Byron's War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution

"Beaton is another historian of modern Greece. He’s also written about global Greece—Greeks, wherever they might be found. He’s very smart and a very good historian. I think he’s retired now. What surprised me about this book is that there was still more to say about Byron. I couldn’t believe it! I thought, ‘Here we go again, more Byron. As if we didn’t have enough portraits, books, poetry, biographies, etc.’ Beaton did something different. He stripped Byron of our assumptions that he belonged in Greece and would die in Greece for Greek liberty, and asked what he was doing before. I don’t know whether Beaton would agree, but the way I understand what he’s writing, Byron was experiencing some sort of midlife crisis and ennui. Byron’s thinking, ‘I’ve inherited now, I’ve had a very good sex life with both genders. I’ve lived in Italy. I’ve met the Shelleys. My body is not what it used to be. Now what?’ Byron is a certain kind of liberal. He begins to contemplate going to Spain, where there’s a revolution. He thinks about Italy, which also has revolutions going on. He wants adventure. He wants to be alive again. He wants to feel and be seen as vital. In the end, he decides on Greece because of its Classical past. As Beaton says, ancient Greece was always Greece’s trump card. So Byron dons the very colorful uniforms—both European military and Greek traditional, as he understands them—and goes to what will become modern Greece. He begins to fund factions of the revolution as his way of becoming relevant and feeling masculine again. Beaton narrates this very well, both as a historian and as a writer. It’s a very good read. Byron had a lot of money, both his own funds, because he’d inherited his wealth from Scotland, and also money from a loan that had been put together in the London bond market to fund the Greek Revolution. But nobody knew who the Greek government was, because they were all killing each other. So Byron arrived as the emissary and made the decision to give the money to anyone except the Peloponnesian landowners. He funded them with money, which to them was unprecedented, spectacular and unimaginable. They then used this money to hire mercenaries to crush the old elites and tip the balance of the Greek Revolution. Usually, we think that Byron came to help the Greeks. But he decided who the Greeks were and then gave them spectacular sums of money to do it. Then he died, as you would expect from a Romantic poet. That’s what Beaton is getting at. It was something really specific. It wasn’t just Greece, it was that Greece."