William St-Clair brought his profound appreciation of the Romantic writings of the early nineteenth century to his study of the Parthenon Marbles. It was this literary expertise in the world of the Godwins and the Shelleys, Byron and Keats, that imbued his work on the building with unusual qualities. Inspired by the poets’ passionate devotion to Greece, he was especially shocked by Elgin’s careless desecration of the Parthenon and dedicated a lifetime of research to the circumstances that had permitted it.

As early as 1967 he published Lord Elgin and the Marbles. The controversial history of the Parthenon Sculptures, which was revised in two subsequent editions and translated into several languages. In 1998 the third edition incorporated the discoveries he had made concerning the treatment of the Marbles by the British Museum. Following the trail for reliable information, he prised open detailed accounts of the cleaning that whitened but disastrously damaged their surfaces.

By questioning the arrangements Elgin made with the local Ottoman authorities, William had revealed much greater detail of their illegality, which also sparked increased attention to the British Museum’s acquisition and guardianship of the Parthenon Marbles. He presented his research in numerous lectures including the annual Runciman lecture at King’s College London in 2012, when Nicholas and Matti Egonhosted a brilliant dinner in his honour. He was Chairman of Open Book Publishers, who also republished his classic study That Greece might still be free. The Philhellenes in the War of Independence’ (1972) in a revised edition in 2008.

We salute William’s determination to unravel the circumstances of the Parthenon Marbles’ journey to England and the significance of the removal of such vital symbols of Greek culture. We will miss his unmistakable presence and enthusiasm at events to celebrate the Marbles and to campaign for their reunification, and we mourn his untimely passing. With deepest condolences to his family and many friends among the giants of the UK literary world. 

BCRPM's Honorary President Anthony Snodgrass knew William St Clair since the 60's and writes:  

'At times, William St.Clair seemed to have lived more than one life. Even in our supposedly 'globalised' age, it came as a revelation to many of his fellow campaigners for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, to learn that he was also an acclaimed literary and historical authority on the Romantic Era - to the point where, on the strength of this, he had been elected a Fellow of the British Academyback in 1992. The same may have been partly true in reverse; and to both parties, it was surprising to find that he had served for years as a senior civil servant in the Treasury, whose research was at first a side-line. His later academic appointments are too numerous to list in detail here, but they covered Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls at Oxford, the School of Advanced Study in London, Harvard and the Huntington Library in California.'

To read all of Anthony's tribute to William, kindly see the attached here .

You can also hear William speaking to student Nina Kelly in September of 2020 on a subject that he loved to speak about, the Parthenon and its sculptures.

In October 2017, the debating society at UCL schedule a debate for the evening of the 23rd  with the motion: 'This House believes the Elgin Marbles should be repatriated'. The evening, part of society's weekly debate series, was held at the Bloomsbury campus in London  and the speakers for the motion included William St Clair, Tom Flynn and Alexi Kaye Campbell. Below all three speakers pictured with Chair of BCRPM, Janet Suzman. The motion was carried in favour of repatriation.

Law, Morals and the Parthenon Marbles

Treachery, subterfuge and "a steady flow of bribes." Writer Bruce Clark unpicks the dubious legality of Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon sculptures.

When Melina Mercouri went to London in 1983, she put the point in her own inimitable way: “This is a moral issue more than a legal issue.” Kyriakos Mitsotakis took a similar line in November when he visited his counterpart Boris Johnson and declared that the sculptures were stolen – a view which Johnson himself, in his student days, had espoused.

The British Museum’s position is diametrically opposed. Its website argues that Elgin acted with the full knowledge and permission of the legal authorities of the day in both Athens and London. Lord Elgin’s activities were thoroughly investigated by a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1816 and found to be entirely legal.

Provocative as it sounds to most Greek ears, the case for the legality of the marbles’ transfer is worth studying. It rests mainly on a document that was apparently issued by an Ottoman official, the kaymakam, at the request of the British embassy to the High Porte, around the beginning of July 1801. It emerged at a high point in Anglo-Ottoman relations, when the two powers were acting in lockstep to expel Napoleon’s forces from Egypt. It was not, strictly speaking, a firman – a term which refers to a decree issued by the sultan himself. But the kaymakam was a high-ranking figure.

Its terms had virtually been dictated by Elgin’s assistant, a shrewd Anglican cleric, Philip Hunt. It allowed a team of mainly Italian artists employed by Elgin to visit the Acropolis, which was also the Ottoman garrison, make drawings and moulds of the antiquities, and specified that …“When they wish to take away some pieces of stone with old inscriptions, and figures, no opposition be made…”

Historians agree that when that text was issued it was understood to refer to picking up objects from or below the ground. (Ever since the explosion of 1687, when a Venetian mortar bomb ignited an Ottoman powder-keg and blew the roof off the Parthenon, plenty of valuable debris had been scattered around on the citadel).

In the course of July 1801, Anglo-Ottoman relations became closer still as fears grew that Napoleon might invade Greece. Hunt was sent back to Athens – on a mission to stiffen the backs of the Ottoman commanders. As he boasted afterwards, this provided an opportunity to “stretch” the meaning of the permit and remove sculptures that were still attached to the temples. In the careful words of historian William St Clair, “Lord Elgin’s agents, by a mixture of cajolery, bribes and threats, persuaded and bullied the Ottoman authorities in Athens to exceed the terms” of the kaymakam’s decree.

As Elgin would later explain, such a document was in any case not the last word – it was a basis for negotiation with local officials, and it did not preclude the need to keep up a steady flow of bribes to ensure that the stripping of the Acropolis continued unimpeded.

Conveniently for Elgin, the post of disdar, or head of the Acropolis garrison, changed hands in mid-1801, as an elderly incumbent, who’d made a steady income in bribes, passed away and the job was taken over by his son. The new disdar felt trapped in the middle of a high-stakes transaction, and he feared dire punishment if he miscalculated. Elgin and his associates made sure that he remained frightened. In May 1802, the disdar became anxious that he might get into trouble with his Ottoman masters because he had been slightly too zealous in accommodating Elgin’s project. But as Lady Elgin smugly reported, one of her husband’s agents “whistled in his lug (ear)” that he had nothing to fear. Or to put it another way, “You have nothing to fear but us…”

Even then, the Ottoman attitude to the legality of the project was never a settled matter. In autumn of 1802, both the disdar and the voivode (governor) of Athens became worried that they might get in trouble with the Porte, because the existing text did not justify the mass stripping which was in progress. Elgin duly procured a fresh document which retroactively legalized the actions of the two officials.

But then fast-forward to 1808, by which time the kaleidoscope had shifted: the Ottomans were at peace with France and spasmodically at war with the British. Many of the sculptures collected by Elgin were still in Greece.

A new British envoy to the Porte tried to get the sculptures released, and was bluntly told that Elgin’s entire operation had been illegal. Only after January of 1809, with the signature of a new Anglo-Ottoman treaty, did the atmosphere change, leading to a fresh document that enabled the export of the sculptures to resume.

During the parliamentary investigation which the British Museum mentions, Elgin was questioned hard as to whether he had abused his position as ambassador to pursue a personal transaction; he replied, absurdly, that, in his antiquarian activities, he was no different from any private archaeologist. But many legislators were unconvinced.

It seemed obvious that the objects for which Elgin was about to be paid £35,000 had been obtained by careful exploitation of diplomatic privilege and of the sweet state of Anglo-Ottoman relations. Elgin got his money, but that does not mean he was believed.

Is this really the kind of behaviour on which British officials should be basing their case? By stressing the very dubious argument for the legality of Elgin’s actions, they risk drawing further attention to the fundamental moral issues.

* Bruce Clark writes for The Economist on history, culture and ideas. He is author of his latest book “Athens: City of Wisdom.”

This article was previously published in Greek at kathimerini.gr, 18 February 2022

Bruce Clark also contributed his article 'Stealing Beauty' to BCRPM's articles section of this website. 

20 November 2021, The Tablet

Just over 400 years have passed since Sir Henry Wotton, travelling through Europe on official business, offered a definition of his role: “An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”

Even if the preceding words are too harsh, the final six remain important. In everything they do or say, diplomats must serve their homeland, not their personal agenda. A recruit to the Foreign Office is warned of a code which forbids any use of an official position “to further your private interests or those of others.” Equally taboo is accepting “gifts or hospitality” which “might reasonably be seen to compromise your personal judgement or integrity.”

The past, you may say, is a foreign country, where things were done differently. But how differently? When Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Sultan in 1799, it was an opportunity not just to consolidate an alliance against the French but to acquire some of the greatest artefacts ever fashioned – in order to decorate his house in Scotland.

He would later give different accounts of his motivation: at times he insisted that he was acting nobly to further British aesthetics. He would claim, quite implausibly, that he only decided to remove sculptures, as opposed to having them drawn, when he saw they were in acute danger. In more private communications, he was more frank. During the summer of 1801, when an exceptional military alliance seemed to offer exceptional personal opportunities, there is no mistaking the excited tone in which he writes to Giovanni Lusieri, his monument-stripper in chief: “The plans for my house in Scotland should be known to you. The building is a subject that occupies me greatly, and offers me the means of placing in a useful, distinguished and agreeable way, the various things that you may perhaps be able to procure for me.”

Studying the documentary evidence for the extraction of the Parthenon sculptures, which began in 1801 and continued intensively over two years, it is hard to avoid a sense of how shocking the operation was to many contemporaries. Was permission given? The original firman (an Ottoman letter of permission) has never been found but let us assume the authenticity of the Italian copy. The person induced to issue it was not the Sultan (who may never have known) but an official several notches down, the deputy to the Grand Vizier; and it has never been clear what exactly he meant by allowing the removal of “some pieces of stone with old inscriptions and figures” from the Acropolis. As the historian William St Clair concluded after a rigorous examination, Elgin’s agents used “cajolery, threats and bribes” to persuade Ottoman officials in Athens to exceed, at least in spirit, the firman’s terms.

When Lusieri and his team went to work with ropes, pulleys and saws, the spectacle was horrifying to British and Ottoman observers alike. As Edward Daniel Clarke, a traveller and antiquarian, describes the scene; “Down came the fine masses of Pentelican marble, scattering their white fragments with thundering noise among the ruins. The disdar (commander of the Ottoman garrison) took his pipe from his mouth and letting fall a tear, said in a most emphatic tone of voice, telos !
It was a scandalous act even with due consideration for the spirit of the times, which was itself pretty horrifying to modern sensibilities. The spirit might be described by the elusive New Testament Greek word harpagmos which refers to the act of grabbing, the thing grabbed or to a grabbing kind of mindset. For the powerful nations of western Europe and their wealthy representatives, Hellenism and its physical legacy was something to be grabbed: either by measuring, drawing and painting the ancient artefacts or, ultimately, by removing them.

Pause for a moment and consider what message is being sent to the world by the British establishment when it retrospectively endorses Elgin’s actions as procedurally correct and legal. Such formalistic arguments cut less and less ice in world where the tide of anger over Europe’s historic arrogance is growing. It surfaced most recently in September when a UNESCO committee, a rotating group of 21 countries, called with unprecedented firmness for the return of the Parthenon marbles to Athens. This emboldened Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister, to make a formal request for talks on [reunification] during a visit to Britain this week.

The trustees of the British Museum insist, accurately enough, that they have no mandate to do anything except act in the interest of the institution and its educational mission. The British government hides behind the independence of the museum; it is not for any cabinet minister to interfere in the decision-making of such a robustly independent body. As a museum spokesperson said in response to the UNESCO vote, the trustees “have a legal and moral responsibility to preserve and maintain all the collections in their care and to make them accessible to world audiences.” But that need not be the final answer. Ways can be found to overcome the legal obstacles. A law was passed in 2009 to enable the Museum to return objects that had been looted by the Nazis. An equally powerful imperative is building up for the return of objects that were grabbed in the colonial era with egregious cynicism. These include the Benin heads that were seized in 1897 after British forces looted a royal palace in Nigeria.

In 2019, Germany vowed to work towards the return of imperial loot taken “in ways that are legally or morally unjustifiable today.” All over the world, the moral pressure to rectify (or at least not gloat over) the legacy of colonialism is growing, with the support of rising powers like China and India.  sensed and anticipated that trend when he said in 2017 that France’s museums should no longer be holding colonial booty from Africa, starting a process that culminated last year in a law which provided for some restitution.

Suppose Britain’s cultural establishment were to renounce the legacy of Elgin and instead throw itself behind the cause of the reunification of the Parthenon sculptures, perhaps on the understanding that Greece would freely grant or lend to the British people other artefacts of real value. Amidst the euphoric chain-reaction that would be triggered, wonderful new ideas would emerge as to how best to share the legacy of Greece with the world. Among the distinguished cultural and academic figures who advocate such a move, the term “reunification” is carefully chosen. If the sculptures now in London belong anywhere it is with the parts of the frieze that remain in Athens and are now superbly displayed, in Greek light and with the Parthenon in view, in the new Acropolis Museum. For the first time in two centuries, visitors would be invited to admire the great majority of the frieze, with its chariots, horsemen, tray-bearers and water-carriers … and ponder what they mean: the fact is that nobody knows.

In its handout on the marbles, the British Museum rightly notes that the Parthenon has a “complex history”, including phases as a “temple, a church, a mosque and now an archaeological site”. If there is a flaw in the way the Acropolis and its monuments are now presented to the world, it lies in the exclusive emphasis placed on the era of Pericles, leading statesman of Athens from 461 to 429 BC – perhaps the greatest of the Rock’s many ages, but not the only one. Eight centuries before Pericles, the citadel hosted a thriving Mycenean palace; two centuries before, the rock’s sanctity, whose violation incurred a terrible, inter-generational curse, became a wild card in Athenian power struggles. And the Parthenon was a temple of monotheism for longer than it served the Olympian religion: a Greek Christian cathedral for perhaps seven centuries, a Roman Catholic one for another two, then a mosque. For Christians, the mysterious light that emanated from the white pillars became an attraction for pilgrims and a sign of the Virgin Mary. In 1394 the Florentine duke Nerio Acciaiuoli bequeathed the entire modest town of Athens to the Catholic cathedral of Santa Maria, in other words the Parthenon.

It is an Ottoman Muslim traveller, Evliya Celebi, who gave one of the greatest descriptions of the Parthenon frieze: “The human mind cannot indeed comprehend those images – they are white magic, beyond human capacity: whoever looks upon them falls into ecstasy, his body grows weak and his eyes water for delight.” And the Acropolis has seen an extraordinary modern history – for example in 1941 when two brave young Athenians scrambled up a vertical tunnel first used by Myceneans in the middle of the night and tore down the Nazi banner that flew menacingly over the city. As described later by Manolis Glezos, emerging from the dark passage onto the moon-lit rock was a moment of spiritual ecstasy as well as political defiance.

All these moments have their place in the story of the Acropolis. It is a shame that the average guide book devotes, say 50 pages to the Periclean century and at most a paragraph to the monotheistic millennium. But if the injuries left by Elgin’s depredation could only heal, then the masters of the Acropolis would more easily find the freedom and confidence to present the story of the Sacred Rock in its mysterious entirety. And the whole world would joyfully assist them.

Bruce Clark’s article was published in The Tablet (Saturday 20 November 2021).

Bruce Clark writes for The Economist on history, culture and ideas. His latest book  'Athens: City of Wisdom', is published by Head of Zeus and is available to purchase via The Tablet also.

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