Awake (not Byron—he is awake!)
Rethinking my instinctual cynicism about Lord Byron's Greek exploits.
Rachel and I went to Athens earlier this year, and we soon figured out that our visit came around the time of the national day of celebration for the Greek war of independence. Across the city, statues of and monuments to the heroes of the revolution were covered in blue-and-white sashes or wreaths or ribbons.
Thanks to the salience created by these recently-placed markers, we ended up doing a little bit of statue-hunting, looking for public monuments to Greek independence.
When we ended up in the National Gardens, very close to all the touristy city-centre stuff, we noticed a few busts of philhellenes: non-Greeks who contributed in some way (typically financially) to the revolution, for basically romantic reasons.1 These philhellene statues all looked essentially the same. You saw plain-looking busts, slightly smaller than life-size, sat on a plinth with some biographical information; imagine something like ‘John Smith, 1770–1840, electrician and philhellene’ (but in Greek, obviously).
In my statue-hunting mood, I wondered aloud whether there was a bust of the philhellene I knew the most about, Lord Byron. A quick google search sent us off to the southwest corner of the park, hopping over fences to get around some roadworks. There’s something neat about little moments of recognition, and I thought it would be cool to see a little marble head with ‘George Gordon Byron, 1788–1824, poet and philhellene’.
That was not what we saw.
We turned past the last of the roadworks and saw, set only a few feet away from an immense equestrian statue of Alexander the Great, a statue around the same size. A larger-than-life Romantic poet stands beside a nude personification of the nation, who crowns him with laurels. There are no dates, no description of who the man was, because it is assumed that of course you know who he was. The text beneath the statue simply reads ‘i Ellas ton Vyrona’: ‘Byron’s Greece’.
Before I went to Athens, I had a set of assumptions and prejudices about Byron and his time in Greece that are (I think) basically standard among Anglophones. ‘Did you know that Lord Byron the poet is a national hero in Greece?’ was one of those ‘fun facts about historical figures!’ I picked up when I was pretty young, and by the time I was in my late teens I had at least a little context to make sense of that fact. The story, as I understood it, was that the Romantic poet had picked up romantic notions about the glory of ancient Greece, and headed—sans military experience—to fight in the Greek war of independence, whereupon he died in short order from fever.
There was something faintly ridiculous in the whole tale. Partly, it was the inherent ridiculousness of anyone heading off to a foreign war on the basis of half-formed notions about the ancient history of the place, only to die of an illness. And partly, it was a sense that it was doubly ridiculous for Byron in particular to be positioned as a national hero or principled freedom fighter.
If the man on the Clapham omnibus knows anything about Byron (beyond ‘he was a poet’ and ‘he was a lord’), it’ll be the overused description of him by Caroline Lamb: ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. The story of the man’s life is salacious, shocking, sexualised. And his life and his literature are basically interchangeable: his correspondence is almost as important to his literary legacy as his poetry, and his poetry is all at least semi-autobiographical. At least in an Anglophone context, to be interested in Byron is to be interested in gossip.2
A member of the British landed gentry taking a grand tour around Europe, leaving a string of broken-off affairs and illegitimate kids in his wake, is a figure better cut out for crude jokes than national pride. And indeed, ‘Byron’s a punchline in Britain’, as it was excellently put in the headline of a recent piece by A. E. Stallings. There is something absurd (it had seemed to me) about such a man playing at national hero status.
What struck me instantly, looking at this statue in Athens—what took me aback, because I had not even considered the possibility that it might be true—was that Byron was not merely playing at it.
I didn’t—I really should have, but I didn’t—end up chatting to any locals about Byron, so I don’t know what the average Athenian thinks of the man’s legacy (never mind Greeks outside of Athens).3 But even if the statue merely stood for the views of ‘official Greece’, it said enough. Placed in the national gardens, within walking distance of both the Acropolis and the modern Greek Parliament, and beside a grand image of the greatest Greek ruler, Byron’s statue instantly conveyed one message: just as Hellenistic Greece was Alexander’s Greece, so too modern Greece is Byron’s Greece.4 This specific claim is (of course) a huge exaggeration; but more broadly, Byron-as–central national hero is the official narrative told in and by the Athenian public sphere.5 Noticing this was enough to upend my thinking, genuinely take me aback.
What did Byron give to Greece, to be treated as such a hero? This was the question that Rachel and I spent most of our trip to Athens asking ourselves. And doing some preliminary research, we landed on the cynical answer: money. Byron’s financial contributions to the Greek nationalist cause were huge. The nobleman made significant donations to Greek nationalists, and used his aristocratic and political connections to secure an even larger British loan for the Greek provisional government, which was worth around £70m in today’s money and set the stage for an even larger loan after Byron’s death.6
But the more that I read about (and by) Byron in the context of the Greek revolution, cynicism seemed increasingly unwarranted. By and large, neither Byron himself, nor the leaders of the revolution, nor indeed politicians of the great European powers, thought of the poet’s presence in Greece in these cynical terms.
Rather, I think Byron’s main contribution to Greece is this: the emergence of modern Greece was a propaganda victory as much as (more than) a military or political one, and Byron was modern Greece’s greatest propagandist.
The historian Roderick Beaton makes a comparison between the Greek revolution of 1821 and the Serbian uprisings of 1804 and 1815. The Serbian revolts eventually led to a small degree of autonomy being granted, but ‘the conflict had little resonance outside the borders of the Ottoman empire; it changed neither the external frontier nor, fundamentally, the empire itself.’7 Serbian independence would not be achieved until the 1860s. The difference between lay not in greater Greek military courage or tactical smarts, but in the international context: Greek nationalism gained the support of the great powers of Europe, who eventually intervened militarily to force the Ottoman empire to accept Greek independence.
The leaders of the other European powers, instinctually reactionary in the aftermath of the French revolution, were not predisposed to support Greece’s own revolution; it took an immense effort of persuasion to change their approach. Much of this persuasion involved considerations of realpolitik, making European politicians believe that an independent Greece would serve their nation’s interest. But equally, much of it came down to the cultivation of a very particular, classical and romantic, image of the Greek past and its bequest of liberty and civilisation to Europe. Greek politicians from the very beginning of the revolution sought to ‘pitch’ it to western audiences: the very decision to name the country ‘Hellas’ and call its people ‘Hellenes’8 was in no small part a political attempt to play on romanticism about classical Greece. (Most speakers of the Greek language in the early nineteenth century called themselves ‘Rhomaioi’.) This vision of Greece inspired the growing philhellenic movement across Europe, and put pressure on even the most cynical politicians.
Byron wrote almost no new poetry after joining the Greek revolution, with one major exception that will be discussed below. As such, he might be thought a pretty poor propagandist. But even without new works, his decision to travel to Greece cast a retrospective hue over his previous works. Byron had always taken inspiration from the classical world and from his experiences travelling through Greece as a younger man, especially in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and expressed his sympathies with Greek resentment against Ottoman rule:
[F]or what are they to be grateful? Where is the human being that ever conferred a benefit on Greek or Greeks? They are to be grateful to the Turks for their fetters, and to the Franks for their broken promises and lying counsels. They are to be grateful to the artist who engraves their ruins, and to the antiquary who carries them away;9 to the traveller whose janissary flogs them, and to the scribbler whose journal abuses them. This is the amount of their obligations to foreigners. [Notes to canto 2 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.]
Byron was possibly the most famous man in Europe in 1821, certainly the most famous writer. In light of Byron travelling to fight for Greece, his immensely well-known body of work came to seem like it had always building towards explicit Greek nationalism. Suddenly, the Greek revolution looked like the realisation, the telos, of Byron’s oeuvre. Verses like the following from 1810 suddenly took on a new, national significance in light of his death:
Maid of Athens! I am gone:
Think of me, sweet! when alone.
Though I fly to Istambol
Athens holds my heart and soul:
Can I cease to love thee? No!
Zōē mou, sas agapō.10[‘Maid of Athens, ere we part’, ll. 19–24.]
Now, interestingly, Byron’s own philhellenism was intellectually quite subtle, and he was more alert to the differences between ancient and modern Greek culture than his contemporaries.11 But he did fundamentally accept the picture of ancient Greece giving a legacy of art and freedom to Europe, and had repeatedly highlighted the irony that the nation that gave Europe liberty no longer had its own freedom. As Byron’s works were reread in light of the Greek revolution, this irony was seen as a contradiction that needed to be resolved. Greek independence was cast as part of the telos, not just of Byron’s work, but of the revolutionary modernity he defended.12
But although Byron was a poet, and these poetic echoes of Greek nationalism were vital, his greatest propaganda was propaganda of the deed.13 It was his practical commitment, and especially his death for the cause, that made non-philhellenes stand up and pay attention.
After all, it’s one thing to have philhellenic notions about the glories of Greece, to write (as Byron’s friend Percy Bysshe Shelley did) that ‘[o]ur laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece’, that ‘[t]he modern Greek is the descendant of those glorious beings’, and that therefore westerners have a duty to aid ‘the descendants of that nation to which they owe their civilisation, rising as it were from the ashes of their ruin’. It is quite another thing to be serious enough about Greek nationalism to travel to Greece and die for the cause.14 Byron’s presence in Greece forced uncommitted westerners to take philhellenism seriously as a political force.
Of course, every cause has its fanatics; the mere existence of a sincere believer does not force anyone to take them seriously. But there is a difference between mere sincerity, which all fanatics have, and seriousness, in something like the sense it is used in visakan veerasamy’s very interesting post. Seriousness demands sincerity, yes, but also good judgment and truthfulness—qualities that fanatics lack almost by definition.
What surprised me as I read was how clear it was that Byron was not merely a sincere romantic, but a serious nationalist. I don’t mean that he couldn’t crack a joke (anyone who’s read Don Juan or Childe Harold know that Byron was anything but serious in that sense), but rather that he took Greek nationalism seriously as a political project, not just an opportunity for glory. In particular, I was struck by his decision—having placed himself in a key position of the Greek politics of the day—to ally himself with the ‘modernising’ politicians who had a good chance of creating a stable and modern Greek state, not with the more romantic and ‘authentic’ rural militia leaders. This also struck Byron’s contemporaries.
Even Byron’s financial contributions, which I initially looked at cynically, were in fact a marker of his serious belief. Sure, the wealthy lord throwing off a few small donations to a cause is an almost perfect symbol of insincerity; but this was not Byron. Saying he ‘should not like to give the Greeks but a half helping hand’, he entirely liquidated his English estate for donations to the revolution, and was well on track to give his entire fortune away to the Greek cause had he not died. This decision was based in his deep ideological commitment to Greek nationalism, sure, but he made the final decision in the light of his serious judgments about the power of finance in world affairs:
Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign
O’er Congress, whether royalist or liberal?
Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain?
(That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.)
Who keep the world, both old and new, in pain
Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all?
The shade of Bonaparte’s noble daring?—
Jew Rothschild, and his fellow-Christian, Baring.Those, and the truly liberal Lafitte,15
Are the true lords of Europe. Every loan
Is not a merely speculative hit,
But seats a nation or upsets a throne.[Don Juan, canto 12, ll. 33–44.]
Byron emptied his coffers to ‘seat’ the Greek nation. And this immense personal financial commitment was, along with the fact that Byron’s allies were serious politicians rather than rural warlords, a big factor in British lenders trusting him in negotiations over the loan. Byron had skin in the game. In the economists’ jargon, Byron’s actions and death were a ‘costly signal’ that he saw the Greek cause as a serious one with a real shot.
In turn, the famous poet’s commitment to Greece cast a new light on the Greek cause as a whole. This shift in perception was crucial for transforming overseas attitudes towards Greek nationalism, which in turn helped secure the new Greek state’s future.
Byron himself understood this situation perfectly well. In a prescient conversation mere months before his death, he said:
Hitherto [Greece] has been a subject for the hymns and elegies of fanatics and enthusiasts; but now it will draw the attention of the politician.
The different views and the jealousies of the European powers are well calculated to favour the efforts of the Greeks; for they apparently will secure their neutrality. This campaign, it seems, will lay the foundations of Grecian independence… [Pietro Gamba, A Narrative of Lord Byron’s Last Journey to Greece, ch. 5.]
This prescient prediction became reality, slowly but surely, over the course of the war of independence.
All of this corrected my prejudice that Byron’s actions were ‘faintly ridiculous’. Given his chosen cause, he acted powerfully and with great seriousness and judgment. But it still left the question: how did it happen that Lord Byron specifically, the mad and bad libertine whose life was just a string of personal scandals, was transformed into a serious believer in a foreign political cause? What happened to him to cause such a change?
It turns out this is a subject of some debate among Byron scholars; his decision at the end of his life to ‘get a sum together to go amongst the Greeks … and do some good’ was relatively sudden and in need of explanation. The aforementioned Beaton argues that Shelley’s death was the driving force, though other scholars are less than convinced. Rachel has suggested, and I think it makes a lot of sense, that Byron’s guilt over the death of his neglected daughter Allegra demanded a kind of ethical distraction; his Greek exploits were perhaps an attempt at ‘moral offsetting’. Maybe the true answer was in Byron’s lost autobiography, and we will never know.
But one factor in the shift has to be the changing context around him. As mentioned above, Byron had sympathies for Greeks who opposed Ottoman rule long before 1821, but these sympathies had not yet taken the form of support for Greek independence. Quite the opposite:
The Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns as heretofore… but they may be subjects without being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they are free and industrious, and such may Greece be hereafter. [Notes to canto 2 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.]
The best that could be hoped for Greece’s future was for imperial rule to become less oppressive. To be sure, Byron was a romantic liberal nationalist for his whole career, with a particular interest in Greece. But he was a pessimistic nationalist, sceptical of the possibilities for change. In particular, Byron understood that international support was necessary for Greek independence,16 yet before 1821 he saw little hope of support materialising.
Trust not for freedom to the Franks—
They have a king who buys and sells;
In native swords, and native ranks,
The only hope of courage dwells;
But Turkish force, and Latin fraud,
Would break your shield, however broad.[Don Juan, canto 3, ll. 767–772.]
More generally, the period during and immediately after the Napoleonic wars was a very pessimistic period for people with Byron’s radical liberal politics. Revolutionary hope was replaced by Napoleon’s imperial ambitions and then seemingly completely extinguished by the Concert of Europe. In some ways, we should not be surprised that Byron lived with so few serious practical commitments: politically speaking, what was there for him to be serious about?
But then, in 1821, revolution came to Greece. And like many a pessimistic nationalist, revolution changed Byron’s view of the situation utterly. Suddenly he saw hope for Greek independence, where before he had seen only the prospect of ‘useful’ colonisation; and suddenly he himself found himself able to do something.
Yet, just as Byron was not completely apathetic towards political causes before 1821, after 1821 he was not dogmatically and unceasingly enthusiastic. He found himself going through phases of doubt and uncertainty about the Greek cause and about his decisions, exacerbated by the neurological symptoms he repeatedly experienced at the end of his life. These doubts are powerfully expressed in his last masterpiece, composed in Greece only a few months before his death, ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’.
My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;
The worm—the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some Volcanic Isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze
A funeral pile.The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of Love I cannot share,
But wear the chain.[‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’, ll.5–16.]
But the same aspect of Byron’s politics that was so valuable to the young Greek state was also valuable to himself: his seriousness. Seriousness in this sense is closely linked to what Bernard Williams called ‘confidence’, which is not the same thing as the absence of doubts in one’s convictions, but is rather the ability not to be destabilised or paralysed by these doubts. And indeed, Byron’s discussion of how the Greek cause gave him confidence is one of literature’s great illustrations of this very idea:
But ‘tis not thus—and ‘tis not here
Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now
Where Glory decks the hero’s bier
Or bind his brow.The Sword, the Banner, and the Field,
Glory and Greece around us see!
The Spartan borne upon his shield
Was not more free!Awake (not Greece—she is awake!)
Awake my Spirit! think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake
And then strike home![‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’, ll. 17–28.]
Reading these lines now, they are no longer coloured in my eyes by ridiculousness and lack of realism. Certainly, there is a classical-education (what today we’d call ‘western civ’) idea at the heart of the poem: for Byron, it is through classical Greek culture that the westerner’s ‘life-blood tracks its parent lake’. And yes, Byron ‘operationalised’ this idea in an essentially romantic way, with a certain degree of death-drive. But these attitudes have given rise to a confident and serious political allegiance. Byron did not vainly charge for glory: he exercised his judgment and kept his focus squarely on his comparative advantage.
It is not that I could pretend to anything in a military capacity—I have not the presumption of the philosopher at Ephesus—who lectured before Hannibal on the art of war—nor is it much that an individual foreigner can do in any other way—but perhaps as a reporter of the actual state of things there—or in carrying on any correspondence between them and their western friends—I might be of use—at any rate I would try. [Letter to John Cam Hobhouse, 7th April 1823.]
Byron’s allegiance was rooted in romantic and classicist ideas that I do not share, and you probably don’t either. But that does not render it ridiculous. And indeed, what jumps out at me in ‘Thirty-Sixth Year’ when I read it now is the honesty, conviction, and genuine commitment Byron felt, his sincere love of country. (And not even his country!) The poem powerfully conveys Byron’s doubts, but also the seriousness that allowed him to—not so much ignore or suppress them—but steel himself in the face of them.
What Byron gave to Greece at the end of his life, he also gave to himself: the benefits of moral seriousness. And his legacy gives the same to us. He is a model of how seriousness can act as a bulwark against anxiety about the meaning and significance of one’s life and commitments. And he is a model of the power of serious commitment to create genuine and meaningful change in the world. The alienness of his Romantic commitments, the ironic and joking approach he took in much of his poetry, and his … messy personal life, make it all too easy for Anglophones to miss this seriousness. But Greece refuses to downplay it or ignore it. I, for one, am deeply grateful for the reminder.
For the duration of the election campaign I have been advised to include this little notice at the bottom of my posts, in case they are officially considered ‘election materials’. I have no intention of turning this blog into a campaigning tool, don’t worry, this is just for legal purposes.
Promoted on behalf of P McLaughlin (Scottish Liberal Democrats), 4 Clifton Terrace, Edinburgh, EH12 5DR.
Or rather, Romantic reasons. This post is about Byron, after all.
Maybe not solely gossip. But in preparing for this post, I read the latest book about Byron in English—Andrew Stauffer’s A Life in Ten Letters—and I struggled to get through the sheer volume of gossiping and speculation to reach the stuff about Greece. Not to accuse Stauffer of bad scholarship; quite the opposite, it’s pretty clear that engaging in gossip is pretty much essential to good Byron scholarship.
Though see the figures here, which suggest Byron is a relatively marginal figure in popular memory of the Greek Revolution.
If you push the analogy you can get a good go out of it: both men died in their thirties, and did not live to see the era they (ostensibly) inaugurated.
If you start looking around Athens for the letters ‘Βύρων’ (‘Vyron’, Byron), you will see them everywhere, from street names to entire suburbs. Meanwhile just this year Greece has produced a series of Byron stamps.
Although the Greek state only saw about £40m of this: see this useful piece on the loans, which is interesting for its discussion of how risk adjustment worked in nineteenth-century financial markets.
Beaton, The Greek Revolution of 1821 and its Global Significance, p. 24.
‘Ellas’ and ‘Ellines’ in modern Greek.
An obvious reference to Lord Elgin, perhaps history’s greatest cultural vandal.
‘My life, I love you.’ Note that I am using a different transliteration scheme for modern Greek and Byron’s faux-ancient Greek.
This comes out especially in canto 2 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and its notes.
It's important to remember that Hegel was Byron’s contemporary, and he was not just philosophising out of thin air: he was putting into abstract, theoretical form ideas that were implicit or explicit in so much contemporary political thought and practice.
Notably, Byron’s poetry is almost inaccessible in Greece—most of his works have not been translated into Greek, and what translations exist are no longer in print.
Not to dismiss Shelley, who might well have contributed practically to the Greek cause had he not drowned at sea in the middle of 1822. The point is just that Byron did contribute practically.
Rothschild is probably a sufficiently well-known name not to need glossing. Barings bank helped finance some of the major political loans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the Louisiana purchase. Lafitte was a famous pirate / privateer—adding his name to the list was cheeky on Byron’s part, as was talking about ‘Jew Rothschild[‘s] … fellow-Christian’.
Though not sufficient:
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?[Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 2, ll. 720–728.]