THE GREEK ADVENTURE
by DAVID HOWARTH 253 pages. Atheneum. $10.
Byron had visited Greece before, so he presumably knew that changes had occurred there since the time of Pericles. But his mistress in Genoa screamed too much, and bored him. Perhaps being Byron bored him too.
Other European volunteers in the Greek war of independence knew the splendor of their own certitudes, but they did not know how or why war was fought in this often grubby and backward land that they honored as the cradle of Western civilization. And, of course, they did not know...