Greece in Shelley’s Laon and Cythna

This paper offers a close reading of the presence of Greece in Laon and Cythna (1817), Shelley’s longest narrative poem and known also for the revised version The Revolt of Islam (1818). Shelley’s idealisation of Greece informs crucial aspects of Laon and Cythna including description, theme and historical framework. Although the setting of the story is in modern Greece and Turkey, local colour is limited in favour of abstract representation to lend a universal character to the heroic idealism unfolding therein. Laon’s conversion to the cause of liberty among the ruins of national progenitors represents a process of spiritual inheritance in which Greece figures as a place where past achievements bear contemporary political relevance. Classical Athens is situated as the first manifestation of the transcendental Spirit of Good in a Manichaean dualistic metaphysics of history. Greek antiquity forms the historical framework into which Laon’s and Cythna’s heroism is incorporated as one evolutionary stage of the alternate predominance of Good and Evil.