The Elgin Marbles Debate
My arguments for returning them to Greece.
[This is my side of the debate published by Antigone magazine here (with thanks to David Butterfield for the images)]
Imagine if, after William the Conqueror became King of England in 1066, he had exercised his royal prerogative to have half of the stone circle of Stonehenge removed to his native Normandy. Centuries later the French-owned stones, supposedly saved from the depredations of English vandals and inclement weather, might have ended up at the Louvre in Paris, offering millions of visitors to that great museum a proud display of that institution’s contribution to the conservation of a site of world heritage.
No-one could suppose, however, that such an act concerning this most iconic of British monuments – albeit one for which little religious or cultural continuity can be claimed – would not nag at the hearts of native Britons (and even non-Britons). Demands for the restitution of William’s semicircle to its native Salisbury would never cease; and the case for restitution would be reinforced by the fact that England and France are close friends on the world stage, with shared cultural aspirations. In this imagined case, the legality of the stone’s original removal would be unimpeachable. However, the sense of aesthetic desecration of the site of Stonehenge, of the need to reunify the stones on their native soil, and of the symbolic importance of returning the “Demi-cercle de Guillaume” to England, would be inescapable.
The removal of the Elgin Marbles from Greece rests on far less solid legal grounds, and the case for their resitution for emotional, symbolic, and aesthetic reasons is no less compelling. This is not a view I have always held. Along with many of my generation in England (I was at school in the 1970s with Noel Malcolm, who has recently published a pamphlet arguing for the retention of the marbles), I was led to believe that the Marbles had been legally acquired, if admittedly only from the Greeks’ then Turkish overlords; that their loss would be a mutilation of the British Museum’s collection; and that after all they had been rescued from potential destruction by Lord Elgin – indeed, that this was his intent. Moreover, it was said that they were far safer displayed in London than in Athens, and that returning them would set a precedent for the wholesale return of treasures from the world’s great museums.
It is now evident that none of these claims is valid. First, the alleged letter of permission (firman) of 1801 may not even have existed. An Italian translation, used in 1816 as proof of Elgin’s legal claim, permits him to take plaster moulds of the statues, and says that he should not be obstructed from taking pieces of stone from the rubble. As William St Clair’s meticulous research revealed,[1] Elgin was an opportunist who removed the stones to adorn his own estate (where important pieces remain), and only sold them to the British Museum, at a loss, when he was on the brink of becoming bankrupt. That it was a noble act designed to preserve the monument for posterity is a convenient myth.
Secondly, few people visit the British Museum simply in order to see the marbles. The wonderful objects that Greece might loan the Museum in return would be a far greater draw, and the Museum owns hundreds of thousands of objects – apart from those recently revealed to have been stolen and sold by a Museum employee – that might be displayed to greater advantage.
No less a myth than that of Elgin’s noble intentions is one that demonstrates the feelings of Greeks. The tale is told that when they were fighting for their independence, some soldiers observed the Turks stripping lead from between the stones of the Parthenon to use for bullets. Unlettered though the soldiers were, they felt this to be a desecration of the monument. They sent a delegation to the Turkish commander with a box of bullets, asking that they be used rather than the building be fatally damaged. Fictional as this tale is, it reflects the emotional resonance of the issue to Greeks. For many, the Parthenon is a vital part of the Greek land and soul, and the despoliation of it by Elgin, compounded by a high-handed or evasive attitude to their return, recently instantiated by the British PM’s unseemly snub to the Greek PM, a fellow conservative, remains an open wound.
Few objects throughout the world have such iconic national significance. Were other museum pieces anywhere considered of similar status, there would surely be an equally strong case for their return to their places of origin. But in fact no museum contains, nor is being petitioned for the return of, a flank of stones from Stonehenge, a section of the Taj Mahal, or the peak of an Egyptian pyramid sawn off its base. The Parthenon sculptures are unique in this respect. Their return to Greece would create no slippery slope for the repatriation of millions of lesser objects that enrich the museums of the world.
Hard-nosed political considerations accord little value to emotional arguments or aesthetic gestures. But in this case the reunification of the Parthenon sculptures – which, it may be reiterated, are only part of the collection of the Elgin marbles – would have a further advantage for its current keepers. The frieze that ran around the inside of the great temple was at a height that made its details less visible than they become at eye level. The figures carved on the metopes would have been obscured in the darkness of the temple’s interior; but in the flickering light of flames viewers would have observed a marvellous moving tableau – a colourful procession of men, women, and animals.
Might not the British Museum honour the story and significance of the Marbles by first returning the original pieces to the Acropolis and then using the tools of modern technology to recreate the display as a wonderfully moving (in both senses) and truly sensational experience for visitors?
It is easy to mock Byron’s lyrical outrage about Elgin’s despoliation of the Parthenon, but proponents for their retention in the British Museum are no less emotionally wedded to the myth that Elgin’s actions were not only legal but noble. If possession is nine tenths of the law, one wonders why retentionists bother to accord hollow claims of legality and scrutiny to the residual tenth. The fact that the law to prevent the return of the Marbles in the UK was proposed as late as 1963, and has since been used to toss the issue fruitlessly back and forth between the Government and the Trustees, highlights the legal fiction of the proposition that Elgin and the Museum ever had lawful title to the antiquities.
If indeed the intention had been to keep them, during the bitter travails of Greece’s struggle for independence, safe from damage and deterioration, honour and decency would require that the (not so) carefully conserved stones should now return to their original and proper home, with the Acropolis Museum now providing a safe and dignified future for them in their native Athens. Moreover, when that day comes it should be felt not as a loss but as a proud gain for both nations.
The return of the Parthenon sculptures, if not of other objects still on Elgin’s estate, will not only create space for a truly inspiring and imaginative display, it will be a welcome boost in this post-Brexit world to Britain’s moral self-image and international standing.
Thanks for that parallel! St Paul’s is good too.
If the issue were approached in a genuinely sympathetic way, the restitution would be à magnanimous gesture of recognition of how much Greek culture has meant to Britain. Barriers have been erected to the return because it’s been treated as a game of political one-upmanship. That’s why I want to emphasise that returning the Marbles could be a win-win for both countries.
Tista Austin writes about 'Mercouri’s talent for emotive hyperbole with her vision of the Parthenon as “the soul of Greece” ...' This is not emotive hyperbole. The equivalent of the Parthenon in any other culture doesn't exist. If King Arthur, Pitt the Younger and Sir Winston Churchill jointly stole the funds of the British Empire and used them to pay Christopher Wren to build St Paul's cathedral which then as a new building formed an important part of the backdrop to the lives of Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, Hobbes and Isaac Newton contemporaneously, you might be somewhere close, but you would still come second.
Now, ok, Athens wasn't Greece, and also wasn't all it's cracked up to be. Pericles did not know when he delivered that oration what the many not the few would do to his and Aspasia's actual and then spiritual son in 406 and 399, and I suspect many admirers of the oration don't know either. But if you can't accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative when celebrating your national myth, when can you? You hear a lot more from the English about Wilberforce than about the historical background giving rise to Wilberforce.
The marbles must go back. Their extended residence in London has almost certainly been a good thing for them and for art and scholarship, but that is irrelevant to their future.