I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil ere his time.

Here we have the beginning of Byron's famous poem. And guess what? In Don Juan, he's found a hero he can really write about.

It's not just Lord Byron who wants a hero—the Romantics generally are very fond of heroes. (Unfortunately, heroines are less common. Shame on them).

The first canto of Byron's famous poem, Don Juan, shows us just how important heroes are in Romantic literature—as characters and as a theme. But the Romantics weren't into your everyday, ho-hum, average Joe hero. They wanted big heroes. And we can see from Byron's words here: "every year and month sends forth a new one,/ Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,/ The age discovers he is not the true one"…even those guys who look like heroes actually turn out not to be heroes.

So Byron takes Don Juan as his hero. Of course, stories about Don Juan were around way before Byron wrote about him. But the point is, Don Juan is a larger than life hero—he's one of the most famous philanderers and lovers of all time. He's a grand enough hero, in other words, to be the subject of Byron's poem.

Byron referred to Don Juan as an "epic satire." It's modeled on the epic genre, but it's about an unusual subject, a lover. Epics are usually about wars and warriors, not lovers. So here we see again a Romantic poet playing with and rebelling against literary conventions. Who said epic has to be about warriors and soldiers? Love is also a fit topic for epic literature.