January 1824. Lord Byron arrives in Messolonghi, a small town on the west coast of Greece to be greeted as a Messiah by the Greeks who are in rebellion against the powerful Ottoman Empire. Exiled from his own country, ostracized by society for his erotic adventures, tired of a futile life in London salons, Byron is ready to throw himself into the battle and die like a hero out of Homer. But in this devastated land he finds only mud, mosquitoes and the anticipation of war. The Greeks make him a general of an army of peasants, wanderers, mercenaries and adventurers. The general prepares his army for a battle that never takes place. Still, driven by the beautiful ancient myths of Greece and the Greeks, Byron is determined to give his last performance. In the chaos of revolution, racked by fever, by the ghosts of his past and by his love for the young Greek Lukas, the poet descends into his hell-defying destiny as it approaches. A fortune-teller in Aberdeen once told him that he would die in his thirty-seventh year. BYRON is not a historical fresco. It is not interested in the birth of a nation but the death of a poet, and of one of the great romantic poets at that. The film forms part of a world-wide current of revival of the causes of Romanticism today at a time when the myths and ideologies of the past seem to be passing permanently into the twilight zone.