Episode 393 - Lord Byron: Part 1

Speaker 1 With the holidays on the horizon, many of us are thinking of those we love and the perfect gift to bring a smile to their faces.

Speaker 1 You've tried socks for your dad, novelty mugs for your co-worker, that protein powder that makes you explosively shit yourself for your gym bro.

Speaker 1 Buying the right gift for the people you care about can be a minefield, and we here at the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast are here to help.

Speaker 1 So when your father is struggling with whatever flat pack bullshit Santa has brought your parents, and your mother is in the kitchen eyeing up a burning turkey and that bottle of gin thinking, next year we're going to my sister's house, your brother is playing with Warhammer, and your sister is being cyberbullied for saying that beans make you gay, why not bring the whole family together?

Speaker 1 Bring them together with anecdotes about how given the context of the Algerian War of Independence, your grandfather is likely a a war criminal.

Speaker 1 With 50% off annual subscriptions using code DEC25 all through December at patreon.com forward slash lines led by donkeys, why not give them a gift they'll love?

Speaker 1 This Christmas, give the gift of history.

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. Joe, Tom, and I are Suliot warriors in Ottoman Greece in 1824.

Speaker 1 We're Christian Albanians, dreaming of the day when we'll be able to invent the concrete bunker and achieve an earthly paradise.

Speaker 1 And for the time being, we're willing to fight on the side of the Greek revolutionary government.

Speaker 1 Because, hey, so long as weird statue guys from northern Europe are funding the revolution, there's money to be had. We're very much interested in beating back the Ottomans.

Speaker 1 And it comes as welcome news that a fabulously wealthy British aristocrat and author has joined our cause, seemingly to lead us in battle.

Speaker 1 We're a bit surprised when we meet him, given that he walks with a limp and seems far more interested in going on long swims every day than anything combat-related.

Speaker 1 But we're willing to entertain some eccentricities. As it stands, we can at least get paid our paychecks, as well as the paychecks of about five other ghost soldiers for each individual fighter.

Speaker 1 It's a great scam. More people should try it.
The thing about our new commander, the one they call Lord Byron, he seems to keep getting ill.

Speaker 1 And every time he gets ill, his doctors insist on doing bloodlettings. They keep slapping leeches on his head or opening his veins.
And it doesn't really seem to be helping.

Speaker 1 Do you think this guy is actually going to be able to take the field of battle?

Speaker 1 Asks Joseph of Armenie, our largest and strongest man, famous for rolling huge rocks down comically steep hills at unsuspecting Ottomans who always react with moans of pain that also sounds sexual somehow.

Speaker 1 It just seems like he's either fainting or making himself throw up after lunch. I've heard legends of men like this, says Nathaniel of Elvitia.

Speaker 1 In the olden days, they'd never open a man's veins to heal him. They had a tincture that could heal all wounds and certainly remedy any deficiencies of the spirit.

Speaker 1 They called it something like the white beast or the white monster. I've heard of this man too, says Tomas of Erlandia.

Speaker 1 He'd visited our shores more than ten years years ago, and among the village youths, they also spoke of a white monster. But from what I can recall, it was more to do with the size of his hog.

Speaker 1 Doesn't it seem a bit ridiculous that he'd travel across the seas only to immediately die from kennel cough? Joseph asks. I didn't know you could die from the sniffles.

Speaker 1 It's like he's got stage four ouchies.

Speaker 1 No, he's not going to die, Nathaniel says. That would be way too stupid.

Speaker 1 That would be like leading a violent millenarian religious movement and then suddenly dying in the middle of it because you ate grass.

Speaker 1 We are, of course, shocked about five minutes later when we learn that our commander has in fact died from the surprising and seemingly implausible medical side effect known as not being able to fight off an infection after they cut all your veins open.

Speaker 1 He'd come all this way, after a lifetime of writing all those poems that always rhymed so goddamn much and having so much sex, most of it problematic, for the noble cause of Greek independence, and then he'd immediately kicked the bucket.

Speaker 1 In the end, all he'd done is make himself a nuisance to us. It's fine, Thomas says.
I'm confident in our victory. I'm confident we'll beat back the hated Turk.

Speaker 1 And I'm confident that this will be the last time a perverted British guy comes here and annoys the piss out of everyone in Greece. It'll absolutely never happen again.
I'd bet my life on it.

Speaker 1 Gentlemen, how are you doing?

Speaker 1 I love to die on the campaign from something that afflicts puppies.

Speaker 1 Well, look, as we'll discover, Byron's attitude towards physical activity and self-preservation probably didn't help much, but bloodletting with non-sterilized medical equipment probably didn't help either.

Speaker 1 It's not ideal.

Speaker 1 Leeches dangling from his forehead.

Speaker 1 He's got parvo from a litter of Greek puppies. Nothing is going great.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I learned more from your cold open about Lord Byron already than I knew before, because the only thing I knew him as is the guy who had like a bear as a pet in university.

Speaker 1 I had no idea about any of this shit. There's quite a bit that kind of forms the Byron myth, but

Speaker 1 if you dig into detail, you realize how much of it is either like over-summarized or kind of like apocryphal or, you know, like

Speaker 1 kind of a legend given longer life. And it either doesn't stand up to scrutiny or it does, but not in the way that it's purported to.
So

Speaker 1 for the listener, we are in fact going to talk about Lord Byron and Lord Byron in the Greek War of Independence in the early 1820s.

Speaker 1 And this episode is going to begin in a manner that's a bit unconventional for our usual format, and that I'm going to tell you how the story ends right up front.

Speaker 1 On April 19th, 1824, George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron, died in Missolonghi, Greece, a city that was at the time experiencing its second of three sieges by Ottoman forces during the Greek War of Independence.

Speaker 1 It's not an exaggeration to say that Byron was among the most famous poets in the English language at the time of his death, if not the most famous.

Speaker 1 And when he died, he was in charge of a unit informally referred to as the Byron Brigade, a company-sized element of about 100 to 200 men and 30 foreign officers.

Speaker 1 In January 1824, when Byron first fell ill, the brigade was in preparation to attack the Ottoman garrison at Lepanto. Byron had no military experience at all.

Speaker 1 It's entirely possible the attack still never would have taken place, as the revolutionary Greek factions stymied one another to an astounding degree and could not agree on any plan to speak of.

Speaker 1 But, on the other hand, it's entirely possible that it might indeed have.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't dare to venture any kind of prediction of the outcome, but it's safe to assume that at least something about it would have been funny.

Speaker 1 But then again, it's already funny, because Lord Byron achieved fame as a romantic poet, as the creator of the Byronic Hero, the aloof and troubled loner on the run from his past, endlessly in pursuit of the breathtaking and sensory.

Speaker 1 always in love, always heartbroken, always incredibly horny.

Speaker 1 You may not be familiar with his work, but you've probably seen the meme about, I'm coming over, you'd better not be romanticizing your melancholic solitude, featuring the 1818 Casper David Friedrich painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

Speaker 1 That's the Byronic hero. That's basically it.
Later on, we'll get into discussions of Byron's literary work, particularly regarding the poems Child Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan.

Speaker 1 But I'm just saying, right now, if you're confused, if you don't catch the reference, I implore you to enter the words, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, into a search engine and see what comes up.

Speaker 1 That's romanticism. That's genuinely the Byronic ethos in a nutshell.

Speaker 1 I want to return to the prestige tradition of dropping poets into military stalemates, which is why I am proposing to you that we, through the methods of drone warfare, drop Eminem in the Donbass.

Speaker 1 It's like six Walmart drones taped together to carry Slim Shady across the front line.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, he manages to offend both sides of the conflict by admitting that he's not actually that homophobic.

Speaker 1 That means we're going to have to have a second fleet of drones to drop Elton John alongside next to him again.

Speaker 1 Nate Temper, baby.

Speaker 1 That's the way I do. You guys annoy me.
You guys distract me. You know, like I said, I get tastes in my own medicine, but it's all good.
That's how we, that's how we make the show work.

Speaker 1 Going on a musical-based rift on a Nate-hosted episode is like dangling a syringe full of heroin in front of a recovered addict.

Speaker 1 Look, I will say, as someone who understands literally nothing about any of the bands you two ever fucking talk about, Tom has convinced me to listen to two of them, Military Gun and Drug Church.

Speaker 1 Literally wearing a Drug Church t-shirt right now. And they're delightful.

Speaker 1 I stand, you know, corrected for all of the insults that I flung your way. Other than maybe, maybe you need to re-evaluate your own taste in music because I enjoy it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, last night I found myself vibing to some deer hunter deep cuts that I'd never heard before while writing this episode. And in a way, I think that's what Lord Byron would have wanted.

Speaker 1 I was about to say.

Speaker 1 Lord Byron would have loved Craig Owens.

Speaker 1 So, how on earth did this man wind up in charge of a revolutionary military unit in Greece fighting the Ottomans?

Speaker 1 Well, it starts with the British class system, I suppose, and the trappings of aristocracy in combination with a lot of boredom and sexual frustration.

Speaker 1 But maybe it's best to start in the very beginning.

Speaker 1 George Gordon Byron was born in London on January 22nd, 1788, the son of a British Army officer named John Byron and a Scottish aristocrat named Catherine Gordon.

Speaker 1 John, or Jack as he was known to his family, appears in historical records primarily as a dissolute gambler and alcoholic, although he was also a veteran of the American Revolutionary War on the British side.

Speaker 1 He's sometimes referred to as Mad Jack Byron, owing to comments that his son made later on, but there's not any evidence that this was actually his nickname during his lifetime.

Speaker 1 However, it might as well have been, because Jack Byron's reputation while alive could be summarized by two points, marrying heiresses and being a bastard.

Speaker 1 Catherine Gordon was his second wife, and without belaboring the point too much, he treated his first wife horribly and did not change his behavior at all for round two.

Speaker 1 After their marriage in 1785, Jack quickly spent any money of Catherine's he could get his hands on and was constantly in debt. He was absent for his son's birth and Christianing.

Speaker 1 He absconded to France to live with his sister when his son was about a year old. He'd regularly write letters to Catherine asking for money and telling her about the sex he was having.

Speaker 1 He once wrote her a letter describing how a guy got drunk and farted really hard in the tavern.

Speaker 1 Okay, if he wasn't abusing his

Speaker 1 wives, I should say, this dude could be a friend of ours, probably.

Speaker 1 He died of what is presumed to be tuberculosis in August 1791, but it wasn't made any better by the fact that he was notable even in his day for drinking too much.

Speaker 1 And he was in no way interested in his son or his son's well-being. Dad?

Speaker 1 Dad, say you? One thing is a detail here that might be interesting to you is that Catherine Gordon was an heiress

Speaker 1 and her family fortune was worth about £27,000 at the time of her marriage to Jack Byron in 1785.

Speaker 1 By the time that Jack Byron died, by the time that basically Catherine Gordon had separated from him, who we refer to as Lord Byron, George Gordon Byron was about a year old.

Speaker 1 The fortune was probably about

Speaker 1 seven-ish hundred pounds, I think.

Speaker 1 Basically from the title, she was making an annual income of about 24,000 pounds in modern money money compared to a family fortune that was worth about £4 million in modern money beforehand.

Speaker 1 If it wasn't for the money, I would say Jack Byron is an undercover Kasabian. He would have loved heroin.

Speaker 1 Just getting a letter saying the Avignon hoes, bad as hell, let me hold $5.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, literally the letter that he sent was like, he was in a tavern and a man ate so much salad, he farted incredibly loud. He was beastly.
And it's like...

Speaker 1 That's what vegetables does to a man. Imagine you need money, and instead you're getting letters about dudes' big farts from your estranged, drunken husband.

Speaker 1 That's what vegetables did to a man back then. I had a leafy green salad.
I'm shit like crazy. I mean, I personally was shocked that a man was eating salad in 1780-something.

Speaker 1 A single Brussels sprout split a man in twain.

Speaker 1 George Gordon Byron was born with a deformation of his right foot, described as clubfoot at the time, but there are some other hypotheses as to what the condition might have been.

Speaker 1 It was described as a heel that turned upward and a sole that turned inward. He walked with Olympus entire life and suffered incredible self-consciousness about this fact.

Speaker 1 He also grew up in very diminished circumstances. As described before, his father had financially ruined the family relative to its previous wealth.

Speaker 1 He lived in Aberdeen, Scotland, until the age of 10, when, upon the May 1798 death of his uncle, William Byron, 5th Baron Byron, also commonly known as the Wicked Lord and the Devil Byron, he inherited his title.

Speaker 1 That sounds promising. Why was William called the Wicked Lord?

Speaker 1 Well, he apparently loved a dissolute orgy on his estate, but it's primarily because in 1765, he killed his neighbor and cousin William Chatworth in a duel after getting into an argument while drunk.

Speaker 1 He was convicted of manslaughter, but received only a small fine since he was a lord and tried by fellow members of the House of Lords.

Speaker 1 The argument was apparently about the best way to keep game animals on an estate.

Speaker 1 Chatworth said that one needed to be strict with poachers and thus take care of the game, while Byron said the best way was to pay it no mind at all and let nature take its course.

Speaker 1 They are literally Kasabians. Like, Joe, I can imagine you arguing with your uncle about what's the way to keep dogs off the lead.

Speaker 1 But this is this, just wait, because you have to understand what happens next. This argument ended with William Byron stabbing Chatworth in the gut with a sword.

Speaker 1 You'll come to find that stories like these are par for the course in Byron's family history.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is like very white trash coated if you change some of the details, like the game part of it, like if you were arguing with your weird cousin about how he takes care of his ferrets or something.

Speaker 1 the thing is, is that this family had, like, this is an aristocratic family that doesn't actually have any money in a lot of these cases because they have a manorial estate and it does generate income, but very little, you know, in terms of what they're able to then spend money on.

Speaker 1 And in the case of Byron's family, in particular, like, you know, pretty much all of his male relatives, you know, within a couple of generations of him were career military.

Speaker 1 And there's just a lot of, yeah, poor treatment of family,

Speaker 1 dissolute gambling, drinking, violence. And, you know, in the case of these guys, like they have title and status, but like they don't actually really have any money.

Speaker 1 And so, for example, one of the ways that Wicked Lord Byron, the devil Byron, made some money back was to cut down what was effectively pristine forest on the land and like denude the landscape to sell it as lumber.

Speaker 1 So the family history goes back. a bit further in terms of like the land as well.
And there's some interesting stories there.

Speaker 1 So obviously with William Byron, the wicked lord deceased, there were momentous changes in the young Lord Byron's life.

Speaker 1 One of the benefits of the new title was the inheritance of a family estate at Newstead Abbey, located in what is now the commuter belt of Nottingham in the West Midlands.

Speaker 1 It was a destitute home by this point, owing to Byron's family misfortunes, stripped of its grandeur and in desperate need of repairs.

Speaker 1 The original priory on the estate dated back to the reign of Henry II, constructed in 1170 as part of Henry's atonement for killing Thomas Beckett, and under the reign of Henry VIII, it was converted to a manor house.

Speaker 1 From earliest memories of the place, Byron always claimed it was haunted, and given what I've learned so far, I'm kind of inclined to agree.

Speaker 1 Up until that point, Byron's childhood had been squarely lower middle class.

Speaker 1 He was sent to grammar school in Aberdeen, but he and his mother were very much poor by the standards of their extended relations.

Speaker 1 And although the family estate was in terrible shape, and stripped of its furniture by creditors, he and his mother chose to live there for about a year, and the young lord received tutoring.

Speaker 1 Before too long he was living with extended family in Nottingham, experiencing horrible Ursatz cures for his deformed foot that did nothing to help, and apparently getting abused pretty severely by his governess.

Speaker 1 Catherine's agent, John Hansen, eventually intervened to have Lord Byron sent to London, where he might receive better medical treatment and attend school at Dulwich College.

Speaker 1 But Byron was not a particularly good or attentive student, and Hansen eventually pleaded his case to the headmaster at Harrow School, despite the fact that, even by Hansen's own admission, Byron was not prepared for a boarding school like that.

Speaker 1 So, at the age of 13, Byron started at Harrow, which was to be his home for the next four years before he matriculated to the University of Cambridge at age 17.

Speaker 1 As we'll soon learn, he formed crucial friendships at Harrow and Cambridge and took his first steps towards some of the passions that would later consume his life.

Speaker 1 Poetry, eating disorders, exercise anorexia, passionate homoerotic relationships, and being annoying.

Speaker 1 Imagine how much it would sell, because from my understanding of the standard English boarding school experience, it's just mostly hazing and abuse.

Speaker 1 And imagine how much worse that is when you have club, like a club foot.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 One thing to make clear in advance is that a number of details about Byron's personal life are the subject of intense and sometimes incoherent argument on the part of Byron scholars, and particularly Byron diehards.

Speaker 1 I read a number of historical works about Byron, and it's worth noting that when the American Byron scholar Leslie Marchand wrote his first biography in 1958, he was granted access to the Byron archives solely on the condition that he not mention Byron's bisexuality at all.

Speaker 1 It wasn't until his revised work, Byron, A Portrait, appeared in 1970 that he addressed it in any way.

Speaker 1 At the same time, there were innumerable scandals and rumors about Byron's personal life, to include intimations of incest and homosexuality while he was still alive.

Speaker 1 Given what was documented at the time, and given Byron's copious correspondence with his close friends from Harrow and Cambridge, all of them like-minded to at least some degree, about the sex he was having in Portugal and Greece and Italy, there can be no doubt he was bisexual.

Speaker 1 However, that'll be relevant later on as we discuss his post-university career. I bring it up now because there's another aspect to discuss.

Speaker 1 Byron's Scottish governess Mae Gray was dismissed on Hansen's insistence because of her regularly beating the boy. This was not particularly debated in historical record.

Speaker 1 It's quite clear that Byron had a miserable home life, that his mother was emotionally unstable, that he was often physically abused.

Speaker 1 However, according to Byron's lifelong friend John Cam Hobhouse, Hansen later told him that Gray also sexually abused Byron.

Speaker 1 The historical debate around this stems from the fact that the exact words used here were as follows.

Speaker 1 Quote, when he was nine years old at his mother's house, a free Scotch girl used to come to bed to him and play tricks with his person, unquote.

Speaker 1 There are scholars who claim that the unclearness of this phrasing leaves it open to debate, but I'd say that in the context of early 19th century correspondence, it seems to leave very little doubt.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's pretty cut and dry. It's like when you read letters from around this time and a little bit before it, like...

Speaker 1 when the terms like ravaged are used, like you know exactly what that word means in the context of the day. Everybody knows what these mean.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Marchand also noted that in Byron's 1821 work, Detached Thoughts, the author had said, quote, my passions were developed very early, so early that few would believe me if I were to state the period and the facts which accompanied it, unquote.

Speaker 1 This presents an issue with threading the needle, because as we're going to learn, Byron was no stranger to being a complete bastard to people, particularly to women.

Speaker 1 Some of the details I'm going to recount in this episode are pretty grim and unsettling, and it's hard to not come away from it with the impression of Byron as a massively self-obsessed and solipsistic person.

Speaker 1 Some of his romantic obsessions, while likely never sexual, are completely indefensible in the modern day and uncomfortable to read about even from a distance of over 200 years.

Speaker 1 Some of his sexual history is similarly upsetting, and I'm not going to sugarcoat that either or try to hand-wave it.

Speaker 1 But throughout the reading I've done for this, I'm also left with the impression of him as a deeply self-loathing and self-conscious person.

Speaker 1 Some of the depictions of him as a child immediately upon becoming a lord describe a boy with manic nervousness who compulsively bit his fingernails, who clearly never felt comfortable in his own skin, and who was made the object of abuse and ridicule because of his disability.

Speaker 1 To say that all of the above played a role in his later personality is putting it very, very mildly. Byron was at times an exceptional and also eminently distracted student.

Speaker 1 His infatuation with and rejection by an older girl that he met while in school caused him to leave Harrow for a while, and he likely wouldn't have finished his studies if not for the interventions of his mother and his seemingly very patient headmaster.

Speaker 1 He did go on to form deep friendships with a small circle of other boys, which would last into adulthood, although not long into adulthood, as many of them died quite young.

Speaker 1 In fact, the turn of phrase that effectively broke his heart was

Speaker 1 in his pursuit of this girl was that she basically said, I have no interest in that lame fat boy, as in physically lame and overweight.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, he had to be kind of cajoled to come back to school because he was humiliated. He would have been about 15.
But he did, he did finish at Harrow and went on to go to Cambridge.

Speaker 1 The entrance process was still quite informal, especially for someone who was a lord. I can imagine, like, yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't like,

Speaker 1 effectively, if he wanted to go, he could. The hardest part about all this for poor young Byron is because of the time, he didn't even have a cell phone he could forget to charge.

Speaker 1 The Irish hadn't invented hot chip yet. So

Speaker 1 because of his club foot, he already naturally sat weird in chairs. I hate both of you that I know what all of that means.

Speaker 1 We didn't have artificial reproduction of sound yet, and so there was no such thing as a speaker system, and therefore there was no such thing as an ox chord that you did not ever want to pass to Lord Byron.

Speaker 1 An ox chord was just a chord that you plugged into a literal ox. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 He's trying to find continental, like commissioning works from continental composers to create like the first death heaven record in 1815.

Speaker 1 Byron's requesting the most obnoxious songs to be played on the hurdy-gurdy. Exactly.
Why is this man going down to the tavern and asking the accordion player to play some Swedish artist named Robin?

Speaker 1 My God, the tavern loot player is playing Never Meant by American Football Again. Hey, I like American football.

Speaker 1 Joe's secret identity starting to come out here. Fuck! So, what I've just described was also true of Byron's time at university.

Speaker 1 Probably the most consequential of his friends from school was John Cam Hobhouse, who was two years older than him and, by all accounts, a far more stable person.

Speaker 1 Hobhouse was Byron's entry into politics, as he helped him join the university's university's Whig club, as in the Whig party of the early 19th century, and he would remain a trusted confidant throughout his life.

Speaker 1 Hobhouse loved and was exasperated by Byron in equal measure, and some of his correspondence is extremely funny in its honesty.

Speaker 1 For example, Byron was, by all accounts, a voracious reader, but nowhere near as thorough as he pretended to be.

Speaker 1 Hobhouse later mentioned that while Byron may truthfully have read over 4,000 novels by the age of 15, as he'd claimed, quote, it is certain he never gave any sign of this knowledge afterward, Unquote.

Speaker 1 I'm enjoying the continuity of teenage lying and that, like, a couple hundred years later, there was like kids that I went to school with who were like, yeah, bro, I've like prestiged like 14 times in COD.

Speaker 1 I'm like, it doesn't really work that way, bro.

Speaker 1 But also, I find it very funny that that was a posthumous comment. He waited till he died.
He'd be like, that motherfucker didn't read shit. What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 I love that that specific lie still carries over to a very particular kind of guy today. It's like, oh, I've read like a thousand books.
Like, no, you haven't.

Speaker 1 If you haven't read Ovid, then you can't call yourself a real man. And it's like,

Speaker 1 I actually think that Byron would have, I do think he, if you read in his correspondence and also in the literary allusions, especially to like classical writing and mythology in his poems, it's obvious that he did, in fact, read and understand this stuff.

Speaker 1 But I think that he...

Speaker 1 What you'll find with Byron is that he was kind of willing to purport himself to be whatever to anyone so long as that would like make them like him and then completely forget about it, completely change his mind and act somewhat confused that people ever expected him to do the thing that he told them that he was going to do all the time in relationships, in political things, in his commitments to causes.

Speaker 1 This is the norm with him. Or IP, Lord Byron, you would have loved the invention of the tote bag.

Speaker 1 Oh my goodness. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I will say it would have been easier for him to keep condoms, which he famously kept in his waistcoat and was constantly writing letters to his friends when he was living in Europe to please post me more condoms because they're illegal in Catholic Europe.

Speaker 1 I'm honestly more surprised he used them.

Speaker 1 Oh, he learned to use condoms by force effectively, and I'll get into that not too long from now. Byron also made a drinking cup out of a human skull while a student at Cambridge.
All right.

Speaker 1 Quote, a skull that had probably belonged to some jolly friar or monk at the abbey about the time it was demonasteried, unquote. He would have been about 20 years old when he did this.

Speaker 1 He wrote a short poem about it entitled Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull. He also apparently loved taking laudanum, which is a distillative opium.

Speaker 1 He's Midwestern. I keep telling you, he is a cassava.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, Britain is big Indiana is kind of starting to take on form here.
He kept a pet bear in his university accommodations, basically as a means of annoying the university.

Speaker 1 who'd forbidden him from having a pet dog as per the rules.

Speaker 1 Byron was a lifelong lover of animals and particularly loved dogs, but the rules didn't say you couldn't keep a fucking bear in your room, did they? You wouldn't download a bear, would you?

Speaker 1 You wouldn't house a bear. This is quite impressive for a guy who's strung out on opium all the time to think of all this.

Speaker 1 He's not necessarily strung out on opium all the time because he used laudanum, but I think most of his consumption was a lot of alcohol and then a lot of like kind of purgative exercise.

Speaker 1 You'll find that with him, it's always like feast or famine. It's always intense highs, intense lows.
Oh boy, I haven't heard heard that one before, Dave.

Speaker 1 I don't want to put a lot of credence into armchair diagnoses of people from hundreds of years ago, but when you read about his moods as described by people who encountered him like on a personal level regularly, I think it'd be pretty hard to argue that this man didn't have some kind of mood disorder.

Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe from all the substances, who knows? But, like, believe me, I'm alluding to it now. It gets way more intense as his life progresses.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I will say from personal experience, if you're dealing with mental illness, normally self-medicated with opiates, synthetic or otherwise, doesn't really give you great results.

Speaker 1 And also just bear in mind that I mean like the sheer volume of alcohol these guys are consuming. Yeah, it's not good.
And there's a few other things that we're going to get to.

Speaker 1 Two themes that emerge early on regarding Byron's conduct, even as an adolescent, are excessive binges and even more excessive purges.

Speaker 1 He was a profligate spender and drinker, someone who always bought rounds for everyone, and he seemingly couldn't tolerate the concept of money just sitting there.

Speaker 1 But he also dieted obsessively, restricting himself to bland foods and taking on immense physical challenges, particularly regarding swimming and boxing.

Speaker 1 As a teenager, he'd weighed 200 pounds at his peak. He was about right between 5'8 ⁇ and 5'9.
And his earliest crash diets caused him to lose over 50 pounds.

Speaker 1 For the rest of his life, he was fixated on his weight. He'd once said he'd either stay below 154 pounds forever or shoot himself.
In later life, he'd taken this even greater extremes.

Speaker 1 But the behavior was already present while still a teen. Once he lost weight, he found that people seemed to react differently to him.

Speaker 1 They found him attractive, compelling, enchanting, enrapturing even. And so from a young age, the idea of being slim and beautiful became deeply central to his self-conception.

Speaker 1 I'm going to give a summarized version of Byron's early literary career, as he was prolific and also self-censorious to such a great degree that he sometimes tried to intervene and halt publication on his own work.

Speaker 1 He often published anonymously, at least at first. And his first book of poetry, Fugitive Pieces, was published when he was only 17, but he had all the copies burned.

Speaker 1 This was mostly to do with some of the love poems he had written, basically, that he was advised that, you you know, this would provoke a scandal and that it would be embarrassing to his family and to other families, and so he took this advice.

Speaker 1 His first actual published collection of poetry that actually got into readers' hands was called Hours of Idleness and published in 1809.

Speaker 1 It's technically accomplished, for sure, but it's also pretty juvenile in the sense that some of the poems are about college exams and going to school and odes to girls on which he has crushes.

Speaker 1 It's obvious, though, he's quite talented, he's quite skilled, he's learned the forms of as poetry was expected to be at the time, but it's it's also not a surprise that he was ripped to shreds by at least one review after it was published.

Speaker 1 But he did get back at the review with a work of satirical verse published anonymously called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. It was because it was the Edinburgh Review that had made fun of him.

Speaker 1 He'd used it as an opportunity to be bitchy about romantic poets who'd received critical acclaim, which seems entirely in keeping with what we know of him as a person.

Speaker 1 I will admit that the jokes of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers fly a bit over my head because it's all very much stuff you'd only get if you also went to accent school and learned to translate ancient Greek.

Speaker 1 But it was apparently scandalous to a degree, and he did later regret it when he made friends with many of the poets and the reviewer he dumped on. That must have been awkward.

Speaker 1 Like, he's he's lying about how many books he's read. He's, you know,

Speaker 1 sleeping around. He's addicted to, well, he's overusing opiates.
He has a pet bear. He's engaging in like supreme, you know,

Speaker 1 scaring the hoes activity. He is the most Twitter bisexual ever.
Yeah. We didn't know that we created Drake in the late 1700s.

Speaker 1 That's unfair. We don't know exactly how old his partners are.
Oh, brother.

Speaker 1 Oh, man.

Speaker 1 I'm not a male manipulator. I'm just a man in the Byronic mold.
I'm a Byronic hero. Byronic Drake is probably the worst thing we've ever invented.
Thank you. It's not male manipulator behavior.

Speaker 1 It's just being a Byronic hero.

Speaker 1 However, However, upon leaving school in 1809, Byron decided to make a grand tour of Europe, but the route of his actual tour took him to Portugal, Spain, Corsica, Sicily, Malta, Greece, and Turkey.

Speaker 1 This was to do with the fact that Northern Europe was embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars and many other conflicts.

Speaker 1 And so it was easier to basically sail directly from England to Portugal and then begin his travels there, some of it by sea, some of it overland.

Speaker 1 He obviously got a charter on our sponsored vacation package with the Stotatic Express. Stotatic Sunshine.

Speaker 1 Yeah, to be fair, the Stotatic Zone hadn't been invented yet, but I think Byron would definitely contribute to the notion that latitudes made Englishmen get horny for other men or other males, because there's some definitions we have to go through here.

Speaker 1 A trip like this was an expectation for aristocratic men as a kind of cultural refinement and finishing school, but also, let's be honest, as an outlet for northern European sex drives.

Speaker 1 In Byron's own recollection, he attributed his desire to leave to restlessness of spirit and a hope of encountering new sensory experiences, which is all squarely in line with the romantic sensibility, by which I mean capital are romantic of romanticism of the early 19th century, the school of poetry to which not only did Byron belong, but is the absolute avatar of in the English language.

Speaker 1 He was deeply in debt at this point and had no real income to speak of, but he financed it anyway by taking out loans and borrowing funds from friends and extended family relations.

Speaker 1 He traveled for two years, particularly with John Cam Hobhouse, but then also partially alone, or at least without accompaniment from similarly aristocratic friends, because he always was traveling with a retinue of servants and assistants and such.

Speaker 1 He had to seek and receive permission to visit Greece and Turkey, which required some diplomatic wrangling given that it wasn't necessarily easy for foreigners to visit Ottoman territories at the time.

Speaker 1 He was at one point invited to Ali Pasha's court in Albania, and there seems to be very little historical disagreement of the following fact.

Speaker 1 Alipasha, who was at that point about 70 years old, very much wanted to fuck him.

Speaker 1 I've heard of this invention called a twink.

Speaker 1 That's coming from the faraway lands. I love that you used that word just in advance of the next paragraph.

Speaker 1 It's very unlikely that Alipasha was successful in his endeavors because there's no evidence to suggest that Byron was attracted to older men or to men his own age, aside from emotional relationships with male friends that he'd made in his adolescence.

Speaker 1 Now, of course, anything is possible.

Speaker 1 And it's very funny to read depictions of horned-up Septuagintarian Alipasha making invitations for the unexpected English twink granted to him by fate to visit his private quarters after hours when he'd be less busy, as he put it.

Speaker 1 Twink of fate is the least known Final Fantasy ultimate weapon.

Speaker 1 I mean, every Final Fantasy is basically Twink of Fate, let's be honest.

Speaker 1 It's like the branding at this point. Byron was by this point regarded as a profoundly beautiful man, with contemporary accounts describing his bright blue eyes and curly brown hair.

Speaker 1 But given what we know of him, chances are good that he wasn't into 70-year-olds. The only hint we have of Byron having any sexual relationship with any older man was clearly negative and traumatic.

Speaker 1 In recollections and correspondence, he seemed to hint at the idea that one of his mother's companions, a man named Lord Gray Deruthen, did something terrible to him when he was about 15 or 16.

Speaker 1 There's no clear record of what it was, but Byron did make it very clear that he hated Deruthen and considered him his enemy.

Speaker 1 He was very much attracted to males though, and that's where things get a little bit uncomfortable. Byron was attracted to women and men younger than him, and at the time he was 21 years old.

Speaker 1 From what we know of his romantic obsessions and sexual encounters, he seemed primarily interested in women in their late teens and early 20s.

Speaker 1 By contrast, he seemed to fixate on adolescent boys in their early to mid-teens.

Speaker 1 This was the case when he was 21, and it was also the case when he was 36 when he died.

Speaker 1 In fact, His last verses, composed just before his death in Greece, make reference to his unrequited love for his page, a 15-year-old Greek boy, named Lucas Chalandritsinos.

Speaker 1 I'm wary of trying to explain this away as it was a different time, because I think the differences in standing and agency and power between a member of the British House of Lords and working-class teen boys in Southern Europe would have been pretty fucking obvious even back then.

Speaker 1 But one thing that I do think is relevant here is that the scandal that could result from and the risk of social expulsion inherent in Byron's sexual contact with teen boys was not due to their ages, but rather that they were males.

Speaker 1 Their age wasn't the main issue, quite frankly, because the age of majority was a vague concept and generally started around the time that kids reached double digits, and teenagers weren't afforded any particular degree of consideration or protection in the eyes of the law back then.

Speaker 1 They were treated as adults. Now, we don't have to pretend to be particularly objective on this podcast.
We shouldn't.

Speaker 1 And I think we can take a definitive position here by saying that it's a good thing that society has evolved along these lines in the 200 years since Byron's lifetime.

Speaker 1 But when we talk of Byron's sexual orientation, when it comes to

Speaker 1 his romantic and sexual contact with other males, it is teen boys.

Speaker 1 And even less understandable, and certainly less defensible, is that Byron also seemingly had strong romantic feelings for even younger girls as well, by which I mean girls aged 11 and 12.

Speaker 1 From what I've read, there's not any evidence of any kind of sexual advances on his part, but he did profess his love to some of these girls, write love poems for them, and in one case, write to a friend that he'd probably marry one of them, quote, once she reached marriageable age, unquote.

Speaker 1 In 1810, Byron apparently offered to buy a 12-year-old Athenian girl named Teresa Macri for marriage and then reneged on the offer, writing to Hobhouse that Teresa's mother, quote, was mad enough to think I was going to marry the girl, unquote.

Speaker 1 Teresa was the subject of Byron's poem, Made of Athens Ere We Part, but there doesn't seem to be any indication that he ever corresponded with her again after leaving Athens.

Speaker 1 It's a real shame that Byron did not own a yacht and the IRA had not been invented yet. I mean, a yacht's going to come up later in the story.
We're talking about a lord pedophile.

Speaker 1 Of course, there's a yacht involved. God damn it.
Is this what it feels like when you guys come to work and I'm like, by the way, today we're talking about horrors beyond human comprehension.

Speaker 1 And you're like, oh, no, Lord Byron's this very weird and interesting

Speaker 1 historical character. Surprise, he's a pedophile.
Like, fuck.

Speaker 1 This is why Nate will never truly leave the British Isles because the most psychically damaging thing he can come up with is hitting the non-solar room.

Speaker 1 The thing about it is, though, is that I think that Byron also, as we'll discover we go in here, had, well, there's two things. He had significant amounts of relationships with adult women.

Speaker 1 They were always younger than him, but the kind of stuff we're describing here wasn't the norm. He also, when we talk about these relationships, they're really uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 Something I'd point out is that Byron always knew where to draw the line in terms of what would be too much for English society.

Speaker 1 I think that like if he'd wanted to pursue sex with men or teen boys the age that attracted him in the UK. There were brothels where he could do that.
He never did.

Speaker 1 There's no historical record that he, he certainly did frequent sex workers. They were all women.
There's no evidence that.

Speaker 1 So, what's strange about this is that you'll come to find that Byron, it feels as though he both very enthusiastically pursued this when in southern Europe, when it was not, you know, um, socially prescribed, but then later on, it's not addressed.

Speaker 1 And the way he treats the people that he did enter into relationships with is, to me, some of the worst.

Speaker 1 Like, a lot of this stuff is uncomfortable, but I think the way that he treated both the adolescent boys with whom he had relationships and the adult women with whom he had relationships, particularly in one case, it's like irredeemably bad.

Speaker 1 So, modern day, like I understand in the context of the day, but modern day Byron,

Speaker 1 instead of going to Greece, he just spends a suspicious amount of time in Southeast Asia.

Speaker 1 I mean, you know what, though?

Speaker 1 Probably, but also like this is kind of fucked up, but like the ages that in terms of at least for gay sex, the ages, that would still be legal in places like Italy and Portugal now, quite frankly.

Speaker 1 Gross. Thank you for that.
Yeah. I hate it.
This is the truth. I mean, yeah, it's uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 It's uncomfortable, but I think both for the way that our way that we view power dynamics and relationships, as well as like the, the, just the gross outness of sort of like, oh, it's just above the age of consent.

Speaker 1 It's like kind of fuck off. That's weird.
In this situation, Byron was what I'm about to talk about, talk about, was 21 years old, which is obviously different than if he were 50.

Speaker 1 But as we go on, you'll discover that he died when he was 36. The behavior, the attitude, certainly the romantic fixations, that never changed.
Fair enough.

Speaker 1 I look forward to learning more about Britain's first libertarian.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, classical liberalism is basically

Speaker 1 libertinism. So you know what? Libertarianism.

Speaker 1 Look, what I just described about The Maid of Athens, Ere We Part, and that story is treated pretty breezily and not a lot of seriousness or a lot of consideration in historical scholarship, which has something of a disorienting effect when you read it in 2025.

Speaker 1 Now, like I said before, it was probably not all that much out of the social ordinary, given some of the other things

Speaker 1 we've talked about. But we should, in my opinion, just try to not mince words here.

Speaker 1 When you read a poem with the lines, quote, by that lip I long to taste, by that zone encircled waste, unquote, and you then learn it's about a 12-year-old whose family saw a potential economic incentive to sell her off to marriage to a 22-year-old foreign aristocrat.

Speaker 1 It's fucking weird. It's fucking weird.
Oh, I hate this so much.

Speaker 1 It's also indicative of Byron very much staying within the limits of what would be considered acceptable versus over the line for a man of his social standing.

Speaker 1 And that's where we get to probably one of the more,

Speaker 1 well, I'm not going to say distressing, but just so much as like, this may be uncomfortable, bear in mind for this paragraph. There is, of course, more.

Speaker 1 During Byron's travels between 1809 and 1811, he met and befriended a 14-year-old French-Italian boy in Greece named Nicolas Giraud, and it's beyond doubt that they had a sexual relationship.

Speaker 1 He later brought Giraud to Malta and paid for his education, but they never saw one another again after the conclusion of his tour.

Speaker 1 Giraud wrote letters to Byron for years, quite passionate letters, thanking him for his help and imploring him to just speak to him again. But before long, Byron stopped replying entirely.

Speaker 1 Byron wrote to Hobhouse in 1810 describing how passionately attached to him Giraud was, bragging that he wanted them to both live together and die together.

Speaker 1 But once the trip ended, it's hard to argue that Byron ever truly gave him a second thought. He did write Giraud into his will upon leaving Malta, but then removed him from it later.

Speaker 1 Early Byron biographers described the relationship as paternal and platonic, claiming that Byron

Speaker 1 was seeking to recapture a kind of youthful innocence, or that he was acting as a philanthropic benefactor and conferring enlightenment upon a bright but underprivileged youth.

Speaker 1 And they claimed that his payments to Giraud and his writing him into the will were effectively thanking him for the Italian tutoring that Giraud provided, which is true.

Speaker 1 And Giraud is probably the reason why Byron was already quite proficient at Italian by the time he did eventually move to Italy.

Speaker 1 But in 1809, Byron took Giraud to an English doctor in Greece to treat him for an infection related to rupture injuries to his anus. So

Speaker 1 I'll leave you to decide what sort of relationship you think it was.

Speaker 1 Oh, god damn it. As a side note, this pattern of intense affection and then total abandonment repeats itself with his subsequent relationships with adult women as well.

Speaker 1 His time with Giraud was most assuredly not the only sexual encounter he had with males during the voyage, as his correspondence with close gay friends in England is replete with coded references to gay sex, specifically an abbreviation of plenum et optibilum coitum, or complete sexual coupling with maximum enjoyment in Latin, albeit somewhat grammatically confused Latin.

Speaker 1 This is a reference to Petrionius's satiricon, and it wasn't until 1958 that Leslie Marchin's scholarship even deciphered this.

Speaker 1 In one of Byron's letters to Hobhouse, he'd asked Hobhouse to relate to a mutual gay friend, quote, that I have obtained above 200 PL and OPT C, which is the code, and I'm almost tired of them, unquote.

Speaker 1 So he was busy. He's penning a letter to his friends.
My dear lords, I have discovered this food in Italy. I have called it cheese pizza.

Speaker 1 I'm not happy with that joke, but go on.

Speaker 1 I don't know because here's the thing, right? Well, I'll finish this paragraph because it's at least a little bit funny. Byron actually also referred to, quote, getting clapped, unquote.

Speaker 1 To quote his turn of phrase, getting clapped, because he was complaining of getting gonorrhea from women prostitutes. Right, right.
He happened to use that term.

Speaker 1 So the thing about it is, is that at the time, Britain was really, really homophobic and getting worse. I'm glad to see that stopped.

Speaker 1 Social opprobrium towards any kind of gay identity or gay sex was stark. At the minimum, you could expect to be imprisoned and probably pilloried for being accused of being gay.

Speaker 1 And certainly the death penalty was, in fact, you people were hanged for it.

Speaker 1 And they were, you know, they had a kind of like proto-vice squad trying to like round people up, catching them in the act, things like that. Boy, Mike, you got a license for that bummery.

Speaker 1 So, when Byron was writing to his friends, one of the things that's interesting is beyond the codedness is that his friends in England, not Hobhouse, as we can tell.

Speaker 1 I mean, Hobhouse just seems to have been a very open-minded person, but

Speaker 1 people like Charles Matthews and Scroop Davies, they were kind of asking Byron to tell them stories to get off because they had actually had never had gay sex because it was too risky.

Speaker 1 They genuinely were like, I've actually never done this. Can you please tell me about it? I really want to know about it.
And Byron was writing these kind of coded letters back,

Speaker 1 intimating as much as he can, making references to Hyacinthos or to Hadrian and Antonius and references they'd all get from classical education.

Speaker 1 But the perception that I can see is that for men of their standing, it was so risky because, like, the cops were trying to catch you and kill you for it.

Speaker 1 I hate being in the romance era group chat with Lord Byron, and his nickname is like Nancy Dave, and he's sending a 14-minute-long voice note into the group chat.

Speaker 1 I should have to point out that I'm not making fun of him for being gay. I'm making fun of him for being a pedophile.

Speaker 1 I guess at the end of the day, it's like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I kind of debated how how to address this because like, I don't want to, to hand wave it, but I also don't know if you, if it necessarily ascribes the same thing, it means the same thing when you describe this because put it this way, everything that made this risky was being gay.

Speaker 1 It was, and in Southern Europe in particular, it wasn't as if they were exceptionally tolerant of being gay, but they were...

Speaker 1 They kind of treated it in the same way they kind of treated adultery in the sense of, yeah, whatever, it happens.

Speaker 1 In terms of being, what would be available, what would be an option for gay and bisexual men or men who had sex with men who were traveling, it was probably going to be young working class people.

Speaker 1 And by young, I mean, you know, teenage and early 20s, because once people were married and more established, it was less, there was more social risk, even if they were quite poor. Sure.

Speaker 1 That's not to say that this doesn't also portray a certain degree of like

Speaker 1 preference on Byron's part, because Byron had, once he became famous as an author, infinity male and female admirers.

Speaker 1 If he'd wanted to fuck men his own age in England and elsewhere, he absolutely could have. He didn't.
So it's weird. Like, look, context, context, context.
We all get that.

Speaker 1 But as we're sitting in what is still the end of 2025, I think we could all agree, ew.

Speaker 1 It's really, it's really uncomfortable. And I think the degree to which these people are all disposable to him.
Yeah, he makes pieces of shit.

Speaker 1 It makes me really, really, it definitely takes any shine that might have been there completely off him. And he was a greatly talented writer, but he was a complete piece of shit.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's just, that's, that's what the conclusion you're going to come to. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, reading his correspondence gives some evidence of his seemingly insatiable sexual appetite, and it's not always coded or subtle.

Speaker 1 For example, later on in Venice, he writes of contriving to meet a woman who'd been blocked from introduction by another foreign suitor, and how he'd, quote, fucked her twice a day for six days.

Speaker 1 Today is the seventh, but no Sabbath day, unquote.

Speaker 1 In another letter, he writes about earning money from writing by saying, quote, what I get from my brain, I will spend on my bollocks so long as I have a tester or a testicle remaining, unquote.

Speaker 1 Bars, bars.

Speaker 1 Perhaps one of the most telling lines from his correspondence, and this is at least funny, is his reaction to the pruriance of English reviewers at his later work, complaining about a critic by saying, quote, did he ever spill a dish of tea over his testicles and handing a cup to his charmer, to the great shame of his nankeen breeches?

Speaker 1 Did he never swim in the ocean at noonday with the sun on his eyes and on his head, which all the foam of ocean could not cool?

Speaker 1 Did he never inject for a gonorrhea or make water through an ulcerated urethra? Was he ever in a Turkish bath, that marble palace of sherbet and sodomy? Unquote.

Speaker 1 He was, at his core, an eternally horny man. His experience in a Turkish bath is much different than my own, but okay.
Well, also, apparently,

Speaker 1 he and his companions, when traveling in Turkey in would have been about 1810, 1811, were so intimidated by the stories of like, if you go into like the inner sanctum of the ham, that the big masseuse is going to beat your ass or whatever, that, like, or like, oh, big dude's going to fuck you, that they didn't actually see any of like the reputable things, or the disreputable things, or at least not to the same extent that were pretty commonplace in the Ottoman Empire at the time.

Speaker 1 And it was during this first voyage, 1809 to 1811, that Byron began work on Child Harold's Pilgrimage, the work that would make him a literary celebrity upon the publication of his first two cantos in 1812.

Speaker 1 It is essentially a verse travelogue of this journey, and I'm going to read one stanza from his depiction of Portugal to give you an idea of what it entailed.

Speaker 1 So, the horrid crags by toppling convent crowned, the cork trees hoar that cloth the shaggy steep, the mountain moss by scorching skies embrowned, the sunken glen whose sunless shrubs must weep, the tender azure of the unruffled deep, the orange tints that gild the greenest bough, the torrents that from cliff to valley leap, the vine on high, the willow branch below, mixed in one mighty scene with varied beauty glow.

Speaker 1 This is technically highly accomplished in terms of like the meter and form, and I can't tell you off off the top of my head how many cantos of Child Harold's pilgrimage there are because he continued writing and publishing additional ones later on.

Speaker 1 But it was the publication of the first two in 1812 after he had returned to England that,

Speaker 1 in his own words, he awoke to find himself famous.

Speaker 1 It's hard to describe the literary celebrity he achieved because it's hard to imagine a long collection of verse poetry causing women to have fainting spells and propose marriage to the author.

Speaker 1 Byron's work was enormously successful, but his financial situation, owing to his profligate spending and incredible amounts of debt, was dire and did not improve with these successes because he, at the time, refused to take money for his work.

Speaker 1 I don't know why it was some kind of aristocratic pride thing, but he was like, no, that basically makes me a prostitute.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to, they publish it and they make money, but I'm just putting my thoughts into the world.

Speaker 1 He would have made thousands of pounds, which at the time was the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's also like congruent with, I suppose, the romantic movement as a reaction to the Enlightenment of like being unbounded and like being free and all this sort of stuff.

Speaker 1 So I can kind of see why he'd be like, oh no, this is not for me.

Speaker 1 Well, also his mother died in 1811 and by that point he decided to sell Newstead Abbey and that took forever and there were a lot of kind of like abortive attempts at selling it where a seller had made an offer and then kind of like backed out of the down payment and then eventually backed out of the deal entirely.

Speaker 1 And so at the time, the deal was for to sell the house for about £125,000.

Speaker 1 And he was basically banking on that. So

Speaker 1 as you'll find later on, his attitude softens towards taking money. But at the time, it was like, well, I'm going to sell this thing that's going to make me a ton of money, thus, I don't have to.

Speaker 1 I can be, you know, artistically uninhibited in this regard, unburdened by commercial concerns.

Speaker 1 Byron continued to publish subsequent cantos of Schild Herald until 1818, and his other works of more Orientalist bent were also massive successes with British readers.

Speaker 1 However, his emotional state was not particularly great after the death of his mother in 1811, and upon his return to England, he effectively lived a life of dissolute manic excess until he finally fled the country for good in 1816.

Speaker 1 The highlights of the Byron Mania era, at least insofar as Byron's personal life are concerned, include having an incestuous affair with his half-sister, which likely resulted in him fathering her child.

Speaker 1 What? Having a

Speaker 1 yes. Yep.

Speaker 1 Byron, that we know of, had four children. Obviously, after Byron married Annabella Milbank, they had a daughter, Ada Lovelace.
He had a relationship with

Speaker 1 Mary Shelley's stepsister, Claire Claremont, and his daughter, Allegra, was born out of that. They never married.

Speaker 1 And in fact, there's some pretty bad relationship stuff that gets into with that child.

Speaker 1 When he was 21, he got one of the cooks in his estate pregnant, and they fired her, but gave her an annual pension of 50 years. A son was born out of that, but it was never acknowledged.

Speaker 1 Although he did write a poem, To My Son. And then the belief that his half-sister, Augusta's daughter, was actually his child.

Speaker 1 So, yes,

Speaker 1 this will come up later quite a bit and also be one of the reasons, like the potential scandal from this, one of the reasons why he decides to leave England entirely.

Speaker 1 He also had an affair with a female admirer named Lady Carolyn Lamb, which he eventually spurned.

Speaker 1 He was back and forth with her, both like basically completely blocking her and then also like professing his love to her. She wrote a satirical novel about him.

Speaker 1 She effectively stalked him in the way that one might be able to, but this also led to a lot lot of kind of social dismay at her behavior just because she was constantly making scenes about it.

Speaker 1 He got married and then separated within a year because he freaked out his wife, Annabella Milbank, so much with his behavior, his drunken rages, his mood swings, his constant allusions to like the dark past he was running from, torrents of abuse.

Speaker 1 And if documents are to be perceived, there's two things in particular that are really fucked up.

Speaker 1 One is that it is he is accused or it was intimated that he pressured her into allowing him him to perform mal sex on her.

Speaker 1 The other is that, and this is better documented, is that his servants had to intervene to stop him four separate times from trying to rape her when she refused to consent to sex in the immediate postpartum period after their daughter was born.

Speaker 1 They had to lock her door and bar him from it. Oh, what a fucking horrible monster.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He, he, this was, I mean, obviously this is, this is described as like his lowest personal point, but like he was a horrible, horrible, abusive person to, to his wife.

Speaker 1 Anyone who's done all of this should be taken out to a field and beaten to death with hammers. That's what I say.
And here's the thing that's fucked up. Marital rape wasn't illegal back then.

Speaker 1 It's still legal in a lot of places, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 This is a thing that Byron, you know, in a way, like, that's another one of those things where I make the point, like, it's good that society has evolved. It's not done.

Speaker 1 The evolution is not done yet, but it's good that we've evolved because some of the stuff we're talking about is really, really, really distressing and upsetting, especially when you kind of picture it with like the kind of burnished legend of Lord Byron, the romantic poet and Greek independence hero.

Speaker 1 And I guess the point that I keep trying to make is that some of the stuff that was considered scandalous was only scandalous because of a minor detail. If it hadn't been,

Speaker 1 you know, teen boys, if it had been teen girls, for example, he was pursuing, no one would have cared.

Speaker 1 If it hadn't been for the fact that his wife was from an aristocratic family and her parents were more powerful and had more money and the ability to basically pressure him in court to separate from her to potentially expose his bad behavior, this kind of abuse of his wife, nothing would have been done about it.

Speaker 1 Like, it's genuinely, it's both a statement of his fucking terrible character as a human being and also a society that really didn't care about women, really didn't care about minors at all, didn't see those concerns, anything that got in the way of property-owning men as a thing to be concerned about.

Speaker 1 So in that regard, yeah, he is a product of his time because it was a time that basically didn't treat women, children, minorities, the poor as human.

Speaker 1 He was a monster because it was a time of monsters. Yes, 100%.

Speaker 1 He just happened to be an incredibly talented writer, genuinely, which is not the first time we've talked about an incredibly talented writer who's a fucking maniac.

Speaker 1 So, in that regard, we're far for the course on this show. Holy shit, is that Yu-Gi-Oh Mishima's music? Yeah, I was gonna say,

Speaker 1 hey, say what you will about him as a monster, but no one ever accused him of being a rapist that I'm aware of. He would have been.

Speaker 1 Don't get me wrong, he would have been. But as far as I know,

Speaker 1 it was so funny because recently someone like asked me a question about my love for Yuki Amishima online. It was like, oh, how do you feel supporting like

Speaker 1 a Japanese fascist? And I'm like,

Speaker 1 look at all of the Yamishima posting online fucking far-right people. You can tell none of them have read a single word that he wrote because if they did, if they did.

Speaker 1 Also, I don't think you could support him. He's dead.

Speaker 1 And also like his attempt at his know, sort of political apotheosis, which is laughed at. Everyone thought he was fucking ridiculous.

Speaker 1 Which is why I like him as a character, not as a person, but as a historical character, I enjoy his story because it is so ridiculous.

Speaker 1 In a way, that's how I feel about some of the less macabre moments about Byron, too.

Speaker 1 There are some things that are so funny and so ridiculous, but then underneath that is a lot of really, really terrible behavior. And, you know, I don't think that you're

Speaker 1 undercutting or demolishing the accomplishments by admitting that.

Speaker 1 It's also an indictment of the times in which he was raised and of the class system that allowed someone from his background to have this power over people. Man, he would have loved the S.H.I.E.L.D.

Speaker 1 Society.

Speaker 1 That would actually be a matchup for the ages, Byron and Mishima. I got Mishima 10 times out of 10.
Dude was jacked. He had two functioning feet and he practiced with a sword all the time.

Speaker 1 Byron was massively into boxing, though. He was an inveterate boxer.
He was in quite good shape. Like he literally swam to Turkey.
Look, whatever's going to happen, they're going to end up fucking.

Speaker 1 He swam the Hellespont. He swam these grand distances in Portugal and in Italy.

Speaker 1 We're talking like miles of swimming, which I mean, I used to be a competitive swimmer, but when you're swimming multiple miles, like wild swimming, that is

Speaker 1 completely

Speaker 1 completely different. I I have a new most deadliest warrior spin-off idea.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, continuing on the sort of Byron mania epic and what was actually going on in his life, he became a society darling and dined out on his reputation while amassing huge debts and running from creditors.

Speaker 1 He had bailiffs sent to his house and he had all his furniture repossessed.

Speaker 1 He gave radical pro-liberalism speeches in Parliament, but didn't really give a damn about politics or the political process because remember, he's as a member of the House of Lords, he is a member of Parliament.

Speaker 1 He took his seat in 1809. He made his maiden speech in 1811 upon his return.

Speaker 1 He decided to leave the country entirely when the scandal of his separation and purported dark history became enough to get him disinvited from dark company. And there were rumors of homosexuality.

Speaker 1 There were rumors of incest with his sister Augusta. And there were rumors about his treatment of his wife.
His wife tried to get him declared insane, but actually the doctor said that he wasn't.

Speaker 1 And so that would have normally been a cause for an immediate separation or like his commitment. And he was determined to not be insane.

Speaker 1 Then Annabella Milbank's parents basically were like, okay, you, Lord Byron, can go quietly and separate, or we can take this to court and people will learn about you. And he chose to separate.

Speaker 1 So after he separated from Annabella and Ada Lovelace, whose first name was actually Augusta, the name of his sister, but Annabella Milbank changed it afterwards.

Speaker 1 It was Augusta, Ada Lovelace.

Speaker 1 That makes it even weirder. That makes it even weirder.
I know he never saw his his wife or daughter again.

Speaker 1 He never once he left in 1816, which at the climax of this period, he never came back to England, he never saw his daughter again, he never saw his wife again. Then all of them were better for it.

Speaker 1 Yes, I would agree.

Speaker 1 Byron's travels abroad once he fled England in 1816 first brought him to Switzerland, where he famously spent time here in Geneva in the summer of 1816, vacationing with Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley, confined indoors due to the notably cold and rainy weather that year.

Speaker 1 Which you absolutely knew it fucking smelled crazy in there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's presumed that the eruption of Mount Tambora the year prior caused a massive cooling effect in the northern hemisphere and came to be known as the year without a summer.

Speaker 1 This had implications like famine and poor harvests and all sorts of stuff in Europe. But in Switzerland at the time, it was quite like single-digit Celsius and rainy the whole time.

Speaker 1 So one of their activities, this group, it was not just the three of them. There were many other people in their group.

Speaker 1 They stayed in separate villas, but next to each other in what's now Colony, which is a kind of a suburb within the Canton of Geneva.

Speaker 1 One of their activities to entertain themselves was to have a competition to write a ghost story, for example, which this John Polidori came up with a story called The Vampire, which kind of brought forth the idea and legend of vampires being blood drinkers.

Speaker 1 And Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein

Speaker 1 or the modern Prometheus set here in Geneva, where

Speaker 1 Dr. Frankenstein creates a sentient being out of corpse parts,

Speaker 1 electrified through amniotic fluid collected from midwives, and then the monster monster achieves sentience and is like, why did you create me and confine me to this fucked up life and gets revenge?

Speaker 1 Shit added out the part where Byron kept trying to fuck it. No, but this is very funny because...
Flat Frankenstein's cheeks.

Speaker 1 I've heard apocryphal stories that describe Mary Shelley as being really annoyed and repulsed by Byron and that, like, oh, she retreated to her room to write the story because he was so annoying.

Speaker 1 I don't find that to be the case in what I've read. She seemed to be really deeply intrigued by him.

Speaker 1 She confessed that he had a really powerful effect over him, but also that he was weird and odd and just perplexing.

Speaker 1 And her nickname for him was Albay, which stems from his tendency to, and I'm not making this up, this is from Mary Shelley's recollections, sing Albanian folk songs at the absolute top of his lungs, apparently at random.

Speaker 1 He's like, hey guys, you want to hear something? And just starts screaming fucking Albanian folk songs. And this is just the scene from Dumb and Dumber.

Speaker 1 He's like, hey, you guys want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?

Speaker 1 But look, I don't think you can make the claim that Byron was anything but annoying.

Speaker 1 I mean, everything I've read, getting deeper into like people who had long-standing personal interactions with him, it's like, this man was,

Speaker 1 I just think he had bipolar disorder. He was like sometimes incredibly charismatic and incredibly charming.
And he always knew how to like work a room and work a crowd and work people.

Speaker 1 But then sometimes it's like he just breaks down into tears of weird shit and just goes on these insane, you know, melancholic episodes. He, the man.
had something wrong with him emotionally.

Speaker 1 I think that's very clear. And when he's finally out of the pits of like, you know, his, the lowest of the peaks and valleys, he just starts screaming Albanian folk songs like, well, he's back.

Speaker 1 No, he's doing, he screams the happy Albanian folk songs when he's happy and the sad ones when he's sad. So he's kind of like a weather pain.

Speaker 1 Mary Shelley rubbing your temples saying, if I have to hear one more fucking thing about a bunker, I'm going to fucking shoot myself.

Speaker 1 If I have to hear one more song about how Greeks don't exist,

Speaker 1 I'm going to take enough Laudenham to kill me. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 So Byron's relationship with the Shelleys was complicated by his brief relationship with Mary's stepsister, Claire Claremont, in that Byron got her pregnant and then basically blocked all contact with her.

Speaker 1 He did provide for his daughter and eventually corresponded through the Shelleys to have his child visit him when he was living in Venice. And then,

Speaker 1 and this is another one of those dark turns, he basically refused Claremont the right to see her child and instead had Allegra placed in a convent in Italy. Now, this wasn't an act of child neglect.

Speaker 1 He wanted her to have an education and he was concerned she wasn't getting an education in the very dissolute environments of like the various villas he was living in in Venice.

Speaker 1 But the story gets darker here because Allegra died after catching a fever in the summer of 1822.

Speaker 1 And Percy Shelley had been trying to get Byron to take Allegra out of the convent because he was concerned about her, you know, her health and her condition. Byron had refused.

Speaker 1 And at the same time, he also refused Claremont any access to her child at the time, seemingly because he resented having to talk to Claremont at all.

Speaker 1 And so he basically blocked the mother of his child from seeing her child, and then the child died.

Speaker 1 Oh, what a real fucking winner he is.

Speaker 1 I read this and I was like, you know, I'm not going to rank things and say they're better or worse, that one act is worse than the other in the sense of like what kinds of things that we now look at and say, this is really fucked up behavior.

Speaker 1 But I don't think there is a moral universe that has ever existed among human beings that aren't pieces of shit where this behavior would be, this specific behavior would be accepted.

Speaker 1 I'm worried that my daughter isn't going to get a good education because I'm hot catching through fucking Italy. Like, just stop doing that.

Speaker 1 You don't have to put her in a convent and strangle off all contact with her mother. Yeah, I mean, Byron was, he was at the time living in Venice.

Speaker 1 He was in relationships with, he found that Venice, Italy in general, and at the time, Venice in particular, to be convenient in that he entered into relationships with married women because there was kind of this chivalric code about being a side piece.

Speaker 1 There was this thing called, it was called a Cavalier Cervante, basically, of like, you know, sort of knight-errant kind of thing.

Speaker 1 The cuck knight.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, well, it was basically, I mean, there's an interesting anecdote about how one of his mistresses getting really upset when he was, he had basically spent some time going on rides in the country and had met a peasant woman, was hooking up with her.

Speaker 1 And this woman came out and tried to start a fight with this peasant woman. And the woman was like, you're not his wife.
I'm not his wife. You're his mistress.
I'm his mistress.

Speaker 1 Like, the person who should be mad is your husband and my husband. So what are you going to do? Yeah, he's a dick-slinging Ronin.
He can do his. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, as I pointed out talking about what he did in the events that led up to Allegra's death, is that Byron was obviously a complicated person and a product of aristocracy and a disturbed person with a traumatic family life.

Speaker 1 But I think you two, us three, and certainly I presume the reader is coming to the same conclusion that I came to while researching this, which is that there's an inescapable fact that he was often a huge piece of shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. More often than not, it seems.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 To like come back to the point about Frankenstein and like whether it is about Byron or not, some people do argue that particularly like Byron's view on God,

Speaker 1 but also

Speaker 1 Percy Shelley really hated that Lord Byron was such a deadbeat dad that like it's a it's a double kind of meaning of it is like Byron's view of God and his view of himself, but also like Byron is like the God and creator, but also the scientist in the sense that like he makes all these children and then just was like, yep, fuck off.

Speaker 1 There were allegations that Percy Shelley had

Speaker 1 gotten pregnant,

Speaker 1 one of his servants, and had basically tried to get her to put the child in a home for foundlings in Vienna. But that's kind of been treated as interpersonal rumors.

Speaker 1 What I know for a fact is that Shelley was much more of a committed atheist than Byron was. And I think Byron's kind of vague deism rubbed him off, rubbed him the wrong way as kind of like cowardice.

Speaker 1 But they were very close friends. They were absolutely close friends.

Speaker 1 And Mary Shelley sitting in the corner is like, both these bitches annoying. Yes.
And also, like, you know, some of the stuff was certainly scandalous.

Speaker 1 And she couldn't really complain about Byron's treatment of her half-sister, the way he treated her, because Shelley had run out on his wife to be with her.

Speaker 1 So, like, it's, it's complicated. All these people suck.
Yeah, they, they suck pretty bad.

Speaker 1 Percy Shelley eventually dies sailing a pleasure yacht that he wanted to name Don Juan after Byron's poem, but Byron was struggling to get it published because English publishers were like, this is this is too scandalous and erotic.

Speaker 1 We can't do it. So they wound up calling it the Ariel.

Speaker 1 And Byron actually helped cremate Percy Shelley's body on the beach after they recovered his, you know, post-drowning.

Speaker 1 His relationship, his friendship with him was complicated, but it was absolutely like a profound friendship. And

Speaker 1 you could say a lot about the problematic nature of the Shelleys and Byron and other associated people like William Blake, but at least what you can say is they didn't do blackface like the Bloomsbury group.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I'm blacked up like Virginia Woolf.

Speaker 1 There's an anecdote that is so fucked up, but also very telling, that when Byron later on sails to Greece on the urging of the London Phyhellenic Committee, he hired a black American to be his servant and cook because he's like, well, in the East, they'll respect you more if you have a black servant.

Speaker 1 It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? Byron inventing inventing proactive racism.

Speaker 1 Byron basically the first instance of the dad from get out.

Speaker 1 Byron was doing dark woke in the 1810s.

Speaker 1 Dark woke by. I mean, dark woke Byron is a thing.
He railed against Lord Elgin for taking the Elgin marbles out of Greece. He was like implacably hostile about that.

Speaker 1 Finally, one thing he railed that I can't oppose.

Speaker 1 I mean, he would periodically, I mean, he was, he was very opposed to the poor laws and like some of the like the debtor punishments being debated and being applied in England, you know, at the time.

Speaker 1 Like he had certain political convictions that like were radical or breaking from the norm at the time that have definitely stood the test of time.

Speaker 1 And I think he was being so committed to like republicanism and liberalism at the time. There's a way in which you can be like, wow, Byron was really ahead of his time.

Speaker 1 And like on a lot of things, yes, he was, but then he was still an aristocrat and he still behaved like an aristocrat and he still both enjoyed and claimed very jealously for himself the privileges of that.

Speaker 1 Like when I read what Lord Byron wrote about

Speaker 1 Ireland in like, I think it's what, like 1811, maybe a little bit later,

Speaker 1 it just reads the same to me as when I have a conversation with an English person now and they're like, yeah, I love kneecap and Fontaine's DC. I'm like,

Speaker 1 yeah, sure. Okay, I don't care if you're one of the good ones.
Yeah, I mean, he

Speaker 1 this kind of tendency is going to come up later in a way that's also a little bit related to Joe's family background. It's quite funny.
Oh, lovely.

Speaker 1 It's not as bad as some of the stuff we've talked about. You might find this interesting.

Speaker 1 But, all right, I know that this is a bit of biographical malpractice, but I have to summarize succinctly a bit of the next few years of Byron's life.

Speaker 1 They were basically, as I described earlier, long bouts of relationships with married women in Venice, and then in Ravenna, and then Pisa, and then in Genoa.

Speaker 1 He did finally sell Newstead Abbey in 1817, and he was able to settle his debts and receive annuity payments well in excess of his expenses.

Speaker 1 He also softened on taking payments for his work and he was able to live very comfortably in Venice without fear of going broke.

Speaker 1 He said that in two years he'd spent about 5,000 pounds while being pretty dissolute by his own standards.

Speaker 1 And at times, publishers were giving him payments of, you know, £3,000, £4,000 for work, in addition to the money he was making, like I said, from the trust established from the sale of his family estate.

Speaker 1 It's kind of crazy that even in modern terms, if you don't convert that to how much £3,000 would be, that's still more than what most writers get today.

Speaker 1 I should think £3,000 would be about £300,000 now, but I'm not quite sure.

Speaker 1 But what he's basically saying was that he was spending as an aristocrat expatriate about £250,000 a year and was earning well in excess of that. That's in modern money.
And so

Speaker 1 he was doing financially well and not worried about debt. He never really worried about debt, but he was annoyed and embarrassed by creditors trying to collect on him.

Speaker 1 This was the first time where he was solvent. And it was during this time that he became interested in the Armenian Catholic Monastery on San Lazaro Island.
Oh, boy.

Speaker 1 Collaborating with the Meriturist monk Father Pascal Ocher on an English-Armenian grammar volume.

Speaker 1 Byron's reason for studying the Armenian language, well, in his own words, He said, quote, I found that my mind wanted something craggy to break upon, and this, the most difficult thing I I could discover here for amusement, I have chosen to torture me into attention.

Speaker 1 Unquote. Oh, that's fair.
Yeah. Language is really fucking hard.

Speaker 1 It also helped that in 1816, while visiting Milan, Byron purchased a volume of classicist study by the Italian Jesuit scholar Angelo Mai, that, among other things, contained a recovered translation of Eusebius of Caesarea's historical work, Chronicon.

Speaker 1 This work had long been considered lost, as no original Greek text of it remained in any lead archives or scholarly libraries, but Mai had found an Armenian language translation of it which he'd subsequently translated into Latin.

Speaker 1 And I don't think it would be particularly difficult to understand why something like this, the discovery of a previously lost classical work, translated only into an exotic language that very few Western Europeans even knew about, would set Lord Byron's imagination alight.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And there's some historical debate as to the level of mastery Byron achieved, or how long he studied the language.

Speaker 1 The common understanding was that he gave up after a few months and he never managed to learn it to any significant degree.

Speaker 1 His role is mostly summarized as a proofreader and benefactor to the publication.

Speaker 1 However, a scholarly article from 2015 shows evidence that the 1819 corrected reprint of this grammar text contains significant writing from Byron in English, involving translations of Armenian sentences, which were written at a time when Aacher's command of English was very limited.

Speaker 1 It is actually entirely possible that Byron became quite proficient in the Armenian language. Sucker learned Western Armenian.
That's not even useful today.

Speaker 1 In addition to this, there's an anecdote that I personally heard from a friend of the show who was educated in the Mectarist order related to Byron's studies there.

Speaker 1 He was never allowed to sleep at the monastery because the priests were concerned he'd tried to seduce the monks. Now,

Speaker 1 this is entirely possible, but I wasn't able to find anything to substantiate it.

Speaker 1 What I did find, though, is the utter confusion on the part of Father O'Cher and the other priests at one can only call Byron's periodic bipolar episodes to include him randomly breaking into tears at the sight of a crucifix, seemingly out of nowhere, and saying he hoped one day he might become a Catholic.

Speaker 1 I can just imagine the head of the Armenian Catholic monks at Salmazaro putting his hand on Byron's shoulder, like, listen, Ape, you're too sexy. You have to go.
We can't contain ourselves.

Speaker 1 The thing that's funny is he would ride a gondola to and from for study, but also like, I mean, reading what I've learned now about Byron's life in Venice, I think that if he wanted to fuck, he'd just go home because that's what he did all the time, especially during Carnival.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I mean, imagine the, like, the kind of thing that comes to a guy like Byron, where he's like, I get to fuck a priest or a monk.

Speaker 1 Or a novice monk, most likely, which would probably be squarely within the age he would be attracted to. Yeah, it would be like an altar boy.
Yeah. Just like the Catholics have those.
Yeah. God.

Speaker 1 Famously, the Catholics have those.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it's really funny, but then when you start digging, you're like, oh, that might also be like,

Speaker 1 that might actually have just been like a child's safeguarding measure. Jesus Christ.
For the first time in recorded history, the Armenian Catholic Church protected its youth. Well done.

Speaker 1 In quick summary, Byron lived entirely in Italy from 1816 until 1823. Once he left Venice for Ravenna, he tried to get involved in revolutionary activities in Romagna.

Speaker 1 At one point, he joined a secret society called Cacciatore Americani, or the American Hunters, an Italian nationalist group seeking to force the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to become a constitutional monarchy.

Speaker 1 He was disappointed to discover that they were, in fact, quite disorganized, and he was distressed and disappointed when the 1820 to 21 revolutions in southern Italy were completely crushed.

Speaker 1 But his life in Italy was, by his standards, quite domesticated.

Speaker 1 He was effectively a kept side piece, at one point living in the apartment above his mistress or his partner and her husband, who was a count, but found Byron to be politically useful and also was kind of, he was 58 when he married his wife, who was 18.

Speaker 1 So it was sort of like, that's part of the code. Like, I'm going to do this.
She's going to do this. Like, it's strange.

Speaker 1 He's quite literally like a, I said a cuck knight earlier, but he's more like a cuck retainer in like the Ronin sense. He's, he's been brought into the Lord.
One of the other women that

Speaker 1 Byron had an affair with, who was, she was the wife of a baker, and the sign on their bakery was all corno, like, you know, the sign of the horn.

Speaker 1 And they people started very rudely referring to this bakery as like, you know, the English horns, because

Speaker 1 the kind of colloquial Italian expression, when you cuckled a man, you put horns on him.

Speaker 1 So Byron, this was completely out in the open.

Speaker 1 And like I said, Byron was kind of taken aback by the kind of the code controlling this, but also by his admission, he didn't want to be in relationships with single women because, for one, in this kind of Italian milieu at the time, single women wouldn't be willing to have sexual affairs with him.

Speaker 1 Unmarried women wouldn't. But once they were married, it was kind of less proscribed.
And that's the only thing he wanted.

Speaker 1 And also, he was married and didn't want to get married again, didn't want to be with someone that would want to get married. He enjoyed having emotional and sexual affairs.

Speaker 1 He enjoyed going to orgies and having sex with sex workers and generally being dissolute. And also, as we'll get into,

Speaker 1 not doing a lot of work on himself as regards body image issues.

Speaker 1 I mean, with all the ups and downs, the peaks and valleys, like emotionally, and all the sex that you're like, do you think he was a fucking sex addict? Like, it seems possible, right? Oh, yes. Yes.

Speaker 1 No, 100%. I think, I think that he, I don't want to be like X happened and thus Y happened, but like, I think that

Speaker 1 he was treated very poorly when he was very young.

Speaker 1 And he was sexually initiated by force and by coercion and also in an environment where aristocratic men had more or less a prerogative to, if not force sexual relationships, to pursue them quite openly with people where they were the servants, they were people of a lesser rank.

Speaker 1 And combine that with what you said about his constant self-image issues.

Speaker 1 None of this would surprise me. Now he's using his vast wealth, his position, and

Speaker 1 anything else to get the thing that makes him feel better for only a fleeting second because then he always ghosts people and vanishes.

Speaker 1 And he mostly at this point, I mean, I think that there's less correspondence, there's less less detail for one of the reasons is that the men with whom he would have corresponded about, you know, the sex he was having with, with, with teen boys in Southern Europe when he was 21 and 22, they had all died, either illness, accidents, things like that.

Speaker 1 In one case, it's presumed that the man may have committed suicide. And so, and he was, I think, a little bit more discreet at the time about what he, because he had such a poor reputation in England.

Speaker 1 So, what we know about this time, like, it's safe to assume he probably was sexually voracious all the time for both women and adolescent boys.

Speaker 1 But what we know of is his very well and quite open affairs living with at times married women from mercantile or aristocratic families in Italy, in

Speaker 1 the case of Teresa Gamba, the wife of a count. But I was going to talk about the body image issues really quickly.

Speaker 1 So at this time, Byron would starve himself on soda water and dry biscuits to maintain his weight. He would chew tobacco and chain-smoke cigars to fight hunger pangs.

Speaker 1 And in the words of his friend, the English adventurer Edward John Trelawney, Byron would eventually become so hungry that, quote, he would make up a horrid mess of cold potatoes, rice, fish, or greens deluged in vinegar and gobble it up like a famished dog.

Speaker 1 Unquote, oh, God. He went for long horseback rides and swims, agonized about the visible signs of aging, and experienced even more bouts of deep melancholy.

Speaker 1 He got up late, worked at night, and took diuretic doses of Epsom salts if he perceived any weight gain in himself, which he documented by measuring the circumference of his wrists every morning.

Speaker 1 He would have loved cocaine.

Speaker 1 R.I.P. Lord Byron, born way too early for cocaine and also to read The Will to Change by Bell Hope.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 R.I.P. Lord Byron, if you had read The Body Keeps the Score, you probably just would have become worse.
Born at the perfect time to practice at the peak of Italian polyamory.

Speaker 1 If he was alive today, he'd be like close friends with Peter Thiel and have a blood boy. I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think he probably would have found, he would have found Peter Thiel vulgar because he only made money through business and didn't make money through, you know, pursuits of the mind and wasn't born into money.

Speaker 1 But also, I don't know, like Byron is interesting because like he effectively, by being an anti-monarchist, is

Speaker 1 condemning aristocracy in its own right. And he's also like, I am the world's most aristocratic aristocrat.
So, you know, oh, wow. This guy fucking self-contradictory.
Who would have thought?

Speaker 1 It was during this time he had the longest and most stable relationship of his life with a married woman named Teresa Gamba, the Countess Guccioli.

Speaker 1 She was about 20 when they'd met, and she'd been married at 18 to a 58-year-old aristocrat.

Speaker 1 Her family were deeply involved with the Italian Republican militant group called the Carbonari, a political viewpoint that Byron shared as well.

Speaker 1 What's strange is that this relationship was known and seemingly condoned by her husband, as I've described before.

Speaker 1 It was also during this time that he began writing his last major work, a poem entitled Don Juan.

Speaker 1 It is effectively an allegory of the Spanish folktale of Don Juan, the great lover and womanizer, except in Byron's telling, Don Juan is meek and innocent and constantly getting seduced by women.

Speaker 1 It is not particularly scandalous by modern standards, but a great frustration of this period of Byron's life was convincing his publishers to even consider printing it.

Speaker 1 At the time, it was seen as immoral to an extent that no one thought it even could be published.

Speaker 1 It's got some funny details in it, like at one point, Don Juan thinks he's fucked a ghost, among other things.

Speaker 1 It's quite long, though. I hate when that happens.
He worked on, I think there's 18 cantos, though the last one is unfinished, because Byron is going to die.

Speaker 1 When the Greek Revolution began in 1821, it resembled similar nationalist uprisings throughout Europe at the time, at least from afar.

Speaker 1 What differentiated it on the ground was that it was an immediate paroxysm of violence.

Speaker 1 Within the first few weeks after the revolution began on the Peloponnese Peninsula, tens of thousands of Turkish citizens of Greece were dead, murdered by their neighbors.

Speaker 1 It's hardly surprising that Byron would become a supporter of the Greek Revolution. The same revolutionary tendencies Byron had supported in Italy were also taking place in the Ottoman Empire.

Speaker 1 And in Greece's case, the prime intellectual movers were a wealthy, educated cadre of Greek émigrés living abroad in places like Odessa, and also because of the departure of upper-class Ottoman Greeks to Western Europe for university education.

Speaker 1 The idea of restoring a classical Greek identity held significant purchase with this class of Greek intellectuals, as well as with a number of intellectuals in places like Britain and Germany.

Speaker 1 Byron was already a lifelong supporter of liberalism and anti-monarchism, as well as a devout admirer of classical Greek culture, especially after his travels in 1809 through 1811.

Speaker 1 However, it's doubtful that while living in Genoa, he followed any of the events across the Adriatic, particularly closely.

Speaker 1 He certainly did not know of the degree of violence that had already taken place. But, once invited to the cause, he was an immediate convert.

Speaker 1 It was one of his hero friendships that rekindled Byron's interest in Greece, and it arrived by happenstance.

Speaker 1 In March 1823, a surprise visitor called upon him in Genoa, bearing a letter of introduction from Hobhouse.

Speaker 1 The visitor was a man named Edward Blauier, a former Royal Navy captain and descendant of French Huguenot refugees who'd settled in Ireland.

Speaker 1 Blachier was a founding member of the Philhellenic Council of Britain, which Hobhouse was a member, and his approach to Byron was simple: flattery.

Speaker 1 Upon meeting, they spoke for only a few hours, and Blochier convinced Byron that he'd personally be able to make a difference, and that the British contingent in the breakaway Greek government would welcome his presence, and that any money he spent in support would quickly be repaid.

Speaker 1 Through his connection with Hobhouse, Byron began to receive letters from the Philhellenic Committee along the same lines, flattering his power to help and influence the cause.

Speaker 1 These were not people with whom Byron had ever corresponded, and he knew nothing of the day-to-day of British politics by this point. But Hobhouse was one of his closest friends.

Speaker 1 The information he received was, of course, completely inaccurate, but it immediately kicked off the kind of excited fascination it was intended to achieve. William St.

Speaker 1 Clair also documents an interesting anecdote in his work.

Speaker 1 In mid-1823, Byron received two visitors to his home, two stranded German Philhillines who'd run out of money while attempting to return to Germany.

Speaker 1 They approached Byron asking for charity, and he spent long stretches discussing their experiences in Greece.

Speaker 1 These were far more accurate sources of information than the letters he'd received, and the news was not at all good.

Speaker 1 They described the fractiousness and disorganization of the Greek revolutionaries, whose reality was more one of peasant rabbles and local warlords than the high-culture intellectuals of Odessa or Istanbul.

Speaker 1 But crucially, these men were young and earnest and sincere, and they'd been there and seen the fighting firsthand.

Speaker 1 By contrast, Byron was bored, aging, self-loathing, and feeling like his life had never truly had a purpose. After an encounter like this, nothing was going to stop Byron.

Speaker 1 By July 1823, he was on a boat sailing for Greece, and that is where we'll pick up next week.

Speaker 1 So, a few things: bored, self-loathing, thinking his life has never amounted to anything, and then joining the military couldn't be me.

Speaker 1 Second thing, he's been to Turkey, he's hung out with Armenians, now he's going to Greece.

Speaker 1 I think Byron is just trying to get to the real cold facts of which one of us were the first people to put minced beef and rice in a grape leaf.

Speaker 1 It's interesting to me because Byron does not seem to be the kind of person who would like kind of make pronouncements about the cultures he visited in writing, being cynical and like, you know, intentionally glib.

Speaker 1 He certainly was in letters, but not in his published writing. But you will find that like he was pretty devoted to learning anything he could about the places he visited, learning languages.

Speaker 1 learning words for things, learning traditions, learning songs, et cetera.

Speaker 1 He had some good qualities. He had some good qualities, but I think his behavior at the time was

Speaker 1 shocking because it was scandalous, because it was sort of like, oh, this is, you know, this is not behavior befitting a gentleman. He's treated other aristocratic women poorly.

Speaker 1 But we look at it now and there's just so much more in here. We're like, this is fucking atrocious.
And I think that's the thing that the English in general,

Speaker 1 well, English language fans of Byron, British people in general who see him as kind of like part of this Enlightenment, early 19th century pantheon of heroes, like there's a lot of stuff in there that I just think, you know, there was a reason why all the kind of Byron hagiographies and scholars sought to not include this stuff.

Speaker 1 And I think I find the one detail I'll leave you guys on this very funny. Sir Thomas Moore wrote the first biography of Byron after his death in 1830.

Speaker 1 And he, Hobhouse gave interviews for this, but Hobhouse was very much taken aback by some of Moore's kind of explaining away of like why Byron went on the trip in 1809 to 1811 and also why he actually asked Hobhouse to leave.

Speaker 1 He said he, you know, gotten tired of him.

Speaker 1 And there was this argument being made about like, oh, he, you know, wanted to like break with, you know, kind of English cultural trappings so he could immerse himself more in the culture.

Speaker 1 And Hobhouse was like, come on, man. You've, you've got to, like, that's the last reason he didn't want any English people around him.
Come on.

Speaker 1 And what he was saying was basically he wanted to do stuff that would be too scandalous for other English people to know about. So that was known at the time.
His friends knew this.

Speaker 1 You know, like it's, it's just, it's that kind of,

Speaker 1 you know, the, the, like, activation phrase for upper class English people. It always works.

Speaker 1 Upper class British sex freak shocks local population by speaking perfect Greek. And Italian and Portuguese.
And apparently Armenian. Yeah.
I mean, I, I am curious because you guys both said that you,

Speaker 1 Tom, I think you knew a little bit more. Joe, you said you didn't know anything about him coming in.
Only the bear story.

Speaker 1 I'm excited to get to the next episode because it's like he has done the grand tour of collecting all of the swarthy Europeans, and now he's going for the swarthy final boss of Greece versus Turkey.

Speaker 1 I hate that I end up on the same side of him, like historically, where like, yeah, I also want the Ottoman Empire to fall, but, you know, maybe without the serial sex freak.

Speaker 1 Well, something that's interesting, actually about his opinions on the Ottoman Empire is that, I mean, he actually, it's not certain if he was being glib or not, but he would often make comments being like, actually, you know, the Turks are just like us.

Speaker 1 Like, okay, they're circumcised and we're not. We have, you know, drawing rooms and affairs with women.

Speaker 1 They go to bathhouses and fuck boys, but at the end of the day, like, culturally, like, they're basically just like us. And I think he did this to shock, you know, English mores.

Speaker 1 But he also, one of the reasons why the authorship of that Armenian English grammar and his role in it is unclear is that he got into an argument with Father Aacher because

Speaker 1 he wanted to write a preface for it that specifically condemned the sultan, you know, the Ottoman Empire. And Father Aacher was like, I can't publish this.

Speaker 1 They will retaliate against my family in Armenia, in the Armenian regions of the Ottoman Empire. You know what I mean? Like, so basically Byron was like, no, this is a moral obligation.

Speaker 1 And this, you know, Armenian Catholic priest who was far older than him, who was quite exasperated by Byron's excesses and insane attitude and just like emotional comportment, was like, no, I'm not getting my family retaliation killed because you want to prove a point about a thing you learned about a day ago.

Speaker 1 That's like the perfect encapsulation of that kind of person. It's like, why don't these people do more about these like horrible crimes and injustices?

Speaker 1 Like, because we don't want our families to be fed into a wood chipper somewhere. Yeah.
You fucking idiot.

Speaker 1 Like, I know you got like hyper-fixated on this part of like what you consider social or justice or liberation theology or whatever it might be, but it's just like, yo, real people actually have to live through this shit.

Speaker 1 Why don't you just like take a knee over there?

Speaker 1 And that's that, this is actually really important to make this point because Greece is kind of the final boss of this for Byron and his life, like this, and the cause of the Greek Revolution as a like northern European co-celeb about like, oh, well, this is the birthplace of classical antiquity.

Speaker 1 It can't be oppressed by the heathen Muslim. Like.
That didn't really have much to do with what life in Greece was like, even for Greek Christians who had

Speaker 1 remotely.

Speaker 1 Remotely close. And in a lot of ways, like

Speaker 1 we're going to get into it, a lot of episode two is going to be about Philhinism and this 1820s kind of like exaltation of classical Greek culture and the political consequences in the early 19th century.

Speaker 1 So I guess

Speaker 1 I'm curious about you guys' thoughts, though. How are you feeling so far? I mean, I do understand what it's like now to get hit with a curveball of terrible shit.
I feel like I've built up

Speaker 1 this. This is is my karma for putting you guys through everything.
And for listeners, remember how you're like, oh, Joe's always running about depressing stuff. Well, I can't wait for Nate to do it.

Speaker 1 It'll be fun.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you so much for listening. And obviously, Tom and I have some other projects.

Speaker 1 I am the producer and co-host of Trash Future, What a Hell of a Way to Dad, and the producer of Kill James Bond.

Speaker 1 I help out a bit with No Gods, No Mayors, and I am in a band called Second Homes that's putting out an album in 2026 at some point.

Speaker 1 So those things, some of them have links in Patreon, some of them will be announced later, but those are all, if you're interested in more from me, you can

Speaker 1 find more there. And Tom, you also both have

Speaker 1 millions of things and things going on.

Speaker 1 You can follow me on Instagram at scam golden. That's G-O-L-D-I-N, to see any of my video projects.

Speaker 1 I am the producer and co-host of Beneath Skin, a show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. And I am the producer of Bloodwork, a show about the economy of violence.

Speaker 1 You can find all of that either on my Instagram or online. We both have millions of things going on, which is quite birotic, but non-problematic.
This is all I got. Thanks for listening.

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Speaker 1 So, thank you for listening. Leave us a review.
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And

Speaker 1 until next time, oh, God. Well, don't pass Lord Byron the ox cord if he gets reincarnated.
But also, when somebody describes somebody as a Byronic hero, be cautious about what that actually means.

Speaker 1 Alarm bells. Before you plug in the ox cord, think perhaps: would the ox like this?

Speaker 1 Goodbye, everyone.