Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny

There are towns and places which seem to remain the same through every change, as if there is some indestructible genius about them, some essence that will reassert itself like a damp mould through every disguise. It is perhaps nothing more than fancy that finds an echo of these horrors among the hills that squat so balefully above the modern town, and yet in the way Tripolis subverts history to the triumphalism of a national myth, we are brought as close as landscape or place can take us to the Greece of 1821.

With the bombast of its civic statuary, with the tyres, rubbish and broken-down trucks that mix with the brittle bones in that nearby gorge, Tripolis is even now a litmus test of sensibility that is not easy to fail and it is a sobering thought that in Trelawny’s account it merits only a casual half-line. It is often as worth noting what a man omits of his experience as what he includes, and Trelawny’s silence here – so different from Gordon’s – seems as eloquent as anything he wrote, an involuntary revelation of the man himself, a sudden glimpse into a moral abyss all the more chilling because he was too blind to try to hide it.

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