorder of feasts and celebrations. Milton's masque "Comus" significantly developed and moralized this figure, transforming him into a seducer who embodies sensual temptation opposing virtuous restraint. For students tracing mythological figures through literary history, Comus exemplifies how minor classical personifications could be elaborated by later poets to serve new moral and artistic purposes. The Greek tradition of personifying abstract concepts (deimos for terror, eros for desire, etc.) allowed poets to give concrete form to human experiences and moral challenges. References to Comus typically invoke festivity, celebration, temptation through pleasure, or the transgressive aspects of revelry. Understanding how personification functioned in Greek thought helps students recognize how abstract concepts could be treated as agents with personalities and genealogies, blurring lines between metaphor and mythology.