From Ancient to Modern: Byron, Shelley, and the Idea of
Greece
Introductory Summary
Byron’s
Childe Harold ( 1812) popularized a
view of
Greece as not merely a site of
classical splendour but of a downtrodden present and a problematic future. This new focus for interest in
Greece
quickly found its place in the emerging, and closely interlinked, ideologies
of Romanticism in the arts and liberalism and nationalism in politics. Radical liberals, such as the English poet
Percy
Bysshe Shelley, admired classical
Athens as a pioneer of a liberal political constitution, as
well as for its aesthetic and philosophical achievements.
Byron, who had been lukewarm about the prospects
for Greek independence in 1812, belatedly
discovered in the Greek Revolution of 1821 an
outlet whereby the liberal/nationalist politics of his poetry could be
transformed into political action.
A careful reconsideration of
Byron’s
writings and actions from his first Grand Tour ( 1809–1811) to his death at
Missolonghi in April 1824
suggests that his decision to commit himself to the cause of Greek freedom
was the culmination of a poetic and ideological development that had
consistently sought to break through the limiting barrier of
words (a perennial dilemma for Romantic artists) so as to
change the course of
things in the world of real politics and
action. “Words are things,”
Byron wrote in
a number of different contexts over the last ten years of his life.
His final commitment seems to have been consciously and deliberately to give
up the vocation of a poet (“words”), when in June
1823 he committed himself to going to
Greece to take part in the Revolution (“things”). Thereafter,
Byron’s letters, and the
absence of any significant poetry, reveal an overwhelming dedication to what
he called the “Cause,” and a remarkably clear-sighted determination that the
future for a reborn
Greece must lie in a
liberally constituted nation-state. In this way,
Byron’s last months in
Greece, and his political contribution to the outcome of
the Revolution, can be seen as the culmination of a defining quest for
European Romanticism, that lies at the root of Modernity as it has come to
be understood since: to transform words into things, ideals into action. The
success of this quest is demonstrated by the fact that as early as 1830, three decades before
Italy and
Germany, “modern”
Greece came to be recognized as the first of the newly
constituted nation-states of
Europe—thus
establishing a precedent which continues to prevail throughout the
continent, and indeed much of the world, today.
Ancient Greece and the Romantic
Traveller
When the young
Lord Byron
first set foot in
Greece, at the end of
September 1809, he was following a well
established tradition for well-to-do Englishmen. The “Grand Tour” in those
days occupied something of the position of the “gap year” for today’s
students. But the world into which the young itinerant was supposed to be
initiated by the experience was not that of contemporary foreign people, but
of the classical past.
[1] Ever since the Renaissance, the ideals to which education and the arts
aspire d had been those of ancient
Rome
and, increasingly, of ancient
Greece. This elevation of
Greece, in particular,
to the status of an ideal reached its peak during the first half of the nineteenth century, under the
dominance of Romanticism. In
Britain a
decisive factor in the ascendancy of classical
Greece was, ironically enough, the depredations to the
Acropolis of
Athens by
Lord
Elgin, and the acquisition, in 1817,
of the “Elgin Marbles” by the British Museum, whose neoclassical,
temple-like buildings date from the same period (St Clair 1998; King 2006). In
Germany the process had begun
earlier, with the influential writings of the art historian
J. J. Winckelmann (2006).
So what
Byron might have been expected to
find inspiring about his travels in antique lands were the ruins of the
classical past. In the event he was relieved to be able to leave the
antiquities to his more stolid companion,
John Cam
Hobhouse. In the second canto of
Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage , which he wrote while staying at the
Capuchin Convent in
Athens
in the first months of
1810,
Byron has much to say,
certainly, about the unavoidable relics of the past. But his musings on the
decline of ancient glory are conventional in content, even if memorably
expressed (Spencer 1954:247–294). What marks out
Byron’s engagement with
Greece from that of most other travellers up to this time
is the vividness of his evocation of the contemporary landscape, his
enthusiasm for the people who inhabit it (Souliots, Albanians, and Turks, as
well as the many Greeks he met on his travels in
Athens and the south of the country), and his thoughts
about their political future.
This is not to say that
Byron at this time
was a philhellene. He had been impressed, certainly, by the patriotic spirit
of some of those he met—in particular his teacher of the modern language,
Ioannis Marmarotouris, in
Athens; and the local chieftain and later hero
of the Revolution,
Andreas Londos, who
entertained him in his home at
Vostitsa
(modern
Aigion). But although he
translated some harmless modern Greek love lyrics, and the “war song” which
he confused with the more famous “Thourios” (war song) by
Rigas Velestinlis (McGann
1980–1993:1.330–337),
Byron in the wake of
his Grand Tour was deeply ambivalent about the political prospects for the
inhabitants of the land that he had found personally so liberating.A few
months after his return to
England he
was writing to Hobhouse: “My own mind is not very well made up as to the
Greeks, but I have no patience with the absurd extremes into which their
panegyrists & detractors have equally run.”
[2] And in the prose notes that he added
to early editions of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in
1812, he was more negative still:
The
Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns as
heretofore, and God forbid they ever should! … To talk, as the Greeks
themselves do, of their rising again to their pristine superiority,
would be ridiculous; as the rest of the world must resume its barbarism,
after re-asserting the sovereignty of
Greece (McGann 1980–1993:2.201–202).
But at least he
cared about the modern Greeks. The enormous
overnight success of the first two cantos of
Childe
Harold , when they were published on 10
March 1812, meant that what
Byron reported and thought about
Greece was read by many more readers than all the travel
books taken together.
Childe Harold , its
translations into European languages, and the cult of the “celebrity” that
began with that runaway success, all ensured that from 1812 onwards
Greece entered the consciousness of
western Europeans as a living landscape inhabited by contemporary people,
whose political future was beginning to be recognized as a problem to be
confronted.
“We are All Greeks”
The first poetic response in English to the outbreak of the
Greek Revolution in 1821 came not from
Byron but from his younger contemporary and
friend,
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Closer in
temperament to the idealising tendency of the German Romantics, whose work,
unlike
Byron, he knew at first hand,
Shelley had long seen in what he had
read of ancient
Greece the proof of the
perfectibility of the human race. The possibility of
Greece as contemporary and actual had probably never even
occurred to
Shelley before he met
Byron in 1816. Then during the first
half of 1821, while living in
Pisa,
Shelley and his
wife
Mary made the acquaintance of
another exile, the Greek “prince”
Alexandros
Mavrokordatos (or
Mavrocordato, as he signed himself in French and Italian).
Mavrokordatos would soon depart from
Pisa to claim a role for himself among
the foremost political leaders of the Greek Revolution. But for six months
before that, he had been close to the Shelleys, and particularly to
Mary, whose close interest in the
unfolding events of the Revolution is evident from a series of letters to
her from
Mavrokordatos, several of them
unpublished.
[3] Shelley’s personal response to “our
turbaned friend,” as he termed
Mavrokordatos, was correspondingly muted, but there can be
no doubt about his enthusiasm for the Greek cause, or that he, too, was
exceptionally well informed about the progress of the Revolution during its
first months.
In the autumn of 1821, while he was waiting for
Byron to join him and his circle of
friends in
Pisa,
Shelley rapidly wrote the “lyrical drama”
Hellas , which he dedicated to
Mavrokordatos. “We are all Greeks,” he wrote boldly and
memorably in the preface to the poem, and went on to explain: “Our laws, our
literature, our religion, our arts have their root in
Greece.” It is to
Greece that modern Europeans “owe their civilisation.” This
Shelley had always believed.But
now, with the outbreak of the Revolution, he had to contemplate “the
astonishing circumstance” of the modern descendants of those ancient Greeks
“rising as it were from the ashes of their ruin.”
[4]
For
Shelley, the prospect held out by the
Greek Revolution was much more than a return to the past. A radical in
politics, although he was also by nature a pacifist,
Shelley was an admirer of revolution anywhere. He saw at once the radical nature of the revolt in
Greece; it was natural to him to associate it in his mind
with the achievement of classical
Athens
in establishing the world’s first democracy. As he put it, in a passage of
the Preface to
Hellas excised by his publisher and
not printed until seventy years after his death:
This is the age of
the war of the oppressed against the oppressors.… [A] new race has
arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which
are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to
accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and dread.
[5]
The Ottoman Sultan
Mahmud in the poem
stands for autocrats and monarchs throughout the world, whose power the
radical
Shelley believes must be
similarly doomed. In this way
Greece,
from having been an
ancient ideal to which the present looks
back in emulation, has become transformed into an ideal to be achieved,
through struggle, in the
future .
“Poets,”
Shelley had declared in a justly
famous essay, just before news of the Greek Revolution reached him in
Pisa, “are the unacknowledged
legislators of the World.”
[6] The idealist
Shelley
never clearly explained how this was to come about. But the shift from past
to future, from words to action, is clear in his poetry and thinking in
1821.
The New Prometheus
Byron arrived in
Pisa on the same day that
Shelley inscribed his dedication of
Hellas to
Mavrokordatos, 1 November
1821. At this time
Byron seems
to have had no thought of taking part in the Greek Revolution. Indeed, the
few references to events in
Greece in
his correspondence until well into 1822 are terse
and studiedly offhand.
[7]
There is little direct evidence that
Byron
and
Shelley talked about
Greece while they were together in
Pisa, during the early months of 1822. The surmise of
an early biographer, who knew bot h men at the time, is probably correct:
that the enthusiasm of
Shelley (in fact
of both the Shelleys), as well as the poem
Hellas ,
may have helped to direct
Byron’s thoughts
and energies in that direction (Medwin 1913:354–355). The time would
certainly have been ripe.
Byron had for
the past two years been increasingly involving himself in the Italian
revolutionary movement of the
carbonari . Revolt in
Naples in the summer of 1820 had raised his hopes that what he called a “row”
would soon break out all over
Italy;
before leaving
Ravenna for
Pisa he had been taking part in clandestine
meetings, helping to store arms, and conspiring with his aristocratic
Italian friends. But what
Byron tellingly
at one point called the “
poetry of politics” was never wholly
serious on his part—and in his turn he often doubted the seriousness of
those alongside whom he was preparing to fight.
[8] When the Austrian army passed
through the neighbourhood of
Ravenna in
February 1821, on its way to crush the
revolt in
Naples, without a shot being
fired,
Byron suddenly and finally lost all
interest in the political hopes of
Italy. His flirtation with revolutionary politics in the congenial aristocratic
environment of
Ravenna had been shown
up for the make-believe it was.
Byron in
1822 was still in search of a cause to which to
devote himself.
On 8 July 1822,
Shelley drowned while sailing off
Viareggio. After the body had been washed ashore, it seems
to have been
Byron’s idea to give his
friend a heroic send-off, after the manner of the ancient heroes he had so
much admired. In a bizarre reenactment of an ancient ceremony, the badly
decomposed body was burned on a specially constructed pyre on the beach, in
front of a shocked and fascinated crowd of onlookers, while the celebrants
sprinkled wine and spices on the flames.
[9] In the only written account that he
ever gave of that event, in a letter written soon afterwards,
Byron also gives an early hint of his still
unformed idea of going to
Greece.
[10]
After
Shelley’s death
Byron moved to
Genoa. His letters from there show the idea of
Greece gaining ground. When a deputation
arrived in
Genoa, on 5 April 1823, from the newly formed London
Greek Committee, and asked him to give public support to the cause of the
Greeks,
Byron was ready for them. He still
took time to make up his mind. It was probably not until mid-June that the die was fully cast.What the
Committee expected of him was still no more than
to go up to
Greece at once for the sake of
showing, in the most positive manner, the interest the English take in
their cause—and for the sake also of getting certain information on
which they can depend.…
[11] The idea of going to fight in the revolution
himself was all
Byron’s.
Many explanations have been proposed for this decision and its timing,
including several by
Byron himself. Was it
an empty gesture of the moment? Had it been long premeditated? Was it the
result of despair, perhaps of a loss of confidence in his writing, or at
least in his reputation with his public? Was it a grandiose way to commit
suicide—a kind of counterpart to the obsequies he had already devised for
Shelley? To a fellow philhellene
into whose company he would be thrown at
Missolonghi, the young doctor
Julius
Millingen,
Byron would
confide:
Heartily weary of the monotonous life I had led in
Italy for several years; sickened
with pleasure; more tired of scribbling than the public, perhaps, is of
reading my lucubrations; I felt the urgent necessity of giving a
completely new direction to the course of my ideas; and the active,
dangerous, yet glorious scenes of the military career struck my fancy,
and became congenial to my taste (Millingen 1831:6–7).
This sounds like authentic
Byron, but
Byron’s authentic voice rarely
declares the whole truth, especially when the subject is himself. We shall
never know with certainty. But it is my belief that
Byron’s delayed commitment to
Greece was the culmination of a long process, whose earlier
traces can be followed through his poetry and other writings of more than
ten years. Although politically far less radical than
Shelley,
Byron had a more developed sense of history. What
Shelley proposed could be achieved by the
“unacknowledged legislators of the world” through writing poetry and
philosophy,
Byron was determined to go
further and act out in the real world.
Byron carried this aspect of his Romantic
poetics all the way to its conclusion, as few others did. But he was by no
means alone in thinking in this way, and the consequences are still very
much with us in the early twenty-first
century. As a study of America’s post-2001 “war on terror” puts it, “The Romantics were thinkers
who felt compelled to translate their thoughts into actions. And the actions
often took the form of armed conflict” (Fletcher 2002:16).
Words and Things
Byron attributed “the
saying … that
words are
things ” to
Mirabeau, whose political stance as a moderate
supporter of the French Revolution he also praised.
[12] The first appearance of the idea
in a poem dates from the summer of 1816. It comes
near the end of the third canto of
Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage , at a rare moment (for
Byron) of positive affirmation about his fellow human
beings. It is still tentative at this point:
I do
believe,
Though I have found them not, that there may
be
Words which are things …
canto III, stanza
114, lines 1059–1061
Byron could often be disparaging about his own craft. But
here he moves towards faith in the poet as a maker. Even if he does not
claim to have achieved this himself, he is prepared to believe that words
have power in the world.
Three years later, in
Ravenna, in the
summer of 1819,
Byron wrote his most overtly political poem on an Italian
theme.
The Prophecy of Dante proposes a view of Italian history that
looks forward to the future liberation of the nation. “Who toils for
nations,” he makes
Dante anachronistically
declare in canto IV, “may be poor indeed / But free” (lines 91–92). Canto II
had ended with a rousing call to the Italians of the future to avoid
“Division” that “sows the seeds of woe” and instead “with
one
deed—Unite!” (lines 134, 145). In very similar terms, but in prose and with
a practical object,
Byron would in future
address the leaders of the Greek Revolution. In the poem, it is supposedly
the long-dead
Dante who is speaking,
prophetically, from the perspective of the early
fourteenth century, when he recalls “days of Old, / When words
were things that came to pass” (canto II, lines 1–2). The
Prophecy of Dante is a call to
future action, grounded in the speaker’s belief in a prelapsarian world in
which the separation between words and things had not yet taken place. But
that is not the world in which either the imagined
Dante or
Byron himself
live. As a result, the call to the Italian people to a war for political
liberation cannot go beyond inspiring words.
A few months after writing that poem,
Byron
returned to words and things, but this time in a context that has more to do
with
Greece. This is in canto III of his
mock-epic poem
Don Juan . The hero has been
shipwrecked on a Greek island. The daughter of its piratical ruler has
fallen in love with him, and during her father’s absence the lovers enjoy a
riot of entertainment, which culminates in a song: the famous “Isles of
Greece.” Read out of context, these
lines in which the poet “dream’d that
Greece might still be free” seem like a moving statement of
philhellenism.
[13] But
Byron goes out of his way to make this
lyrical affirmation of a future freedom for
Greece problematic. The famous lines are supposed to be
improvised by a professional rhymester, a “sad trimmer” who earns his living
by flattering whatever audience he happens to be addressing. Just when it
seems that
Byron-as-author has demolished
this figure, and therefore, it would seem, completely undermined the
sentiments of the inserted poem, he turns serious:
But words
are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew,
upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands,
perhaps millions think…
canto III, stanza 88, lines
792–4
The thought is familiar by now. But this time it leads into a meditation that
lasts for several stanzas and develops in a different direction from the
expected one. It turns out that
Byron is
thinking not about words as the
motive for action, but rather
more subtly, that history is all in the telling. Even the most heroic or
inspired action is given meaning through being memorably told. The nub of
the matter is that a person’s g lory owes more to “the historian’s style”
than to any intrinsic quality of the individual or the actual deed he has
done. In that case, even a trimmer-poet can rise to the occasion and “agree
to a short armistice with truth” (line 664). In a remarkably postmodern
manoeuvre,
Byron has undermined his own
undermining. Words may lead to heroic action, and in that sense become
“things.” But heroic action itself is vindicated by the
words
that commemorate and preserve it. Action only exists as a “thing” through
being monumentalized in words. This mutual dependency of words and things
brings us close to the heart of
Byron’s
commitment to
Greece.
When those lines were written, that commitment was still some years in the
future. Something of the same idea appears again, in 1820, near the close of the drama
Marino
Faliero . The play is set in medieval
Venice, and in it
Byron
makes a rather contorted attempt to understand and justify the kind of
political action he was contemplating for himself at the time in
Italy. The hero, like all Byronic heroes, fails
at the end. Refusing to justify his actions before his execution, he gives
as his reason:
… for true words are
things ,
And dying men’s are things which
long outlive,
And oftentimes avenge them.…
Act
V, scene 1, lines 288–290, original
emphasis
Once again, words are more than “mere”
words, they have the tangibility of things, the power of deeds. But things
are also words, in the sense that what outlives the man of action, and may
have power in the future, is not his deeds directly, but the words that
record them.
The last reference to words and things in
Byron’s poetry comes in the ninth canto of
Don Juan , in stanzas on which he was working in the immediate
aftermath of
Shelley’s death (Steffan
1957:289; BCPW 5.736), that is, at the very time of the ancient funeral
obsequies on the shore near Viareggio—the catalyst, as we saw, for
Byron’s newfound interest in going to
revolutionary
Greece. Speaking in his
own person, the author-narrator declares his purpose:
And I
will war, at least in words (and—should
My chance so
happen—deeds) …
canto IX, lines
185–6
For once the implication is clear: the poet is
contemplating going beyond words and taking direct action. As he goes on to
make clear, the action he will take is dictated by a political conviction
which is not everyone’s.Driven, as he declares, by “detestation / Of every
despotism in every nation,” he is “of no party” and therefore accepts that
“I shall offend all parties:—never mind!” Sandwiched between these lines is
the subtlest and at the same time most serious statement of political
conviction that
Byron ever made: “I wish
men to be free / As much from mobs as kings—from you as me.”
[14]
From the moment that he finally took the decision for
Greece, in
Genoa in
June 1823,
Byron in effect ceased to be a poet.
Don
Juan was abandoned suddenly, a few stanzas into its seventeenth
canto. He never returned to it. A few fragments of verse and one completed
short poem are all the poetry he wrote thereafter (McGann
1980–1993:7.77–83). It is impossible to tell whether it was a conscious
decision to turn his back on his art, as
Shakespeare did after
The Tempest ,
and as
Arthur Rimbaud famously would do
almost a century later. But for
Byron
there were to be no half measures. For the poet to become a man of action,
to overstep the bounds of words and begin to shape things in the world, he
had to cease being a poet. In
Greece,
there would be no room for the “
poetry of politics,” as he had
gleefully described his involvement with the
carbonari
(McGann 1980–1993:8.47, emphasis mine) . For
the remainder of his life,
Byron would
dedicate himself to the politics that had always been inherent in the poetry
he had been writing up till now. This would be Romanticism translated into
action.
Byron in Greece
The story of all that
Byron did and said during the last eight months of his life,
after he left
Genoa, first in
Cephalonia, and then at
Missolonghi, has been told again and again. But there is a larger story that remains to be told: of how his actions and
his words were received among the Greeks and how they may have contributed
to the eventual outcome of the Revolution.
[15]
It has often been said that
Byron chose the
worst possible moment to go to
Greece. Between the summer of 1823 and the
autumn of 1825 , the progress of the Revolution was stalled; the
energies of the Greeks in the regions that had been successfully liberated
in 1821 and defended in 1822 were now directed towards internal conflict, often
described as the first two (of three) civil wars that disfigured the course
of the Revolution.
[16] Recently, some Greek historians have taken a different view. The period of
civil war represents a “necessary, unavoidable, a defining stage” of the
Revolution, in that sense comparable to the period of the Terror of 1793–1794 in
France.
[17] These two bitterly fought internal conflicts, whose
beginning coincided with
Byron’s arrival
in Greek waters in August 1823, were the
crucible in which the future political shape of independent
Greece would be forged.
Byron may have thought that he would be
throwing his money and his prestige into combatting the Turks. In that
conflict there would have been little practical difference that his personal
contribution could have made, at this or at any other stage of the war. But
to the
internal conflict between competing interests and
competing models of what “liberty” might mean, and how it might be
protected,
Byron had something very
definite to contribute. He quickly came to adopt three basic principles, and
despite provocations and prevarications by those around him, and his own
vagaries of temper, he never substantially wavered from them. The first was
essentially a prerequisite for the other two: a free
Greece must be a centralized state with a constitutional
government, in effect what today we would call a nation-state. Such a
government, and only such a government, would be able, secondly, to secure
and responsibly to disburse the economic support from outside that a
successful revolution would require; and, thirdly, to reach an accommodation
through diplomacy with the Great Powers of the day, without which true
independence would never be possible.
His fellow countrymen, then and since, have often been sceptical about
Byron’s political grasp of the
situation in
Greece.
[18] The first Greek historian of the
Revolution,
Spyridon Trikoupis, who as a
young man had composed and delivered the funeral oration for
Byron at
Missolonghi, was more generous, and probably more
accurate:
His policy in
Greece
was profound and judicious. Unlike many philhellenes, he had his feet on
the ground. He was no dreamer of republican or anti-republican systems. Even a free press he considered premature. For him what mattered was the
deliverance of
Greece. To this end
he exhorted the Greeks towards harmony among themselves and due respect
for foreign courts. The organization of the army and the finding of
means to maintain it were his primary concern. He was ambitious, but not
vainly so.
Trikoupis 1853–1857:3.123, my
translation
There is much more to be said about the detail of this picture, in order to
substantiate
Trikoupis’s judgement. But
I move on now to consider another aspect: what did
Byron believe that he was fighting
for ?
Two facts stand out. One is the entirely uncharacteristic dedication and
consistency of purpose with which
Byron
devoted himself to serving the interests of
Greece, from June 1823
until his death. Although his letters and journal often voice
anger, frustration, even helplessness, in the face of the difficulties
confronting him, he never seriously considers abandoning the struggle.In
January he wrote to his banker,
Charles
Hancock in
London, “I
mean to stick by the Greeks to the last rag of canvas or shirt—and not to go
snivelling back like all the rest of them up till now nearly—if it can be
avoided, that is to say.”
[19] There are many statements to this effect in the letters
of his last months. But in none of them does
Byron really account for this remarkable tenacity of
purpose.
The second fact, which seems on the face of it to contradict the first, is
Byron’s often intemperate outbursts
against the very Greeks for whom he was determined to give so much. On the
modern Greeks his recorded comments are often blistering. It was commonplace at the time for foreign philhellenes to make unfavourable
contrasts between the Greeks they encountered and the great achievements of
their ancient forebears. But
Byron,
unusually, could be just as critical of the
ancients , too.As
he is reported to have remarked during the voyage to
Cephalonia, “The Greeks are returned to
barbarism;
Mitford says the people never
were anything better.”
[20] Byron’s knowledge of ancient
Greece came largely from
The
History of Greece by
William Mitford, published in five
volumes between 1784 and 1818. We know
that
Byron had these volumes with him in
Ravenna in 1821, and also in
Cephalonia
two years later.
[21] Mitford had written, in language that
closely anticipates
Byron on the moderns,
of the “piratical, thieving and murdering kind of petty war, to which the
[ancient] Greeks at all times and in all parts were strongly addicted.”
[22]
Even in his last months, then, while he was refusing to desert his post in
Missolonghi,
Byron was far from being a typical
philhellene—or even perhaps a philhellene at all. What drove him at this
point in his life seems not to have been any particular affection for the
Greeks as a people, whether ancient or modern, but devotion to what he
termed “the Cause.” The nearest he came to explaining this was in a letter
written a little over a month before he died:
I cannot quit
Greece while there is a Chance of my being
of any (even
supposed ) utility—there is a Stake worth
millions such as I am——and while I can stand at all—I must stand by the
Cause.——When I say this—I am at the same time aware of the
difficulties—and dissensions—and defects of the Greeks themselves—but
allowances must be made for them by all reasonable people.
[23] Back in
Italy, in his
carbonaro days,
Byron in his letters had often referred to Italian
liberation as a “cause,” but without the capital letter. Whenever he refers
to the Greek struggle, in his letters from
Cephalonia and
Missolonghi, it is always as a “Cause,” with the capital
letter.
[24]
What
Byron died for, then, was an
idea : the liberation of
Greece; the revival of an ancient civilization in the
modern world; the principle, perhaps, although he would never have
formulated it in this way, of the nation-state. Through
Byron’s turn from poetry to action, from words
to things, the idea of
Greece became
transformed in the modern imagination. No longer only ancient,
Greece became a “Cause” to die for in the
modern world.
Modern Greece: Paradigm Nation
In this way,
Byron’s last
months in
Greece, and his political
contribution to the outcome of the revolution, can be seen as the
culmination of a defining quest for European Romanticism, that lies at the
root of Modernity as it has come to be understood since: to transform words
into things, ideals into action. This is not to exaggerate
Byron’s personal role in the outcome. Rather,
his high-profile example served to encapsulate something that was happening
all around him. But he
did exercise an influence, precisely
because his public profile was so high, and also because his political
judgements and his connections abroad lent weight to one faction in the
Greek civil war of the 1820s against the
other.
Byron’s personality was
instrumental in securing the first of the two loans for
Greece raised by public subscription in
Great Britain. Right from the
first, he had urged that the conflict should be internationalized. This
finally happened in July 1827, when a treaty
signed by
Britain,
France, and
Russia agreed the terms on which these powers would
intervene in
Greece (Finlay 1861:2.174). Three months later, in
Navarino Bay, off the southwest coast of
Greece, the decisive battle of the
Greek Revolution would be fought on 20 October
1827. The belligerents were neither Greeks nor Turks, but the
combined fleets of the three European powers and the viceroy of
Egypt.
For three years after that, the representatives of the same three powers met
at a standing conference in
London,
until on 3 February 1830 their ambassadors
were ready to sign the “London Protocol.” Article 1 of the Protocol states:
“
Greece will form an independent
State, and will enjoy all the political, administrative, and commercial
rights attached to total independence” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1999:30,
in French, my translation). Another two years would pass before a further
Protocol would ratify the final terms of independence ( 30 August 1832), and the fledgling state would
have to wait for its formal inauguration until February
of the following year and the arrival of the future king,
Otto, aboard a British warship.
[25] But it is the text
of 1830 that marks the defining moment. Not only
had the military struggle against Ottoman rule been won, but so had the
diplomatic effort that
Byron had
envisaged, and in aid of which he had supported the government faction
against the “captains” of the Peloponnese.
Byron had rightly foreseen, in a letter to
Mavrokordatos written shortly before
he left
Cephalonia for
Missolonghi, that
Greece at that juncture of the war had only three possible
options: “to win her liberty, to become a Colony of the sovereigns of
Europe, or to become a Turkish
province.”
[26] The
example that
Byron gave of the second of
these was
Italy, at the time still
dominated by
Austria; of the third,
Wallachia, which had been
reconquered by the Ottomans after the failure of the Greek campaign of 1821. Had he enjoyed the benefit of hindsight, he
could have given an even more telling example.
Serbia had rebelled against Ottoman rule as early as 1804, and again in 1815. Without the western intervention that would prove decisive in the case of
Greece, the Serbs would be obliged
to be content, in 1829, with a degree of autonomy
that fell significantly short of full sovereignty. For more than half a
century after their rebellion, the Serbs would remain nominally subject to
the Ottoman Porte, until the Congress of Berlin in 1878 (Jelavich 1977:31–37, 55–58; cf. Glenny 1999:1–21). If
Greece had not obtained the
diplomatic support and recognition (however grudgingly given) of the Great
Powers, one or more principalities ruled by a local chieftain could have
fought free of Ottoman control, but would still have remained politically
and diplomatically subject to
Turkey—as
did in fact happen, exceptionally, on the island of
Samos.
The “Cause” to which
Byron devoted the last
months of his life, whether or not he saw it himself in precisely those
terms, was not just the removal of Ottoman rule from
Greece, it was the cause of the modern nation-state. “I did
not come here to join a faction but a nation,” he wrote in his journal, not
long after arriving in
Cephalonia.
[27] Justly has it been
said that
Byron “was one of those who did
most to make nationalism the religion of the last [i.e.the nineteenth] century.”
[28] This meant that although he
declared himself above factions, his real contribution was to strengthen
very considerably the position of the constitutionalists in the struggle to
define the nature of the liberty that would be won at the end of the
Revolution.
Something else that
Byron could probably
not have foreseen was the enormous power that the idea of the nation-state
would come to exercise over the political imagination of nineteenth-century
Europe and beyond.
Greece, recognized as sovereign and independent
by the Protocol of 1830, would become the first of
the new nation-states established in
Europe after the end of the Napoleonic wars—followed by
Belgium in 1831,
Switzerland in 1847,
Italy in
1861,
Germany in 1871, and its
neighbours in southeastern
Europe even
later, between 1878 and 1923.
[29] The process has
continued since 1989, with the break–up of
unitary states such as
Yugoslavia and
Czechoslovakia. The latest
addition to the European “family” of nations has been
Kosovo, recognized by most, though not all,
European governments since February 2008;
at the time of writing, the possibility that
Belgium might break up into Flemish and Wallonian
nation-states is being discussed in the media.
Today the European Union has yet to achieve the legitimacy in the popular
imagination that would enable it successfully to challenge the hegemony of
nation-states in
Europe. That hegemony,
and the prevalence throughout much of the world of a form of polity born in
Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic
wars, can be understood as one consequence, at least, of the quest in which
the poets
Byron and
Shelley played their distinctive parts, in
their determination to transcend the bounds of language (“words”) and create
a new world of things, in which we all live today.
The subsequent course of history has tended to obscure the significance of
the 1821 struggle for Greek independence and its
success in establishing a new model for a modern polity, a “paradigm nation”
in the words of the political historian Paschalis Kitromilides (2009). But
whether we realise it or not, the transformation of
Greece, as an imaginative idea, from ancient arbiter of
aesthetics to political ideal for the future, that took place in the early
nineteenth century represents one of the foundation stones of what we have
become accustomed to call Modernity.
Much of the primary material relating to Byron to which
reference is made here, including poems, journals, and letters, can be found
in an online edition-in-progress, with commentary, by Peter Cochran at:
http://petercochran.wordpress.com/ (2 July 2010).
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Footnotes
Note 1
This section is indebted to Woodhouse 1969:13–65, although I take issue
with his presentation of Byron as the exemplary philhellene.
Note 2
Byron to Hobhouse, 3 November 1811 (Marchand 1973–1994:2.124–127; cf.
Byron to Hobhouse, 14 October 1811 (Marchand 1973–1994:2.114s–115).
Note 3
Bodleian MS Abinger 516/5 c. 45 contains seventeen letters in French
from Mavrocordato to Mary Shelley, dated between 3 April and 25 June
1821, and containing a great deal of up–to–the–minute information, not
all of it accurate, reported from Greece. Eight of these letters are
included in Shelley 1882:3.581–647.
Note 4
Shelley, preface to Hellas (Leader and O’Neill
2003:549).
Note 5
Shelley, preface to Hellas (Leader and O’Neill
2003:550–551, 806).
Note 6
Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” written February-March 1821, published
1839 (Leader and O’Neill 2003:701). Cf. “A Philosophical View of Reform”
(written 1820, not published until 1920), cited and discussed in Holmes
2005:585.
Note 7
E.g. Byron to Hobhouse, 20 May 1821 (Marchand 1973–1994:8.122); Byron to
Murray, 4 June 1821 (Marchand 1973–1994:8.135).
Note 8
Byron, Ravenna Journal, 18 February 1821 (original emphasis) (Marchand
1973–1994:8.47); cf. among many other instances Byron to Murray, 16
April 1820 (Marchand 1973–1994:7.77).
Note 9
The best–known account, though not to be trusted in its details, is
Trelawny 2000:300–302. For corrective see St Clair 1977:216–217;
Marchand 1952; Langley Moore 1974:332–360.
Note 10
Byron to Moore, 27 August 1822 (Marchand 1973–1994:9.197).
Note 11
Hobhouse to Byron, 11 June 1823 (Graham 1984:332).
Note 12
Marchand 1973–1994:4.74 and editor’s note. For a different inference
drawn from some of the citations from Byron discussed in this section,
see Keach 2004:40–45, who also notes, “I have been unable to trace the
source [for the ‘saying’ attributed him by Byron] in Mirabeau’s writings
or speeches” (Keach 2004:166); cf. Foot 1988:21, 185 for references to
Burke and Hazlitt. For Byron’s approval of Mirabeau’s politics, see
Byron to Hobhouse, 22 April 1820 (Marchand 1973–1994:7.80–81).
Note 13
Don Juan III , “The Isles of Greece,” stanza 3,
lines 701–704; for a sceptical reading, see Cochran 2005:65–71.
Note 14
Don Juan , canto IX, stanzas 24–26; cf. McGann
1980–1993:5.739; Kelsall 2004:55.
Note 15
So far discussed only by Minta 2006. The topic will be explored further
in my ongoing project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (UK) through a
Major Leverhulme Fellowship (2009–2012), with the provisional title
Byron’s War: The Greek Revolution and the English
Romantic Imagination .
Note 16
E.g. Finlay 1861:2.37; Brewer 2001:232–233, citing Gordon and
Makriyannis.
Note 17
Papanikolaou 2006:229, original emphasis, my translation; cf.
2006:227–228 and Rotzokos 1997:203–204.
Note 18
E.g. Finlay 1861:2.22–26; Nicolson 1924:ix–x, 297; Kelsall 1987:194–195,
but see, for a more positive evaluation, Minta 2006.
Note 19
Byron to Hancock, 19 January 1824 (Marchand 1973–1994:11.97).
Note 20
Trelawny 2000:212, cf. 201. A similar statement is also recorded by
Finlay, in a letter of June 1824 reproduced in Stanhope 1824:523.
Note 21
For Ravenna, see Marchand 1973–1994:8.238; cf. 8.18; for Cephalonia,
Finlay to Stanhope, 31 May 1824 (Stanhope 1824:511).
Note 22
Mitford 1829:1.482. See also Miliori 1998:21–30.
Note 23
Byron to Samuel Barff, 10 March 1824 (Marchand 1973–1994:11.131).
Note 24
In addition to the letter just quoted, see Marchand 1973–1994:11.58, 76,
125, 140–141, 144, 147.
Note 25
For the relationship of the protocols of 1830 and 1832 see the editor’s
comments in Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1999:27–28, 35–36.
Note 26
Byron to Mavrocordatos, 2 December 1823, Italian original and English
translation (Marchand 1973–1994:11.70–71).
Note 27
Byron, Cephalonia Journal, 28 September 1823 (Marchand
1973–1994:11.32).
Note 28
Brinton 1966:154, a view challenged by Rosen 1992:301. See also St Clair
1972:184 (“Byron, by his death, unwittingly played a part in promoting
nationalism to the position [long held by religion] of being the most
divisive and destructive element in Western civilization.”)
Note 29
For fuller discussion see Beaton 2009.