‘In Greece, and for Greece’
Lord Byron’s death there in April 1824 created an enduring legend. But the real story of the poet’s mission to help Greece in its revolution against Ottoman Turkish rule is one of hard-headed politics, which goes straight to the heart of the country’s present-day crisis, says Roderick Beaton.
In the summer of 1823, when the 35-year-old Byron sailed from Italy for Greece, there was more than one war going on there. Two years into the revolution large parts of the country had already been freed. A relative lull in hostilites on the external front left the way open for a much-needed reckoning among the Greek leaders. Out of the resulting internal struggle would be forged the future shape of Greece as the modern nation-state that we know today. It was to the settling of this internal conflict, and not the war against the Turks, that Byron would make his most significant and far-reaching contribution. It came down to a conflict between rival political concepts of what it meant to be free.
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