On the eleventh of August 1823, Byron took a brief holiday from Turkish naval blockades and the already exasperating factional squabbles of the Greeks. With several companions, he had himself rowed across from his temporary base in Cephalonia to the adjacent island of Ithaca. There, he insisted that he was interested neither in classical ruins nor in fiction, whether Homer's or his own. 'I detest antiquarian twaddle', Trelawny reported him as saying. To which he added, 'do people think I have no lucid intervals, that I came to Greece to scribble more nonsense? I will show them I can do something better.' Offered a tour of supposed Homeric sites on the island, Byron resisted - only to wander off when the expedition nevertheless occurred, and seek out for himself, after a considerable climb, the cave in which Odysseus had reputedly secreted the treasures given him by the Phaeacians. Meeting with an old shepherd, he immediately identified him with Homer's loyal swineherd, Eumaeus, and invited him to share their picnic lunch. Byron liked Ithaca: 'If this isle were mine', Trelawny records him as exclaiming, 'I would break my staff and bury my book - What fools we all are!' (HVSV, p. 421) Trelawny's reports can never be entirely trusted. This, however, registers as a characteristically Byronic set of Shakespearean echoes and allusions, managing as it does to run together the cynical glee of Puck inA Midsummer Night's Dream ('Lord, what fools these mortals be!' (iii.ii.115)) with The Tempest: Caliban's 'This island's mine' (i.ii.331), Gonzalo's 'Had I plantation of this isle' (ii.i.144), and most explicitly, of course, Prospero's renunciation of his magic in Act v. But Byron has reinterpreted (as well as slightly misquoted) the last. Prospero was preparing for return to Milan and his dukedom. Byron, twisting Shakespeare's words, imagines for a moment that it might be possible to jettison both his military responsibilities and his poetry, not to mention Italy and England, and never leave Ithaca at all.