Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  A lame brat looks at the Acropolis

  It was only after leaving Vostitsa that Byron for the first time came face to face with ancient Greece, that Hobhouse had thought he had glimpsed before they even landed. The travellers were rowed across the gulf and came ashore at the tiny harbour and customs post on the site of the modern (and ancient) port of Itea. From there, the ride through the ‘forest of olive trees’ towards the ancient sanctuary of Delphi, on the flank of Mount Parnassos, impressed even Hobhouse as ‘very romantic’.28 Byron interrupted the narrative of Childe Harold's adventures in Spain to write this:

  Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey,

  Not in the phrenzy of a dreamer's eye,

  Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,

  But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,

  In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!29

  What Byron saw and what he remembered from his classical schooldays had nothing to do with moral maxims against excess. He knew that Parnassos, ever since ancient times, had been sacred to the god Apollo, patron of the Muses. This was the fountainhead, the ultimate source of artistic inspiration for every poet from Homer down to his own day. None of the great English poets had ever seen Parnassos. But all had paid tribute to the idea. Now he, Byron, was seeing the real thing. Before him, as he and Hobhouse rode up from the landing place, rose not a legend out of a book but a mountain, at this season bright with fresh snow on the upper slopes. Hobhouse fretted that the highest peaks were out of his sight. But Byron was overwhelmed by the actuality of what he was seeing.

  It probably helped that the remains of the ancient sanctuary of Delphi at that time lay under the modern village of Kastri. Almost nothing was visible except a few ancient walls and inscriptions, many of them approachable only through tunnels and cellars. At Delphi, Byron did not have to confront the ruins of the ancient past.

  As they travelled southeastwards over the next ten days, he and Hobhouse turned aside to identify places that had been important in classical history. There was little to see at the battle sites of Plataea and Chaeronea. At Thebes, home of the legendary King Oedipus and an important city in classical history, as at Delphi, the modern town completely covered the ancient, so little could be seen (as is still the case at Thebes today). Little more remained at the site of ancient Orchomenos – if the travellers were even looking in the right place.30

  It was at Athens, where they arrived on Christmas Day, 1809, that Byron found himself for the first time face to face with the ancient world in the form of monumental ruins. At Athens, more than any other place that he would visit until many years later he went to Rome, the ancient ruins still possessed the power to dominate the present-day landscape and the modern inhabitants. The experience seems at once to have impressed him and to have depressed him.

  Athens at this time was a walled town of about 12,000 inhabitants, built on the northern slopes of the natural fortress of the Acropolis, and spreading a little way to the north and west. Roughly it comprised the modern districts of Plaka, Monastiraki, and Psyrri – the only old parts of the modern city, though hardly any buildings that were there in Byron's day are still standing. The Acropolis itself was a separate citadel that housed the garrison. It had its own governor, who had to be bribed with gifts of sugar and tea before he would allow foreigners access. Engravings of the period show houses, often built into the parts of the monuments that stood above ground, with gardens and even a few farmyard animals (Plate 1a). A small mosque nestled inside the great temple of Athena, the Parthenon, whose roof had been blown off in a gunpowder explosion during the Venetian siege of 1687. Below the southern walls of the Acropolis the view stretched unimpeded to the sea. Outside the town were olive groves, garden plots for vegetables, ploughed land that Hobhouse noted was full of ‘a thousand pieces of marble’, then bare, stony ground without cultivation. The three rivers described by ancient authors, that have since been built over, were still visible. Characteristically, Hobhouse went over the ground, identifying landmarks in the guidebook to Greece that had been written seventeen hundred years before, during the heyday of the Roman empire, by Pausanias.31 Byron slept late, and did not accompany his friend on these expeditions.

  Plate 1a. ‘View of the Parthenon’, showing the Acropolis as Byron and Hobhouse would have seen it in 1810, lithograph published in Edward Dodwell, Views in Greece (London, 1821) (National Library of Scotland)

  It is often said that Byron was uninterested in the ruins of antiquity. In later life he would say so categorically, seeming to contradict much that by that time he would have written in the second and fourth cantos of Childe Harold. It was not lack of interest. In part, this was a matter of deep-seated principle. But there was also a more practical reason for Byron's attitude.

  Within days of arriving in Athens, he had embarked on the second canto of his poem, which brings his ‘childe’ hero to Greece. ‘Come’, the poet addresses a contemporary inhabitant,

  – but molest not yon defenceless urn:

  Look on this spot – a nation's sepulchre!

  In the stanzas that follow, Byron seems to be imagining the whole of Athens as the ‘urn’, the burial place, of the long-dead civilisation of ancient Greece: ‘Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn’. The ruined state of the ancient temples seems to the poet to prove that no religion can offer true consolation, let alone protection, against ‘Doubt and Death’: ‘That little urn saith more than thousand homilies.’

  Before long, the poet has moved on from ancient remains to human ones:

  Remove yon skull from out the scatter'd heaps:

  Is that a temple where a God may dwell?

  A pun is probably intended. But it is more than wordplay. The death's-head skull and the whitened shells of ancient marble buildings become equivalent in the poet's imagination: each, in its own way, the temporary receptacle of the ‘divine spark’, life. The juxtaposition is well caught visually in an engraving included in the travel book by Christopher Wordsworth, published in 1839 (Plate 1b).32 For Byron, the ancient ruins when he saw them were too much bound up with human death for him to share in his friend's excitement at exploring them. It was perhaps for this reason, too, that he came out so strongly, and so publicly, against Lord Elgin and other collectors from the west, who vied with one another to strip the artworks from these monuments and ship them home. Lord Elgin had left Athens exactly seven years before, in January 1803. During the two years before that, Elgin and his agents had dug up, and in some cases even cut from the building, the frieze and some of the sculptures from the metopes of the Parthenon on the Acropolis – the so-called ‘Elgin Marbles’.33

  Plate 1b. Athens ‘lives in the inspiration of the poet’, perhaps illustrating CHP II 82–92, lithograph published in Christopher Wordsworth, Greece Pictorial, Descriptive and Historical (London, 1839) (National Library of Scotland)

  The stanzas of Childe Harold deploring Elgin's ‘violation’ of the Acropolis were written on 3 January 1810, just after the opening ones about the ‘urn’ and the skull.34 What aroused Byron's visceral ire against Elgin was not what has incensed many Greeks and many archaeologists ever since: the removal of the artworks from their rightful home, or from their archaeological context, or both. When he complained that Elgin ‘could violate each saddening shrine’ and ‘displace Athena's poor remains’, he meant it literally. What Elgin had done and others were still doing was in Byron's eyes sacrilege against the dead. In those days there was no perceived distinction between today's science of archaeology (yet to be named) and the trade in looted antiquities. Byron's distaste extended equally to both, and this was why.

  There was also a more practical reason. When Byron wrote those stanzas denouncing what Elgin had done to the Acropolis, he had still only seen the Parthenon from a distance. The whole passage is written from the point of view of someone looking up, while sitting on one of the broken columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, on the flat land by the Ilissos river, towards ‘yon fane [i.e., tem
ple] / On high’.35 So far as we can tell, during the two months of his first stay in Athens, Byron made only a single visit to the Acropolis. That was on 29 January, by which time he and Hobhouse had been living there for over a month. Hobhouse had already spent a long and satisfying day among the ruins three weeks earlier, poking about on foot. Hobhouse's diary is methodical in recording, on every outing, whether he walked or rode. Only when he goes out on horseback does he ever add: ‘with Byron’. This was not a matter of attitude, like lying in late. Byron could not walk far.

  He had been born with a severe disability in one foot. The precise nature of the disability, and even which was the affected foot, have long been the subject of speculation. But its effect was to make any form of exercise involving walking or running impossible. Walking even quite short distances outdoors caused him great pain, as well as the humiliation of not being able to keep up with others. About this infirmity he was extravagantly sensitive, and would do all he could to conceal it. As a child it had caused him agonies, especially when his mother had taken him to doctors to have it ‘cured’. Even worse, at moments of stress while she had been bringing him up alone, as an only child, deserted by his father, she used to bawl him out as ‘a lame brat’. For this he was never able fully to forgive her, even years after her death.36

  So, even if he had wished to, Byron could not have participated in most of the expeditions that Hobhouse made alone, or with others, to inspect ancient sites. His antipathy towards Lord Elgin and the removal of the ‘Elgin Marbles’ from Greece has perhaps been doubly misunderstood. The pleasures of the antiquarian (whether or not legitimate by modern standards) had to be rather differently experienced from horseback. And anything that Byron could not share in, he was inclined to resent.

  Years later, he tried to explain part, at least, of his attitude:

  Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical – the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands? The COLUMNS of Cape Colonna [Sounion]? or the Cape itself?…There are a thousand rocks and capes – far more picturesque than those of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves…But it is the ‘Art’ – the Columns – the temples…which give them their antique and their modern poetry – and not the spots themselves.37

  What affected Byron was neither the ancient nor the modern in itself, neither the ruins of human achievement nor their natural surroundings, taken in isolation, but the conjunction of both. Lawrence Durrell was later to try to capture a similar idea in the phrase ‘spirit of place’. Sigmund Freud, when he first stood on the Acropolis, reported a ‘disturbance of memory’ that years afterwards he would explain as the shock of discovering that something he could remember, as an idea, from early childhood, actually existed.38 Something comparable seems to be reported by Byron when he described, a little over a year later, how

  the sense aches with gazing to behold

  The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon[.]39

  If the ruins of a dead civilisation were to be seen as extensions of human remains on a larger scale, then the living traces of the past, preserved through memory and the arts, must be equivalent to the half-lost childhood dreams of mankind itself. Revisiting those primal scenes would enable a kind of visionary reconnection to a past otherwise unreachable. Greece offered a secret conduit, a back-channel, through which something that had gone for ever could possibly be recovered. Byron was ready, now, to move on.

  Beyond ruins

  In Athens, the travellers were lodged in two adjacent houses in Thekla Street, owned by two sisters, one of them the widow of a Greek who had been British consul. Byron is supposed to have flirted with all three teenage daughters of the widow Makri. To the youngest, the twelve-year-old Theresa, he addressed the poem that guaranteed her fame for the rest of her long life: ‘Maid of Athens, ere we part…’. It has a refrain in Modern Greek. From this it can be seen that either Byron's language was faulty or he was not on close enough terms with the beloved to address her familiarly. It was not, in any case, a very romantic affair. Just before he and Hobhouse left Athens, Hobhouse drily records: ‘Teresa, twelve [years] old brought here to be deflowered, but Byron would not.’ Later, Byron would claim that the widow had offered to sell her youngest daughter to him for 30,000 piastres.40 So it may have been the price, rather the girl's age, that put him off.

  The firman, or official edict, granting permission for Byron and Hobhouse to continue their travels to the east was despatched from Constantinople on 7 February. It would have arrived not long after the middle of the month. The day after the episode with Theresa and her mother, a British naval captain offered them a passage from Piraeus to Smyrna and they hastily accepted. They arrived on 10 March, and stayed just over a month. This was their first landfall outside Europe. It was also their first experience of an Ottoman city, which in this case was also a busy commercial port. They did not like what they saw.

  The time that Byron spent at Smyrna seems to have marked a low point in his travels. He and Hobhouse were put up at the house of the Consul-General, Francis Werry. Byron was often bored. The consul's wife flirted with him, undeterred by being ‘fifty-six at least’, in Hobhouse's perhaps uncharitable estimation. ‘Werry very sulky, so Byron and myself determined to be very proud all dinner time’, Hobhouse recorded about halfway through their stay.41 Byron sounds sulky too, in a letter to his mother written the day before: ‘I have written to no one but yourself and Mr. Hanson [the lawyer responsible for his financial affairs], and these are communications of duty and business rather than of Inclination.’ This must have been hurtful to Mrs Byron to receive. He continued, harping on a theme that recurs throughout these letters: ‘I keep no journal, but my friend Hobhouse scribbles incessantly.’42

  The truth was that Byron, too, was scribbling incessantly in Smyrna. Curiously, although there is evidence that he showed it to Hobhouse while he was working on it, he never so much as hinted at the existence of Childe Harold in any of his letters until he was on his way back to England, a little over a year later.43 On 28 March, the first draft of Canto II was finished. He would make some important additions between now and its publication, two years later almost to the day. But, for the time being, his first large-scale work was done. He would wonder, during the next leg of his travels, about continuing it with another canto.44 But in the event it would be six years before he took up Childe Harold again. He had been writing intensively for five months. It would not be surprising if the effort had drained him.

  From Smyrna, he made only one significant excursion with Hobhouse. This was to the ancient site of Ephesus, some fifty miles to the south. They rode through farmland that at first reminded Hobhouse of England. Further on were marshes and wooded hills. Ephesus in ancient times had been a seaport, but the sea has since receded many miles. Their first night was spent in a Turkish village. A stork had built its huge nest in a tree. At its foot was a small Muslim cemetery. On their way they stopped to rest in the shade of the trees by some more gravestones. A little further on, they found camels and goats grazing.45

  An air of languor and gloom hangs over the expedition to Ephesus. This was the scene that would come back to Byron six years later, when he incorporated it into the poem ‘The Dream’, that in turn would become the basis for the painting by Thomas Eastlake, ‘Byron's Dream’. What would stimulate that memory, six years on, was talk with his new friends, the Shelleys, about ghosts. There was certainly something ghostly about this expedition as he and Hobhouse experienced it. They had been told that they should expect to hear jackals howling on their journey. What they in fact heard was probably only the croaking of frogs in the marshy ground. But Byron would ever afterwards insist that he had heard, and even seen, ‘the hyaena and the jackall’ among the ruins of Ephesus.46

  The temple of Diana, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, had vanished so completely that another century would pass before its foundations could be identified. Very little of the city that has since been excavated would have been visible in 1810. Bu
t the site is so vast that much of it still remains in the form of the overgrown shapes of masonry sticking up out of the marshes, that Byron and Hobhouse would have seen. Sometimes the ruins themselves had evidently been built out of yet older ruins: Hobhouse recorded an inscription from blocks that had been incorporated into a building, upside down. Even he was infected with the mood of the place. His first impression was of ‘a scene of the most perfect desolation’. Later on, wandering the ruins at twilight, both he and Byron ‘found it most desolate and melancholy’.47

  Back in the consul's house in Smyrna, sitting up late into the night, Byron was intensely nostalgic for the other side of the Aegean that he had left behind. It was at about this time that he wrote the stanzas of Childe Harold in which he meditates on the possibility that Greece might ever, one day, be ‘restored’:

  A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;

  An hour may lay it in the dust: and when

  Can man its shatter'd splendour renovate,

  Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?48

  It was the baleful operations of time and fate that had been most in evidence at Ephesus and on the way there.

  In the same section of the poem he wrote wistfully of Greece as a ‘Land of lost gods and godlike men!’ In Athens the temples at least still stood, even if plundered and decayed. But at Ephesus Byron seems to have felt the presence only of death. Even more depressing than ruins was the absence of ruins, where one of the ancient world's greatest buildings should have been. This sense would become intensified at the travellers’ next stop after Smyrna, Troy.