Greece through classical antiquity: Byron and the distorted prism in Childe Harold’s pilgrimage and Don Juan
Bruno Lykiardopoulos
When considering British Romantic Hellenism, one figure undoubtedly stands out. Lord Byron, the most prolific 19 th -century poet who wrote about Greece, is often held responsible for perceptions about the birth of the modern Greek state in the views he instilled in both his contemporary and present-day readership (Roessel, 2002). To understand the perceptions of Greece which Byron exported to the world one must first understand what informed Byron’s perception of the Greece he saw and wrote about. Byron’s often highly contradictory writings reveal two dominant and competing influences which coloured and informed his perception of Greece: Greek modernity and Greek antiquity. The former concerns the influence of Greece’s contemporary political situation on Byron, whether that be the effects of the Greek War of Independence or wider modern Greek culture. The latter concerns the allegedly overriding influence of classical/ancient Greece, be that its ancient principles, archaeological beauty, or mythology – the so called ‘distorted prism’ of interpretation. Such an ‘undisputable’ position seemingly renders competing influences insignificant; suffocated in the anoxic purgatory of constant lamentation for a fallen Greece. The object of this essay will be to navigate between these two interpretations in the context of the poet’s major ‘Grecian’ epics; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimag e (CHP) and Don Juan . This essay will contend that classical antiquity cannot be said to be the sole influence on Byron in his writings about Greece. Rather, one can observe a gradual evolution in Byron’s writings which ultimately allowed Greek antiquity to co-exist with Greek modernity. Byron therefore challenged the distorted prism of classical antiquity, and in doing so split the melancholic refractions and blinding idealism that had plagued the nation for most of its modern history. Understanding the influences on Lord Byron is integral to understanding the Greece he portrayed and subsequently released to the world. As David Roessel argues, ‘ in the eyes of the West, the poet created Greece twice — first when he put the Greece of Byron down on paper and later when he played a major role in the liberation of the country ’ (Roessel, 2002, p. 80). I will here focus solely on Byron’s ‘first creation’ of Greece, and the vessel through which such a creation was borne – Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage . Following Byron’s fashionable ‘Grand Tour’, he arrived in the eastern Mediterranean and in Greece, where his travels in the Ottoman-occupied territory provided material for the first two Cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Britannica, 2021). Published in 1812, the work catapulted Byron to fame, and made him one of the world’s first true ‘celebrities’, as Byron turned his experiences and opinions about Greece ‘ into a bestseller ’ (Beaton, 2016, p. 3) . What actually informed Byron’s opinions about Greece in CHP , however, needs to be investigated. Some argue that the ‘dominating’ influence of Greek antiquity can be identified in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage through what has come to be labelled as ‘ the fetishized past ’ (Pregnolato, 2018). This is the tendency of the aristocratic and educated circles (of which Byron was a member) to venerate classical antiquity to the point of fetishization. In the opening cantos of CHP, it seems that Byron repeatedly engages in such ‘aristocratic’ signposting to describe and contextualize the Greece he saw before him
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