Chapter 6: The British Refusal to Return the Marbles
The British arguments against returning the marbles are first, that they were bought legitimately from the Turks on the basis of a legal document (the Sultan's firman); secondly, that they removed them with the object of saving them from total destruction and, thirdly, that the Greeks were indifferent to the fate of their ancient treasures. Since atmospheric pollution has come to plague the Athens area the added argument is now advanced that the marbles are better off in the clear and unpolluted air of London. These arguments were used as lately as November 1983 after the official Greek demand for the return of the sculptures and were repeated in the House of Commons by the spokesperson for the British government.
To deal with these arguments one by one, the first one is invalid because any purchase from the conqueror in a conquered land is tantamount to buying stolen articles from a thief or a robber. In any case, in all the correspondence and documentation relating to the Elgin Marbles, no actual purchase is mentioned but only bribes consisting of such things as jewel-studded pistols, an Arab horse, a watch, a telescope and British-made leather reins. These gifts were made to the Turkish garrison commander of the Acropolis, the Cadi of Athens and even to Ali Pasha of Yannina, for Elgin did not limit himself to looting the Acropolis but sent his agents to Epirus and to the Peloponnese as well, to pick up any antiquities they could find.
As for saving the sculptures from destruction, Elgin did not only cause irreparable damage to the Parthenon and the Erechtheum by stripping them of their decorations but also mutilated the sculptures by sawing some of them in half in order to reduce their weight and facilitate their transport. Thus, the column capital of the Parthenon, the Erechtheum cornice and many metopes and slabs were sawn and sliced. And Elgin would not have contented himself with one caryatid but would have removed the entire colonnade if a large enough ship had been at hand to transport it. Even so, the removal of the single Caryatid was enough to upset the stability of the monument.
As to the third argument, concerning the indifference of the Greeks to their ancient treasures, there is little doubt that any Greek voice raised in protest would have been quickly and brutally subdued by the Turks when a similar protest by the French consul in Athens resulted in his imprisonment.
There are many indications, however, that the Greeks grieved over their looted treasures such as the myth that the Caryatids could be heard wailing at night, mourning for their plundered sister, who could also be heard lamenting from the city prison where she had been temporarily confined after being removed from the colonnade.
There is also the story that the Greek porters who were carrying the wooden cases containing the sculptures to Piraeus thought they could hear cries coming from the figures in the crates and, setting them down, refused to carry them an inch further.
Edward Dodwell, an antiquarian, classical scholar and collector, who visited Greece early in the 19th century, reports that whenever a Greek farmer would find an ancient sculpture in his fields, he would embed it into the masonry above his front door, considering it to be an object of veneration and a guardian of his home. In his book, "A Classical and Topographical Tour through Greece", published in London in 1812, he mentions the looting of the Acropolis and affirms that the Athenians were lamenting the ruin of their antiquities and reviling the Turks for giving permission to foreigners to remove them.
Early in 1812, a group of distinguished Athenians, two of whom were members of the secret Philike Etairia (Friendly Society), founded the Philomusical Society (Society of the Friends of Music) among the members of which was Lord Guildford. One of the Society's aims was the protection of ancient monuments. The Society's activities were also encouraged by the Patriarch's office in Constantinople which instructed the Greek clergy to protect and preserve antiquities from damage or theft.
Further proof of the attachment of the Athenians to their monuments is contained in a letter from Lusieri to Elgin in which he says:
"If I cannot remove the entire Pandrossium (the colonnade of the Caryatids) I do not despair about one of the Caryatids. But the Greeks are devoted to it." (i.e. the Pandrossium).
The final argument about air pollution in Athens cannot be accepted because the sculptures suffered much more damage from their lengthy stay in the heavily-polluted atmosphere of London than they would have done if they had stayed in Athens where pollution is only a recent phenomenon. Lord Elgin himself, in his memorandum to the House of Commons affirms that London's dampness had caused decay to the sensitive Pentelic marble. This was in 1816. Since then, a more severe deterioration can be observed in the blackened sculptures of the temple of Epicurean Apollo at the British Museum.
In any case, regardless of whether the foregoing arguments have any validity or not, the fact remains that when an ancient work of art is removed from its original setting, of which it forms an aesthetic and historical part, it loses most of its value and becomes merely an item of archaeological interest. The contention, therefore, that there are no grounds for the return of the marbles is entirely insupportable.
Lord Byron put it very well when he said:
"The sea-ruling Britannia snatched the last spoils of Greece, that was in the throes of death."
The words of Alexander Rangavis at the meeting of the Greek Archaeological Society on May 12, 1842 before the eastern pediment of the Parthenon are also apt:
"What would Europe say, atremble, if one should find a drawing by Raphael or Apelles and, unable to carry it all away, should cut off the legs or the head of that work of art? If England, the friend of valiant deeds, cannot carry this entire temple to her soil and, with it, the deep blue sky under which this all-white monument stands, and cannot carry the transparent air which bathes the temple and the brilliant sun that gilds it -- if England cannot carry all those things to her far-northern climate then, just as kings and commoners formerly sent humble tokens of worship to the Parthenon and the Acropolis, so should England send us, as a token of reverence to the cradle of civilisation, the temple's jewels which were snatched from it and lie now, far away and of little value, while the temple itself remains truncated and formless."
In its various publications on the Elgin Marbles, the British Museum presents Elgin as a lover of antiquity who dedicated himself to rescuing Pheidias' sculptures from ultimate destruction. But the facts of the case present a very different picture. With the Sultan's firman in hand, Elgin seemed to think he had been given the right to take away anything he could lay hands on. This becomes manifest from the manner in which he went about his depredations and the way he abused his diplomatic status. Indeed, at one point, a parliamentary committee carried out an investigation to find out whether he had overreached his diplomatic privileges in this respect. Furthermore, the way he disposed of the 120 vases he gave to Ali Pasha of Yannina is indicative of his "concern" for the safety of the antiquities he was collecting. His rapacity seems to have been shared by his agents with Thomas Lacy suggesting the removal of the entire Pandrossium and expressing his regret that the transport of the pieces he found in Olympia would be too expensive and Philip Hunt voicing his grief at the fact that the two lions over the gate at Mycenae were too heavy to carry off. In the Peloponnese, Elgin managed to obtain from the local Turkish authorities "unlimited permission to excavate" and he returned from there with many vases and inscriptions.
But his activities did not pass unnoticed. J. Newport MP stood up in the House of Commons and protested:
"The honourable Lord benefited of the most unjustifiable means and committed fragrant looting. He looted what Turks and other barbarians had considered sacred."
Another MP, H. Hammersley, suggested that the collection be bought for £25,000 and kept at the British Museum,
"in order to be returned, whenever requested to the first Greek government formed after the liberation of the country."
Hammersley also condemned Elgin for the manner in which he had acquired the collection.
Over the course of time, these protests were forgotten in Britain and more recently, Elgin has even been represented as a protector of Greek antiquities. But the words of Horatio Smith, the poet who called Elgin a "marble-stealer" live on as do those of Lord Byron in "Childe Harold" where he writes, after witnessing Elgin's looting of the Parthenon during his stay in Athens during the winter of 1810-11:
"Blind are the eyes that do not shed tears while seeing, O, Greece beloved, your sacred objects plundered by profane English hands that have again wounded your aching bosom and snatched your gods, gods that hate England's abominable north climate."
In the same poem, Byron stigmatises the pillage and the vandalism which, he remarks, neither the Goths nor the Turks had dared perpetrate.
The publication of "Childe Harold" was accompanied by many footnotes regarding the looting. In one of them, he says:
"At this moment, 3 January 1810, besides the objects already brought to London, a Hydran ship is waiting at Piraeus for another load. I heard a young many saying, together with many of his countrymen, that they are afflicted deeply, sensing the situation; Lord Elgin may now boast of having ruined Athens."
In 1828, four years after Byron's death, his poem "The Curse of Athena" was published for the first time in England. It had been inspired by his stay in Athens in March 1811. In it, he calls Elgin a robber and likens him to a Goth. In another publication, "Hermes the Erudite" (1818) we find: "Byron and other Englishmen who toured Greece lately are naming Elgin a shameless thief."
John Hobhouse, a friend and fellow-traveller of Byron's notes in his book on the voyage, published in 1813, that on a wall in a chapel on the Acropolis he saw the following carved inscription: "Quod non fecerunt Gothi, hoc fecerunt Scoti" (What the Goths did not do, the Scots did here) – an obvious reference to Elgin who was a Scotsman.
The argument put forward by Elgin in his time and by the present curators of the British Museum, that the antiquities were transported merely to be saved, is pure hypocrisy. One look at the state of the sculptures of the temple of Epicurean Apollo in the British Museum will convince anyone that their long stay in London has done them considerable harm.
Another British traveller to Greece, Edward Clarke, in his book "Travel to European Countries" published in 1811, also predicted the disastrous effects the damp London climate would have on sculptures made from Pentelic marble.
We are told by Forbin, a French traveller of the time, that the Caryatid Elgin removed was the best preserved of them all. Yet, by 1965, when the atmosphere in Athens was still relatively unpolluted, the London Caryatid appeared more eroded than those in Athens.
Another argument advanced by the British is that by being in the British Museum, the sculptures can be seem by many more people. This is also a fallacy because in 1983, more than 1.2 million entrance tickets were sold on the Acropolis and if one should add the attendance on the two days per week which are free and that of schoolchildren and others with free passes, the figure rises to 2,500,000 or 7,000 per day. The Duveen Gallery could never account for that number. But even if this argument were valid, the fact remains that it makes a very great difference to the aesthetic value of the sculptures to see them out of context instead of in their natural environment.