The evil eye

The evil eye is a folk belief in which a look can bring harm, but the book gives that look a wider and more ambiguous reach than simple malice. During Lord Byron’s final illness, a servant identifies it as the source of his decline; in the narrator’s later reflection, it becomes both a possible explanation for catastrophe and a protective sign worth carrying. The motif holds superstition, admiration, medicine, and uncertainty together without resolving them into a single account.

A Look That Can Harm

The explanation offered by a servant attending Lord Byron is blunt: someone has cast the evil eye. A foreign doctor rejects the suggestion, assuming that such a curse must come from someone who envies Byron or wishes him harm. The servant, however, understands the belief differently. In her account, even admiration can open a door to the devil. The distinction makes the evil eye more unsettling than a deliberate attack: the danger may come from a look that is not hostile at all.

The book connects the belief to the word for the eye and to ideas of luck and protection. In Kalamata, a description of the town’s name suggests an association with good luck and an eye that wards off evil. The motif therefore faces in two directions: the eye may be imagined as a source of injury, or as a means of guarding against it. That double function helps explain why it remains meaningful beyond the scene of Byron’s illness.

Byron’s Illness and the Servant’s Diagnosis

In Messolonghi, Byron suffers a fever, fits, and faints, and his condition worsens over the course of March. His doctors fret at his bedside, but the servant’s diagnosis is not heard as medical knowledge. The text makes the imbalance explicit: an English doctor is not going to listen to an uneducated Greek woman. He has heard Byron mention the evil eye in poetry, but he understands it only as an envious or malicious curse, not as a harm that admiration might cause.

When the doctors leave the room, the servant puts a drop of oil into a small glass of water beside Byron’s bed. The oil sinks, confirming her belief that the evil eye is present. The test gives her certainty, but not authority: she cannot persuade the doctors to accept her explanation or act on it. Meanwhile, they repeatedly bleed Byron, a treatment that further weakens him as his illness advances. The narrative sets these responses beside one another without making the servant’s diagnosis a proven cause of his death.

Death, Doubt, and a Missed Ritual

After Byron dies, Messolonghi mourns publicly: guns are fired from the fortress, Easter Week celebrations are cancelled, shops and public offices close, and three weeks of mourning are declared. The cause of his death remains contested. Later explanations include Lyme disease, malaria, epilepsy, and the effects of excessive leeching. Against these theories, Byron’s maid maintains throughout her life that the evil eye killed him. Her conviction survives, though it never becomes a public accusation against Despina, whose look no one suspects.

The servant’s regret focuses not only on what she believed had happened but on what she was prevented from doing. She says that if she had been allowed to perform the ritual to cast out the evil eye, Byron might still be alive. The thought is necessarily counterfactual: the book offers no way to establish whether the ritual would have changed the outcome. Its force lies in the gap between the servant’s confidence and the doctors’ dismissal, and in the possibility that a form of care was excluded before it could even be tried.

Protection and the Narrator’s Reflection

The narrator does not claim certainty about curses. After reading about Byron and considering his suffering, the narrator says that the idea of the eye as protection is appealing and carries one on a keyring, just in case. This small object translates a dramatic historical belief into an everyday precaution. It does not settle whether the evil eye can cause illness; instead, it shows how a symbol may offer comfort even to someone who doubts the explanation attached to it.

The motif also echoes the book’s attention to how people interpret what they see. A beautiful place or a welcoming encounter can shape a traveller’s sense of safety, while the eye may signify either a threatening gaze or protection from harm. In Byron’s story, admiration itself is feared as dangerous; in the narrator’s present, the eye is kept close as a safeguard. The belief’s lasting significance comes from that unresolved reversal: the same image can mark exposure to misfortune and the hope of resisting it.