Byron felt compelled to set the record straight after it was alleged that he had swum the Hellespont the easy way.
Every night, so the Greek myths tell us, Leander left Abydos in Asia Minor and swam across the narrow Hellespont to his lover Hero, priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos in Thrace, the European side, until he was drowned in bad weather. On May 3rd, 1810, George Gordon Byron and his friend Lt William Ekenhead swam the same stretch of water in the other direction, from Europe to Asia.
The flamboyant English poet went to extreme lengths to get a refund on an unsatisfactory purchase.
After moving to Ravenna in 1819, poet Lord Byron bought a black horse which had a tendency to trip and throw his rider, as Byron discovered only the second time he rode him. Byron demanded his money back, and as he cheerfully confessed to Edward Trelawny, things started to get a little ugly.
Lord Byron could not have hoped for a better omen in his support for the oppressed people of Greece.
George Gordon Byron, one of the greatest of all English romantic poets, died in 1824, aged just 36, in Missolonghi, Greece. Yet he played a key part in liberating Greece from almost four hundred years of oppression by the Ottoman Empire.