For my sins, I have since the mid-1980s been heavily involved in a partly political, partly aesthetic, partly academic campaign: to reunify all the extant members of the original Parthenon temple back in Athens where they originated in the sixth and seventh decades of the 5th century BCE. The campaign didn’t, of course, start in the 1980s but rather in the second decade of the 19th century, almost immediately after the largest single act of ‘removal’ occurred, thanks to the endeavours of the 7th Lord Elgin and his cohorts. ‘Thy plunderer’, thundered philhellene Lord Byron, ‘was a Scot’.
A commission of enquiry, set up by the British – or brutish? – government of the day, disagreed with Byron and sided with Britain’s former ambassador to the Sublime Porte, agreeing to pay Elgin £35,000 pounds in return for his handing over what he had ‘collected’ to be held in trust in perpetuity in the British Museum on behalf of the British nation or people. It is that 1816 Act of Parliament under which the Trustees of the British Museum today shelter in an attempt to justify their clinging on to what even they now call the Parthenon (no longer ‘Elgin’) Marbles. For they have no other possible justification: even if there were cast-iron documentary proof that Elgin had been given express official permission by the then Ottoman ruler of Greece to do what he in fact did (which there isn’t), they would still be using the context of a radically alien international order (the Napoleonic wars) to confer a spurious legality on a transaction that according to today’s international norms of cultural diplomacy has no possible justification whatsoever.
A further – and to some of us insurmountable – objection to the British Museum Trustees’ claimsis that since 2009 there exists in Athens, almost within touching distance of the Acropolis, a new Acropolis Museum, the top floor of which has been constructed as a dedicated gallery to house those removed remains of the Parthenon that cannot for obvious reasons be replaced on the remains of the temple itself, but which nevertheless gain immeasurably in perceived significance by being viewed within sight of the actual Parthenon. The key word is ‘Acropolis’. The Parthenon derives its significance ultimately from its physical context. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. A good deal of the original building has miraculously been preserved and in recent times expertly curated. The gap between the Acropolis Museum’s Parthenon display and that in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum is simply immeasurable.
I must ‘declare an interest’. I am currently Vice-Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM) and an elected Vice-President of the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures (IARPS). The BCRPM was not actually the first such national body – that honour belongs to the Australia Committee (IOCARPM) founded by Emanuel J Comino, in 1981. Both national committees were inspired by Greece’s then Culture Minister, Melina Mercouri. The ‘R’ of BCRPM originally stood for ‘restitution’, and that term is still often bandied around in the ongoing debates, but it’s a legal term, and we of the IARPS, following the lead of successive Greek governments, have set our face against pursuing the legal route to reunification. This is particularly relevant to the peculiar British case, where the Museum that holds the largest amount of Parthenon sculptures outside Greece relies on the supposed legality of an Act of Parliament. Actually, neither the claim that Elgin acquired his loot ‘legally’ nor the claim that the British Museum holds what it holds lawfully holds any water.
But over and against the alleged claim of legality – always problematic in the sphere of international diplomatic relations – there is on our side the overriding claim of ethical probity. Times change, and mores with them. Imperial or colonial force majeure cuts no ice today in matters of cultural heritage such as these. It was in post-colonial France, and with special respect to Africa, that the modern movement towards restoring to their homes of origin artefacts forcibly removed under colonial-imperial dispensations first acquired a head of steam. The Parthenon and its sculptures are a resolutely European-European issue, and one moreover with a peculiarly political dimension.
In the 1960s the late Balliol Classics don Russell Meiggs wrote a brilliant short essay entitled ‘the Political Implications of the Parthenon’. In the later 1980s Balliol Classics undergrad and President of the Oxford Union, Boris Johnson, forcefully argued for reunification – yes, really! Since then, the place of the Parthenon as an integral component of the development of Europe’s’ earliest form of democracy has become ever clearer, as, for example, perception of the deliberate alignment of the monumental entranceway to the Acropolis with the island of Salamis has made plain. Aeschylus’s Persians, Europe’s earliest extant tragic drama, is above all else a hymn to the Athenians’ democracy. Of course, their democracy was not ours: the Athenians owned slaves and denied votes to citizen women. But the notions of freedom and equality are equally fundamental to both their men-only direct democracy and our gender-inclusive representative democracy. This is what gives the call for the reunification of the Marbles in Athens its peculiar salience: what is required from our British government is a gesture of generosity – one that would be reciprocated by the Greek government in, if you’ll forgive the pun, spades. The Parthenon sculptures simply mean much much more to the Greeks than they do to us in Britain. It is time therefore for Hestia (see illustration) and her companions to be allowed to go home.
And in case anyone should still suggest that that would be to open the floodgates of claims for ‘restitution’ of other artefacts among the 8 million currently held by the British Museum, let me be crystal clear: we of the BCRPM and IARPS are adamant that the Parthenon Marbles are a unique case, without any further implications. The proof? We are not even asking for the return of the most beautiful Caryatid support pillar removed by Elgin from the Athena temple known as the Erechtheion, even though her sisters can now be seen to truly stunning effect in the new Acropolis Museum!
This blog post was first published in Hestia, the official blog of Trinity College Dublin Classics.
About
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow, Clare College & Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. Paul was a lecturer in ancient history in the School of Classics, Trinity College Dublin between 1973-78.
