David Crane

Byron’s War, by Roderick Beaton – review

Although Lord Byron is hailed as a national hero in Greece, his legacy has been largely destructive, says <em>David Crane</em>

On 16 July 1823 a round-bottomed, bluff-bowed, dull-sailing collier-built tub of 120 tons called the Hercules made its slow, log-like way out of the port of Genoa. Roderick Beaton writes:

Aboard were a British peer, who happened to be one of the most famous writers of the day, a Cornish adventurer, an Italian count, a Greek count, a doctor and a secretary (both Italian), half a dozen servants of several nationalities, five horses, two dogs and a prodigious amount of money in silver coin and bills of exchange.

The Hercules was not the most glamorous vessel to carry Lord Byron towards Greece and immortality, nor was the ship’s company the most bellicose to have sailed to a ‘seat of war’, but then little about Byron’s last days has ever corresponded with legend. In the years since the outbreak of the Greek revolution in 1821 there had been some desultory talk of volunteering, but the Byron who went aboard the Hercules in the summer of 1813 might just as easily have gone to Spain or a South Sea island as dedicate his fortune and life to a country, a people and a dream that he had invariably seen with a very un-Philhellenic clarity.

It is unlikely that Byron himself could have said what finally induced him to quit Italy — memories of his earlier eastern travels with John Hobhouse, ennui, conscience, a sense of his own mortality, duty, flattery, a hankering after a life of action, destiny — but for Beaton the answer is far simpler. ‘Above all, there was Shelley,’ he concludes, as he at last launches Byron on his Greek adventure with an explanation of how he got there,

Over the years, the persuasive ‘Snake’ had become his conscience, inverting the biblical role of the evil tempter.

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