wrote to Byron in January 1815: Byron had not been responding to Nicolo's letters, which Nicolo mentions in the letter: "It is now almost three years that I am at Athens; and have sent you many letters, but I have not received any answer". It is possible that Byron did not respond because he was married and, according to the 20th-century Byron biographer Phyllis Grosskurth, "Nicolo was the last person he would have wanted to hear from." Relationship with Byron Early biographers, who had a tendency to idealise Byron, generally depicted his relationship with Giraud as platonic, generous and paternal. Moore, Byron's friend and chosen biographer, described the relationship between Byron and Giraud as: However, it is worth noting that Moore's stance was criticised by Byron's close friend John Hobhouse, who claimed that "Moore had not the remotest guess at the real reason which induced Lord B. at that time to prefer having no Englishman immediately or constantly near him." Early 20th-century biographer André Maurois argued that "what Byron was capable of loving in another was a certain kind of innocence and youthfulness" and that the relationship was one of Byron's "protective passions". Likewise, G. Wilson Knight, in his 1953 biography of Byron, claimed that Byron became protective over Giraud just as he did with all of the children he met during his travels. Giraud was special to Byron, and, according to Knight, "it was probably of Nicolo that he was thinking when he wrote that Greece was 'the only place I was ever contented in. In Byron: A Biography, published in 1957, Marchand pointed out that Byron "wished Hobhouse there to share the nonsensical gaiety" of when Byron and Giraud were together, but changed his mind after remembering that Hobhouse's personality would not be conducive to entertainment. Their time together "was a relaxed pleasure that [Byron] was to remember more fondly than most of the adventures of his travels". Later critics and biographers have frequently asserted that the relationship between Byron and Nicolo was sexual, and should be viewed as part of a pattern in Byron's life of sexual engagement with socially inferior young boys. For instance, the early 20th-century biographer Ethel Mayne pointed out both the frequency of such relationships in Byron's life and their inherent ambiguity. She notes that Nicolo's "stay was also marked by one of those ambiguous friendships with a youth infinitely below him in