Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, Vol. 1

Byron and Ottoman love: Orientalism, Europeanization and same-sex sexualities in the early nineteenth-century Levant

“…Crompton suggests that Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , composed in part during his Albanian stay, showed that ‘he had been meditating on English severity at the same time he was observing Albanian manners’ (Crompton, 1985: 139). Two lines of the poem, deleted before publication, described the ‘shameless torch of wild desire … lit’ for Ali Pasha’s ‘boyish minions of unhallowed love’ (Byron, 1980b: 63).…”

“…Since Byron seems not to have been attracted to pre-pubescent boys, the more accurate term would be ephebophilia: sexual desire for post-pubescent males whose secondary sexual characteristics are not yet fully developed (youths ‘slight and slim, / Blushing and beardless’ (Byron, 1986: 47)). ‘When boyish blood is mantling, who can ‘scape / The fascination of thy magic gaze?’, he asked (Byron, 1980b: 33), and rhapsodized, ‘sweeter … than all / Is first and passionate love’ (Byron, 1986: 49). The three males whom Byron loved most or had the strongest sexual attachments to – John Edlestone, Nicolas Giraud and Lukas Chalandrutsanos – were all 15 when the attachments began (Crompton, 1985: 237–8).…”

“…Whatever the reason, Byron saw his love of youths as a tender passion, and he wanted his young male beloveds to return his devotion with passion, gratitude and deep respect. In the Romantic worldview that he helped disseminate in Europe and especially Britain, a beloved should be ready to lay down his life for his lover, as he describes the beautiful Greek youth Antinous dying for his lover, the Roman emperor Hadrian (Byron, 1980b: 190). 8 For Byron, love made sexuality spiritual; it was ‘by Alla given, / To lift from earth our low desire’ (Byron, 1981: 75).…”

“…He seems to have attributed the difference to the decadence of the modern Greeks under Ottoman rule. In fact, Byron compared the Greeks unfavourably to the Albanians and Turks – though beautiful, Greeks have ‘all the Turkish vices without their courage’, he complained (Marchand, 1973a: 238) – while hoping that the Greeks ‘will … be better’ (Byron, 1980b: 201) once freedom ‘converted the Slave into a sober Citizen’ (Marchand, 1981: 33). Complaining in 1810 of the fickleness of the Greek boy Eustathius Georgiou, a ‘child … as forward as an unbroken colt’, he cited approvingly the dismissive comment of a janissary who said that Georgiou ‘was too true a Greek not to be disagreeable’ (Marchand, 1973b: 6–7).…”

“…This specifically Greek element mattered less to the Orientalist Byron. He had commented in a note to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), ‘To talk, as the Greeks themselves do, of their rising again to their pristine superiority, would be ridiculous’ (Byron, 1980b: 202). His policy in the revolt confirmed his freedom from ethnic partiality.…”