The Curse, unlike Hints from Horace, has the advantage of a definite and undivided aim. It is an exposure and denunciation of Lord Elgin, who, appointed in 1799 to the embassy from England at the Porte, had interested himself in the remains of Greek architecture and sculpture on the Acropolis and had secured the services of the Neapolitan painter, Lusieri, to sketch the ruins. In 1801 he obtained a firman from the Sultan allowing him to carry away “any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon,” and accepting this as a guaranty against molestation in his project, he at once proceeded, at his own expense, to dismantle the Parthenon and to ship the finest specimens to England. Although he left Turkey in 1803, the work continued through his agents until 1812. His collection, the cost of accumulating which was estimated at 74,000 pounds, was purchased by the nation for 35,000 pounds in 1816, and now forms part of the so-called “Elgin Marbles” in the British Museum.
Although opinions as to the propriety of Elgin’s actions differed widely at the time, it is now fairly well established that his foresight prevented the ultimate destruction of the statuary by war and the elements. Byron’s conclusions, formed on the spot where the operations were being carried on, have, however, some justification. He felt that it was the degradation of Greece at the hands of a foreign despoiler, and he resented the intrusion as interference in the affairs of a helpless people. In English Bards he had mentioned Elgin, along with Aberdeen, as fond of “misshaped monuments and maimed antiques,” and had ridiculed him for making his house a mart,
“For all the mutilated works of art.”
When later he saw the havoc that had been caused at Athens, his mood changed from raillery to seriousness, and he burst out with fury at the man whom he considered a wanton plunderer and at the nation which could tolerate his depredations. Under this stimulus he wrote the stanzas on Elgin in Childe Harold, but his rage found a better outlet in The Curse of Minerva. This satire contains only 312 lines, but it goes straight to its goal, with a directness and a concentration which distinguish it above any of the other early satires, even above English Bards, superior as that poem is to it in more important respects.
The satire has a narrative basis, with a plot which is simple and unified. The beautiful opening description of an evening at Athens precedes, and accentuates by contrast, the ensuing indictment by Minerva of Elgin, the desecrator of all this loveliness. The poet’s reply to the accusing goddess disclaims any responsibility for the vandalism on England’s part, and lays the blame on Scotland, Elgin’s fatherland. Minerva’s answering curse and prophecy extend the scope of the satire beyond mere personal malice, and give it a broad application to England’s policy as oppressor and devastator. Her speech ends somewhat abruptly, and the poem closes.
Although Byron was, by his own admission, “half a Scot by birth, and bred a whole one,”[146] he joined, in The Curse of Minerva, the long line of satirists from the authors of Eastward Ho! to Cleveland with his grim couplet,
“Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom;
Not forced him wander but confined him home,”
and to Dr. Johnson, who have jeered at the Scotch and Scotland. Byron’s antipathy for his early home evidently developed from his quarrel with the Scotch reviewers. English Bards had contained scattered references to “Northern wolves” and to the “oat-fed phalanx” of the critic clan, and had alluded scornfully to the children of Dun-edin who “write for food—and feed because they write.” In The Curse of Minerva, a new occasion for dislike having arisen, the attack on the Scotch is more vicious and intolerant. Many passages have their counterparts in portions of Churchill’s Prophecy of Famine (1763), a pastoral in the form of a dialogue, with the motto, “Nos patriam fugimus,” ingeniously applied to the Scotch in the translation, “We all get out of our country as fast as we can.” Churchill, who, it will be remembered, hated the Scotch critic, Smollett, as ferociously as Byron hated Jeffrey, had been aroused also by the growing influence of Bute and other Scotchmen at the court of George III, and his poem, accordingly, became a severe political invective, interspersed with vilification of the Scotch climate and the Scotch people. It is interesting to compare Churchill’s description of the barrenness and dampness of Scotland with Byron’s picture of that country as “a land of meanness, sophistry, and mist.” The former poet calls Scotchmen “Nature’s bastards”; Byron refers to Scotland as “that bastard land.” Both writers have caustic lines on the shrewdness, importunity, and avarice of the Scotch people, wherever they settle. Although the similarities between the satires warrant no deduction, there is a possibility that Byron, who undoubtedly had read the Prophecy of Famine, may have recollected certain passages in a poem the spirit of which is very like his own.[147]
Basing his argument chiefly on the fact that a couplet of Pope[148] is parodied in Byron’s lines,