For generations of readers, the experience of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage has been caught up with a reading of Byron's psychology, for the poem has commonly been seen as the expression of an incompletely repressed alter ego to be read in parallel with Byron's own life and expressed opinions. It therefore finds itself firmly placed within the bounds of an interpretative frame whose constant reference point is the concept of a flawed and melancholic psyche. Within this, approving critics may note the perspicuity of the poem's dark opinions, or the fascination of its psychology, while disapproving critics might censure the indulgence of high Romantic self-expression or dramatisation. These approaches, and their approving or disapproving reflexes are not misreadings. In many ways, they constitute a meta-narrative which is historically continuous, amply echoing the response of Byron's contemporary audience, which enjoyed the poem precisely because it seemingly alluded to the authentic experience of its author. But in general, such a view is likely to eclipse other of the poem's achievements, for it tends to reinforce the Romantic cult of introversion wherein the isolation of the private poet is seen as a necessary condition of a gifted perception. I will argue here for an understanding of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage i and ii as a profoundly public work written in a style designed to appeal to a new audience sympathetic to its coherent and anti-teleological explorations of history, politics and contemporary affairs. It is an ambitious poem which constructs a world-view for the modern - that is to say 'Romantic' - post-revolutionary intellectual, a view which in turn produces the psychology of the Byronic hero as a dramatisation of its effects. Significantly, its perspective is European, discarding orthodox or nationalistic understandings of history and empire, in favour of an all-embracing scepticism, which interrogates ideals of civilisation's progress and nationhood through a series of meditations around posterity's judgements on heroism, fame and achievement.