London, Thanasis Gavos

The idea of  "rotating" loans for the sculptures from the Parthenon is unsatisfactory when one also considers that Greece's ask is wholly justified. The ask is for the permanent reunification of all these sculptures. A request that was first made shortly after Greece gained her independence.

British supporters for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles consider the possible "deal" described by a Bloomberg report on Tuesday night to be disappointing.

Citing sources on the ongoing talks, the news articles said parts of the sculptures could be returned over time and "on a rotational basis" from the British Museum to the Acropolis Museum, as part of a "cultural exchange".

In light of this, Professor Paul Cartledge, Vice-Chair of the British Committee for Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM) and Vice-Chair of the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures (IARPS), said that he understands that the Bloomberg report has been denied by the Greek Ministry of Culture .

"I can understand why both the British Museum is keen to give the impression that it is not just saying no (to reunification) but that it is interested in some kind of negotiated solution, while on the other hand I fully understand why the Ministry of Culture in Greece would accept nothing less than the return of all that the British Museum and, incidentally, other museums - as a whole and for eternity" the former professor of Ancient Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge told SKAI.

"None of these piecemeal 'here you go, you can have this piece of frieze and then we expect some nice things from you back and then we'll give you some more of the frieze', i.e. we'll lend them to you, we won't give them to you of course," Mr. Cartledge added, rejecting the content of the deal described by Bloomberg sources.

The British professor agrees, however, that even if we have not reached the desired outcome, the constant references to talks and possible agreements prove that progress has been made.

"I think the pressure is intensifying. The fact that the Pope has agreed to give back – and not in some way lend or raise any legal issue – the pieces held by the Vatican Museums, is the latest in a series of different things that have been achieved outside of Britain. All this leads to the conclusion that it is obvious that the British Museum's Chair and Trustees should do the right thing and enter into negotiations on the basis that the relevant laws (preventing reunification) should be amended or withdrawn for this specific case. But also that they wish, not that they are obliged, that they wish to give back (the Sculptures) as they normally should. So there is no doubt that (there is) this  idea of the deal, as if the British Museum has some basis on a moral basis, which we believe it does not have," Professor Cartledge noted.

The rotation of the Sculptures would not solve the issue of ownership. Another thorn, of course, is the British Museum Act of 1963 which prohibits the removal of exhibits from the British Museum's collection.

A possible way out of this is the British Charity Act of 2022, as pointed out by lawyer George Dimaras who specializes in cases of mixed national jurisdiction and works in Greece, Britain and other countries: "Greece's ownership arguments remain strong. However, there is also the recent change in legislation in Britain in 2022 and the Charity Act, which allows museum to request the return of objects found in British museum collections on the basis of moral obligations. Although this is a difficult issue, perhaps the new law could affect decisions regarding the Parhenon Sculptures," the Greek lawyer, George Dimaras told SKAI.

It should be noted, however, that the implementation of two crucial articles of the new law has been put on hold by the British government in order to  carry out additional research in order to "thoroughly asses their impact" on museum collections.

Source: skai.gr

To liten to the report, follow the link here.

An interview with Professor Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow, Clare College. Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, Cambridge.

Paul Cartledge is the longest serving member of British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM), and is a Vice Chair of both BCRPM and the International Association for Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures (IARPS).

In this interview by Russell Darnley of the International Organising Committee – Australia for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles (IOC-A-RPM) Paul critiques the arguments advanced by the British Museum (BM) in its attempt to justify retention of the Parthenon Marbles. To watch Episode 2 (with two parts) on the Parthenon Channel, follow the link for Part 1and Part 2.

The present display in Room 18, where the Parthenon Marbles are kept is so poor that it undercuts any benefit that might accrue to the Museum by their holding, and displaying them.

There is such a ton of other terrifically good 5th-century BCE artefacts in the BM to illustrate more than adequately our (Western) heritage/legacy from 5th century BCE Athens/Greece that the BM doesn't need the Parthenon Sculptures to do that job as well (not to mention that, were the BM to release their prisoners, the Greek Government would compensate it mightily in the form of superb, hitherto unexported artefacts for temporary loan and display in Room 18).

Russell Darnley of the International Organising Committee – Australia for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles (IOC-A-RPM) in conversation with Professor Paul Cartledge, Vice-Chair of BCRPM.

 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.

Professor Paul Cartledge has written the text that will be used for a pamphlet and distributed under the auspices of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM). The puropose of this publication is twofold: to set out briefly, in the light of current and likely future political, cultural and environmental circumstances, the arguments FOR reunification of those Marbles taken from the Parthenon back to Greece to the purpose-built  Acropolis Museumof Athens, and AGAINST the supposed arguments advanced, mainly by the Museum’s Trustees, in favour of their retention and display in the British Museum (BM), where they have been held since 1817.

The stakes are high, both rationally and emotionally. When the well-known US actor George Clooney publicly declared his support for Reunification, he was accused – by a Classically educated politician no less, now the British Prime Minister – of advocating something equivalent to Adolf Hitler’s despoliation of the cultural treasures of occupied European countries. For someone who admits to Turkish blood in his veins, the irony of such a comment is not lost.

Just as Britain’s ambassador to Ottoman Turkey’s occupied land, Lord Elgin, was doing his worst on the Acropolis, other colonial powers were competitively looting giant obelisks from Ottoman Egypt and shipping them to Paris and New York as well as London. In fact, it was mainly because Britain was France’s enemy and France was Turkey’s, that the Ottoman Sultanate looked at all kindly upon Elgin, based not on mutual respect but on the hardnosed realist principle ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’.

What is in fact required now is not hardnosed instrumentalism but rather a supreme generosity of internationalist spirit and moral courage. BCRPM’s campaign – the nature and origins of which are set out in the text of the document - has as a result recently acquired a further wave of international support from various widespread anti-colonialist movements for the repatriation of cultural treasures that for centuries have been variously looted or misappropriated, officially or unofficially, by colonial powers and their merchant venturers either for purely personal gratification or as an instrument of national self-advancement or both together.

To read the text, kindly follow the link here.

Professor Paul Cartledge, Vice-Chair of BCRPM and author of this document

Janet Suzman, our Chair was on ERT TV's 9 o'clock news on Saturday 06 March 2021. The interview took place following on from the article that was published in Ta Nea by UK Correspondent Yannis Andritsopoulos that morning. Janet emphasised that all like minded, profound people, hope to see the sculptures removed by Lord Elgin and currently housed in the British Museum's Room 18, re-joining their surviving halves in the Parthenon Gallery of the superlative Acropolis Museum.

Janet added in her press statement to Yannis Andritsopoulos of TA NEA that: "the fact that George Clooney, and an increasing number of thoughtful people in the public eye, would wish to see the Parthenon Marbles reunited with their other halves in the Acropolis Museum is a measure of how aware they are of the justice of such an event. Were it to be achieved it will be the pressure in the public sphere both of respected individuals with high profiles, and a groundswell from the museum-going populace at large that will eventually persuade a great institution like the British Museum to shift its stance. These sculptures belong uniquely to an edifice that still dominates the skyline of Athens and all of Western thinking. They stand at the very heart of Greece’s cultural patrimony. Claiming a spurious ownership is not something such a respected treasure house can continue without feeling a bit foolish, above all because there exists no absolute proof of that ownership. The Museum has more than enough fascinating objects to survive the gesture with its universalist head still held high."

Professor Paul Cartledge as Vice-Chair of the BCRPM and the IARPS added:"We warmly welcome George Clooney's continued supportfor the reunion of the Parthenon Marbles. What is needed now is a supreme generosity of internationalist spirit and moral courage. Our campaign has recently been accompanied by a large wave of international support from various anti-colonial movements calling for the repatriation of cultural treasures. For centuries, colonial powers and their merchants have plundered or individualised, officially or informally, these treasures, either for purely personal gratification or as a means of national self-evolution - or both."

To read the Ta Nea article (in Greek), please follow the link here. 

Many other outlets picked up on this story including The Art Newspaper that also carried Janet Suzman's letter in their March 2021 edition.

Delivered at the IARPS Conference, 16 September 2022, in the Pandremalis Auditorium of the Acropolis Museum

Paul Cartledge, Vice-President, of BCRPM & IARPS

‘Just how democratic (in what ways, to what extent) was the (original) Parthenon?’

[Thanks: to Culture Minister Mendoni, to Acropolis Museum Director Stampolidis, to everyone else involved in the organisation of this great conference, and to you, my audience, but above all to Prof. Kris Tytgat, Chair, IARPS.]

‘Ten Things’

It’s often said that the Parthenon – not its original ancient name – is a democratic building, a symbol of ancient Athenian democracy, even a symbol of world democracy. So I thought it might be an idea to dial down the rhetoric (good ancient Greek word!), and to re-examine what exactly democracy meant in Classical Athens in the middle of the 5th century BC/E, and how exactly the Parthenon fitted into that uniquely original political project.

I’ve a little skin in this game of scholarship: in 2016 I published on both sides of the Atlantic a book entitled Democracy: A Life; and two years later, in 2018, the book was re-published in a cheaper, paperback version, but with a crucial addition – an Afterword: in which I traced a brief account of the startling events that had occurred between 2016 and 2018, affecting – sometimes seriously badly - the nature and course of democracy in the contemporary world, again on both sides of the Atlantic (with special reference to the Brexit referendum vote in the UK, the election of President Trump in the US, and the election of Président Macron in France).

My first slide says ‘ten things’, but there are of course many more things than ten that people ought to know about ancient Greek democracy – or rather, since there were many more kinds than just the one – democracies in ancient Greece. But the first and biggest thing of all is this: that no version of democracy in ancient Greece was anything much like any version of ‘democracy’ currently on offer in Europe, the Americas, Australasia or anywhere else in the world today. For this basic, categorical reason: all ancient democracies were direct – the demos, the people, ruled for and by themselves – whereas all modern democracies are representative, indirect, in which the people chooses others – representatives – to rule for them, that is, both in their interest (they hope) and, no less relevantly, instead of them.

As the jacket-image of my Democracy book perfectly illustrates. Of course, it’s not a photo of a meeting of the ancient Athenians’ Assembly (ekklesia) being held on the Pnyx hill below the Acropolis and being addressed by a helmeted Pericles. It’s the idealised vision of a German painter working in the 1840s, within a decade or so of the foundation of the modern Greek state – which looked back to ancient Greece and especially to ancient Athens for validation as well as inspiration. But it was painted when Greece was formally a monarchy, not even a republic let alone any form of modern democracy!

So, how different was the ancient Athenian democracy of Pericles’s time from anything we might recognise as ‘democracy’ today? Let me count the ways!

I’m going to use the text and image of the decree/law shown on this slide as my way in. But first, a word of chronological warning. This decree and this stone date from 336 BC/E, that is, over a hundred years after the Parthenon was first commissioned, in 448/7. And between 448 and 336 a lot of water had flowed under several bridges, so far as democracy at Athens was concerned. In 411 in the midst of a long, expensive and bloody war – with Sparta, then aided by Persian money – the Athenian democracy had been overthrown in a reactionary and violent rightwing coup and replaced with a narrow oligarchy. That narrow oligarchy had lasted only a few months and was replaced with a broader oligarchy, which in turn lasted only 8 months or so, so that by the summer of 410 Athens had regained the democracy it had in 448 (and had had since about 460). Only to lose it again, together with the war itself, in 404, after which Sparta imposed an even narrower and nastier oligarchy, a junta of just 30 ultra-oligarchs. They proceeded to rule very violently, murderously, aided by a Spartan garrison on the acropolis, so violently and so controversially that after only a year even Sparta stood aside when a democratic Resistance defeated the forces of the junta in the Peiraieus, and from 403 Athens was a democracy again.

But not the same democracy again: a new, different and in some ways more moderate or less extreme democracy, one that was moderate enough not to provoke the Athenian ultra-oligarchs into attempting another coup, and one which lasted some 80 years until it was forcibly exterminated by the new Macedonian rulers of Greece, in 322. The document of democracy on your screen belongs to this final phase of democracy, to a very late stage of it, by when the Athenians had been heavily defeated in battle by the Macedonians (Chaeronea, 338), their Theban allies had had their democracy suppressed and a Macedonian garrison installed on the acropolis of Thebes, and the majority of – democratic – Athenian citizens feared that the same fate was about to be imposed on them. Whereupon they passed the Law proposed by Eucrates, a law specifically against not oligarchy but against Tyranny. Here’s a key clause (I paraphrase): If any Athenian should suspect another of trying to bring about the replacement of democracy with a one-man dictatorship, then he might lawfully kill such a traitor without incurring the punishment for culpable homicide.

Why was it against Tyranny? For two main reasons: first, the imposition of a tame local, pro-Macedonian tyrant was how Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander, liked to rule the subordinated, formerly free cities of mainland Greece; second, the Athenians’ own democratic mythology held that their democracy had originally been instituted in the late 6th century thanks to an act of Tyrannicide – it was a myth, it wasn’t true historically, but it was none the less potent for that: in 336, most Athenians automatically identified democracy as non- or rather anti-Tyranny.

So, that tells us what the Law of Eucrates was – it doesn’t tell us how the Law came to be passed, and it doesn’t tell us why the Law was inscribed on a handsome stele of Pentelic Marble with a relief decoration above the text, and set up on public display in the Agora (civic centre) of Athens – where it was unearthed by the American School in the 1930s. Let’s begin with the relief decoration. That was put there partly because not all Athenian adult male voting citizens aged 18 or over (of whom there were about 25,000 in 336) were fully literate. And the image chosen – an image of the Goddess Demokratia crowning an image of Mr Joe Athenian citizen, as if he were a heroic victor at the Olympic Games – was to remind and reassure the Athenians that at least one very important Goddess was on their side. Besides of course Athene Polias (‘of the City’) and all the other Athenas – Promachos, Parthenos etc etc – not to mention Zeus and all the other gods of the official Athenian pantheon, and all the heroes and heroines both local and non-local (some of them depicted on the Parthenon) whom they worshipped. In Classical, democratic Athens religion and politics were inseparable.

OK, so now I want to go right back to the beginning, to the origins, of the Law of Eucrates. He was its proposer and original drafter, but between the moment of proposal and the moment of inscription and public display lay several crucial other moments. First, Eucrates had had to put a proposal in some verbal form to the Council (Boule) of 500, a standing committee of the Assembly (Ekklesia) responsible for managing its business, both preparing it and seeing that its decisions were carried out. The 500 were selected annually, by lot (the democratic mode), to serve for just one year in the first instance – they could serve again, but just once, and not in 2 successive years. It’s possible, even likely, that in 337/6 Eucrates was himself a Councillor – but he didn’t have to be, because ‘any Athenian who wished’ (the democratic principle) could put a proposal before one of the 40 – yes, 40 – pre-Assembly Council meetings, and the Council and its ‘presidents’ could decide either to welcome or to reject or to welcome and then debate/modify its terms. If a majority was agreeable that the Assembly should have a vote on it, then the Council could either send it forward just as the proposer (Eucrates) had formulated it or amend it and then put it forward to the Assembly in amended form – where it could be amended again. By this time it had turned into a probouleuma, something ‘pre-deliberated’.

The time for the next Assembly has arrived – imagine, in the tense situation of early 336, at least 6000 Athenian citizens in good standing (formal checks were minimal, but this was a relatively small, close-knit society) processing up onto the Pnyx and taking their seats on the ground. To hear the herald read out the proposal of Eucrates, now a probouleuma, whether amended or not in Council. The herald would then bellow out – this is in the open air – ‘who wishes to speak?’, implying that any one Athenian citizen who wished might stand up on the bema (speaker’s platform), a very egalitarian-democratic notion of public political freedom of speech (isêgoria). Probably, in actual practice, only known, experienced and authoritative speakers would for the most part have the courage and oratorical ability to do so, and probably there wasn’t much in the way of debate but just speeches PRO and CON – or PRO but suggesting amendments. A vote would then be taken, not a secret ballot but a raising of the right hands, and the numbers for or against would be ‘told’, that is assessed rather than individually counted – unless the voting appeared very close. As it would not have been in this particular case.

However, by 336 the Athenians had for long been cautious about passing any new laws – without the further scrutiny of another, much smaller committee, drawn - again by lot – from the permanent annual panel of 6000 Athenians who served during a year as jurors in the People’s courts. Once that committee had ratified the Assembly’s vote, Eucrates’s proposal was a law, and steps could be taken – by the relevant subcommittees of the Council – to have it inscribed, with accompanying relief decoration, and erected in the Agora.

Now… let’s transport ourselves back a century or more, to 448 BC/E. Then, there was no distinction drawn between a temporary or local decree and a general, permanent law, so there was no need for a further ratifying legislative step after the Assembly’s vote on the probouleuma proposing the (rebuilding of the) Parthenon. But – and it’s a big ‘but’ – implementing the Assembly’s vote on that was far far more complicated; and, secondly, though the Parthenon was visually and financially going to be the biggest thing on the new Acropolis, it was not actually the most important – in religious, cultural and political terms. That was the Temple of Athena of the City (Polias), which eventually was to come into being in the form of the Erechtheion on the opposite, north side of the Rock. And there were other temples and monuments besides the Older Athena Temple and the Older Parthenon that the Persians had destroyed in 480-479 and that the Athenians wanted to resurrect, and others again that the Athenians might want to add, e.g. an Athena of Victory (Nike) temple.

So, whoever was going to be the main or sole proposer of a rebuilt Parthenon was going to have to work out and put forward an immensely complicated proposal, a building programme indeed, and one that had to be costed, and then project-managed. I can’t go into all the finer details in the time available to me, but let’s just say that the ancients’ view – and pretty much the modern view too – is that the chief political architect of the Acropolis (re)building programme from 448 to the early 420s was the man depicted in that 1840s German painting I showed you earlier – Pericles son of Xanthippos of the deme Kholargos, to give him his full democratic name. Surely, though, he needed help – and the evidence suggests he could call on assistance from people who were not just the best experts in all the relevant fields but also personal friends of his. I’m thinking especially of Pheidias. Very very few other Athenian democratic politicians could do the same. And I do want to emphasise that Pericles was a (very) democratic politician. Despite his aristocratic and wealthy background, he devoted himself to what he took to be the best interests of the Athenian people, most of whom were not aristocratic or rich.

So, let us imagine that it was his proposal that in 448 went first to the Council then to the Assembly and received a majority vote in favour. What then? What we Brits call the nitty-gritty – deciding on a ballpark figure for costs (to be met by public not private funds), selecting architects, seeing that the architects got paid, and then that they, together with the contractors, employed all the necessary craftsmen and secured all the necessary materials. A bureaucratic nightmare - but somehow or other it was achieved, together with its cult-statue by Pheidias, and fast (by 432). The ultimate secret, I believe was the appointment of a subcommittee, reporting to the Assembly via the Council, of ‘Overseers’ (epistatai), just half-a-dozen, with a permanent secretary and deputy secretary. Some of their records or accounts – written, public, the democratic way – survive: I’ll cite just IG i3 449 dated 434/3 BC, conveniently available in ‘Attic Inscriptions Online’ with original Greek text and English translation and commentary. Pericles, typically, served his turn as an Overseer.

Nevertheless, Pericles – and the Athenians generally – received what we Brits call ‘stick’, severe criticism – not mainly because the Parthenon was a democratic building (though there were oligarchic critics, Athenians and others, who did badmouth both the Parthenon and Pericles for precisely that reason) but because it seemed out-of-scale, hubristic even, and too self-glorifyingly Athenian. After all, the Athenians – with the Spartans – hadn’t defeated the Persians singlehanded in 480 and 479. And as the Parthenon didn’t function only as a religious building – it became the City’s Treasury, its Fort Knox or Bank of Greece – there were those Greeks who saw it as not so much a symbol of democratic freedom but rather as a symbol of potential political and economic oppression. These were the Greeks who feared and resented what they thought of as an Athenian ‘empire’. Which it was – though it was also, paradoxically, a democratic empire! They did things differently then and there!

And it’s on that paradoxical note that I want to leave you. Yes, the Parthenon was – and is – supremely democratic, but not everyone saw it that way then - or see it that way today.

On 13 June 2018, Vice-Chair of BCRPM, Professor Paul Cartledge wrote in the Frieze. It was at that time that the then leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn had also announced his support for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles in Greek newspaper, Ta Nea.

Paul Cartledge writes: 'The 5th-century BC artefacts were brought to London by Lord Elgin at the beginning of the 19th century, having apparently secured permission from the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, which occupied Greece at that time. They have been housed at the British Museum from 1816, and the Greek government has regularly lobbied for their return. Corbyn told the Greek paper: ‘As with anything stolen or taken from occupied or colonial possession – including artefacts looted from other countries in the past – we should be engaged in constructive talks with the Greek government about returning the sculptures.’ To read the full article in Frieze, follow the link here.

Support from Labour MP's saw two prominent Ministers at the heart of BCRPM's capaigns in the 90's and beyond, namely Christopher Price and Eddie O'Hara, respectively Vice-Chair and Chair of this committee. Support has always been there yet Tony Blair's government didn't do anything and tragically, there was no support from Gordon Brown.

Jeremy Corbyn was and continues to be supportive. And what of Sir Kier Starmer? 

Labour Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, Jo Stevens spoke about the sculptures alongside a panel hosted by the BBC on Politics Live. This was  post Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis' London visit and meeting with UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

Labour MP for Hornsey & Wood Green and Shadow Foreign Minister (Europe & Americas), Catherine West also interviewed by Ta Nea on Thursday 02 December, was quoted as urging Prime Minister Boris Johnson to bring the matter of these sculptures to the House Commons. Catherine West feels that all MP's deserve to know the full story and have an open discussion.  

In today's Ta Nea, UK Correspondent Yannis Andritsopoulos has once again interviewed Jeremy Corbyn, a firm supporter for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles. Jeremy Corbyn hopes that Labour leader, Keir Starmer will also add his support.

“My position has always been that the Parthenon Marbles should be returned to Greece." Despite being a 'wonderful, beautiful' collection of sculptures, Jeremy Corbyn insists that the Parthenon Marbles do not belong in the British Museum and he hopes that the Labour Party will decide to defend this view.

“Boris Johnson may well be a classicist. He may well love Greece. I love Greece too." Adds Corbyn, and goes on to say that this love of Greece is not the justifucation for keeping the sculptures divided. He continues: "Let's be grown up about this.The idea that it's okay to forcibly remove things is wrong. Cultural artefacts are there for all, but they really belong in the place that they were made and developed in the first place.”

Chair of BCRPM, Janet Suzman stands by the release issued in 2018 where she concludes: “Nothing will change in relation to the Parthenon marbles until and unless there is a meeting of minds at head of state level between Greece and Britain.” A sentiment that also formed the Decision made at the 22nd session of UNESCO's ICPRCP meeting 27-29 September 2021. 

RECOMMENDATION 22.COM 6

The Committee,

Recalling that the issue of the Parthenon Sculptures has been a pending item in the Committee’s Agenda since 1984,

Acknowledging relevant UNESCO recommendations expressing its continuing concern for a solution to the issue of the Parthenon Sculptures,Recalling that the Acropolis of Athens is an emblematic monument of outstanding universal value, inscribed in the World Heritage List,

1.Acknowledges the ongoing cooperation between Greece and the United Kingdom on cultural matters and expressesthe wish that it should continue with a view to conclude the ongoing discussions in respect of the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures;

2.Notesthat Greece invites the United Kingdom to collaborate with Greece in exhibiting all the Parthenon Sculptures in their respective collections in the Acropolis Museum;

3.Takes noteof the Acropolis Museum’s invitation to the British Museum in order to advance further collaboration on Parthenon studies; which the British Museum warmly accepted;

4.Also takes noteof the good progress made by the Acropolis Museum and the British Museum in the collaborative programme of digital scanning of the sculptures of the Parthenon in both museums;

5.Further acknowledges that an official letter was sent in August 2013 by UNESCO to the United Kingdom government and the British Museum, inviting them to explore the possibility of the United Kingdom agreeing to the procedure foreseen in the Rules of Procedure for Mediation and Conciliation within the framework of the ICPRCP;

6.Thoughtfully takes note of the fact that, in March 2015, the United Kingdom government and the Trustees of the British Museum informed UNESCO in separate letters respectively that they did not believe that the application of the mediation procedure would substantially carry forward the debate and that they had decided respectfully to decline the request;

7.Thoughtfully takes note that, following the Committee’s Recommendation 21.COM 7, Greece sent to the United Kingdom an invitation to a bilateral expert meeting in Athens which was not accepted by the United Kingdom;

8.Expresses concern that the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum is not currently open to the public, due to essential repairs and looks forward to its reopening in due course;

9.Calls upon Greece and the United Kingdom to intensify their efforts with a view to reaching a satisfactory settlement of this long-standing issue, taking into account its historical, cultural, legal and ethical dimension;

10.Invites the Director-General to assist in convening the necessary meetings between Greece and the United Kingdom with the aim of reaching a mutually acceptable solution to the issue of the Parthenon Sculptures.

DECISION 22.COM 61

The Committee,

1.Recalling Article 4, paragraphs 1 and 2 of its Statutes,

2.Noting that the request for the Return of the Parthenon Sculptures is inscribed in its Agenda since 1984,

3.Recalling its 16 Recommendations on the matter,

4.Recalling further that the Parthenon is an emblematic monument of outstanding universal value inscribed on the World Heritage List,

5.Aware of the legitimate and rightful demand of Greece,

6.Acknowledging that Greece requested the United Kingdom in 2013 to enter into mediation in accordance to the UNESCO Rules of Procedure for Mediation and Conciliation,

7.Recognizing that the case has an intergovernmental character and, therefore, the obligation to return the Parthenon Sculptures lies squarely on the United Kingdom Government,

8.Expresses its deep concern that the issue still remains pending;

9.Expresses further, its disappointment that its respective recommendations have not been observed by the United Kingdom;

10.Expresses its strong conviction that States involved with return or restitution cases brought before the ICPRCP should make use of the UNESCO Mediation and Conciliation Procedures with a view to their resolution;

11.Calls on the United Kingdom to reconsider its standand proceed to a bona fide dialogue with Greece on the matter

The presentation by Greece at UNESCO's ICPRCP 22nd Session took place on Wednesday the 28th of September 2021. Greece was represented by the Ministry of Culture by the Secretary General of Culture George Didaskalou, the new General Director of the Acropolis Museum Nikolaos Stampolidis, the Head of the Directorate of Documentation and Protection of Cultural Heritage, and Legal Adviser of the Special Legal Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Artemis Papathanassiou (all pictured above). For the first time, apart from the recommendation, a decision with stronger wording was also agreed.

05 January 2022, CGTN Live

Were the Parthenon marbles acquired legally by the UK? 'No.'

Professor Paul Cartledge spoke on Global Business Europe today with presenter Robyn Dwyer about the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles. To watch the interview, please use the link below:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJNE1qzokIQ

Boris Johnson says ‘2021 is a significant year for Greece and a very exciting year for Britain to be invigorating our relationship with the Greek people’. If only. If only that good brain of his endowed with an impeccable classical education would dare to think outside the boring old box. Go on, Boris, reinvigorate the relationship with the one thing that would do it instantly: give back those Parthenon marbles. The old refrain that they were legally acquired is an invention, a factoid; say something often enough and people begin to believe it. Boris is a master of that sort of sell. There never was any proof of permission to export those figures, and the laws of the time have become inappropriate and dated. These sculptures represent the very heart and soul of Periclean Greece and so of the modern Greek state. The Ottomans are long gone. After 200 years the Marbles have done their job of enlightening and civilising the peoples of the West. The British Trustees do not own them they hold them in Trust, and to decide that the Greek people should in their celebratory year of 2021 have a chance to bathe in the aura of the originals would be a magnificent, and wholly decent gesture on their part. Those figures so brutally detached from the building still soaring above Athens, should be back where they belong, in sight of the Parthenon itself. A beautiful museum awaits them.

Janet Suzman, Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles 

 Now is the time, now is the hour, Prime Minister Johnson, to show that you are a true philhellene. That you truly respect not only what the brave Greeks of 1821 and following accomplished, against huge odds, in the name of liberty, but also what the Hellenes of the 5th century BCE achieved in creating a culture and a civilisation that has been an example and model to the world in the 25 centuries since. Consider what Pheidias, master-craftsman and master-designer, and architects Ictinus and Callicrates, would think if they knew that their masterpiece, the Parthenon, had been torn apart and kept apart - not only by a gunpowder explosion in the heat of battle with Venetians long, long ago but by British hands and minds, from the 7th Lord Elgin to the current Trustees of the British Museum even today. Do your duty by the Greeks, would-be philhellene PM Johnson! Reunify.

Professor Paul Cartledge, Vice-Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM) and the International Association (IARPS)

 ‘Our Prime Minister’s comments are very disappointing. He talks of friendship and cooperation with our European friends and claims that the Parthenon marbles were obtained legally. But the permit for their removal from Athens was granted by the occupying Ottoman forces and the Greeks themselves had no say in the matter.

I believe that works of art should not be returned to their country of origin save in the most exceptional of circumstances. In the case of the marbles their ownership is doubtful to say the least, the British Museum only has some of them and there is a rightful place for them at the Acropolis Museum where the surviving sculptures could be displayed in their entirety. If we are not prepared to return them permanently could we at least lend then to the Parthenon for the 2021 celebrations.’

Lord Alf Dubs, Labour Life peer

The Classical Parthenon
Recovering the Strangeness of the Ancient World

William St Clair (author), Lucy Barnes (editor), David St Clair (editor)

Complementing Who Saved the Parthenon? this companion volume sets aside more recent narratives surrounding the Athenian Acropolis, supposedly ‘the very symbol of democracy itself’, instead asking if we can truly access an ancient past imputed with modern meaning. And, if so, how?

In this book William St Clair presents a reconstructed understanding of the Parthenon from within the classical Athenian worldview. He explores its role and meaning by weaving together a range of textual and visual sources into two innovative oratorical experiments – a speech in the style of Thucydides and a first-century CE rhetorical exercise – which are used to develop a narrative analysis of the temple structure, revealing a strange story of indigeneity, origins, and empire.

The Classical Parthenon offers new answers to old questions, such as the riddle of the Parthenon frieze, and provides a framing device for the wider relationship between visual artefacts, built heritage, and layers of accumulated cultural rhetoric. This groundbreaking and pertinent work will appeal across the disciplines to readers interested in the classics, art history, and the nature of history, while also speaking to a general audience that is interrogating the role of monuments in contemporary society.

Preface, Paul Cartledge Clare College, Cambridge May 2022

Rather than repeating—all—the excellent and apposite remarks and items of information of Professor Beaton in his Preface to the companion volume Who Saved the Parthenon?, I shall begin by repeating just one of them: ‘remarkable richness’ 1. Readers who wish to know more of the late William St Clair’s (1937–2021) life trajectory and academic career, especially since 1967 (Lord Elgin and the Marbles), are referred at once to that lapidary Foreword, and to Beaton’s Memoir of St Clair published in Proceedings of the British Academy 2 But those who wish to sample and savour St Clair’s Classical Parthenon chapters on their own terms of ‘milky fertility’ (lactea ubertas), the memorable phrase once used by an ancient critic of Livy’s Roman history, should simply read on here!

The Parthenon, the original building constructed on the Acropolis of Athens between 447 and 432 BCE, is, to essay a for once legitimate use of the metaphor, an icon. An image, a metaphoric as well as a literal construct, it has stood the test of two and a half millennia to continue to cast a long cultural shadow, however much its physical fabric may have been depleted by the depredations of both non-human and inhuman agencies. It is also in many respects and for many reasons something of a puzzle. Or, as St Clair nicely puts it, ‘a case where questions about the representative quality of the evidence are central to any attempt to understand why and how it came into existence’. He rightly makes no bones about it: the Parthenon’s history is affected and afflicted by ‘huge evidential gaps’.

It is a puzzle, for example, that the Parthenon—not the temple’s ancient name, but just that of the main room that housed the cult-statue of Athena the Virgin (Parthenos) by Pheidias—had no unique dedicated altar. Another puzzle is that the building is often thought of today as peculiarly democratic, and that the great democratic statesman Pericles probably had a major hand in bringing the project to fruition, although contemporaries seem to have seen it as not so much democratic as imperialist, and not so much to Pericles’s credit as a bid for unseemly personal glory. St Clair well captures these rather jarring peculiarities when he writes that educated Athenians of the mid-fifth century BCE were ‘both conscious of their deep past and aware of how little they knew about it’. Implying—if they knew so little, how could we possibly today know more?

To address that uncertainty, St Clair resorts to—or rather boldly embraces—the expedient of a kind of thought experiment. To avoid the sin of ‘presentism’, he writes the sort of speech that Thucydides—a contemporary Athenian historian—might have put into the mouth of the official Board of Commissioners (for the rebuilding of the post-480 Acropolis) when addressing the democratic Athenian Assembly in a later fifth-century annual report. Why the Acropolis had to be rebuilt, following the Persian sacks of 480 and 479 BCE, and why it was rebuilt when and how it was, is of course a larger story than just that of the Parthenon, though the Parthenon certainly was thought of as central to it despite its not being the principal temple of the Athenian state. That was the Erechtheum, the temple of Athena Polias with Poseidon Erechtheus, rebuilt even later than the Parthenon and not finished until the concluding decade of the fifth century. For that, see Chapter 2, replete with characteristic learning (349 notes!): Prof. Beaton rightly hails St Clair’s ‘meticulous archival research’ and ‘formidable intellectual underpinning’.

In Chapter 3 St Clair resumes what he calls ‘the normal authorial voice’—stating and assessing what we can recover of how the Parthenon was regarded and used in fifth-century Athens. Which doesn’t exactly prepare us for Chapter 4, in which he offers a new analysis of a very old chestnut indeed: namely, what exactly is represented on and by the 160-metre-long Parthenon frieze with its 378 personages, both (putatively) human and superhuman, and 245 edible animals? Probably the modern scholarly consensus view is that it represents some version of a Panathenaic procession, that is, the procession (pompê) annually marking the supposed birthday of Athens’s patron goddess Athena Polias. But St Clair will have none of that: to him, the frieze scenario is nothing to do with the Panathenaea. And to be fair, he does have an initial point: Athena Parthenos and Athena Polias were two quite separate and distinct divinities, so why should the latter be so celebrated on a temple dedicated to the former? But readers will have to make up their own minds—or re-make them up—after a reading of St Clair’s typically penetrating arguments.

Chapter 5—and we must remember that St Clair died before he was able to apply the finishing touch to this or the other chapters—offers a ‘rhetorical discourse’ or ‘exercise’ that revisits some of the earlier material, while Chapter 6 discourses briefly on still often vexed questions of the Parthenon’s legacy and heritage.

Finally, it would be wrong not to point out in conclusion that William St Clair was a stalwart supporter of the cause of the return of the Parthenon Marbles, of which most of those now outside Athens are held or imprisoned in the British Museum, London. St Clair was for many years indeed a member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM), for which he acted as a leading academic spokesman. The Classical Parthenon thus takes its worthy place in a chain of being inaugurated by his Lord Elgin and the Marbles and made unbreakable by That Greece Might Still be Free (the title a quotation from Lord Byron, a devoted early opponent of Elgin), first published in 1972 and reissued, with much new visual material, in 2008 by Open Book Publishers—just before the triumphant opening of the new Acropolis Museum with its dedicated upper Parthenon gallery looking out upon what remains, most impressively and suggestively, of the building itself.

The interested reader may wish to consult any or all of the following, which in their different ways complement or otherwise illuminate aspects of the arguments of this book:

 Roderick Beaton, ‘Memoir of William Linn St Clair’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 20, 24 May 2022, 179–199, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/4099/20-Memoirs-09-StClair.pdf

Paul Cartledge et al., ‘The Case for The Return’, BCRPM website: https://www.parthenonuk.com/the-case-for-the-return

Christopher Hitchens, The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification, new edn (London: Verso, 2008 & available as an ebook since 2016).

Paulina Kravasili, (no title), https://greekcitytimes.com/2020/11/07/greek-sculptures-away-motherland/

Jenifer Neils, The Parthenon Frieze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

William St Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967; 2nd edn 1983; 3rd much enlarged edition, with new subtitle The Controversial History of the Parthenon Sculptures, 1998).

William St Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2008).

1 Beaton, Roderick, ‘Preface’, in St Clair, WStP, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0136.32

2 Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 20, 24 May 2022, 179–199, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/4099/20-Memoirs-09-StClair.pdf

Ta Nea, 12 March 2019 

Greece’s daily newspaper, Ta Nea, has seen, studied and photographed the controversial ‘firman’, the Ottoman document used by Lord Elgin to remove the Parthenon Sculptures and bring them to London. It is the Italian version of the ‘firman’ which was acquired by the British Museum 13 years ago and has since been kept in its Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities.

Ioannis Andritsopoulos,Ta Nea's UK Correspondant

The original ‘firman’ allegedly written in the Ottoman language has been lost, with several experts questioning both if it ever existed and the authenticity of the document currently held in London. The so-called firman played a key role in the House of Commons’ decision to buy the Sculptures from Elgin in 1816.

To read Yannis Andritsopulos' article in Ta Nea, follow the link here.

Several historians and lawyers cast doubt on whether Elgin legitimately removed the Marbles from the Acropolis site.

“Concerning the precise wording of the two 'firmans' (legally binding official royal permits) that the Ottoman Sultanate is said to have granted to His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador to the Sublime Porte (Thomas Bruce, the 7th Lord Elgin), all or almost all is smoke and mirrors. For no literal transcripts of the original Turkish documents exist - or are known to exist - today. One thing, however, all sane commentators agree on: no firman can possibly have granted Elgin explicit permission to do what he and his agents in fact did, namely destroy rather than remove to safekeeping significant portions of the original Parthenon marbles.”, said Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture emeritus, University of Cambridge, and Vice Chairman of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.

Professor Paul Cartlege

“The so-called 'firman' was an official communication from the Grand Vizier or in his absence his deputy to the Governor and Judge of Athens. It was not, as has been claimed by staff of the British Museum 'permission given to Lord Elgin'. Plentiful contemporary historical sources confirm that the local Ottoman officials exceed the terms of the document, as the Ottoman Government itself acknowledged. It was their understanding that the pieces had been removed 'without remonstrance' that persuaded a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1816 to recommend the purchase of the Elgin collection. They had, of course, no authority to pronounce on Ottoman law, nor did their decision to waive doubts about legality, on which they did not make a recommendation, amount to asserting legal ownership. What some may take from Dr Fischer's remark is that he is claiming that an act of the British Parliament could somehow give legitimacy to a messy business of what in modern terms would be described as bribes, threats, and political pressures” commented renowned William St. Clair, senior research fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

William St Clair

‘200 + 20 years in captivity. The Parthenon Sculptures from Elgin to Boris’

Paul Cartledge spoke at the Culture Through Politics online event on Sunday 11 April 17:00 BST. His talk followed on from Professor Pandermalis, President of the Acropolis Museum and was made alongside other distinguised speakers. 

‘Decolonising’ the Elgin-Parthenon Sculptures

First, may I begin with a huge vote of thanks: above all to the ‘Culture Through Politics’ group for organising this exceptionally important webinar, but also to my very distinguished fellow-invitees, for their important contributions.

Second, let me say a word about the title of our public webinar debate: it alludes of course to a very specific and very special anniversary, a famous bicentenary. And as a Greek historian colleague of mine has acutely observed, you tell me what anniversaries you want to celebrate/commemorate and I will tell you who you are. ‘1821’, in other words, is for Greece collectively and for Greeks individually a magical year – their ‘1789’, if you like. Or, in a way, our – English - ‘1066’! For it marks the beginning of a new Hellenic identity, but not only Hellenic: in retrospect, we can see that it was only the first step on the road to political freedom and ultimately to democratic self-determination throughout the continent of Europe.

To me, however, as a historian of ancient/Classical Greece/Hellas, 2021 has another signification as a major anniversary year: it is the 2500th anniversary of what the Western world’s first historian, Herodotus of Halikarnassos, called τα Μηδικα, what we ancient historians call the Graeco-Persian Wars. As in AD 1821, so in 480-479 BC, democracy as well as freedom was at stake – as I have tried to show in a number of lectures both in Athens and online. And at the beating heart of that ancient Greek – and more especially ancient Athenian – achievement of victory and liberation there lay and there still lies a building, a unique and quite extraordinary structure, one that we today – not quite accurately – refer to for short as ‘the Parthenon’.

What I want to do in my allotted 10 minutes is try briefly to con-textualise what (Lord) Elgin and his cohorts did TO – that is, against – that building and structure in and around 1801. I do so in the hope – probably a vain hope – of bringing the UK’s current, classically-educated Prime Minister to a proper appreciation both of the enormity of that long ago act of vandalism and of what now urgently needs to be done with and FOR those Parthenon Sculptures that are currently not in Athens. Which brings me to …

Thirdly, my own chosen title: “‘Decolonising’ the Elgin-Parthenon Sculptures”. If I may, I shall begin with a little autobiography. I was born in 1947, so that by my early teens I was well aware of the – literal – decolonisation, the shedding of imperial possessions, that Britain was – under its then also classically-educated PNM, Harold Macmillan – in the process of beginning. India had already ‘gone’, ‘been lost’, to the British Empire, so the focus in and around 1960 was on the continent of Africa, and I was at first puzzled to hear that the very word ‘empire’ had become – in some, enlightened quarters - a ‘dirty word’, something to be spoken of with distrust if not contempt. As I entered my late teens – and Oxford University (to read Classics, pretty much the same degree as Macmillan read before me and Johnson read after me) – I became even more acutely aware that there was something called ‘the Third World’, encompassing huge swathes of Asia, Latin America and – of course – Africa. It seemed obvious to me that the ‘Third World’ did not exist as if by nature, but was the direct product of self-interested intervention and depredation, mainly economic but also cultural, by the countries of the ‘First World’.

By the time Melina Mercouri ,in the early 1980s, launched her campaign for the repatriation and reunification of what were then usually called ‘the Elgin Marbles’ in the British Museum, it was becoming clear to me that the fact that the British Museum held the Marbles of the Parthenon (and other Athenian monuments) was part of a broader, imperial or imperial-colonial story.

I became a very early member of the British Committee for the Restitution (now Reunification) of the Parthenon Marbles [BCRPM], as it became ever clearer to me that the ‘British Museum’ should really be known as the ‘British Imperial War Museum’. As regards specifically the Parthenon Marbles in the BM, this was not only because those Marbles had been acquired – stolen – when the British Empire was at its height and as part of a very dirty deal between Britain’s imperial representative in Constantinople and the local Ottoman authorities but also because the attitude of the British Museum Trustees towards their possession of the Marbles was – still, in the 1980s - precisely imperialist or colonialist: not only – in their view – had the Marbles been legitimately (as well as legally) acquired but also they thought the BM deserved to continue to hold them because, under the stewardship of the Trustees and the relevant Keepers and other curatorial staff since 1817, the intrinsic aesthetic and cultural value of the Marbles – the Marbles in London only, that is – had been somehow enhanced. Somehow, their stay in London was represented as so much part of the overall ‘story’ of ‘the Marbles’ that reunification of the ‘Elgin Marbles’ to Athens would somehow diminish them, all of the Marbles.

That indeed remained the status quo down to 2009 – when the entire BM colonialist-imperialist ‘narrative’ was disrupted, rendered null and void, by the foundation of the (New) Acropolis Museum (NAM), under the genial Directorship of Professor Pandermalis. A new justificatory strategy was therefore required by the BM’s Trustees, and they fell back on a supposedly decisive, and incontestable, distinction of hierarchy between ‘universal’ museums such as the BM and supposedly inferior (merely) local or national museums such as the NAM. All the while, the colonialist-imperialist line remained intact for the Trustees, who even invoked the ultimate absurdity that the Parthenon Marbles that were in the BM were better understood IN the BM – better there than anywhere else indeed, because they could be seen and appreciated in the context of all other ‘world’ cultures represented artefactually in that same (8 million…) collection. What the BM Trustees could not, however, either see or anticipate was that a big anti-colonial head of steam was building up, focused especially though not of course uniquely on artefacts looted from Africa.

I know a good deal about that anti-colonial head of steam because it has come to affect not only the Marbles but even my own discipline and profession of Classics, especially since the beginning of this year but not only since then by any means. In the very same decade that the BCRPM was founded (in 1983) scholars who were not actually Classicists began to put it about that Classics as a discipline was fundamentally flawed at its very roots and conception: it was at best an ethnocentric, at worst a racist and sexist, project of Western and male and white supremacy, rooted in the study of societies that were themselves based on slavery and generally sexist too. So, why bother to study two main ancient civilisations – the Greek and the Roman - that had so little that was admirable let alone imitable to offer us?

Needless to say, there are defences – very good defences – available to those who believe (as I do) that Classics has a great deal that is positive still to offer us, and that a key part of that is a story about freedom and democracy, a story that has at - and as - its centre the Parthenon. In my ‘Salamis 2500’ lectures I always end with the Parthenon and its place within the entire Athenian Acropolis building programme of the second half of the 5th century BC. I do so because the Athenians decided democratically to have the Parthenon built, in a quite extraordinary way, as an overpowering symbol: both of what it meant to be Greek, as the Athenians of the 5th century BC understood that – free both personally (free from) and politically (free to), self-governing, and of what it meant to be democratic – that is, giving the lion’s share of the political power of self-determination to the demos of the Athenians, the poor majority of the empowered (free, adult, male) Athenian citizens.

Of course, we must not hide the many features of ancient Athenian democracy that we today would not choose to repeat – the exclusion of women, the exploitation of non-Greek slaves – but these must be understood within the context of those, very different times. The positives also need to be emphasised, unashamedly. Which is why it matters so much to me that ALL surviving sculptures from the Parthenon currently outside Athens – not only but especially those in the BM – should be returned and reunified in Athens. As regards the BM in particular, the case for reunification is not only scholarly, not only aesthetic, but also – and perhaps above all – ethical and moral. And in that regard it is above all anti-colonial: an attempt both to repair the damage both physical and metaphorical done by Britain’s colonial representative Elgin 200 years + 20 ago, and at the same time to make a progressive statement of anti-colonialism today. It is a unique case but also one that is completely in line with and in sympathy with other campaigns affecting other museums and other cultures for the repossession and reintegration of culturally identifying material artefacts.

Professor Paul Cartledge 

Taxiarches, Order of Honour, Greece

A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow, Clare College, Cambridge

A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture emeritus, University of Cambridge

Jack Blackburn, The Times: 'The [British] museum is said to be wary of highly accurate copies. Some fear it could make the argument about returning the sculptures unanswerable'.

It is ALREADY unanswerable! Do the decent thing, British Museum Trustees! And soon.

Professor Paul Cartledge, Vice-Chair of BCRPM

 We would love to have your views too, send us an email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Twelve British philhellenes share their thoughts on Greece ahead of 2023, writes Yannis Andritsopoulos, London Correspondent for the Greek daily newspaper Ta Nea. 

The 1821 Greek Revolution against the rule of the Ottoman Turks sparked a wave of sympathy and support in many parts of the world, which came to be known as the ‘Philhellenic movement’ or ‘Philhellenism’ (the love for Greek culture and the Greek people).

April 19, the date on which the poet and great philhellene Lord Byron died, has been declared by the Greek state as Philhellenism and International Solidarity Day.

Two hundred years on, many people around the world continue to love Greece and stand by it.

Twelve acclaimed contemporary British philhellenes send their wishes for the New Year to Greece and the Greek people in this article written exclusively for the Greek daily newspaper Ta Nea. Notably, most of them think that the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles is one of the highest priorities in Greek-British relations.

Sarah Baxter

Journalist, Director of the Marie Colvin Centre for International Reporting, former Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times, Member of the Parthenon Project's Advisory Board

Happy 2023! Here's to a year of friendship and harmony. I'm hoping we will see the Parthenon sculptures begin their permanent journey home, with some wonderful Greek treasures heading in the other direction to the British Museum on loan. We know a "win-win" deal is going to happen eventually. Let's get on with it!

Roderick Beaton

Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, Language & Literature at King’s College London, Chair of the Council of the British School at Athens

A wish that won't come true: for the UK to return to the place it left in the EU following Brexit. Not only would we, the friends of Greece, regain the right we lost to stay close to you without restrictions, but also the voice of a country that had so much to offer to everyone would be heard during the political developments and critical decisions that 2023 will inevitably bring. Just imagine how you Greeks managed your referendum more skilfully than we did!

Paul Cartledge

A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, President of The Hellenic Society, Vice-Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM) and Vice-President of the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures (IARPS)

Greece has become such a major world player in the past century, not to mention the past two centuries, that it's hard to select any contemporary or likely future issue where relations between Britain and Greece in 2024 are not of the utmost significance. In the sphere of international cultural relations and soft diplomacy, one issue stands out above all others for Greece and Britain mutually speaking: 'the Marbles'. A resolution sparked by British generosity is devoutly to be wished.

Bruce Clark

Author, journalist and lecturer, Online Religion Editor of The Economist, BCRPM member

In 2023 it will be 190 years since the Ottoman garrison left the Acropolis and the Holy Rock became an archaeological site which fascinated and dazzled the world. The arguments for reuniting the Parthenon sculptures, for the benefit of people in Greece, Britain and many other countries, become stronger with every passing year.

Alberto Costa MP

Conservative Member of Parliament for South Leicestershire and Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Greece

On behalf of the All-Parliamentary Group for Greece in the British Parliament, I would like to wish our friends in the Greek Parliament, and the Greek people, a very happy New Year. I am delighted that relations between our two countries are stronger than ever and that Greece and her people enjoy a huge amount of support in the British Parliament. We very much look forward to building upon on our relationship, and our shared values and commitments, next year and in further strengthening the historic bonds that our two countries share.

Armand D'Angour

Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford, BCRPM member

It is heartening to see that the partnership of the UK and Greece is closer than ever, and that the green light has now been given for the return of the Parthenon sculptures to their rightful home. In these politically fractious times, governments should recognise who their friends are and be generous with both moral and practical support. The return of the sculptures will be a long-awaited gesture of friendship as well as a great morale-booster for both countries.

Hugo Dixon

Journalist, Commentator-at-Large with Reuters

My 2023 wish is that Turkey chooses a new leader and the West finds a way to bring the country in from the cold. A new leader should realise that it is not in Turkey’s interests to play the West off against Russia – especially as Vladimir Putin is a loser. If Turkey comes back to the heart of NATO, Greece will be one of the biggest beneficiaries.

Kevin Featherstone

Director of the Hellenic Observatory at the LSE, Eleftherios Venizelos Professor in Contemporary Greek Studies and Professor in European Politics at the LSE’s European Institute

Dear Greece,

I hope we will agree to send the Marbles back in 2023. Our two countries have a long-term ‘love affair’ and it’s the least we could do after the folly of ‘BREXIT’ – pushing up university fees for Greek students. But we have a favour to ask, please. At present, our prime ministers don’t last as long as a lettuce, and they have much less brain power, so might you have a politician to spare? Not Dimitriadis or Kaili, though, or we’ll go ‘nuclear’ and send you Boris.

Judith Herrin

Archaeologist, byzantinist, historian, Professor Emerita of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies and Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow at King's College London, BCRPM member

Dear friends,
As 2022 comes to an end, I send my warmest greetings to Greece hoping for a healthier and more peaceful New Year.
The campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to their rightful place in the new Acropolis Museum gathers momentum, reminding us of the powerful initiative of Melina Mercouriand Eleni Cubitt.
Let's hope for a breakthrough in 2023! Happy New Year!

Victoria Hislop

Author, BCRPM member

I wish all my friends in Greece a Happy New Year. We are living in uncertain times but there is one thing I am becoming more certain of - opinions are beginning to shift significantly on the Parthenon Sculptures and I think we are moving closer to the time when they will be returned to their rightful home in Athens. Many other museums in Britain are recognising that they have objects in their possession that were unlawfully acquired during our colonial past - and the return of Elgin’s “loot” is long overdue. This is my wish for 2023.

Denis MacShane

Former Minister of State for Europe in the Tony Blair government, former President of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), author and commentator

2022 was the year Britain returned to Greece. Up to August 2022, 3 million visitors went from the UK to Greece – a three-fold increase on the previous year. The weak English pound devalued thanks to Brexit has not damaged the love affair of the English with Greece.

But love has its limits. Although Prime Minister Mitsotakis told a packed meeting at the London School of Economics that he hoped soon the looted Parthenon Marbles would rejoin the rest of the sculptures from the Parthenon in the Acropolis Museum, there was no indication from Britain’s Conservative ministers London was willing to move.

The pro-Turkish Boris Johnson was fired by Tory MPs from his post as Prime Minister. But while France’s President Macron has expressed support for Greece as Turkey’s President Erdogan, inspired by Vladimir Putin, steps up his bellicose language threatening Greece, Britain remained silent in 2022 on the need for Europe to stand with Greece against Erdogan’s threats and demagogy.

Dame Janet Suzman

Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM), actor, Honorary Associate Artist at The Royal Shakespeare Company

In a world which seems unremittingly wicked we want tales of powerful gods presiding over squabbling mortals and blissful marriages with happy endings. That’s my dream for the Parthenon Marbles: the Prime Minister will charm the Chairman of the British Museum into a wedding ceremony in the Acropolis Museum, to witness the marriage of the two estranged halves of the glorious Parthenon pediment - accompanied by the cheers of the wedding guests galloping happily round the frieze, now returned home. If only…

This article was published in the Greek daily newspaper Ta Nea(www.tanea.gr) on 30 December 2022.

Where best for the Parthenon Marbles? (LSE 17 October 2022), panel organised by the Hellenic Observatory (Professor Kevin Featherstone.) with Lord Ed Vaizey (‘Parthenon Project’) & Dr. Tatiana Flessas (LSE)

Thanks to Kevin Featherstone, to the Hellenic Observatory, to the audience both online and in person (esp. High Commissioner of Cyprus, Andreas Kakouros, an LSE graduate, in person).

I am an honorary citizen (epitimos dêmotês) of modern Sparti, but don’t have the honour to have been born a Hellene. I am, however, a devoted phil-Hellene, consciously following in the footsteps of Lord Byron, and for 60+ years I’ve been trying to turn myself into something as close as possible to a true Hellene. I started learning ancient Greek at 11, modern Greek at 23, I read Greats (Classics) at Oxford 1965-9, I completed an Oxford DPhil thesis on early Spartan archaeology and history under (Sir) John Boardman (1969-75), I taught ancient Greek history and archaeology at 4 universities, for over 40 years in all (1970-2014), I am currently A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College Cambridge and President of the UK’s Hellenic Society. In 2021 I was lucky enough to be promoted Commander (Taxiarchês) of the Order of Honour (conferred by the President of Greece). But in tonight’s context I am above all Vice-Chair, BCRPM, and Vice-President, IARPS.

The British Committee (BCRPM) is almost 40 years old. It was founded in 1983 in response to the heroic initiative of Ms Melina Mercouri, then Culture Minister in Greece’s PASOK government. The BCRPM is now one of altogether some 19 national committees outside Greece. It was not however the first: that honour belongs to the Australian Commttee ( IOC-A-RPM) co-founded and chaired by Emanuel J. Comino(now 89, originally from the island of Kythera). The IARPS is rather younger, founded in 2005 and now chaired by Belgian archaeologist Dr Kris Tytgat. I am not sure whether I am actually a founder member of BCRPM, but I am certainly an early member, and well recall being invited to join, through my Cambridge (and Clare) colleague Prof. Anthony Snodgrass, and meeting with the likes of Eleni Cubitt, Prof Robert Browning, and MPs Eddie O’Hara and Chris Price, giants all.

My point is this: I’ve been actively campaigning for at first the ‘restitution’ and now the ‘reunification’ of the Parthenon Marbles/Sculptures back in Athens – all of them that still reside outside the Acropolis Museum, not just those in the BM – for almost 40 years. There’s no argument therefore or twist of argument for their retention outside Greece, esp. those in the BM, that I have not heard, all of them of course fatally flawed. On the other hand, I’ve been gladdened and heartened to watch over the years the steady – and lately far more lively and vigorous – growth of support for our reunification campaign, especially from among the ‘great British public’. I’ll come back to that. First, why the change in terminology from ‘restitution’ to ‘reunification’?

I’m no lawyer myself (though I happen to be surrounded by them at home), but it seems clear to me, as it always has been to BCRPM and IARPS, that ‘restitution’ has at least overtones of legalism and legality and therefore of ownership. I hardly need point out that all attempts to go down the legal route to reunification not only have manifestly failed in (or not in) the courts but have merely muddied the campaign waters, by raising precisely that ‘ownership’ red herring. I don’t mean to imply that the legal issue of Lord Elgin’s and so the British state’s and so the British Museum’s title to the Marbles is not important. It is. Indeed, I’ve just been reading in draft a wonderful forthcoming book by a French human rights lawyer to the effect that in international law the UK probably does not have much of a case. What I do mean by called ownership a red herring is that we campaigners should steer very clear indeed of resorting to legal argument or action in the present and for the future.

To be very personal for a moment: I was very kindly sent personally by Mr John Lefas (founder and funder of the Parthenon Project) a copy of Who Owns History? by Geoffrey Robertson (then) QC. That was in 2019, but I confess I couldn’t bring myself to read it then, as I was too upset by Mr Lefas’s and Mr Robertson’s involvement in (costly and fruitless) legal action. Instead, I clung on all the more fiercely to (my Oxford contemporary and fellow activist) Chris Hitchens’s The Parthenon Marbles, which in its 3rd edition (Verso, 2008) came with a Preface by Nadine Gordimer and excellent essays by Robert Browning (on the chequered history of the Parthenon as a building over the centuries) and by Charalambos Bouras (on restoration works conducted since the mid-1970s).

Why did I choose to join and campaign actively for the BCRPM all those years ago? Why do I choose still actively to campaign? Before I state them, I would like to emphasise that my reasons, being those of an academic with skin in the game of Hellenic cultural history over many years from antiquity to modernity, will not necessarily coincide completely even with those of my fellow BCRPM members. They are basically two (or three). First, moral-imperative; second, academic-aesthetic. The context and the main act of removal of Parthenon Marbles from Athens (by Lord Elgin and his cohorts from 1801) did not then and does not now reflect well on the standing of Britain as a sovereign nation – as Greece of course in the early 19th century was not.

It is to this day a shameful nonsense that not only do large parts of an original whole (the unique frieze) remain divided between London and Athens but that even individual sculptural members (a metope, say, or a pedimental sculpture) still are too. Members which, I must stress, are not ‘merely’ art objects – as if carved by Pheidias for display in an ancient Uffizi – but much much more than that (especially as regards their original religious-political dimension). Then, there is the wider, deeper, altogether even more problematic issue of politics – not academic politics, but governmental, and interstate, cultural politics. For reunification will require eventually at least one Act of the UK Parliament, and I need hardly remind this academic audience that it behoves us, as a (still, just) liberal-democratic polity in an increasingly un- or anti-democratic, illiberal world, to promote soft, cultural, interstate diplomacy in every positive way we possibly can.

Towards which goal I detect a number of promising straws in the recent wind. The latest yougov. poll. The return of Parthenon fragments from Heidelberg and Palermo (though not yet from my own Cambridge). The recruitment of several prominent journalists to the reunification campaign. The success of the parallel Benin Bronzes and other (imperial/stolen) African objects repatriation campaigns, especially in France (itself once, like Britain, a colonial/imperial power, indeed a once competing power – hence, in significant part, Elgin’s ability to loot, plunder and destroy as he did). The latest (November 2021) UNESCO resolution on cultural property. Finally – and by no means least – the Parthenon Project and its ‘front man’ Ed VaIzey, himself a recent convert to the reunification cause (echoing the published views of a couple of former BM Trustees). Lord Vaizey’s very recent debate in the UK House of Lords focused quite rightly on the National Heritage Act of 1983and rightly provoked several comments to the effect that we in Britain must do ‘the right thing’ by the Marbles.

Two final points. First ‘Parthenon Marbles’. To clear up any possible confusion, it really is the repatriation of only the marbles/sculptures wrenched from one particular building (still there) on the Acropolis of Athens, the Parthenon, that the Greek Government – and therefore BCRPM and IARPS – are requesting, in particular of the BM. Don’t get me wrong – I too love much of the BM (though I am sometimes tempted to call it the British Imperial War Museum). But quite apart from their holding on to the Parthenon Marbles illicitly and immorally and quite probably illegally, the Trustees – and Curators - are guilty of mounting a simply disgraceful display in the (infamously named) Duveen Gallery. Ironically, just how wrong and how bad it is (and always has been since 1962) was brought home to me by my Cambridge colleague, Dame Mary Beard, in her excellent little 2002 Parthenon book. Ironically, because she just happens now to be a BM Trustee.

Final final point. Oh – I nearly forgot… to answer the question posed by this LSE debate. ‘Where best for the Parthenon Marbles?’ It’s a no-brainer. In the newish (founded 2009) Acropolis Museum. The clue is in the name. The Parthenon is a building essentially of as well as on the Athenian Acropolis. In Athens, in the dedicated Parthenon Gallery of the Acropolis Museum the remaining Parthenon sculptures that the Museum holds are arranged so that they face outward, as they have always done. Their alignment is accurate, they are bathed in Athenian light, and viewed against the Parthenon itself and the Acropolis. At night, the glass surfaces of the Museum afford dynamic comparisons, reflecting the sculptures against the illuminated Parthenon and Acropolis. In the Acropolis Museum, and only there, it is possible properly to understand and appreciate the sculptures close to their original environment, where light, clouds, rain, and outcrops of marble all add to the story. In Athens, moreover, visitors approach the sculptures in a correct sequence, having been prepared for the ultimate glory of the Parthenon by first traversing and viewing up close works that both reflect and encapsulate the whole connected history of the Acropolis up to the Parthenon’s date, the latter half of the 5th century BCE.

Professor Paul Cartledge, Vice-Chair of BCRPM & IARPS