ABSTRACT
The facts about Lord Byron’s bisexuality have been well known for a generation. Byron has left ample evidence that he was familiar with the literary and historic traditions of Greek male love. Byron was most conscious of the Greek tradition in its Latinized form. There are very few examples of heroic love in Latin, but Virgil in the ninth book of the Aeneid tells a story obviously inspired by Achilles and Patroclus, the episode of Nisus and Euryalus, a tale that early gripped Byron’s imagination. For as Byron changed the addressee of his translation from male to female, so Catullus changed the gender of the speaker in his Latin translation of Sappho’s famous ode, making the poem an expression of his love for Lesbia. Byron’s own psychological development reveals that, first as a boy and then as a young man, he turned at one moment to women, at another to his own sex.
