A young Spaniard is sent abroad after a scandal and stumbles through shipwreck, slavery, war, and the bedchambers of empresses, not as a seducer but as a beautiful boy to whom things simply happen. Lord Byron reimagined the legendary rake as a passive, good-natured innocent and used his adventures as scaffolding for a sprawling satirical epic that mocks everything: war, marriage, commerce, poetic convention, and Byron himself. Written in ottava rima with a conversational ease that disguises extraordinary skill, the poem sprawls across sixteen cantos left unfinished at Byron's death in 1824. Its true subject is not Juan but the narrator's restless, entertaining voice, so alive it makes the silence that follows feel like a loss.