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Updated: June 8, 2025
The only barrier opposed to the entire extinction of the Greek population was their single stronghold of Missolonghi, which was now besieged by Rashid Pasha and the Turks. If Ibrahim had joined his forces with the besieging army of the Turks, Missolonghi could hardly have resisted their combined attack, and the Greek race would have been in danger of suffering annihilation.
The arrival of Lord Byron at Missolonghi was not only hailed as a new era in the history of Greece, but as the beginning of a new cycle in his own extraordinary life. His natural indolence disappeared; the Sardanapalian sloth was thrown off, and he took a station in the van of her efforts that bespoke heroic achievement.
It was in Missolonghi, Jan. 22, 1824, that, with the memorandum, "On this day I completed my thirty-sixth year," Byron wrote his latest verses, most pathetically regretting his youth and his unfortunate life, but arousing himself to find in a noble cause a glorious death: "The fire that in my bosom preys Is like to some volcanic isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze, A funeral pile."
Yet greater assistance soon came in the shape of an Egyptian army, led by Ibrahim Pasha himself. An overwhelming power was thus organized during the last weeks of 1825, and the defenders of Missolonghi were left to succumb to it, almost unaided.
"The wife of one of the Turkish inhabitants of Missolonghi," said an English visitor in 1824, "imploring my pity, begged me to allow her to remain under my roof, in order to shelter her from the brutality and cruelty of the Greeks. They had murdered all her relations.
Who has not read with deep emotion those last pathetic lines, beautiful as the after-glow of sunset, in which love and resignation are mingled with something of a melancholy heroism? Who has not lingered with compassion over the dying scene at Missolonghi—the sufferer’s inability to make his farewell messages of love intelligible, and the last long hours of silent pain?
Bravely said! but deserving of little attention. The fate of Missolonghi could have had no visible effect on that of Athens.
The Greeks welcomed him and made him a leader, and for a few months he found himself in the midst of a wretched squabble of lies, selfishness, insincerity, cowardice, and intrigue, instead of the heroic struggle for liberty which he had anticipated. He died of fever, in Missolonghi, in 1824.
Basili was strictly charged by Ali Pasha in person to attend us, and Dervish was one of fifty who accompanied us through the forests of Acarnania, to the banks of the Achelous, and onward to Missolonghi. There I took him into my own service, and never had occasion to repent it until the moment of my departure.
Had he survived, it might, instead of awakening the derision of history, have supplied to himself materials for another canto of Don Juan. I shall select one instance of his afflictions. The captain of a British gun-brig came to Missolonghi to demand an equivalent for an Ionian boat, which had been taken in the act of going out of the Gulf of Lepanto, with provisions and arms.
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