Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 394 - Lord Byron: Part 2

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys The conclusion to our series on Lord Byron.

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. 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. 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. So when your father is struggling with whatever flat-packed 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 cyber-bullied for saying that beans make you gay, why not bring the whole family together? Bring them together with anecdotes about how given the context of the Algerian War of Independence, your grandfather is likely a war criminal.

With 50% off annual subscriptions using code DEC 25 all through December at patreon.com over slash lines led by donkeys, why not give them a gift they'll love? This Christmas, give the gift of history. Hello, and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. So, when we left off last week, Lord Byron had set sail for Greece from Genoa. There were a few false starts because of bad wind, but eventually Byron begins to advance. towards Cephalonia in the Ionian Islands. In his work entitled, that Greece might still be free, the Phil Helene's in the Greek War of Independence, the scholar William St. Clair describes

Byron's departure as follows. At last on 13 July 1823, Byron left Genoa in a chartered vessel. He had on board a domestic retinue of nine servants, including a doctor specially recruited, five horses, two small cannon, a store of medicines, 10,000 Spanish dollars in cash, and bills for a further 40,000. Passage was given to a few volunteers. volunteers. There is no doubt that Byron regarded this expedition as a serious one, almost as a sacrifice. Any suggestion that he was simply out for adventure were firmly discounted. Yet it is no slur on his main motives to say that he also hoped that he would enjoy himself, that he would again be a figure in the land, and even that glory might come his way. Like many a lesser Phil Helene,

Byron gave himself away by his wardrobe. The fascination of the appurances of war just could not be resisted. He took half a dozen military uniforms in many colors and all lavishly decorated with gold and silver braids with sashes, epaulettes, waistcoats, and cocked hats to match. He took two gilded helmets, decorated with the family motto, create a Byron and at least ten swords. On the way, he persuaded his friend Trelawney to give him his black American groom, since he knew that it added to a man's dignity in the east to have a black man as a servant. Okay, a few things there.

Just a few. Imagine being the specialty of the doctor personally recruited by Lord Byron after everything we know about him. And Lord Byron has a Bud Cave magazine subscription and is buying old swords off of it is how I like the picture of this. Lord Byron carrying the buster sword because he is in fact the twink of fate is, you know, it all comes together. It's like Lord Byron waking up after buying a bunch of swords. Yeah, his final limit break is twinks of the round. Fair enough. So yeah, problematic, weird, strange, but no. A serious voyage. This was, this was meant

to be as a guy who had never been in the military and was a fucked up dandy on laudanum. This was him conceiving of what one needed for a military voyage. He brought a slave for clout. Yes. What the fuck? I mean, not a slave per se, but a, yeah, basically a servant slave. Yes, might as well.

What a lot of people don't know is that Lord Byron, I was actually trying to go to the mystical island of Matanui instead of Greece, but couldn't find the little Lego robot. Watson and instead ended up in Greece. He wanted to follow the legend of Rappanoi and instead just

collected a whole bunch of uniforms and slaves. How did we end up on Lord Byron, bionical lore? Because he's a bioncle. Shut the fuck. All right. In order to understand the Greek Revolution, it's worth understanding that by the time of its outbreak in 1821,

Greece, as we know it today, had been part of the Ottoman Empire since 1460, with Constantinople falling in 1452, and Crete finally falling in 1670. A few notable exceptions to this are the Ionian Islands, which fell under the dominion of Venice and which resisted Ottoman occupation. These were areas in which the Greek language and culture persisted in an entirely different way than on the Greek mainland.

And while Venetian was the official language, the Ionian Islands would become crucial parts of the modern nationalist conception of Greece from the early 19th century onward. The Ionians became French possessions after Napoleon conquered Greece in 1797, and then joint Ottoman Russian possessions after 1799, But this was a period in which they were effectively an independent state called the Scepinsular Republic. They weren't occupied by the Ottomans, even though they fell under their dominion.

And then in 1807, they became British possessions following Napoleon's defeat. This wasn't fully completed legally until 1815, but the Ionian Islands were at the time of this story, a completely separate entity in terms of civil society and governance, and also a place where the Greek language and Greek culture was quite distinct from, or at least less Ottomanized and Balkanized in a lot of ways than it was. on the Greek mainland. Lord Byron getting lost and accidentally ending up in Ionia, Michigan. I mean, so many weird names of American cities probably come from people who were weeps for Byron. When you think about the time that they were settled and named and founded and such,

there's probably somebody who's like, God, I wish I could have died in Greece. Instead, I'm going to found Utica, New York, or some shit like that. It's fair to say that autumn and Greece had absolutely no resemblance to the Greece of today, nor to the Greece of ancient history. In particular, Athens's population had a very large Albanian population to the point where the Greek language was by no means linguafranca. Ethnic territorial boundaries in the Ottoman Empire were at best fuzzy where they existed at all. National determination and membership was decided by language and religion rather than specific location. Of course, by contrast, much of modern-day Serbia and Bulgaria and Albanian were more Serbian and Bulgarian than not. But understanding

early 19th century Greece and the Ottoman Balkans requires us to divorce ourselves from the notion of homogenous nation states with fixed territories. It is in the interest of nationalists and and nationalist historiography and myth, to project this backwards in time, but it is by no means the most reliable reflection of late Ottoman realities. The historical forces that sat at the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in the 1820s speak to the transformations within Ottoman society that historian Bakitazan terms the second Ottoman Empire. While the classical Ottoman Empire had a clear Islamic character to its leadership, it had emerged from the ethnically and religiously mixed frontier zones created by the long, slow collapse of Byzantine rule in Asia Minor and the Balkans.

royal line was Islamic and Turkic, but in its early days, fed by intermarriage with Christian princesses, and later by a harem made up of enslaved women from all over the place. The classical empire's primary mode of social division was between the Ascari, the ruling military class, and the Ra'aia. The Ra'aia was the flock, basically anyone else that wasn't part of the Sultan's extended pyramid of military political households that upheld the empire, and also these were people who were not in the religious clergy. This organization allowed for institutions such as the Janissaries, the Sufahis, household cavalry granted rural fiefs in the problems to manage, and the cool, who were young boys largely from the Balkans

forcibly recruited into training as the Sultan's political and military household elite. This worked excellently for the better part of a couple centuries, but naturally as the empire reached its height, its borders became quite fixed, and it faced new economic and military challenges, as well as the makeup of its society and internal politics slowly began a transformation 2, with new groups emerging to claim and contest power. I'm really excited to learn more about the Ottoman version of the Praetorian Guard with Albanian characteristics. I mean, there's something that's going to be very funny and relevant, just about that.

So just wait. Texting my bodyguard is like, hey, I'm under attack. And he's like, okay, boss, there in 15 minutes and he arrives in 35. But he's got a red track suit with a double needle on it. I'm in a gray C-out. I'm just thinking of the character from Grand Theft Auto that every time he's, his phone rings. It's just his cousin wanting to go bowling. Nico, it's your cousin Roman.

So the Janissary steadily became something more akin to a hereditary guild of artisans with a sideline in soldiery rather than crack troops recruited, converted, and remodeled into elite warriors from when they were barely into double digits. The Sipahee cavalry became increasingly militarily obsolete, and the court, meanwhile, began a process of accommodating and incorporating local notables, turning to a system of tax farming to mortgage their income from rural areas into advanced payments. What this did was move the primary mode of social division from ruling elite versus the rest with quite fixed boundaries beyond being lucky, if you want to call that, enough to get

enslaved as an 11-year-old and made Ottoman, if you look brainy or brawny enough to the recruiter. Try to recruit my local jacked 11-year-olds. It's like, there's just one 11-year-old who's hench as fuck and he just constantly picking up large rocks and rolling them downhills. It's like, yeah, I think he's got a future for it. He's got a future in the Janus series. This moved the social division to one of religion, where boundaries could only be crossed

in the direction of conversion to Islam. Whereas before, the experience of a Muslim Balkan peasant and an Orthodox Balkan peasant in the next village would have been almost identical. By the late 17th century, and certainly the 18th, the virtue of being Muslim, allowed social advancement that had hitherto been impossible for those of lower status. Where all peasants and non-elite town folk, regardless of religion, had been other to the Ottoman system, By the time of Tezjan's second Ottoman Empire, the in-group had extended to cover most Muslims, while now non-Muslim subjects alone were the other.

Mashalah, brother. Also, the level of taxation was specifically on ethnic lines. And we talk about this also with how Armenians were treated in the Ottoman Empire. It's like, oh, there's a wealth tax on Armenians that's 600% like things along those lines. This is why I need Sadiq Khan to become Prime Minister of Britain so I can convert to Islam and pay less tax. I thought you meant have Sadiq Khan become prime minister, so Armenians have, have to pay more in taxes specifically? Yeah.

You laugh, but there's actually a country where if you're Muslim and you're of the ethnic majority, you pay less in tax. It's called Malaysia. Genuinely, they don't like talk about this, but they're like, malays get too mad at Chinese people being rich, so Chinese people have to pay higher tax rates. I'm dead serious. But if you talk about this in Malaysia, you go to jail.

That's why Ian Miles Chong never talks about, uh, even though he's, I'm pretty sure he's, I think, with Chinese. It's like, can't talk about the fact that like your melee neighbor has half the mortgage rate that you do if you buy a house. you fucking weird ant-covered freak. It's like, yeah, so the Ottomans they did bequeath a legacy to a other weird country.

No, no, my ants. I can't afford my mortgage because I have to feed these ants. Ian Miles Chong is like, what if you took a fat 11-year-old and gave them diphtheria? He's a different kind of Janissary recruited at 11 to be the most annoying man online ever. It's that scene

from Kung Pow enter the fist where it's like what if Janissaries were trained wrong on purpose? but also like every single one of the recruits the super Chad meme for some reason and they see like they move in their circles of ultra Chad jaws and they see this gawky weird 11 year old flirting with being a Nazi online they're like he's the one

I like his aunts becoming a posting Janus area 35 years of age it's true that the advent of notions of nationalism and the nation state did in the end for the Ottomans the same as they did for Austria, Hungary, Russia and other vast multi-ethnic, dynastic land empires. However, the way in which the structure of social and political power in the Ottoman Empire shifted so much along religious lines, and the fact that

its European neighbors all had an interest in them not discriminating against Christians, particularly set the Ottoman Balkans up to be a battleground of nationalist fragmentation with varying levels of Western European and Russian support and influence during the 19th century. Something that will never happen again. No, never again. You're never going to see a photo of a hot, blonde, Muslim woman smoking a cigarette while I'm like an AK-47. Never again. The Balkans have always been the picture of stability. There's nothing to look into there.

Yeah, Sarajevo has only ever been famous for being a nice place. It is nice. It's been a tourism destination for upper-class British people since at least 1993. Oh. Joe's making reference to a thing that the Italians have actually begun prosecuting when there's apparently rich people paid to go to Sarajevo during. the Bosian Civil War to be allowed to fire on human beings. Human safari, as it's been called.

Which is disgusting. And I didn't know about this, but it had been stuff that apparently have been talked about in like apocryphal things, but apparently enough information has emerged at the Italian, I guess at the whatever level of prosecution this is taking place, have decided that they want to investigate and prosecute Italians that they think did this. So, yikes. I learned a little bit about it in grad school when I was studying the genocide there. And it was one of those things that's like, there were stories about it. There was a little bit of evidence, but nothing really concrete.

And it's one of those things that when you read about it, you're like, yeah, humans would do this. And then it's like, oh, you know, evidence suggests they came from Russia, the United States, and the UK. Like, yeah, that's exactly who would do that. Yeah. Yeah. As we discussed last week, the advent of a modern Greek nationalist identity was born out of Greek contact with Western European liberalism and nationalism, in the sense that wealthy Greek communities in Mediterranean and Black Sea cities outside of the Ottoman Empire had infinitely

more contact with the outside world than Greek Orthodox citizens under Ottoman control. They were far more likely to be literate, well-traveled, educated, and in contact with like-minded people from other European countries where such political projects had, at least temporarily, seen success. And another factor which won't come up to any great degree in Byron's story as it's confined in our narrative here is Russian political intrigue in opposition to the Ottomans. Russian interference and expansionism was in fact the catalyst for a lot of rebellion and unrest in the Ottoman Balkans in the half century leading up to the Greek War of Independence. Russia's encroachment on Ottoman frontiers and into Ottoman affairs was a multi-front operation.

Russia was also busy going about the process of conquest and domination of the Caucasus. It took control of Circassia and Georgia and used the Armenian population of Erzurum as crude pawns in 1830. Refusing to let them return home after they realized their treatment and condition within Russian-controlled territory was at least as bad as it had been as suspected traders on the Ottoman northeastern frontier. Suffice to say, Britain and France did not fully trust Russia's intentions either, given the long history of trade and diplomacy the two had enjoyed with the Ottomans. Russian entry into the Mediterranean, Persia, and Central Asia constituted a threat to British imperial interests. Intervention to prevent Russia forcing Ottoman collapse

was at least a partial motivation for later Anglo-French interest in ending the Greek revolt and setting up a limited but independent Greek state. In all the scholarship I've read to research this project, the consensus among historians seems to be that the Greek revolution, as fought on the ground in Greece, starting in the Peloponnese Peninsula, the moving onward, was not particularly related to any idea of a Greek nation state called Hellas. That was the imported intellectual underpinning of it.

But the Greek elements on the ground, waging the war, were primarily local strongmen and their fighters who did not want to be subjects of a Muslim empire, so much as they wanted to be in charge. In some cases, during the darker periods, of the rebellion when things were not going particularly well, one of the leaders who Hellenized his name to Odysseus before the war broke out, tried to negotiate with the Ottomans to allow for a settlement in which he'd be in charge but would report to hire just like any other

Ottoman-susoran. The idealism around it, and making it into a co-celebrb for 19th century liberalism and republicanism, that all had zero purchase among the Greek warlords who were at the time known as the captains. And by 1821, things were not going well for European liberals and Republicans, which is a funny turn of phrase given the way American politics has twisted and reinterpreted those terms, but for clarity, what I mean is, things were not going well for constitutionalists and anti-monarchists. Napoleon was dead and buried. The French Revolution was even more dead. After Waterloo and Napoleon's final exile, there were monarchs back on the throne in France and Spain. Spain's 1812 constitution, probably the most liberal of its time, and certainly a rallying cry for liberals

in this era, was rescinded. It was periodically reinstated in accordance with the political whims of King Ferdinand the 8th. Portugal, invaded by Napoleon in 1807, and occupied such that Prince Regent Jean-6 and Queen Maria I, displaced their entire court to Brazil, was once again an absolute monarchy. I don't know if you know this story, but Portugal is occupied for Napoleon. It's like, no, we're moving the Portuguese Empire to Brazil. We're a European power, but we're based in Brazil. Suror de Bunda, Baile Fung. It all starts from here. Furthermore, in the aftermath of Napoleon's defeat, the Congress of Vienna settled upon what became known as the Metternich system, named after Austrian foreign minotor Clemens von Metternich. What this effectively translated to

is that the monarchies of Europe agreed to enforce specific principles regarding what types of governance they'd tolerate. And given that we're discussing a full retrenchment of the old monarchist regimes of Europe, you can imagine what that might entail. Specifically, it homed in on there being zero tolerance of constitutions, zero tolerance of free assembly, or freedom of the press, or any claim to power from anyone who wasn't deemed legitimate by which they meant a member of the nobility. This would come to change in the 1820s and 1830s. While the Italian liberal uprisings that Byron supported while living in Italy ended in either total abandonment or brutal repression, there were significant successes for constitutionalists in some parts of Europe in the following decades. Obviously,

1830, 1848 are huge ones, but we're even just in the 1820s. By 1822, King Ferdinand the 8th had been forced to re-adopt the Constitution for a period of time. It goes back and forth like this for a while. It's starting in 1830, France becomes a constitutional monarchy. It does change. But at this time, the kind of nadir of this after the Congress of Vienna is basically all of the monarchies of Europe are back and they're like, there's no such thing as the rights of man or a constitution, fuck you, will kill you. That's the kind of situation for European 19th century liberals and Republicans at the time. What matters for us here is that at the time of the Greek uprising, balance of power in Europe was implacably hostile to any Republican or liberal constitutionalist

sentiment, which is exactly what the Greek revolution was nominally advancing. Now, the Ottomans were by no means included within the indisputable order of Ancien regime Europe. Not by any means. They were literally the hated Turk. They lusted in their hearts for Vienna. They were the enemies of Christendom. The first people to the moon. Exactly. And they're still there looking down on you, fucking you up. But what this created was a situation in which popular support and any government support for the ideals of the Greek revolution, as it was perceived by intellectuals and as it was kind of advanced by Greek intellectuals, received intense scrutiny and censorship.

from the governments of Europe, because at its core, it was the same kind of liberal national uprising as what the Carbonari had attempted in Italy and the Spanish constitutionalists before them, and pretty much the entirety of the Napoleonic project. I realize that's an oversimplification, but one thing Napoleon did was do constitutional monarchies. That was kind of a thing. And people like tend to discount how, uh, how hard it was for the Carbonari to get their meat sauce correctly. It's Carbonara, not Carbonari. The term comes from burning coal light in secret meetings. and shit.

I know it's not called that date. But you know what? I thought the exact same thing and I almost made the same joke and then I realized that to an Italian, that would be like taking two words that sound, let you start with the same letter in English, but have nothing to do with each other and be like, yeah, I mix of this one up, but that's the one, you know, exactly. That is the name of our game here. You're giving up the goat.

I'm just imagining an Italian history podcast that picks up all American stuff and starts doing like dumb American voice. Gee golly, boy, howdy. It's fucking cold outside. I'm gay and I'm a cowboy. What up, y'all. Your mama damn sure gives up those sloppy Joes. I guess what we're saying is go back and listen to our series in the Texas Revolution. But imagine Italian guys doing all those voices. Also, Carbonara isn't a meat sauce, Joe. I thought it was a meat sauce. No. It's based with panchetta and melted cheese and egg.

See, I'm more upset that I got that wrong than the fact that it's called Carbonara, which I did know. But I thought it included meat. Fuck. It does have meat in it. It's got, it's got panchetta, like, like Laredons or like bacon cubes, basically. But it's, it's not really a meat sauce. It's, it's more of a melted cheese sauce. God damn. Egg, pecorino, Romano, some black pepper.

Mmm. It's just doing it big, you know, I'm sauce maxing. I'm carbonara-pilled. A thin white sauce is what she calls me. I mean, dog, I didn't know about Pesto Calabrese until recently. It's so fucking good and it's so unhealthy compared to regular Pesto. Because it's just like, oh, what if you made Pesto? with sauteed peppers that you then miss in onions and that you melted like four kinds of

cheese into it. It's incredible. I apologize for my sauce heads out there for getting that sauce incorrect. I will do better. We'll try as hard as we can to make sure that our history is flawless or as close to flawless as we can be as high effort, high research. Our jokes are dumber than fuck and our sauce is incredibly exotic, but also true to the Italian recipe because we don't want the five people in Italy who listen to the show to take up a crusade against us and invade the Netherlands somehow. Invades Switzerland too. Who up dispensing the exotic sauces? Hey, you know what? I feel as though the more that we dig into the Ottomans and then also weird like Orientalist conceptions are the Ottomans, the more we're going to learn about who up dispensing

the weird sauces. I'm just saying. What strange exception to this hostility to constitutionalism is Britain, which at the time was an established constitutional monarchy and probably had the freest press in all of Europe. Britain was often a place of refuge for displaced revolutionaries. fleeing repression from the restored reactionary governments of the Italian states and France and Spain and Portugal and elsewhere in Europe. The only problem there was that they then had to live in Britain.

They're only free because they didn't have phones to hack at that stage. I mean, I'll be honest with you. There were stories of guys who went to fight, like, there's an Italian count named Santa Rosa. He was living with his wife and eight children and Nottingham and he's like, I will just go and die in Greece. And it's like, that's what Nottingham does to an MF.

Tom does bring up the idea of an Ottoman era phone Freaker. Or like Rupert Murdoch, but Ottoman. That's just a guy stealing letters, I think. Shooting birds on the sky and taking the letters. That's actually relevant is that at the time, Britain had like a kind of hereditary family secret office to intercept diplomatic post and break the seals and read everything and put

it back together in a way that like it wasn't caught. They didn't detect it. And this went on until they banned it in 1844. So one of the origins of the phone hacking scandal and, you know, Rupert Murdoch's weird freaks digging through your trash, is that Britain had like a secret office of dudes who were really good at heating up envelopes over steam and or recreating broken wax seals so they could read diplomatic misses because like the communiquees had to pass, get into the country somehow. That's actually like part of one of the reasons why Britain was decently well informed on what

was happening in Greece and in the Ottoman Empire. So Britain did more than its fair share to defeat Napoleon in the first 15 years of the 19th century. But at the time, Napoleon was also the standard bearer and martyr of Whigism in the United Kingdom. When you think about people like John Cam Hobhouse, Byron's close friend from Cambridge and throughout his life, he was a dedicated Bonapartist from an early age. He was a fan of Napoleon even when they were in university together. In Britain, that political philosophy had far more room for maneuver. And as we discussed last week, it was the Phil Hellenic Council of Britain that managed to recruit Byron into the cause through the tireless proselytizing of Edward Blackyer and, of course,

Hobhouse. But in the early days of the Greek uprising, it wasn't the Brits who were campaigning and fundraising, or at least not to a great extent. And it certainly wasn't the Brits who were sending large numbers of volunteers to fight alongside the Greek rebels. It was Germany. Or rather, the 40-odd principalities of the German Confederation, because remember in 1821, neither Germany, nor Italy, nor Greece were coherent nation states. The Germans heard there's plenty of beaches for them to sit around naked. I'm like, we'll go. Well, I was like, Greece's great weather. And as you'll discover, like, their shoes wear out and they get too poor

for clothes. They do get to be the first FKK people in Greece, but they also die from it and they get scabies. We must fight the Ottomans. We need to secure our supply of duna. I feel like they would have probably called that like, I don't know, the devil's spiral or something like that.

The devil's meat tornado. Extreme, like, Lutheran German, just like losing their fucking shit at the idea of Capsalon. We've talked a little about Phil Hellenism and the volunteer fighter is known as Phil Helene's, and I think it's worth giving a little bit of attention to what exactly this meant at the time. What will immediately strike the modern reader about Phil Hellenism is manifested after basically

the initial successes of the Greek Revolution, which ended on Easter 1821, is that these people are basically a bunch of weabs for ancient Greece. Maybe that's me being a revisionist, and maybe I'm neglecting my duties in service of this show's mission, which is to combine a crystalline focus towards historical accuracy with the absolute dumbest most brain dead shit ever uttered by a human being. But that's really what it was. Phil Hellenism, as in a love of Greek culture, stems from early enlightened philosophies and a preponderance of classic studies in the education of the European bourgeois elite. It is not until much later that ruling elites of European aristocracy themselves begin to flirt with Philhellenism and the idea of supporting

the Greek rebels. In 1821, it was, to a large degree, the domain of professors and historians in German and Swiss universities, and particularly their young students. Don't get me wrong. This was a pan-European phenomenon and frankly an intercontinental one, in the sense that there were plenty of Philhalenes in the United States in 1821, and also at that time the U.S. was seen as an example of Enlightenment liberal governance, so long as you were willing to look past the whole founded on chattel, slavery, and genocide part. I don't want to oversimpliffic. and I don't want to get things wrong by going down rabbit holes. But even if you confine yourself to physical manifestations of the aesthetic trends of this era, as in works of architecture that are

still standing to this day, you'll immediately see the influence of neoclassicism and an adoption of ancient Greek building styles and the academic paintings of Greek myths and so on, starting from the mid-18th century onward. And so when you think about the classes of people who'd be studying in universities in the early 1820s, you have to remember that these are very much rarefied economic elites. They're destined for high status occupations. They might be minor aristocrats like Byron, but they're typically not air-standing thrones. They'd all be men. They'd all have received educations like Byron's, in which the study of ancient Greek and Latin, recitation or memorization of poetry from these languages, translation of the same, and discourses on the philosophies

of those cultures, was central. It's likely very many of them had heard of Byron and maybe even read his work in translation. It was a coincidence, of course, but when the third canto of Don Juan was published in mid-1821, it contained a mediation on the Greek Isles and a stanza that probably wound up getting a lot of people killed, which was, the mountains look on Marathon, and Marathon looks on the sea, and musing there an hour alone, I dreamed that Greece might still be free. For standing on the Persian's grave, I could not deem myself a slave. And now, now, you're telling a bunch of webes for ancient Greece that the literal survivors of ancient Greece have taken up arms against the godless Turk, but they're outnumbered and need help if they're going to withstand the Ottoman

and Horde, you're saying the dream could be real? Yeah, this is like guys from Chicago or Philadelphia or Boston who still post chucking our law in 2025. Well, I got something for you, Tom. Probably not for Joe, because I don't think he's going to get this, but I know you will. I wrote this just for you, Tom. I thought about what kind of comparison I could make here, given that Byron was incredibly famous, but also it had been 12 years since the publication of the work that cemented his literary reputation, which was Child Herald's pilgrimage. It wasn't that he'd banished, but he'd not been anywhere near his active or ubiquitous at the time. And suddenly he was relevant again, showing up for a highly charged political event on the side of what was

considered radicalism for the time. And then it came to me. Remember when Jeff Mangum showed up at Occupy Wall Street and played neutral milk hotel songs for the gathered protesters in Tucati Park? Well, it was sort of like that. But then I realized, wait, no, no, no, no, no. Take that image a little further. Imagine there was a neutral milk hotel song that convinced a bunch of guys to go to Syria and join ISIS. Radical Milk Hotel. Imagine if Jeff Mangum went to Syria to fight on the side of humanity as he saw it, but it turned out he was still joining ISIS.

But they gave him his own unit. They named it after him. They called it Jabot al-Neutral. Fucking Christ. We have the ability to contrast other uprisings by Ottoman subjects against the Ottoman Empire versus the Greek rebellion. And it's hard to avoid the conclusion that being a weeb for ancient Greece did in fact make the difference.

What I mean is the first Serbian uprising happened in 1804 and didn't really attract much attention, even after it was crushed post-1813, and the Ottomans spared no effort in selling as many accused rebels into slavery as they could. The Greek rebellion stands out in that it caught Philhalene's attention almost immediately, and it kept it, or at least until the more committed among them went to Greece and had their illusions shattered. In the beginning, the most enthusiastic Philharine volunteers came from what is now Germany. The Brits were generally sympathetic, but not moved to any great degree, possibly because of how weird and off-putting the hardest core of Phil Hellenic advocates were in the early days. In France, in Prussia, in Italy,

and in the low countries, state censorship and suppression of anything close to liberal constitutionalism made it very difficult for anyone to actually organize. In southern Germany, specifically what's now Baden-Vortembourg, as well as in Switzerland, this wasn't really an impediment. But these weren't just college students, although those did make up a decent chunk of the initial cohorts of the eight ships worth of Philhalines who sailed from Marseille in 1821 and 1822. There were also a lot of bonapartist professional soldiers who'd found themselves unemployable or underemployed, sometimes followed by monarchist secret police, sometimes fleeing potential execution. Yeah, black musket coffee didn't really take off back then. So he's like,

ah, I got to take my skills somewhere where I can be recognized. And also it's like, some guys just the same problem that people had coming back from deployments in the U.S. military in, you know, our generation, which is that like, once they got back from, you know, Napoleon's Grand Armey getting their ass kicked, they were like, yeah, but I was good at being a soldier. and doing stuff in combat. And now it's just like, be on parade grounds, polish your boots, get yelled at, do basically like the grown-up version of boydressage, which is what we call. What do we call boydressage?

Wasn't it like military academy stuff? Yeah, yeah, basically. There were also a number of Italian and Spanish revolutionaries who'd seen their own cause collapsed when the Hobbsburg monarch of Sicily crushed the Naples uprising and effectively had nowhere else to go. In fact, the largest number of initial volunteers for the Greek Civil War, the Greek revolution as far as foreigners going to fight. They all came from what's now Italy. By a long distance, that's the largest contingent. However, reading accounts from that initial wave, you keep hearing

stories of young men recruited in German-speaking areas, taking up the road and trying to find where they were supposed to report in order to get to Greece. The surest route at the time was via Marseille, because while the French monarchy was entirely committed to the Metternich system, they also had a bit of a wait-and-see attitude about it. They hung out in Marseilles, got drunk, collected small stipends from Philhilim charities, waited on news about a boat. Turns out hiring a boat is actually really expensive. Charities weren't raising enough money to do it. They got into duels. They got into theological arguments. They went insane. You name it. But eventually, the boats did begin to leave. As such, the Philhalines went to Greece, either seeking a chance

to keep soldiering, or in the case of the young German and Swiss students, seeking adventure in a chance to liberate the ancient Greece of their dreams from its benighted oppression. And when they got there, they were distressed to discover that the Greece of their dreams was actually just Albania. Everything is Albania. I left college. Now I have a fucking black eagle tattooed on my chest. They're seasoned soldiers from Napoleon's army on the boat with me. They're robbing me at gunpoint. I'm somehow being offered Swiss citizenship in a position on the Swiss

national football team. One of my friends and I, we went to Marseille to get a boat. He got Chlamydia, went insane and stabbed me with the sword. I got the duel with an English guy. I got a duel with another Swiss guy, talked about Martin Luther, talked about Napoleon. This sounds like the absolute worst study abroad anyone has ever done. I'm obviously being glib here, but in the aftermath of the first wave of Phil Helene's, there were a number of books published in over a dozen European cities, most of them German and Swiss, recounting the experiences of volunteers who'd survived, but returned disgusted and often crippled. They pretty much all came away from the experience hating Greek people. There are reasons for hating them ranged from shock and dismay at

the fact that they dressed like Albanians, smoked pipes, sat on the floor, were perceived as lazy and dishonest, didn't speak ancient Greek, didn't speak Greek at all, couldn't read, fought amongst each other, bought the volunteers, and were far more interested in pillaging and mass murdering any non-Greek they could find than they were in, say, winning a battle. This is the average experience of American tourists in Dublin. Yeah, everybody in Dublin is also Albanian. What we're describing here is a kind of 19th century war tourism Paris syndrome. But I feel like, despite this being a segment in which we're not going to laugh very much,

it's worth exploring what it was about what these men saw that disgusted them so much. And the following is from the journal in English Phil Helene named WM Humphreys, recounting his experiences between 1821 and 1833. And I have to thank Joel Butler for this because he actually went to a research library and found some source documents and found this account. As soon as the Greeks had entered the town in force, they, by which he means the Turks, sued for quarter, but in vain. The barbarians went from house to house, sparing neither age nor sex, and the work of slaughter

continued the whole night. The women of the bay's harem had set fire to it and perished in the flames. There were two or three other fires in the town, and had the wind been high, the greater part of it would have been consumed. It now lighted them to their defenseless victims. The fires, shots, screams of agony and terror, and shouts of these monsters formed a night of dreadful horror. About 2,000 women and children who had survived the massacre and escaped from the town were left among the huts, which had been our camp. And then during the next day, the Greeks were chiefly occupied in plundering. A fellow Phil Helene, Monsieur Raybo, was wound with several times in the greatest danger of being killed by the Greeks, as he was endeavoring

to defend women and children. He wounded two fellows with his saber when surrounded by more than a hundred. In an attempt to save some poor women, they afterwards murdered in cold blood. Never was a town so completely pillaged. Not the most trivial article was to be found in the houses. The boards were ripped up in search of plunder. The wind windows and doors were broken up, and not even a single lock left to them. As they were thus busied in pillaging, it was not until the third day after the assault that these wretches, as if not satisfied with a number of victims they had already devoted to the most cruel deaths, determined on destroying those that remained in the huts of the old camp. They

stripped and drove them away, intending to shoot them in a near deep pit in some distance from Tripolisa, but the thirst for blood was too great to enable them to wait so long, and they covered the road to the spot destined for their butchery with bodies of women clasping their infants to their bosoms and children clinging to their mother. Many of the children showed great courage in dying and looked at their murderers, perpetuating cruelties, of which they were instantly to become victims themselves, with much more expression of indignation than fear. The hour of retribution for the Turks had come, and nowhere could fitter executioners have been found. However deserved, however well-married it might have been their fate, yet it could

not make the perpetrators of it less detestable or hardly less guilty. Quote, we have done no more harm to them than they used to do to us, unquote, was always their excuse. The greater part of the Greeks who had traveled did all that lay in their power to restrain the natives, but from them it was useless to expect that they would show mercy. They had been brought up to regard the Turks as their oppressors. They had severely felt them as such, and they were incapable of distinguishing between what was right and justifiable to do in order to free themselves and what was inspired by a thirst for vengeance, by including which they proved themselves equally barbarous and relentless when they had it in their power to so be, as their oppressors had been to them. The barbarous, joyous,

mirth they displayed while inflicting the most dreadful tortures on their victims showed how congenial cruelty was to their nature, and to the same dastardly coward, who could turn pale thought of fighting, exalted over the agony of an expiring and defenseless foe. The Jews, of whom there were a great many in town, and whom they detest equally with the Turks, shared the same fate. They were known to possess great riches, and the pertinacity they showed in refusing to disclose where they had secreted them was extraordinary. One poor wretch who they were torturing, by stabbing him slightly with their daggers, went twice into his house for the purpose of getting his money and returned without bringing it. On being forced

in a third time, he expired of his wounds. They disabled their prisoners by cutting off their arms and legs and then lighted fires under them, whilst yet still alive, to burn them slowly to death. And they severed the heads of the most lovely female forms and replaced them with the heads of dogs for their sport. Such are the modern Greeks, debased, degraded to the lowest pit of barbarism, that they are unworthy of emancipation as a natural idea which their national individual depravity gives rise to. Yet still, as Lord Byron justly observed in the notes of a poem in which he so beautifully depicts them, that depravity is to be attributed to causes which can only be removed by the measures one reprobates. The soil from which the true courage and true

nobleness of soul alone can be expected to spring requires the sunshine of liberty. They flourish not beneath the shade of slavery. On going to our tent, which was still pitched in the old camp, I found a Turk and his child, a most beautiful little girl of about four years old, whom Mr. Gordon's servant, a most faithful man in Armenian as he had remained to take care of Mr. Gordon's baggage, had saved together with two of his countrymen. The little child, I assure you, was quite a treasured to us, and Monsieur Raibo and I took her under our protection, and it was our chief amusement in the unpleasant situation. I love for adventures had placed me in. In the evening, a large house behind that of the prints was discovered to be on fire, and it was only by great

exertions of the men and officers of the battalion that we prevented its communicating to his house. Not one of the other Greeks would assist us, but stood looking on as it burnt down a whole street before it went out. One or two shots went past close to me. Whether designed the aimed at me or not, I do not know, as I stood alone on the tottering roof of the flaming houses. This is just a small sampling. Quite frankly, there's so much more that I'm not going to read. As Ottoman strongholds fell in places like Navarino and Monomvasia, the Greeks slaughtered any Muslim they fell upon, as well as Jews and Armenians. There were a decent number of Jews in the Peloponnese Peninsula. Age and gender did not matter at all. Monomvasia

was unique in that not every single civilian died. About 160 managed to escape. But an excerpt from William St. Clair's book that Greece might still be free paints a picture of what that battle looked like. Quote, when the gates are opened, the Greeks rushed in and the whole population of between 2,000 and 3,000 were killed, with the exception of about 160 who managed to escape. Some of the Turks were left to starve on an uninhabited island in the harbor. A Greek priest, who was an eyewitness, described the scene as a Turkish woman were stripped and searched to see if they were concealing any valuables. Naked women plunged into the sea and were shot in the water.

Children of three or four were thrown into drown, and babies were taken from their mothers and beaten against the rocks. This was particularly pronounced in Tripolitza, which fell in October 1822. What Humphreys was describing was Tripolitsa as well. And by this point, there were European volunteers fighting with Greek rebel forces. I'm just going to quote St. Clair again, because I think the following passage gets the point across pretty clearly. Probably 100 Europeans saw either the fall of Tripalica or its immediate aftermath.

For many, it was their first and last experience of the Greece War. Men who had taken part in numerous bloody campaigns in Europe found that they had reached the limit of their tolerance. Those who had the money to pay for a passage and still had a homeland to return to, made their way back to Europe. For some, their only military experience in Greece had been fighting against the Greeks themselves to try to save a few Turks from the general massacre. Others who had taken under their personal protection, Turkish women and boys, whom they

had found starving in the ruins, sadly abandoned their protégés, well aware that they would not survive long. For those who had no home to go back to, the prospects were terrible. They had only two choices. Either stay with the Greek forces in hopes that their comrades would support them until something turned up, or alternatively, to enter the service of any one of the other captains. This second alternative amounted to a betrayal of their ideas and their sense of military

honor, sidebar, in the sense that they were just Greek warlords. One side was the kind of like a Greek expatriate nationalist group that was nominally directing the government, and the rest were like local strongmen who were actually doing the fighting. It also meant embracing a life for which they were not fitted. it. They had to somehow learn a difficult language to adapt themselves to live off the roughest of food, consisting often merely of wild herbs, to live among men who never washed and took pride in the amount of body lives they carried, and to accept the haphazard plundering and killing

associated with the life of a brigand. Only a few had the stamina for this. My warlord smoking that wild herb. I mean, there's a fucked up story of a guy, one of the Philhelenes, who marries a Turkish woman that he has saved from being murdered. And she converts to Orthodox Christianity so they can get married and then takes on a Greek name. And then he even dresses her in like men's clothing so that she won't be seen as a civilian when like they're moving camp. And the first time she leaves camp to go pick herbs to make dinner for him, Greeks find her and murder her on the spot. Jesus. Right. Imagine doing really grim. Something so awful or a series of things so awful that no small number of dudes who survived Napoleon's march into Russia is like,

I've seen horrible things. This is beyond anything I've ever seen. Like, fucking insane. Volunteers began to flee as soon as they could, becoming destitute in the process, begging for alms, trying to find any friendly European ship that might grant them a place.

These were the men that Byron encountered in Genoa. Needless to say, the recruiting efforts in Europe were still going strong, and people simply did not listen to returning veterans who described the horrendous terrain, the violence, the poverty, the disease, the senseless murder, the total lack of organization, you name it. The people lining up in Marseilles to get on boats

still had weeb dreams of the Acropolis. That is, until France shut down the boats to Greece, mostly out of humanitarian concern when it became obvious that these men were likely heading to their deaths. It's estimated that one in three of the Philhalene volunteers died, at least in the initial contingent. Holy shit. It's bad. Now, by this point, you may be asking yourself, well, you're talking about what the Greeks did. Surely there was an Ottoman response. Yes, There was, and it is exactly what you would expect it to be. After the initial outbreak of the Greek uprising, the Ottoman response was as flat-footed and brutal as one might imagine.

They basically detained and killed any loyal Greek subject with any links whatsoever to the Palpatineas Peninsula, regardless of where they were in the empire, out of suspicion that they must have been involved in the conspiracy. Bear in mind that these people knew absolutely nothing about what was going on at the time, and the decision to strike in 1821 wasn't even a coordinated thing so much as one faction taking the plunge in the rest of them following suit. And yet, Ottoman Sultan Mahmoud II's reaction was to create as many enemies as possible.

But I'd be completely negligent here if I didn't mention a specific battle that was in many ways the most effective rallying cry for Philhalene support of the Greek Revolution, Shios. Shios lies less than 10 kilometers off the coast of what is now Turkey. It wasn't involved in the revolution in the beginning as the uprising broke out on the Peloponnese, which is on the complete opposite side of the Aegean Sea, are about 250 kilometers away. In early 1822, revolutionaries from the neighboring island of Samos landed on Shios, vandalized mosques, attacked the Ottoman fortress there, and enlisted a small contingent of Shios residents in the fight. Literally, for the purposes of understanding this, the attack happened because an outside contingent landed there and tried to kick things off as much as possible. The overwhelming majority of the island's residents had nothing to do with it, and the attack against the Ottoman Citadel was not in any way effective.

So, what was the Ottoman response? to kill everybody. Yeah, it tracks. It's worth bearing in mind that Shios was in some way a success story for Greek identity in the Ottoman Empire before the revolution. They grew mastic,

which is used to make kind of chewing gum. It was very prosperous. It wasn't as heavily taxed as other parts of the Balkans. It was at the local levels primarily run by Greek officials. In general, it was not at all interested in the revolution. And when the Ottomans responded, Shios' proximity to Asia Minor

wound up playing a part in its undoing because irregular forces from Turkey from Asia Minor on that side of Turkey, which were probably just a lot of angry, armed Ottoman Muslims who also saw people coming back with plunder, crossed over on their own to attack any Greek person they could find. When it was done, at least 40,000 people were dead, and possibly up to 100,000. Women and children were taken as slaves and placed in brothels. Supposedly, it crashed the sale price in the market for slaves because there were so many slaves suddenly on the market. There are anecdotes of hearing choruses of screams from boys being forcibly circumcised in groups of 40 or

50 at a time. The Ottomans completely laid waste to what was one of the least rebellious Greek territories in their control. And while word of Greek massacres in the Peloponnese was highly suppressed and ignored, what happened at Shios would capture the world's attention as soon as word reached Europe and then America, which is not to say that it activated the consciences of the world entire, but it certainly received more press and shifted more public sentiment than the massacres of Muslims and Jews and the Peloponnese did. The interesting thing is that by the time Byron got to Greece in late 1823, the war had approached something of a stalemate in that Ottoman counter-attacks on the Peloponnese had failed. The two seizures of Misalongi had failed.

Athens was still in revolutionary control, but at the same time, the Greeks had next to know naval forces to speak of, certainly not to the extent that they could contest naval superiority on the part of the Ottomans. And the Ottoman Navy could project force throughout the Aegean opposed. The Greeks did have boats, and some of their hit-and-run attacks are actually quite effective, but if you took it up head to head, the Ottomans had a clear advantage. Attempts to create European-style regular armies had alternated between mild temporary success and odor and complete disaster. There was no actual central government, and there was certainly no central source of revenue. None of the plunderer obtained from victories against

the Ottomans left the hands of the captains who'd plundered it. Another outburst of German Philhellenism resulted in the creation of a coherent, equipped volunteer military unit called the German Legion, who arrived in Greece in 1823 and were left to sit around doing nothing with no money until they died of disease or went crazy. In the first three years the tangible contributions of European Philhalines amounted to very, very

little. Germans going insane the first time they lay eyes on a donor like, it just keeps spinning and they carve meat off of it. What is this devilry? What kind of animals nothing but meat in a huge cylinder? They told me to rotate a horse in my mind, but I did not expect it to be

like this. I didn't realize that there'd be centripetal force is forcing the meat together. A cylinder of meat. I believe you're just describing harvesting Tom on a stick. So this was the world that Byron entered with a promise that he'd be the one to turn the tide. Now look, Byron was crazy. Absolutely. He was crazy, but he wasn't stupid.

He spent a few months in Calfalonia in the Ionian Islands before moving onward to mainland Greece. At the time, staying with the British consul, a man named Charles James Napier, who I'm sure we've talked about before. we certainly will talk about again. He factors in the British conquest of India quite a bit. By all accounts, at this stage of his life, Byron was an observant and deliberate person, but not particularly decisive. And it became obvious to him that the stories of Blackiere and the London Committee were completely false, just as it became obvious that his German acquaintances had undersold the level of dysfunction among the revolutionaries.

Once he moved onward to mainland Greece, seems to have dawned on him that he'd been dup, that he was a celebrity making a celebrity endorsement. In the brief time that he spent on the mainland, he witnessed at least two instances of Greek revolutionary warlords attacking other Greek revolutionary forces. He was asked to pay the backdated salaries of a unit of Suliot warriors who became so fractious that in a particular outburst in February 1824, one of them killed a Swedish filhling officer named Adolf von Sasseh, who'd been to Greece twice, been enslaved, escaped slavery after being captured and tortured, and still came back. Some of the Suliots directly threatened Byron too. To say that the reality disgusted him would be to put it very mildly.

Of course, we know what happened next. Byron died. He became very ill in mid-January, 1824, only a few days after arriving Missalongi. He seemingly recovered, took ill again, and died on April 19th. This is what happens when a British man has that, you know, has Suvlaki for the first time. I mean, also doesn't help that Missa Lungi was surrounded by lagoons and this is like malarial as all hell. You should never go to the lagoon if it's before the advent of modern medicine.

I don't know. Byron lived in Venice for a very long time. managed to not get lagoon diseases, or at least not to the same extent. The different lagoon. There's levels to the lagoons. There's lagoon levels. There's levels to these estuaries and these bodies of water, these brackish bodies of water. The bloodletting didn't help near, nor did the leeches, nor did the malaria

climate of Missalongi, nor did the fact that he had actually left Cephalonia in a little, I think it was a little before Christmas 1823. And it took about 10 days in a boat to get to Missalongi because they had to constantly dodge Ottoman boats. So he'd been out exposed for quite a while. Byron's the first man ever to catch malaria from having sex with a mosquito. I mean, look, Byron strikes me as the kind of person who either would have had some weird romantic thing about like, what happens if a mosquito bites your dick right as you nut or he would just have been like, he'd be like, Hitler level of disgust of all insects. I don't know.

One or the other. One of the other. Exactly. I am airing on the side of a J.G. Ballard in this case. You got to help me out with J.G. Ballard. I know a little bit, but not enough. He wrote Crash. I know that, but I'm wondering what J.G. Ballad, was he into mosquitoes and sex? No, it's more so like,

Byron's doing the, uh, the crash thing of like, I can only know on the, on the verge of death from mosquitoes biting my cock. And or leeches put on my head by my doctor. If you suck more of the blood out, there's more space for calm. Yeah, it's the humor. They have to be balanced.

Yeah, that's the secret fifth humor is calm. My dude, this is the very, specially recruited doctor that he himself brought. You really need to hold that thought because it's a very funny. Byron learned to the fate of the German Legion once he'd arrived on the Greek mainland. And now, with his death, Byron brigade suffered the exact same fate alongside him, except they'd somehow managed to speed run it. I literally could say the end here, but I feel like that would be maybe a bit too

bironic because there's a few things we need to tie up here. So in the end, Byron's death in Greece did, in fact, capture all of Europe's attention. In dying there, he managed to accomplish what he'd set out to do, although obviously not in the way that he had hoped. For all of his romanticizing about a soldier's death, I think it's safe to say that he'd hoped to achieve something more than the 1920s equivalent of getting traveler's diarrhea and dying from it before conducting any military campaigning at all. But Byron's death made headlines and drew attention to the struggle in Greece in a way that very little else had up to that point. It caused a new wave of weird romantic poetry guys to volunteer in Greece. Effectively, not just webes for ancient Greece, but also webes for Byronism. But it also did cause a significant change in public opinion.

In France, for example, where expressions of Philhellenism hadn't been as ubiquitous. In the summer, right after Byron died, Eugène Delacquot exhibited unambiguously Philhellenic painting, representing the plight of captured women from Shios. This was massively popular. notable at the time, and it obviously caught people's attention about what was being depicted. This probably doesn't mean that much on its face, but the effect was to compel able-bodied military veterans to volunteer, people who were Bonapartist veterans of those campaigns, but also more wealthy sympathizers made donations. So it did capture people's attention, and this did go on,

especially with the association with Ms. Alongie. Say what you will about Byron. He did achieve a soldier's death. most soldiers die from shitting their guts out. Yep, yeah, yep, yep. Since we're following Byron's life and Byron's role in the war, what comes next is going to appear to be a quick summary, which I realize that the truth is the stalemate described went on for some time. Key points worth considering is that the British began making loans to the Greek rebels

in early 1824. Now, this was not philanthropy. This was straight up fucking speculation, but they loan hundreds of thousands of pounds, which, you know, factor it like a hundred times as much with inflation was a huge amount of money. And in fact, when Byron died, like, I think the day or day after he died, one of the boats arrived with some of that money that was meant to be dispersed.

This money is mostly pilfered and hoarded, but it does have some rallying effect as far as coordinating the various factions goes. But around the same time, Mehmed Ali Pasha, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, is requested to assist, interest into a discussion with the Ottoman Sultan, the Turkish Sultan, and then sends his extremely effective, reformed, retrained military, trained by a lot of people who fled the same persecutions that made people from Italy and Spain, for example, and France flee to Greece to fight. He sends his very effective military and very effective son, Ibrahim, to support the Ottoman struggle against

the Greeks. This very much leads to a reversal of fortunes for the Greeks. For example, in April late 25, Ibrahim wins handily against a Greek force trying to relieve the siege of Noplia. In April 26, Misalongi finally falls, and the symbolism is not lost on Europe, given that it was the city where Byron died. Didn't help that the previous two sieges had ended in either stalemates or failures for the Ottomans. And the Ottomans are really confused by the human mosquito hybrids that were running around the swamps. Yeah, exactly. These are war orphans. A war orphan mosquitoes. They're writing poetry. It sucks. It didn't help that a failed breakout from Missalongi at the very bitter end of the third siege resulted in at least three.

thousand people's heads being sent as trophies to Istanbul. The Ottoman victories galvanized European sentiment and wind up bringing Britain, France, and Russia into the war as an alliance. Once again, I know I'm summarizing to a great extent here. It's to avoid things from spiraling out of control on us to take on a much bigger scope. So I have to, though, as we finish up, recount a very funny detail, or rather two funny details. Right. After the failed relief of Noplia in 1825, Ibrahim was generous to the captured European prisoners and offered them just to the Dobbs serving the Ottomans. Now, the Philhalians are not exactly people who are going to be interested. Like, if they were professional soldiers looking for jobs who couldn't go home, maybe.

However, one of the Philhalines did, the only one who accepted was Byron's personal physician, Julius Millingin. And there's a postscript. He stayed in Turkey. He converted to Islam. He got married. He had a family. And his son, Osmond Bay, is noted in St. Clair's work as, quote, one of the pioneers of obscene modern anti-Semitic literature, unquote. Fucking Christ. There's so many just incredible small dominoes, big dominoes in this. One of them being that, the other one being Lord Byron dies in 1820s, Greece,

and then nearly about 200 years later, my friend got Climidia off a guy who posts his poetry on Instagram. It's byronic. It's the most byronic thing you can do. Well, that guy, that guy, the Chlamydia guy, was a performance of bisexual. He never seen one up close, but did it for clout. Oh, no. He did it for clap. The Byronic legacy lives on. So the second funny detail is more salient to our story. In late 1827, the situation still

looked very, very bad for the Greeks. But on October 20th, 1827, the combined fleets of Russia, France, and Britain entered the Bay of Navarino, more or less to reconnoiter, definitely not to attack. The orders from their allied governments was that they were to maintain neutral Although, I think everyone involved knew that that was not really a serious request, but they weren't going on the attack. They weren't provoking. They were meant to stop, basically, to more or less referee and to keep the Turks from attacking the Greeks, etc.

However, here's what happened. One of the Allied ships sent a row boat to approach Egyptian fire ships and determined if they were about to be put to use, because the rumor was they were going to attack. That boat received small arms fire, so the Allies sent a larger boat to cover it. That boat also received small arms fire. So, allied ships pulled up, put musketeers on their own sides, started firing muskets to try to suppress the fire of musketeers firing on these rowboats. And then one of the Egyptian ships fired its cannons. So the Allied ships started firing the fucking cannons and they sank the entire Ottoman fleet, the entire fleet.

All the Egyptian ships, all the Turkish ships, they all sank in Navarino in October 1827. And suddenly, that was it. The Greek rebellion didn't have to worry about Ottoman naval incursions. which had been a threat, even if the land contingent had not been very effective. They didn't have to worry about Ottoman deployment of troops. They didn't have to worry about the Ottomans projecting force the way they had before. Although the rebel Greek government barely controlled the country, relatively speaking, there just wouldn't be any way for the Ottomans to reconquer it.

And so that was it. And this is one of the stupidest things I have ever encountered in this show. And like, we all know how Hong Christ's story ends. And yet, it's like, basically one thing leads to another, like, hey, no, fuck you. you can't shoot at me, ends in your entire fleet gets sunk. And the war that you were winning, massively winning is like,

done. Whoops, he doodled my way to Greek independence. Yep, whoops. Now Greece is in the EU. Obviously, we could spend a lot more time

on the Greek Revolution itself. And maybe we might in time because there are a lot of events basically from Byron's death in 1824 until 1827 that I haven't touched on Ipsulanties. I haven't. touched on any of the warlords, the internecine fights. I guess for me, we wanted to confine this to Byron and Byron's legacy and Byron's role in the Greek War of Independence.

So that's where the story ends, I guess. Byron's legacy is obviously complicated, but he wound up being one of four Europeans commemorated his heroes in the Greek War of Independence. This was not solely done by the Greeks. The Greeks asked the European colony in Athens to submit names, and the four they submitted were, if I remember correctly, it was Byron. It was a Swiss guy who brought a bunch of printing presses and created newspapers. It was a French former Bonapartist soldier who trained like the first regular army. Why is Byron Incly?

He did nothing. It's like the meme of Drake dressed as a basketball player and it says like this motherfucker thinks he's on the team. I think the thing about it is is that Byron's death in Greece, going to Greece and dying in Greece did call attention to the conflict in a way that it hadn't been noticed before. Up until he died, he was just doing. a tuxedo mask in Sailor Moon. My work here is John dies.

Didn't do anything. It tells a lot about the value of a man that the best thing that's ever happened to you is die. Well, I mean, I guess that's what I was trying to get at is that like, Byron going to Greece and dying there did bring Europe's attention to it. And we have to trust that it was a cause that was deeply significant to him. He had talked about it long before the revolution had broken out.

And I guess the way you can best understand it is that it might have, have happened the same way without him. We don't know. But we do know what did happen in that Byron's death made a difference, but just not the way he wanted it to. He probably would have made a lot less difference if he would have survived and written poetry about it. Like, him shitting his brains out and dying in the arms of his mosquito mistress is the best thing that he could have done. You know, it's very funny is that as a side note, obviously I told you in the last episode that like he was in love with his page boy, but it was listed as unrequited in the way people describe it, that his affections weren't returned. And so what you're implying is that

Byron got curved by a 15-year-old Greek boy so bad that he decided to fall in love with a mosquito. Yes. That's actually very, very funny. Yes. By my next romanticie novel coming out where I talk more about this. Brought you by Chuck Tingle. The Byron Brigade did nothing of note. Byron engaged in no military operations whatsoever. But he did leverage his celebrity and in a roundabout way, it worked. So I guess that really kind of hammers at home for me at least about his legacy being complicated. I think it's fair to say that Britain's conception of him is one that completely ignores or sands down the uncomfortable parts of his story, which given our experiences with British historiography, I think is

completely par for the course. There's also the perhaps more prosaic fact that Byron's style of writing is so of its time that while it's interesting to fans and to scholars of early 19th century English-Romanic poetry, and it's obviously fodder for school assignments, especially if you go grow up in Britain, it comes across as really archaic and cryptic to a modern reader because it's incredibly formal. Everything rhymes. Everything is within the kind of like the classic structures of whatever kind of verse poem is representing. And also there's so many references to classics to, you know, Greek and Roman myths and writers and such that that's not as central to the literary canon and like who gets educated has expanded so massively that like that's not

really a part of mass literary culture the way that it would have been at the time. So Byron's remembered for his poetry. Yes, but Byron's mostly remembered for dying in Greece and being Byron, being this larger than life figure. He was at times seemingly a very, very generous person and also unbelievably contemptuous and cruel. The way in which we perceive his behavior and I think our willingness to confront the thing that we implicitly know already when we read about his treatment of people in his personal life. That's also changed with times. And I think that, okay, maybe that understanding and the new way that we look at it in the sense of the world and how our view of interpersonal relationships, things like, you know, the rights of minorities,

the rights of children, the rights of women, like the concept of feminism, the concept of like patriarchy, all these things. Like that has changed the way that we might have been induced to look past that. Like, and certainly like scholarship. it would have been like, oh, that doesn't matter. Now it does. And they're more free to talk about the stuff that's been in those archives all this time, but was more or less suppressed by the kind of Byron mania. And you can understand now why his first biography written in 1830 by Thomas Moore completely eliminated, because Byron was the guy who gave his life for Greece. So they weren't going to talk about the horrible shit that he did. I think that our understanding of that

and a willingness to confront that has probably taken his shine off a bit more than just the fact that he wrote tons and tons and tons of poetry that is going to see. incredibly old-fashioned, to put it mildly, to your average reader. I do like that, like, the British have really learned their lesson, and they no longer do a lot of heavy lifting to cover up various sex crimes of people of the past. No, never. But there's another fact, too, this may be simpler, which is, it's just, there's been a lot more writers since then.

It's been 201 years since he died. There are more writers that we read now. There's more poets that we read now. Byron is a figure and a key figure in English literature. Get the fuck out of here, Lord Byron. I want to read Kwan Mills. I mean, Byron was part of this, but like, you know, 201 years of literary history have also passed since them,

and there's just more stuff out there. So I guess I'm going to leave you with something here that it's going to start out as a huge downer, but I think it's worth considering despite the fact that what I'm about to read is objectively abhorrent. So this is from a Los Angeles Times article by Christopher Hitchens, who may he rest in piss. What a combination. Yeah, a 1999 Byron biography by a historian named Benita Isler. This is what Hitchens wrote. Exactly two centuries ago, the 11-year-old George Gordon-Nole, later to be Lord Byron,

was put in the safekeeping of a drunken and promiscuous Scottish nursemaid named May Gray. She beat him savagely during the day and took him into her bed for sexual games at night. She also instructed him in the Old and New Testaments. By the time he was 12, therefore, and had been retrieved by his aghast mother, the boy had a working knowledge of libidinous cruelty and an instinctive contempt for religious cant. I think we have to say, then, that the romantic movement owes May Gray a debt that lies well beyond repayment. if I knew the whereabouts of the grave of this obscure and brutish slattern, I should make it a place of pilgrimage. Oblisks should rise even now with lapidary words inscribed upon them.

I think it's fair to say that this couldn't be published today. I think it's fair to say it might be the most Christopher Hitchens things I've ever read. Given in no small part to the fact that Christopher Hitchens is dead and the only utterance he can now make is hopefully the sound of his grave getting pissed on. Oh, I'm dead. Oh, I'm rotting. Oh, there's pissed. But, all right, bear in mind, this is published in 1999. I mean, all three of us were alive.

I'm the oldest in the show. I was a teenager. Yeah, I was close. This was written to be arch and to be funny and to be, to flirt with the edges of cynical transgression just to the point of offense in the sort of like free 9-11 coked up British fight club sort of way. And yet in our lifetimes, we've seen your viewpoints change to the extent that this sort of thing is admittedly shocking even to me, despite, you know, peeing around for it kind

of when it happened in the sense that I was, you know, reading the news. I would venture that's unambiguously a good thing. We've come to see this kind of cynicism, for example, as a small example, as bullshit and fucked up and just very like soulless and cruel. And that's an evolution that we've experienced, I think, that art, you know, we've moved on from. That's a good thing. I think the same is true as regards Byron's legacy. How he was perceived in his times and how his legacy was sanitized and whitewashed and then how it was fleshed out and then reappropriated, those are all reflections of the times in which those reinterpretations occurred. How we wind up seeing him now is most certainly going to be different than how further scholarship

might assess him in 50 years, and that's honestly just to be expected. In the end, Byron did sacrifice his life for something he believed in. He also a conception of nationalism and nationhood based on ethnic boundaries that really has not served Europe particularly well, and he contributed to a retroactive conception of nationality and ethnicity that continues to ruin people's lives to this day. That wasn't his intention, but that's what happened. It certainly was based in the worldview he had at the time. He wrote profusely. He made a profound mark on English literature. He was a man of his time and his class in the sense that he took full advantage of the perquisites and cheat codes that this rank afforded him. He was not a

particularly good person. I don't think you can objectively say that he did a good thing. But the way his life ended was without a doubt a significant thing. And that's probably why we're talking about him now, because that's a part of his legacy that has stayed relevant the longest. So I guess if you're going to give it your all and you're going to potentially sacrifice your life or something you believe in, you better at least try to make sure in advance that you're not, that you're not joining job at all neutral. The end. Go to Matanui, which you're a bionicle to play with bionicles. I can't wait for us to get a cease and desist letter from Neutral Milk Hotel's lawyer,

who I'm sure is very busy. I mean, look, I'm not a huge fan of Neutral Milk Hotel, but I mean, it was funny to me because I think it was specifically it came to me. I had to amend the script this morning because I realized at first the joke was going to be like the only way you can imagine this happening is it's 2011 and somehow Tame Impala wrote a song so good. It made dudes go to Syria and join ISIS. But then I realized that like Jeff Mangum was like that level of the people who were into it were into it massively emotionally. And then after that second album, they kind of vanished. He was on hiatus. He played a Chris Knox benefit concert in New Zealand, but otherwise they didn't do anything. And then suddenly he pops up in 2011, you know, playing music for the crowd as you Party Park. And it's like, take that time's infinity. And that's the closest you can get to it. Is Byron suddenly doing the thing and becoming relevant in a way that he kind of ceased to be amongst, especially amongst slightly younger people? I have to check this scoreboard here. Ten military uniforms he brought with him. Zero military actions.

Correct. None whatsoever. There were people who came to Greece wearing like remade or like 1800s versions of like Athenian and Spartan helmets to wear. Hell yeah. Like it was It's so far for shit. I love it. It's genuinely like, hey, I'm gonna larp like a Roman Legion and then immediately get killed by Al-Shabob. Like, it's just, it's so fucking stupid. Carrying my hoplight shielded

immediately getting hit by an explosively foreign penetrator. Yeah, exactly. I'm dressed up like the sacred band of thieves and a dude's direct firing a fucking mortar at me using an iPad to fucking figure out the angle. Like, oh my God. So I guess what are you guys' reactions?

Because, I mean, we could have gone a lot more into the Greek Civil War, the Greek War of Independence, but I think that for me, Byron is seen as so, like, intrinsic to this and how it's recounted in the English-speaking world. And so it felt like that's what we wanted to focus on, was this weird guy who wound up in this fight that he both believed it and knew nothing about, and then died immediately, and yet somehow became emblematic of it as a hero. I mean, he is, like, just the, the prototypical figure of Edward Saeed's Orientalism was like, oh, yeah, I'm obsessed with this shit. I don't don't know how to survive there. I'm going to bleed out and die within three months of getting there.

It's just like, I think it applies a point about like an extremely moneyed European urge to go fight for some sort of belief in the East, but also like it's kind of, it is congruent with the kind of rise of like post-enlightment obsession with like classics and like, oh yeah, we're going to read Socratic dialogues and then I'm going to go and get fucking airhole. by a Turkish soldier? I mean, I would also say, too, that I remember reading an Italian journalist who had worked as a freelancer in Syria and talking about, like, how depressing it was because there was no way, like, there wasn't actually a demand for, for serious reporting.

There was just for demand for stringing. And stringing was insanely expensive that people who came out there, the only way, like, they could barely afford to, like, write the next story. And all around them were some of the most insane, confusingly, like, airheaded dreaming people who thought they were going to come to Syria to do some, do something to help. One of the things was literally three German guys who brought like classical music instruments to play like string concertos in the street in Aleppo. It's like, what? She also said like trying to refer situations where she'd found orphans that needed care and like some of the

charities. They were like, oh, we're actually here to study childhood, but not, we don't, we don't really deal with actual children. Outstanding. Fuck them kids. And let's see how they're fucked. That's genuinely like some of the stuff reading about this. For example, the relief of the famine and the immediate aftermath of the victory in 1827, there were a bunch of American charities involved because American Bill Holines did get involved with fundraising. And quite frankly, there's a story of one of them rescuing a Greek boy and bringing him home. And he actually wanted him to be, I think, the first Greek American congressman who was elected in the 1850s. But he like separated this boy from his older sister. And the guy was like, yeah, his sister was pretty upset when I

took him away. But like, what can you do? You kidnapped that child. Nothing is known of his sister. It's like, that stayed with me, maybe because I'm a parent. I'm just like, it's like, clearly you could have taken two kids, you fucking freak. Well, that reminds me of something very recent of like some Marine bringing kids. Yeah. From Afghanistan. Yeah. They kidnapped an Afghan kid during the American withdrawal.

And then like has the fucking ball, for one, not arrested, but for two, like to go to court and contest that they have custody. It's absolutely insane. It's not an isolated incident by any stretch of the imagination. And as far as what I think about Byron, for an individual character that we've talked about, because we talk about a few over the years, he's probably the one that outside of, of course,

like horrible dictators and whatever, the one that I hate the most, because he's just so contemptible. Like he's a fucking asshole. He's legendaryly annoying. on top of all the other crimes he committed before during and after becoming famous, it's almost the least understandable.

For a lot of the other bastards throughout history that we've talked about, their crimes make sense in context in so far as like, they're a military dictator. They're on a campaign. Like, yeah, those are things that you would do. Not saying I applaud them or understand them, but they make sense in the context of the character, you know? I don't know.

I just fucking hate this. guy. I hate him so much. Jeff Mangum could write Don Juan, but Lord Byron could not write a concept album about being in love with Anne Frank. Can you imagine George Gordon Byron trying to hit those high notes on

fucking two-headed boy? This is not happening. Two-headed boy would make him think that they were singing about in Albanian and he get turned on. I have to leave you with one detail that you'll find very funny. They, of course, being early 19th century liberals, appointed a king to have a constitutional monarchy in Greece. The king that they

appointed wound up being King Otto the first of Greece and he basically from 1832 until he was deposed in 1862. He was a 17 year old Bavarian prince. The other candidate wound up becoming the king of the Belgians first while they were figuring situation out King Leopold the first. Which implies King Leopold

the second could have been the king of Greece. Leopold's son, the pervert and the mutilator of the Congo. Yeah, but if he if that family line ended up taking the Greek thrown around the Belgian throne, maybe he wouldn't have had the clout or power to do the horrible things he would eventually do to Congo. We don't know. We don't know. But yeah, anyway, that's Lord Byron in the Greek revolution. I hope you've enjoyed this. I was alternating between laughing and being absolutely

horrified and dismayed. Sometimes I felt sorry for young Byron. Most of them I was like, you are the biggest piece of shit that's ever walked the face of the earth. Anyway, I hope you learned something. Hope you guys had fun. We have a question from the Legion. The question is, well, first of all, we do questions from the Legion. Basically, if you join on our Patreon, you can ask us a question. You can, um, you can ask it on Discord on Patreon by email. You can send it in the contingent of money to fund the Greek Revolution that shows up, sadly, right after one of us dies. And then we have to figure out what to do with it. And it just winds up going to guys to build Greek Dubai in 1825. This question is,

what media do you love that people would expect you to hate? And what media do you hate that people expect you to love? I suppose something that's come out recently that people would probably expect me like is the series Masters of the Air that I absolutely have no interest in. I tried to watch it because it's supposed to be band of brothers, the Pacific,

but involving the Army Air Corps, same production team on that shit. It's got none of the juice. It's just not good. I don't like it. I don't particularly care about the Army Air Corps either. But I would watch it if it was at least well put together.

It's just, no, don't care. Didn't like it. It's something I do like that people would expect me to hate. I have a kind of personality that when I say that I like something, people are just like, yeah, of course you like that. You know what I mean? Like, nobody's really shocked that my media diet is quite honestly a shotgun blast of ridiculous bullshit.

I haven't really kept up with stuff when it comes to TV and movies, but I am a fan of a really bad show that most people would probably assume I wouldn't like, which is called, I think we've talked. about it a lot on here when I've raved about it called Borja Faith and Fear. It's just softcore porn with incredible costume design and it goes on forever and it has like every European actor working in the late 2000s about the Borges, about Cheseray Borja and Lucrezia Borja. It's fun. It's so stupid. But I would say, obviously, we talk a lot about music on here and I would say a thing that I like that most people would assume I would hate. Look, I'm not saying

any of the later stuff is good. It's all bad and I particularly resent it because of the age I was when it was popular, but the first Creed album is actually good. I'm sorry. The first creed album has one. It has my own prison. It has torn. It's good. And then they got popular. They put out like, you know, where the home's right open? I had to listen to that song like every 15 minutes on the radio when I was on the school bus. I mean, this is quite similar to the first whole album. It fucking rules. The first, I mean, the first whole album is insanely good. And then, uh, what's it called? Um, but also like, like, holes weird because like live through this is also good. And then, uh, was it pretty on the,

inside is good, is great. It doesn't sound like anything later. Live through this is also good. Doesn't sound like the previous. And I mean, what's it called? Celebrity Skin? Fuck, is that the name of the album? Celebrity Skin the last one.

Step down. Big step down. I don't know, man. It's got some great songs on it, but it's like some really bad songs on it. Dude, I'm sorry, Malibu's an incredible song. It's genuinely incredible song. I think what happened with Hole, it happened to a much lesser extent that people that will completely forget that the span ever existed in, in a while is like panic at the

disco is eventually it turned from being a band to being one person and then a rotating string of dickhead musicians behind them. Also, like they got Michael Bynhorn like nobody's business. Michael Bynhorn is famous for being a fucking asshole, but also saving bands in trouble. And he basically did that with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the late 80s. He was a guy who produced Soundgarden super unknown. And when he produced celebrity skin, he loved making people do very long stretches of pre-recording rehearsals. He basically did everything he possibly could with Courtney Love's support to mind-fuck the drummer from Hull into having a nervous breakdown so he could replace her with

the drummer from Journey. And then Paddy killed herself. She was addicted to drugs for a really long time and she died, yes. That brings me to another piece of media that I like that people probably won't surprise I do. I like panic at the disco, Tom. That's not a surprise. I don't like that people think I would like.

I don't, you make this joke all the time, I don't really like guided by voices. I never have. It's just spiritually a very U band. Fair enough, yeah. Something that I like that people to see my hate is, I don't know, I love Love Island and I love like married at first sight and all that shit. It's just great down. I'm big into the 90 day fiancee extended universe. I see, maths. Mavs is great because it brings out the real psycho shit in people. It's like, you think they're, oh, they're nice.

Then it gets to like week six and it's like, no, I'm going to like emotionally destroy you behind doors. I don't really like reality TV, but I actually, in the early days of dinner date, I actually really liked it. It's so, because it's so like British and like down market. It's actually really entertaining and just like genuinely kind of sweet. Like I did actually enjoy it. I'm not big into reality TV at all. When I watch 90 day fiance, it is quite literally a hate watch. Like I hate everybody on the show. I wish nothing but bad things for them. The only reality TV that I like is shows that people be like, yeah, you watch it like physical 100 fucking rules. I have a controversial one though of a something that

people would assume I love. It's not necessarily that I hate. I just really do not care. And that is Lord of the Rings. What? I mean, same with me with Dune. I just don't give a shit about it. I don't really. Okay. I'm in the same boat as Nate. I don't give a shit about Dune. I do not care. I'm a science fiction author. People probably assume that I have it on my bookshelf and I just do not fucking care. I liked Redwall books when I was a kid and my teacher thought I would like Dune when I was 11 and it kind of became like a, well, we don't have a gifted and talented program for fifth graders. So you just have to do this extra assignment for English. And I had to read Dune and write about it. And I was like, I hated it. And I was like, I think I might if I'd come

into it later on my own, I might have liked it. But being made to do extra homework that none of your friends are doing when you're 11 to read a book you're not really into. I was like, no, fuck Frank Herbert. Fuck Dune. Fuck Paul Treaties. Suck by Dick. That is not the bridge I expected to go for Redwall. I assume they'd have you read Lord of the Rings, not do. or they'd be like Nate we want to ruin your life we want to ruin your emotional state why don't you be water shut down yep yeah my thing with Lord of the Rings

maybe it's just my age it's just like there was just such a period of like complete media saturation where I'm just like I just don't care yeah that's fair I'm not gonna watch one of those like oh we're gonna stay in at the weekend and watch all the extended cuts over the course of the day I'm like no I would rather watch

brilliant Alexander Plats instead yeah that mean that's fair when I I read Lord of the Rings before the movies came out. So it was prior to the media saturation for sure. I do have one final story based on Nates about your teacher giving you something extra to read and you joking about it being watershipped down. Mine was not watershed down. I was in middle school. I cannot remember which grade.

I want to say seventh or something. Seventh or eighth wasn't sixth. And we had no gifted program or anything. I mean, we barely had programs. Yeah. My fifth grade classroom was in a fucking trailer on blocks because they had the school who was overflowing. They didn't have enough room in the elementary school. So the couple of the fifth and sixth grade classes had to be in like in extension buildings. Similar. Yeah, similar experience. And my

teacher, uh, who I do really like, he was one of the only teachers who, uh, actually when I said I wanted to be a writer, he's like, oh, that's great rather than like, oh, so you want to be unemployed. Um, he, he realized I was quite bored doing the class readings. And he's like, I'm going to give you a book to read. You don't have to do report on it. I just want you to read it and then we'll talk about it. But I need you to go get like a permission slip from your mother. And my mom didn't give a shit because she's probably thinking, what is the

worst possible book? He is going to give me. She signs it. She probably would have signed it even said like he's going to read MindConf because like I'm the youngest of three at that point. My mom just didn't give a shit. She's like, I'll sign the permission slip. Just go away. At least he's reading. Yeah. He had me read Motley Cruz

the dirt. Oh my God. I'm not going to recommend anybody reads. It's certainly an experience in biographies about a band. But on top of all the other incredibly fucked up shit that happens in that book, it literally opens with the members of Motley Crew buying microwave burritos to put over their dicks to get the smell of groupy pussy off of them before they go home to the girlfriends. I read that when I was in seventh or eighth grade and I remember it to this day.

No, I think people should read the dirt because it's like, it is a telling on yourself for the ages is like how it got past an editor and they actually published it because it's like no one looks good in this book. Everyone looks like a fucking dirt bag. Yes. Then they made a movie with MGK and it. And that movie sucks shit. They cut all the stuff that made that book. Not good, but interesting out of it. But yeah, my teacher gave that to me to read when I was like, how old are you in seventh grade? Like 13? You turn 13 to 12 to 13. Yeah. I mean, like, shouts out to Mr. Farley. I don't hate my teacher for making me read Dune. I just, it didn't connect, whatever. I just, it's a memory. And at age 11, I was soured on the, the Dune universe and never got it back.

I would shout out my teacher, but I'm pretty sure he still is a public school teacher in the same school district. I really don't want him to get fired. I don't even know if my old teacher is still teaching. The year that I was in fifth grade was 95 to 96. So it's just been a long time. That's it, guys. We've done two episodes now on Byron. I've led the show for three weeks in a row. I hope you've enjoyed it. I know it's slightly different. I've had a lot of fun. I've learned a lot. And all I can say at the end of it is, well, until next time, don't join neutral milk ices. It's never going to work out well for you. Call your boy uncle. Yeah, he probably misses you.