With Childe Harold for the time being finished, and neither Byron nor his host in any better humour, it was time to leave Smyrna. The Salsette, a thirty-six-gun frigate of the Royal Navy, would shortly be on its way through the Dardanelles to bring home the ambassador from Constantinople, at the end of his tour of duty. Byron and Hobhouse were glad to embark.
The Salsette was obliged to wait, at anchor off the Dardanelles, for a firman to arrive from Constantinople granting permission to pass the forts that guarded the entrance to the straits. Hobhouse reread the opening of Homer's Iliad and was prepared to concede that the beach off which they were anchored, ‘flat, broad and shelving’, could well have been the place where the Greek ships had been drawn up, during the ten-year siege of Troy. Where the city itself had been was more difficult to determine. It was not until the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s that the site known at the time as Hissarlik was identified beyond reasonable doubt. Until then, opinion had been fairly evenly divided whether there had ever been such a city, or whether the epics of Homer and other ancient myths had been pure invention. Hobhouse approached the question with scholarly enthusiasm and a dose of scepticism.49 What mattered to Byron was the intense reality of a place in which the present could be experienced, lying superimposed on the past. As before at Ephesus, it troubled him in the Troad that the visible signs of such a famous past were so few.
With Hobhouse and several of the ship's officers, Byron rode for miles over the scrubby, low-lying landscape. The only antiquities that were clearly identifiable were burial mounds. Tradition had attributed these, ever since Roman times, to illustrious Greeks who had fallen during the siege of the city. To his mother two days later, Byron wrote bleakly, ‘all the remains of Troy are the tombs of her destroyers’.50 Years later, his comic creation Beppo would be ‘cast away / About where Troy stood once, and nothing stands’. This scene of absence would be recreated again in Don Juan.51 The next day the whole party set out on horseback in a different direction, overland to the Hellespont, the narrow strait that divides the Asian shore from the Gallipoli peninsula in Europe. Here, Byron and one of the ship's officers tried to swim the channel, but were driven back by the cold and the strong adverse current.52
Over the next two weeks, while the Salsette was still held at anchor waiting for the firman to arrive, Hobhouse records several trips ashore, but on foot, which means that Byron was not with him. Byron might possibly have gone exploring on horseback elsewhere, but there is no indication that he did. He seems to have spent the entire time cooped up on board. Perhaps he was imitating the behaviour of Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, who had famously sulked in his tent, a few hundred yards away, while the battle raged across the plain. Or perhaps he was practising swimming from the ship. Byron, more than most people, hated being thwarted. He would not have given up hope of swimming across the Hellespont, if another opportunity were to present itself. Aboard the Salsette, inactivity caused tempers to flare. Captain Bathurst bawled out Byron for ‘getting up late’. Ordinarily, he would have been quick to take offence, and his response to insult could be extreme (in Malta he had challenged an officer to a duel). But aboard a British ship of war the captain's word was law. Byron appeared at breakfast the next morning – for the first time since joining the ship at Smyrna.53
Then on Thursday, 3 May, Byron got the chance he had been hoping for. The Salsette had permission to proceed. But for several days the wind had been blowing strongly from the northeast, making the passage of the straits impossible for a ship whose only means of propulsion was sail. While they lay at anchor off the European shore, Byron and his companion from his last attempt, Lieutenant Ekenhead of the Marines, swam from one shore to the other, the lieutenant in one hour and five minutes, Byron in one hour and ten.54 It was one of the greatest exploits of Byron's life. He would boast of it repeatedly in prose, in verse, and in conversation as long as he lived.
It is worth pausing to wonder why this particular feat mattered so much to him. It was not just that he had overcome the natural hazards of intense cold, a treacherous current, and his own disability. The exploit also had a literary dimension. The ancient Roman poet Ovid had told the story of the love of Leander, of Abydos in Asia, for a girl called Hero, who lived in Sestos on the European side. Leander used to swim across the Hellespont each night, until he lost his way in a storm and drowned. The story had been retold in English verse by Christopher Marlowe, and a few years later Byron himself would invoke its setting in one of his ‘Turkish tales’, The Bride of Abydos.55 In re-enacting Leander's exploit, Byron temporarily became the hero of an ancient legend, a character in a treasured story. A moment from the remote past was made real, and lived, again. It was the very opposite of the absence that had so oppressed him at Ephesus and now, most recently, in the Troad.56
A few days afterwards, while the elation of the event was still on him, Byron wrote a light-hearted poem about it. In these lines, he says something more about the motive that had prompted him to risk his life in these dangerous conditions. Leander had swum ‘for Love’, but ‘I for Glory’.57 Homer's heroes had accepted that they would die young, in order to live for ever in the ‘fame of men’. Much the same ethos held true for the contemporary Greek klefts, as Byron probably by this time knew. It was an idea to which he would return, many years later.
Liberation
Byron's impressions from the two months that he and Hobhouse spent in the Ottoman capital, Constantinople (today's Istanbul), were of a rather different sort. They left no trace upon the early editions of Childe Harold. But, in the seventh edition, in 1814, he would add seven stanzas that celebrate the brightness, colour, and movement of a city that had once been the capital of the Greek-speaking eastern Roman empire. He knew that Greeks such as Londos dreamed of restoring Constantinople as a Greek and Orthodox capital city once more (this, minus the Orthodoxy, had been the political vision of Londos’ hero, Rigas, before him). But Byron had also seen the Ottoman state in all its pomp and splendour, as well as its squalor and occasional horrific cruelty. He had been present at an audience with Sultan Mahmud II in the Topkapi palace. As he saw it from the perspective of 1814, the great city might conceivably change masters:
But ne'er will freedom seek this fated soil,
But slave succeed to slave through years of endless toil.58
It was decided at this time that Hobhouse would go back to England with the Salsette and the returning ambassador. Byron thought he would stop off in Greece and stay there on his own, perhaps for another year. As he acknowledged about himself while in Constantinople: ‘I am quicksilver, and say nothing positively.’59 He also began to draw wider conclusions from his travels. These he summed up for the benefit of a friend back in England, namely: ‘that all climates and nations are equally interesting to me; that mankind are every where despicable in different absurdities; that the farther I proceed from your country the less I regret leaving it…I would be a citizen of the world’.60
The Salsette left Constantinople on 13 July. Four days later, at the harbour of the small island of Kea, not far from Athens, Byron said goodbye to Hobhouse. The parting was ‘non sine lacrymis’ (not without tears), as the latter recorded, quoting the Roman poet Horace. Byron's comment was more brutal: ‘got rid of Hobhouse…[T]hough I like him, and always shall,…he will never be any thing but the “Sow's Ear”…I feel happier, I feel free.’ The same night, Byron was back in Athens – a place, he quickly decided, despite the searing heat, ‘which I think I prefer upon the whole to any I have seen’.61
For the first time in his travels, Byron was on his own. His only link to England was William Fletcher, the faithful valet who would remain with him until his death at Missolonghi fourteen years later. But even Fletcher was under notice that he would be sent back to England ahead of his master. It was now, and in all probability not before, that Byron sought liberation in a form that would remain a taboo subject until the 1960s.
Ever since setting out, the already pr
omiscuous Byron had been alert to the possibility of discovering new forms of sexual experience on his travels in the East. While waiting to sail from Falmouth, in June 1809, he had been excited, in anticipation, by the presence of so many young sailors, and may have gone swimming in the harbour with some of them.62 From his Cambridge friends William Bankes and Charles Skinner Matthews, he certainly knew about homosexual practices. In student circles such as theirs it was well known – and the fact was much discussed – that sex between adult males and adolescent boys had enjoyed particular esteem in the ancient world, especially in classical Athens. Neither Byron nor Hobhouse seems to have been much surprised by the discovery that the latter records in his diary during their first month in the modern country, and that would even find its way into the notes to Childe Harold: ‘paederasty is practised underhandly by the Greeks, but openly carried on by the Turks’.63
Probably, up to the time when he left England, Byron had had no homosexual experience. The story that he had ‘corrupted’ his pageboy, Robert Rushton, has been dismissed as just that. For the choirboy John Edleston, whom he had befriended at Cambridge, his feelings were surely sexual. But the poems he wrote addressed to Edleston (or ‘Thyrza’) surround their object with a romantic aura of untouchable purity. In real life Byron recognised a strong need to keep his distance from Edleston. It was not only that homosexual behaviour in England was illegal, and could even carry the death penalty. For all his later courting of scandal, in many ways Byron the late-arrived aristocrat could be socially conservative. Though his most recent biographers have tended to suppose he was as promiscuous with men as with women, it is quite possible that Byron never had sex with a man in England.64
In Greece, where others did, Byron did too.
In the Londos household at Vostitsa, his eye had been caught by a young man whom he must have befriended quite openly, because when he met up with him again he could describe him to Hobhouse as ‘my dearly-beloved Eustathius’ and ‘the dear soul’. Returning six months later without Hobhouse, when he left Vostitsa he took young Efstathios Georgiou with him. But, despite the youth's apparently ardent devotion, the idyll was a dismal failure. Byron wrote an exasperated account of these adventures to Hobhouse, in which it does not appear that he is being anything less than frank. There is no reason to suppose that anything happened that could not have been witnessed by Fletcher, who must have been present throughout. Homoeroticism was in the air. But, the way Byron tells it, there were too many elements of farce for anything more serious to have happened.65
Opportunity came his way in Athens. By this time he had moved out of the Makris household to the Capuchin Convent round the corner, in today's Plateia Lysikratous. All that stands from Byron's day is the ‘lantern of Demosthenes’, the monument built in the fourth century BCE that was at the time incorporated into the convent walls and functioned as a kind of monastic cell. Here he found he could happily relive his student days, with none of the annoyances or demands of Cambridge. Apart from the Father Abbot and himself, the other occupants of the convent were six young students with whom, Byron reported, ‘We have nothing but riot from Noon till night.’ One of the students was Nicolo Giraud, whose sister was married to Lusieri, the Neapolitan painter who was still being employed by Lord Elgin to bring the last of the sculptures from the Parthenon frieze out of the country. (Despite this association, Byron was on excellent terms with Lusieri.) Nicolo was about fifteen. His parents were French but he had been born in Athens, spoke Italian like a native and Greek fluently. Soon he was helping Byron to practise both languages. In return, Byron took Nicolo swimming at Piraeus. He affected to be shocked that the boy bathed naked, as he himself did not.
On 23 August, Byron wrote to Hobhouse of the progress he was making. Heavy hints indicate that this was to be understood as more than linguistic. Using a cryptic abbreviation from Latin that had originated with Matthews’ homosexual circle at Cambridge, Byron declared, ‘I must arrive at the pl & opt C, and then I will write to [Matthews]’. Coitum plenum et optabilem (‘full intercourse as much as I could wish’) is the narrator's reward in a scurrilous episode of the novel Satyrica, by the Roman author Petronius, written in the first century CE. The point of the code was that in Petronius’ story the intercourse had been between an adult male and an adolescent boy. Byron had no need to resort to code to report his female conquests to his friends, including Hobhouse.66 Although he could have been referring only to the new prospect of sex with Giraud, having previously ‘arrived at’ the desired point with others, it is more likely that a line was about to be crossed for the first time. Matthews (himself inexperienced) had promised Byron at the time when he left England: ‘of the pl&optC, should I be so happy as to obtain one, or of the progress towards it, you shall be fully informed’. Byron hoped soon to be able to return the compliment, via Hobhouse.67
It worked. The first ‘pl & opt C’ took place at the monastery below Mount Penteli that Byron and Hobhouse had visited together. Thereafter, Nicolo Giraud became his constant companion for the remainder of his time in Greece. Fletcher, now seriously an inconvenience, was despatched to England in November, and young Giraud was promoted to be his ‘Dragoman [interpreter] and Major Domo’.68
On his first (and longest) trip with Nicolo outside Athens, to the ancient site of Olympia in the Peloponnese, Byron caught a fever and became seriously ill at the house of Strané, the consul in Patras. Probably it was malaria, caught from the mosquitoes of the Alpheios riverbed whose silt at that time almost completely covered the site of the ancient Olympic Games. Nicolo nursed him with such devotion that he too fell ill, and it was Byron's turn to perform the same offices for his nurse. While he was still recovering, he wrote a high-spirited account for Hobhouse of all that he had suffered, for which he blamed the local doctors as much as the disease. But in a sober exchange of opinions with a clergyman friend, after he had returned to England, he would confide that he had thought he would die in Patras.69 By 4 October, recovering with Nicolo from the fever and only six weeks after he had reported his early progress, Byron boasted that he had ‘obtained above two hundred pl & opt Cs’ and was ‘almost tired of them’. If that was anywhere near true, it might have been another reason for his near-death experience in Patras and the extreme fatigue that followed, after he returned to Athens.
There seems to have been something joyous and extravagant about the affair. When Byron came to make a will, back in England, the principal bequest, outside his family, went ‘To Nicolo Giraud, subject of France, but born in Greece’ – to the tune of 7,000 pounds. As late as 1815, Nicolo would write in a mixture of English and Greek, ‘Oh my dear master I cannot express the pain my heart endures from not seeing you for so long. Oh that I might become a bird and fly, to come and see you even for an hour[.]’70
During his second winter in Athens, in the disorganised but collegiate atmosphere of the Capuchin Convent in Plaka, Byron became a student again. He was keeping company with antiquarians and artists from several countries of Europe. These foreigners were harsh in their judgements of the people among whom they lived. The accounts of the country that he had read, by western travellers, tended to be disparaging too. None of the friends he made at this time was Greek. But, perhaps through Nicolo, who had never lived anywhere else, Byron was roused to try to imagine how all this must seem from a Greek point of view. As he put it in a short essay on the present-day Greeks dated ‘Franciscan Convent, Athens, January 23, 1811’, ‘instead of considering what they have been, and speculating on what they may be, let us look at them as they are’.71
To pursue these enquiries, he had to have a tutor – a native of the country, and someone of more advanced education than young Nicolo. His choice was probably severely limited. Athens was not, at that time, among the several centres of Greek learning in the Ottoman empire. Ioannis Marmarotouris is regularly described by editors and biographers as ‘a leader among the Greek patriots’. All that Byron himself tells us is that he was ‘a Greek of Athens’.7
2 Marmarotouris is not otherwise known to Greek history or Greek literature. He had collaborated in a translation into modern Greek of the influential work of historical fiction, The Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, that had first appeared in French in 1788, and hoped – against all probability – that his pupil could help him have it published in London. A printed prospectus for this work, with a list of subscribers, that Byron brought home with him, is dated 1799, so Marmarotouris’ hopes cannot have been very high when he gave it to Byron twelve years later.73 Otherwise, Marmarotouris appears in print only as the translator into Greek of an edifying treatise in Italian, written ‘by a merchant’ for the benefit of those wishing to go into business, and published in Trieste in 1800.74
Throughout the first months of 1811, at the Capuchin Convent, Byron seems to have worked diligently with Marmarotouris. It was during this time that he assembled all the miscellaneous material on modern Greece that he would later publish in the ‘Notes’ to Childe Harold. Only some of this material is included in the standard modern editions.75 It was no doubt with his tutor's help that he produced a series of translations of popular poems from the ‘Romaic’ (or Modern Greek). One of these was the Greek version of the ‘Marseillaise’ that he had first encountered with Hobhouse in Londos’ household at Vostitsa. Another is a love song about a beautiful girl called Haidee. From Candia (the modern Heraklion, capital of Crete), his friend John Galt sent him the manuscript of a narrative poem, The Shepherdess, that had been written in the Cretan dialect around the year 1600. Byron refers disparagingly to this in his letters at the time, perhaps reflecting his tutor's opinion. He would not have been able to read it without assistance from Marmarotouris. But it must have left its mark, because almost ten years later he would combine the story of the Shepherdess with the name in the love song to produce the Haidee episode in Don Juan.76
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