‘Confounded fantasies’: Byron and Romantic Platonism

Behind the mock outrage of Byron’s ridicule of Plato’s ‘confounded fantasies’ in the first canto of Don Juan lies a years-long encounter with the Platonic dialogues and their protagonist, Socrates, whom Byron once called ‘Athena’s wisest son’. Byron certainly took issue with his friend Shelley’s Platonic views and commitments, especially on the issue of Platonic love. But a careful review of the evolution of Byron’s engagements with Plato’s writings, especially in the unfolding of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (where the comment about Socrates is to be found), shows how intricately Byron’s own confounded fantasies were entangled with what he would have found in such works as the Symposium and the Phaedrus . Socrates’s representation of love as a kind of divine mania in these dialogues was something that seems to have been particularly important to Byron, especially in the context of what Louis Crompton has called ‘Greek love’.