Helena Smith writes in the Guardian about the Palace of Aigai, the largest surviving classical Greek building, after 16-year reconstruction completed.

For historians inside and outside Greece the new palace does something better still: refocus attention away from the classical age of Pericles in Athens to the Macedonian dynasty of northern Greece and achievements of Philip and Alexander.

“History is always about what we focus on,” said the British historian and broadcaster Michael Wood, speaking from London. “And this focuses our attention on the incredible events that began there. This small, provincial, militaristic kingdom would be the catalyst for the spread of Greek culture and Aigai the launch pad for Alexander the Great’s adventure in history, his expedition to Asia and conquest of half the known world.”

If the Parthenon represented the peak of the classical age, the royal metropolis conjured the beginning of the Hellenistic age, one that would last for hundreds of years and be felt as far as Afghanistan and India.

But there was something else, said Wood, who retraced the young warrior king’s epic journey through deserts, mountain ranges, rivers and plains from Greece to the north-west frontier of Pakistan and India in the 1990s.

The palace’s reconstruction had shown, yet again, that like the Parthenon marbles, great historical monuments have “an integrity” best seen united in their natural landscape. “The modern Greek state, as it should be, is proving to be a pre-eminent guardian of its ancient Greek culture,” said Wood. “What the palace also does is draw attention to the fact that the fifth-century sculptures should all be in the same place, back in Athens.”

Read Helena Smith's article in the Guardian, here.

Letter in the Financial Times 10 January, 2024: Give Parthenon marbles a one-way ticket home

One of your predictions for 2024 (FT Report, December 30) is that Britain will return the Parthenon marbles to Greece, albeit via a loan agreement rather than a full return.

You are probably right but I don’t think it is so much a question of if, but only when the marbles will eventually return to their home country. However, the idea of a temporary loan is not the solution.

The sculptures are far too fragile to be shipped between the two countries on a frequent basis. It is a forgone conclusion that it will have to be a one-way ticket.

The Elgin marbles have been well cared for by the British Museum but circumstances have changed. It is now widely acknowledged that the new Acropolis Museum is the appropriate home for the sculptures. This is also backed by a large majority of the British population.

Put it another way. The Parthenon marbles have been on loan to Britain for more than a century and now the time has come to return them to their country of origin.

Angus Neill Art Dealer, London 

Letters to the Sunday Times post Lord Sumption's article.

Supporting the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, and the return of the pieces in the British Museum to the Acropolis Museum:

Greece was under Ottoman-Turkish occupation

Lord Sumption says the Parthenon’s marbles were lawfully given to Lord Elgin by the legitimate government of Greece between 1802 and 1804 (Comment, last week). Not so. Greece was under Ottoman-Turkish occupation, and in 1826 Britain assisted the Greeks in their war of independence. This indicates that Britain also considered the Ottomans to have been unlawful usurpers.
Nemo dat quod non habet is a legal principle which says that no one can sell something which they do not legally own. If, during the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, Hitler had sold the Eiffel Tower to the Americans, would it be OK for the US still to keep it?
Kyriacos Kyriacou, London W8

Shaky reasoning
I hesitate to disagree with a former justice of the Supreme Court, but Sumption’s arguments for keeping the Elgin Marbles in London don’t stack up. It’s true the Ottoman authorities gave them to Elgin: the question is whether they were entitled to do so. It’s also true that cultural artefacts have been plundered for millenniums and often been dispersed in the process. That doesn’t mean this is OK. And to wail about the “gross cultural vandalism” of breaking up the British Museum’s collection seems hypocritical. Why is it acceptable to break up the marbles but not the British Museum’s collection?
Robert Wright, Cheltenham

Bribes paid
Sumption disregards the fact that Elgin did not buy the marbles, and so never acquired legal title to pass them to the British Museum. Elgin’s acquisition costs include “commission and agency … in Turkey” (that is, bribes) but no purchase price. As the museum never acquired title, the marbles do not form “part of the collections” and the British Museum Act 1963 would not preclude the trustees from returning them.
OM Lewis, Richmond, southwest London

Send them back
Sumption makes an intelligent case but he does acknowledge that the Greeks see the Parthenon frieze as “an emblem of their nationhood”. Spot on. What the Greeks feel about the Marbles, we do about Stonehenge. We should look at the issue a different way. The Parthenon Marbles have been on loan to Britain for more than a century. The time has come to return them to their country of origin.
Angus Neill, London SW1

Home truth
It is wrong to argue that something should remain where it is because it allows us to compare it to similarly important items. Yes, historical and cultural comparison has value but this should not detract from the greater value of reintegrating a work in the original place where it belongs.
Anastasia Demetriou, Southgate, north London

Missing argument
It is a bit rich for Sumption to accuse the Greeks of being nationalistic. The Parthenon sculptures are only here because of the chauvinism at the heart of the British Empire. As for the argument traditionally put forward for keeping them in the British Museum — that only we can look after them properly — recent news about hundreds of artefacts going missing from the museum, and previous revelations about damage caused in cleaning, surely put paid to that.
Ronnie Landau, London N12

Letters supporting Lord Sumptions argument for the UK and the British Museum retaining their half of the sculptures removed by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon, and in a fire sale becoming part of the British Museum collection since 1816:

Imperialist Athens
The Greeks do themselves no favours when they complain the Parthenon marbles were stolen. Sumption is right to say that their removal by Elgin was fully authorised. Perhaps we should remind modern-day Greeks that the Parthenon and its marbles were financed by Athens’s own theft of funds from the Delian league of city states, over which it exercised a cruel and greedy imperialism.
Charles Forgan, Great Broughton, North Yorkshire

Museum’s hands tied

The Greeks have no legal claim and the matter keeps going only because people such as George Osborne allow them to claim they are “in negotiations” — even though the proposed transaction is illegal. The British Museum’s trustees do not have a free hand; it’s time they and the board accepted the legal constraints and got on with the boring job of conserving the collection.
David Edwards, Eastbourne, East Sussex

To read Lord Sumption's article visit the Sunday Times. To read Dame Janet Suzman's reply, visit the link here. 

Greek Culture Minister Lina Mendoni has pledged to ‘fill the void’ at the British Museum should the Parthenon sculptures be reunited with their counterparts in Athens. It’s a brilliant idea.

The Kritios Boy, a masterpiece of ancient Greek marble sculpture, currently stands atop a pedestal in the Acropolis Museum in Athens. For historians he speaks quietly of the transition from the Archaic to the Classical periods in Greek sculpture (as well as having one of the most beautiful derrières in the history of art). He could potentially be among the many extraordinary treasures never previously exhibited in the United Kingdom but which could be seen in London if the British Museum’s trustees were enlightened enough to accommodate Ms Mendoni’s workable solution to the current impasse over the Parthenon Marbles.

Were the British Museum to agree to reunite the sculptures with their counterparts in Athens, Ms Mendoni has promised that Greece would reciprocate by sending rotating loan exhibitions of ancient masterpieces like the Kritios Boy never previously seen by many UK museum-goers. To realise the many cultural and diplomatic benefits of Ms Mendoni’s initiative would require the trustees of the British Museum to expand their vision beyond considerations of ownership and begin a more cooperative relationship with Athens over the future of the Marbles.

The first stage in that process requires the amendment of the British Museum Act of 1963 which currently prohibits the deaccessioning of objects from the Museum’s collections. The British Government’s refusal to even consider such an amendment has two negative consequences. In the first instance, the way the Marbles are currently displayed in Bloomsbury perpetuates a misleading understanding of their historical importance, denying their original significance as part of the Parthenon’s architectural programme. In the Parthenon Galleries of the Acropolis Museum their connection to the monument is clear and deeply moving.

It is the duty of every museum to promote a fact-based understanding of material culture, historical and contemporary. Where the Marbles are concerned, the British Museum is currently failing in that regard.

Secondly, the refusal to amend the 1963 Act deprives the UK’s museum-going public (as well as visiting tourists) of an opportunity to learn more about the art of ancient Greece through new educational displays.

As a scholar of ancient Greek polychrome sculpture, I have visited the Acropolis Museum on numerous occasions, both in its previous romantically ramshackle location on the monument itself, and on many subsequent occasions following the opening of Bernard Tschumi’s superb new Museum at the foot of the Acropolis in 2009. Few other museums in the world are able to offer as coherent an account of the coloured nature of ancient Greek sculpture as the Acropolis Museum.

The superb ‘Colour Revolution’ exhibition currently own show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford testifies to the enduring public fascination with colour and its impact on art and design in the Victorian era. It also touches briefly on one of the central aesthetic controversies of the nineteenth century — the true coloured nature of ancient sculpture.

The British Museum has been guilty in the past of scrubbing the Parthenon Marbles with wire brushes in a misguided attempt to whiten them. It now has an opportunity to absolve itself of those errors by reopening the conversation with Athens.

The immediate and long-term benefits are obvious for all to see. George Osborne has an opportunity to cement his legacy by persuading his Eton and Oxbridge colleagues in government to revisit the British Museum Act. Mark Jones might also go down in history as more than merely an “interim” director of the Museum but rather the man whose brief custodianship opened a new chapter in museum diplomacy.

Dr Tom Flynn

Dr Nigel Spivey is a Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College. Specializing in Classical archaeology, he studied at Cambridge, the British School at Rome, and the University of Pisa. Among his publications are Understanding Greek Sculpture (1996), Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (2001), The Ancient Olympics (2004), and The Sarpedon Krater: Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase (2018). His television credits include the major BBC/PBS series How Art Made the World (2005).

Dr Spivey joined joined Professor Paul Cartledge on GB News' Sunday with Michael Portillo (03 December 2023) to discuss the merits for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles. 

Dennis G. Mendoros OBE, DL, FRAeS, is a qualified Aeronautical Engineer and a businessman with over 45 years experience in the international aerospace industry.
In 1988, Dennis started his own business, Euravia Engineering, that grew from a ‘one-man’ business to a successful international aerospace company and was bestowed the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade.

In 2001 was awarded OBE for services to industry and in 2004 he was commissioned a Deputy Lieutenant of Lancashire. Dennis was elected a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 2008 and in 2010 he was appointed the High Sheriff of Lancashire by HM Queen Elizabeth II.

For over 30 years Dennis has, and continues to, lead and support several regional initiatives and partnerships between the private, public & voluntary sectors including armed services support organisations.

Following the formation of Euravia Engineering, Dennis made his home in Lancashire.