The premise of Byron's 1813 work The Giaour might strike many now—when told in the abstract—as a case of crude exoticism or overwrought romanticism. Byron claims he based the poem on a tale he heard in Greece: about a woman who had been wrapped in a blanket and drowned in the sea for the alleged crime of adultery. The poem follows her lover's eternal quest for vengeance.
Mere melodrama and Orientalism, one might be tempted to say.
Except that it appears there are indeed parts of the world where people are still being martyred for love. The New York Times reported recently on a case in Pakistan in which a woman and man were executed in public for an alleged extramarital affair. One of the most striking aspects of the case was the woman's defiant words, shortly before her death:
"You can shoot me," she said, "But nothing more than that."
Woe to them that can kill the body but cannot kill the soul, in other words. As Roxana writes from the seraglio in Montesquieu's Persian Letters: "I have lived in slavery, and yet always retained my freedom: [...] my mind has always maintained its independence." (Davidson trans.) The human heart, as Byron writes, is "that all/ Which tyranny can ne'er enthral[.]"
Read that Times story in full and tell me again if Byron's work was mere fable.
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