Isabel Ruffell, professor of Greek drama and culture at Glasgow University, reflects on the Parthenon Marbles

The Sunday Post's Ross Crae wrote an article on the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, to read the article published on Sunday 12 December, kindly follow the link here. 

Isabel Ruffell, professor of Greek drama and culture at Glasgow University, reflects on the Parthenon Marbles. She is quoted as saying: “It is morally indefensible for them to be in London. It’s bizarre that you’ve got all these bits from the same building all over Europe.

These are iconic images of profound significance to the people of Greece. Their removal belongs to the smash-and-grab period of classical archaeology, which is intertwined with our colonial past, and we need to face up to that.

You’ve got these really high stakes pieces of sculpture that matter a great deal to one of our fellow European countries and it seems slightly peculiar that we’re not giving them back. It’s really quite childish in a way.”

She, too, believes the Acropolis Museum in Athens would be the best place to show the marbles in all of their glory. “From an educational point of view, the British Museum display is really unhelpful,” she said.

“The Panathenaic frieze is inside-out, and the other frieze elements dislocated in other ways. The display in Athens, which is waiting for their return, will display the surviving material in a way that is as close as possible to the original layout.

“It is a fabulous museum. It has really good displays of some of the other stuff that was on the site so you get a much better sense of what it was like – it was incredibly crowded. It’s not just the edited highlights, you see the whole lot. A lot of museums have big aesthetic treasures completely divorced from context.

“Having them in this austere white room in the British Museum is a very strange, misleading way of looking at it.

“As someone who has benefited from the school trip to London in my time, it is very educational and useful but you could do that with plaster cast or loans of material. I think museums are quite co-operative on the whole these days, so these kinds of things are not unprecedented, loan deals and plaster casts and so forth.

“If the goal here is to provide a resource to people to learn, which is what it should be, then there are ways of doing it without having to do the ‘it’s mine, you can’t have it back’ kind of thing.”

Professor Isabel Ruffell has now joined BCRPM as a member and we're delighted to welcome her.