Page 50 - Beholding Liberty!

I.1.9
Lord Byron
The Works [...] Containing English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers; The Curse of Minerva, and the Waltz, an Apostrophic Hymn. Philadelphia: Published by M. Thomas. 1820.
Library of the Hellenic Parliament
THIS EDITION of Lord Byron’s works includes the iconic “Curse of Minerva”, composed in March 1811 during the poet’s stay in Athens, and published the following year.
This is his polemic against Lord Elgin (Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, 1766-1841), who had desecrated the monuments of Athens by brutally removing the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon – causing structural damage to the monument – and one of the Caryatids of the Erechtheion, among others.
In a dialogue form between the poet and the god- dess Minerva, Byron lyrically conveys his antiquar-
ianism and classical education – the foundations of his philhellenic sentiment, which led him back to Greece again during the Greek Revolution [cat. no II.8.B], this time irrevocably.
Elgin’s seizure of Greek antiquities was also criti- cised by other scholars and antiquarians, but it was the brilliance of Byron’s poetic discourse that consol- idated Elgin’s place amongst the notorious figures of Greek history and culture. Conversely, “The Curse of Minerva” is a hymn to the Greek light, in actual and symbolic terms, and helped forge the ever-expand- ing pre-revolutionary philhellenism.
50 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!