On April 19, 2024, mournful Greece will commemorate the bicentennial of the death of her dazzling adopted son, George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824), whose personal involvement in the Greek War of Independence (1821-1829) turned European attention to the plight of Greece under Ottoman Turkish rule and resulted in the establishment of an independent Greek state for the first time since the Turkish conquest of 1453. Lord Byron died at the age of 36 of malaria complications in Missolonghi, in the land whose captive beauty he mourned in Canto II of his immensely popular “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (1812-1818), which made the author a European celebrity overnight. Byron’s fame extended worldwide in the 19th century, with several cities in the US named after him, including in Iowa and Illinois.
Byron’s literary alter ego, Childe Harold, sets forth on a secular pilgrimage Byron himself undertook in 1809 at the time of Napoleonic wars. In Canto I, the hero travels through the southern periphery of Europe, Portugal, and Spain, and laments the fate of Spain fighting for its independence from Napoleon at the height of the Peninsula War. In Canto II, Byron heads to Greece and writes of his first encounter with the land of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Pheidias. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Byron was well versed in Greek literature and philosophy, and it pained him to see this famed land languishing under Ottoman Turkish occupation. In Canto III of his massive 16,000-line epic poem “Don Juan” (1819-1824), Byron laments Greece’s lost glory:
“The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sang,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phœbus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.”
After visiting Athens, Byron became a champion of the cause of the Elgin Marbles which remains unresolved today, with Greek and British prime ministers trading harsh words over their fate earlier this year. Removed from Athens by Lord Elgin between 1801 and 1812, half of the surviving Parthenon Marbles remain in the British Museum, a move Byron savaged in his 1811 poem “The Curse of Minerva.”
Last summer, I retraced Byron’s 1809 Greek and Albanian travels and visited the old Turkish fortress in Janina, which is today in northern Greece. Here Byron met Ali Pasha, the ruler of greater Albania, who invited the young poet to his palace in Tepelene, now in central Albania. I explored the ruins of this Albanian fortress as well and stood on the spot where Byron started composing “Childe Harold” − the edge of a cliff over a swift mountain steam rushing towards the horizon in the far distance. Sublime does not begin to describe the location that birthed the Byronic character, forever associated with his creator.
The alienated, cynical, brooding, and dejected hero he created and which to this day bears his name, Byronic, inspired countless literary characters from Rochester (“Jane Eyre”) and Heathcliff (“Wuthering Heights”) to Julien Sorel (“The Red and the Black”) and Edmond Dantès (“The Count of Monte Cristo”). In Alexander Pushkin’s 1825-1832 novel in verse “Eugene Onegin,” the main character, who is described as a “Moscovite in Harold's cloak,” is an avid reader of “Childe Harold” and tries to emulate the Byronic ideal in every possible way, to the bewilderment of his friends and foes. Needless to say, Pushkin wrote the novel under the watchful gaze of a Byron portrait above his desk - and a statue of Napoleon on the mantelpiece - the two quintessential sources of poetic inspiration of the 19th century!
Emerging out of the initial thrill of the French Revolution of 1789 and the eventual disillusionment with the direction of the revolutionary project and the meteoric rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Byronic hero captured the Zeitgeist of the age and spoke to the alienation of an entire generation of European young men who became weary of unhindered idealism which invariably devolved into fratricidal slaughter. Anguished and cynical, the Byronic hero resurfaced in the 20th century in the characters portrayed by actors such as Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Heath Ledger, and still haunts the cinematic universes of Star Wars, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Twilight, and, of course, Batman.
“Childe Harold” catapulted Byron to international fame - and many shorter poetic works (The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair) were created at the peak of his literary stardom. As a hereditary member of the House of Lords, Byron delivered two notable speeches in Parliament, but his scandalous bisexual escapades did raise a few eyebrows in England - and he left for continental Europe once again in 1816 - never to return.
After visiting the battlefield of Waterloo (more in my May column), Byron traveled along the Rhine to Switzerland − where he hosted Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley - at the time when Mary was writing yet another masterpiece of the Romantic age, “Frankenstein.” Byron spent several years in Italy, whose fate he glorified and lamented in Canto IV of “Childe Harold.” And in 1823 he embarked from Genoa on his second and final trip to Greece. He offered the Greek independence cause financial assistance and trained troops who were fighting for their homeland in the aftermath of the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in 1821 on March 25 − still celebrated today as Greek Independence Day.
In 1824 Byron wrote: “I gave [Greece] my time, my health, my property, and now I give my life. What could I do more?”
After Byron’s death, the fate of ravished Greece was captured in all its agony by Eugène Delacroix in his 1826 painting “Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi” and in his “Faust,” Johann von Goethe dedicated to Byron the tragic character of Euphorion, a youth who, like Icarus, flew too close to the sun and crashed to his death. Byron’s death stunned Europe; England, France and Russia, enemies from the Napoleonic wars, united their efforts in support of Greek independence - which was finally recognized in July of 1832 at the Treaty of Constantinople. Greece was the first Ottoman Empire subject to receive full independence and international recognition.
A poem from Byron
On Jan. 22, 1824, three months before his death, Byron wrote a poem that included the following lines:
“Awake (not Greece—she is awake!)
Awake, my Spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake
And then strike home!
...
Seek out—less often sought than found—
A Soldier's Grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy Ground,
And take thy rest.”
RIP, Greece’s Euphorion, the inimitable champion of freedom, Lord Byron…
Anna Barker received her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature in 2002 with a dissertation in translation studies. At the University of Iowa she has taught courses in the English Department, in Comparative Literature, in Russian Literature, and in the Honours Programme.
This article was first published in the Iowa City Press Citizen, on 05 April 2024.
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