POETRY BY A. E. STALLINGS

Archaic Smile

Hapax

Olives

Like

This Afterlife

TRANSLATIONS BY A. E. STALLINGS

The Nature of Things

Works and Days

The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice

First Paul Dry Books Edition, 2025

Paul Dry Books, Inc.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

www.pauldrybooks.com

Copyright © 2025 A. E. Stallings

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

A version of this text was originally published in The Hudson Review, Volume LXXVI, Spring 2023, 75th Anniversary Issue

Parthenon image from Freepik

Nicholas Calas, excerpts from “Acropolis,” translated by David Ricks. Reprinted with the permission of the translator.

James Merrill, excerpts from “On an Italian Shore” and “Losing the Marbles” from Collected Poems, edited by J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. Copyright © 2001 by The Literary Estate of James Merrill. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

W. D. Snodgrass, excerpts from, “Coming Down from the Acropolis” from Selected Poems: 1957–1987. Copyright © 1977 by W. D. Snodgrass. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Kathy Snodgrass, permissionscompany.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024952577

ISBN: 978-1-58988-200-3

For John, co-conspirator in the full catastrophe

CONTENTS

Marbles, Fast and Loose

PART I

Shadows and Magnitude

Rock and Ruin

As Poetical in Piccadilly

Imperishable Columns, Immortal Dinner

In-valuable

Another Painter

“Characteristics . . . of an Intellectual European”

“The More Beautiful the Whiter It Is”

PART II

“It Gives the Dirt a Polish”

Mountain and Monument

Duveen’s Deep Clean

Lost in Translation

Shanghaied to Bloomsbury

On the Tack of Caring for Greek Sculpture

Greek Poets and the Marbles

Enchanted Bodies

A Centaur at the Wedding

The Temple of the Cari-Something

PART III

Eyewitnesses

Carrots and Sticks

Regretted by All

Turks and Greeks

A Light-Filled Mosque

Turks, Travelers, and Time

“Detached Heads”

Interlude: Washed Away

Mercouri

“Memorably to Camera”

Losing the Marbles

The White Line

Old Drums

PART IV

Bullets, Again

An Intellectual Clockwork

Polarizing Celebrities

Ringing the Changes

A Tale of Two Cities, Two Museums

A Creative Act?

Divided Narratives

Begging the Question

A Breakthrough?

Room 19

“Scattered to the Light”

Would It Be Permissible to Speak of a Caryatid?

Appendix A: Word Problems: Money, Math, and Marbles

Appendix B: A Modern Timeline of the Parthenon and the Marbles of the Acropolis

Appendix C: Architectural Elements of the Parthenon

Appendix D: Translation of the Italian Translation of the Firman, As Listed in the Appendix to the 1816 Special Committee Report

Appendix E: Lord Byron’s The Curse of the Minerva

Some Acknowledgments

Some Sources Consulted

MARBLES, FAST AND LOOSE

Athens is well-situated when it comes to marble. That’s what the mountains that surround it are made of, particularly Pendeli, the mother of Pentelic marble, famed for its fine whiteness that ages to warm gold. The marbles of the Acropolis were quarried from the Attic landscape, and as the Parthenon continues to be repaired and rebuilt, it is with marble from the same source. Modern Athens is largely a concrete city, but marble is everywhere you look. I live quite near to Athens’ First Cemetery, founded at the beginning of the Greek nation state, a garden of marble statuary. It is still a working cemetery, and on the Street of Eternal Repose that leads up to the gates, numerous stone shops are busy with repairing old monuments and carving new ones, often using the same methods and tools as ancient sculptors. As it happens, many of the sculptors of the cemetery also work on the nearly half-century-old project of restoring the Parthenon. (Building the original took less than a fifth of the time it is taking to repair it.) Marble is not only above the city skyline, but in doorways and lintels, squares and staircases, even beside garbage bins, where a ripped-out marble sink from an old apartment might lie awaiting a new life as a planter. Treacherously slick after a rain, gleaming marble underfoot has provoked many a sprained or broken ankle or elbow. Perhaps the damaged figures of the Parthenon could relate.

London, that much larger and more populous city to the north, is entangled with Athens in ways that become more obvious when you start to pay attention. Its plethora of pillars and pediments, allegorical friezes and stocky caryatides, most obviously in the massive façade of the British Museum, but also in churches and monuments and private clubs, not only reflects the general Greek revival of the early- to mid-1800s, but, especially in the wake of the Greek revolution in which so many British philhellenes played an important part—most notably Lord Byron, philhellene supreme—represents conscious allusions to that most famous and recognizable of Greek buildings, more than half of whose surviving ornaments and some of whose architectural elements ended up in the British Museum, which in turn has centered its identity on those particular holdings. As the museum was being reestablished as an imperial project, London was setting itself up to be the new Athens, a symbol of liberty in the struggle against an over-weening tyrant aiming to conquer vast territory: not Darius or Xerxes, but Napoleon.

You could say that the modern story of the Marbles of the Parthenon begins with a bang. Having stood more or less intact for over two millennia, the ancient temple to the goddess Athena on the Acropolis—converted at the time into a splendid Ottoman mosque—was being used both as a powder magazine and as a shelter during a battle between the Venetians and the Ottomans in 1687 when a “lucky shot” by the Venetians blew it up. The explosion killed hundreds, set fire to the surrounding houses and buildings, and blew the longstanding ancient monument decorated with some of the finest examples of Classical art practically in two. Three of four of the cella walls “nearly collapsed and three-fifths of the sculptures from the frieze fell.”¹ The roof was obliterated; over a dozen massive central columns tumbled, bringing down tons of marble architraves. Yet somehow the shell of the building was left standing, and amazingly much of the decoration, some pedimental statutes, many of the metopes, and a chunk of the frieze, remained in place. The temple stood, no longer as monument, but as picturesque ruin, with a new smaller mosque built in its midst, relatively unmolested—although more vulnerable to souvenir hunters and antiquities collectors—for a bit longer than a century.

Cannons feature in the second chapter of the modern history of the Marbles as well, but they are the cannons of ships, in a battle across the sea from Greece. The destiny of the temple shifted in August of 1798 with the Battle of the Nile. Napoleon’s attempt to wrest control of Egypt from the Ottoman Empire on his way to India was foiled by Britain’s Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson. Nelson’s victory was decisive. The Ottoman ruler, Sultan Selim III, brimmed with gratitude. It was during this brief period of cozy warmth between the British and Ottoman Empires that Lord Elgin waltzed into the position of UK Ambassador to the Sublime Porte (Constantinople), being appointed in December, only a few months after the battle. The Elgins arrived in Constantinople in 1799, and were showered with gifts: jewels, silks, a fine horse. They set out for Athens, an Ottoman backwater, in 1802. (Only a handful of years later, relations between London and Constantinople had soured, culminating in the Anglo-Turkish war of 1807.) Removal of Marbles from the temple, beginning with the metopes, under the supervision of Elgin’s agent, the painter Lusieri, was already under way even before Elgin set foot in Athens.

The ancient story of the Parthenon might not be quite what we think of it, either. Built between 447 and 438 B.C., with the sculptor Phidias’s program of elaborate decorations of the temple, carved in situ, taking only another five years or so, it stood in place of an earlier, unfinished “hundred-footer” of a temple that had been destroyed by the Persians between 480 and 479 B.C. The plays of Aeschylus, the first great Greek playwright, took place in a theater beneath the Acropolis, but not in the shadow of the Parthenon’s columns; rather beneath the black wreckage of the older razed building, the ruins left in place for thirty-two years, perhaps as a reminder of the barely-escaped dangers of foreign invasion by Eastern “barbarians.” Wreckage as monument should be familiar to us, as Joan Breton Connelly and others have pointed out, from the Ground Zero scar of the Twin Towers and the gaps in the city’s skyline. The destruction of the first Parthenon was a 9/11 moment for the Athenians, and perhaps the Greeks.

The temple we associate with the glories of ancient Athens’ golden age crowned the city for only a brief period of democracy. The overlap of time when Athens was at the height of her glories and powers and the Parthenon with all its decorations was complete is breathtakingly short. Scarcely a year after the final touches of the building were finished in 432 B.C.—the encaustic paint, pigments heated with bees-wax perhaps from Hymettus’s hill, was plausibly still drying—the Peloponnesian War broke out (431); the war that would see Athens devastated by a plague (of which Pericles himself would perish), and then lose to and fall under the sway of its archrival: undemocratic, oligarchic Sparta. We might well picture Plato and Socrates strolling under a timeless temple on the hill, but it was a relatively new structure then, of no antiquity. Socrates, son of a stonemason, witnessed its construction, and Plato was born when the completed building was only five years old. By the time Plato starts writing his dialogues, Athens had lost the Peloponnesian War and begun its relative decline. The Parthenon had been complete only thirty-three years when Socrates was sentenced to death.

The propaganda, though, of Athenian philosophers and playwrights, propaganda that gives Athens precedence in our study of ancient Greece to this day, was remarkably successful, and the education of every British, or indeed European, gentleman of the nineteenth century was infused with it. This was useful to the Greek cause when its struggle for independence broke out in 1821. A local landmark of the relatively small town of Athens (and one which stood alongside other landmarks, such as the widely beloved Erechtheion, and the since demolished Frankish tower), a building which had variously been reconsecrated as church and mosque since the dissolution of paganism, had a different meaning to the West; it was a rallying symbol for freedom and democracy. The Greeks adopted this view, and the Parthenon became an emblem not only of ancient Greece but of a fragile new nation state built on the enlightenment ideals of liberty, republicanism, and self-rule.

The rock of the Acropolis, it can be easy to forget when studying such things in books, not only was the ancient cultural and religious center of Athens, it was and is the natural fortification for the city. You cannot hold Athens long without having control of its dominant central position. The Persians razed its buildings. The Ottomans used it for a military citadel, which was why Western travelers needed permission to draw structures within its walls. The Acropolis was subject to two bloody sieges during the Greek War of Independence, where Ottomans and rebels alternated in their possession of it. And when the Nazis rolled into Athens with their tanks in 1941 to place it under Occupation, they raised the Nazi flag over it: the subsequent taking down of the hated swastika from the holy rock by two young men of the resistance made them national heroes. In the decade of punitive austerity imposed on Greece, the Parthenon’s damaged façade was splashed over the pages of glossy economic magazines as a visual shorthand for a nation’s economic ruin.

Throughout this book, I will be referring to the ornaments of the Parthenon and other architectural items from the Acropolis that Lord Elgin took with him to England not as the Elgin Marbles nor as the Parthenon Marbles, but simply as the Marbles. The Elgin Marbles as a term was seen as objectionable by some even in Byron’s day (and curiously the British Museum itself no longer refers to them as such), but “Parthenon Marbles” is not sufficient either. The Caryatid from the Erechtheion in the British Museum does not belong to the Parthenon, nor do a number of other ornaments and architectural elements from buildings on the Acropolis that the museum houses. Perhaps “Elgin” as a label is useful after all, for the Acropolis marbles he removed, which have suffered a different fate from those he was prevented from extracting and which remained in Athens. But context here should be sufficient to make clear which set of this divided collection I am referring to at any one time.

The debate, though, about where the removed Marbles belong, and why, can largely be traced back not to politicians or pundits, but to poets and their painter friends. Would there have been much of a controversy if Byron, who had visited Greece and the Acropolis but never seen the Marbles in the British Museum, had not written thundering tirades against Lord Elgin’s exploits in his wildly popular bestseller verse travelogue cum autofiction Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, followed up by his libelous “Curse of Minerva” on the same topic? Would we admire the fragmentary perfection and stillness of the Marbles, their Truth and Beauty, abstracted from their historic context in the halls of a museum, in the same way without Keats’s swooning declarations in his sonnet on their Grecian grandeur? These are the two poles around which the arguments for or against their reunion have, for better or worse, revolved for the last two centuries.

What began as a short pandemic lockdown essay on these two poets and the Marbles, plus some statements by Cavafy to put a Greek poet’s perspective in the mix, led me down a warren of rabbit holes, especially as I came across still other poets and novelists, painters and architects, who have chimed in. (I was vexed too at the time by social media posts by Classicists who pontificated on the Marbles without it would seem having any background on their history since ancient times—did it not behoove them to know something beyond a vague notion that Elgin had simply purchased them from the Ottomans—the one version of events that everyone with any knowledge on the matter would categorically deny?) But once I got started, I was pulled deeper and deeper in, by characters and circumstances, friendships and enmities, scandals and scavengers. I came across good poets and bad painters, jewel thieves real and fictional, actresses and activists, shipwrecks and sultans. Once you realize how the Marbles touch on nearly every topic of the long nineteenth century, and much of the twentieth—aesthetics, Classics, race theory, economics, geopolitics, our shifting climate—you start to find reflections of them everywhere.

Periodically the question of their removal from the British Museum to Athens, or the issue of the reuniting of the collection, flares up with renewed urgency. Such has it been for two centuries and more, although the arguments, again, have been remarkably repetitive, stuck in their groove. Two hundred years from now, will it matter? I think not. Assuming human civilization survives that far into the climactic ruin we seem dead set on bringing down upon our own heads, the dispensation of the Natural world a temple shattered by human greed and indifference, we will be concerned with other losses and injustices on an infinitely greater scale. Perhaps the Marbles will survive not only debates but museums themselves. The rude wasting of old Time is not done with his abrasions. Yet even so it is not too late now to look on this seemingly insoluble stalemate of a controversy with fresh eyes, to consider not only legality and legitimacy, but justice and generosity.

Perhaps one of the strangest things about the Marbles of the frieze, so familiar to us, is that this parade of figures, folk attending a sacrifice on a peaceful citadel in some eternal pious morning, was not, in a sense, created for the close-up scrutiny of the human eye at all. Even prinked out in garish paint, at forty feet up and in the shadow of entablature, they were only sketchily visible from the ground. So much artistry, grace, proportion, and technique all went into decorations that were not merely adornments, but gifts for the eyes of the gods. Perhaps that is why, gazing at these vivid human and equine figures, made not of ephemeral flesh but the stuff and geologic time of mountains, we feel ourselves step out of mortality and time, we feel a little divine.

AES

1. From “Morosini in Athens” by Kornilia Chatziaslani, in Archaeology of the City of Athens, https://archaeologia.eie.gr/
archaeologia/En/chapter_more_8.aspx

PART I

Shadows and Magnitude

It is easy to forget that, when John Keats (1795–1821) wrote his often-anthologized sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” in 1817, the eponymous Marbles were relatively new immigrants to England. They retained a frisson of recent controversy: the source of public and parliamentary debate a year before, they had only just been unveiled to the general public in the British Museum. The poem—light on observed detail and heavy on high Romantic swoon—seems more a hymn to Stendhal syndrome than a description of an actual artistic encounter:

My spirit is too weak—Mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep

Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—

A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

Without the poem’s title it would be very hard to guess what the phrase “these wonders” refers to at all. Only “godlike” and “Grecian”—at a stretch “old time”—even gesture at their general direction. Whence the pinnacles and steeps or the eagle? The billowy main and the sun—an imagined Greek setting—Greek sun and sea—are trucked into the cool, dim salon of the British Museum’s Temporary Elgin Room by the imagination.

Keats had not been alone on this visit: his friend, the irascible and erudite painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846), had served as enthusiastic docent. Keats dashed off this sonnet that same evening and sent it to Haydon, while still giddy from the museum experience; it is the second of a brace of sonnets, the first addressed to Haydon directly:

Forgive me, Haydon, that I cannot speak

Definitively on these mighty things;

Forgive me that I have not eagle’s wings—

That what I want I know not where to seek:

And think that I would not be overmeek

In rolling out upfollow’d thunderings,

Even to the steep of Heliconian springs,

Were I of ample strength for such a freak.

Think too that all those numbers should be thine;

Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture’s hem?

For when men star’d at what was most divine

With browless idiotism—o’erweening phlegm—

Thou hadst beheld the Hesperean shine

Of their star in the east and gone to worship them.

Both sonnets were published, one atop the other almost as if a single poem or double sonnet, in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner a week later.

This sonnet is much less of a “keeper,” with its vague sweep of Greek geography and unfortunate rhyme word “phlegm” (although here it means “stoic calm”), but the sonnets do shed light upon one another. The eagle makes an appearance in both, but in this poem, the eagle’s wings (this eagle is not too sick to fly) belong to Haydon rather than the speaker. Keats asks forgiveness for not being able to speak “Definitively on these mighty things,” which Haydon presumably can, perhaps thunderingly so. But by the second poem the vagueness and inability to articulate about the marble fragments becomes an immortal phrase in itself: “a shadow of a magnitude.”

It is irresistible to try to imagine the visit, with Haydon pontificating and Keats in tow, perhaps dumbfounded. Haydon had been obsessed with the Marbles—and would continue to be so for the rest of his life—since he first encountered them with his friend, the painter David Wilkie, nearly a decade earlier in 1808 in a “damp, dirty pent-house” in a yard on Park Lane, where the Marbles had lain “within sight and reach.”

In Haydon’s lively autobiography, he recounts this transcendent experience:

The first thing I fixed my eyes on was the wrist of a figure in one of the female groups, in which were visible, though in a feminine form, the radius and ulna. I was astonished, for I had never seen them hinted at in any female wrist in the antique. I darted my eye to the elbow, and saw the outer condyle visibly affecting the shape as in nature . . . That combination of nature and idea which I had felt was so much wanting for high art was here displayed to midday conviction. My heart beat! . . . I felt the future, I foretold that they would prove themselves the finest things on earth, that they would overturn the false beau-ideal, where nature was nothing, and would establish the true beau-ideal, of which nature alone is the basis. . . . I felt as if a divine truth had blazed inwardly upon my mind. . . .

Haydon concludes this recollection with “I do not say this now, when all the world acknowledges it, but I said it then, when no one would believe me,” adding that he was in such a state of excitement when he got home that Wilkie, a Scot, had to try to “moderate” his enthusiasm with his “national caution.”

At Haydon’s next opportunity to visit the Marbles, he dragged the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli) with him, who endeared himself to Haydon forever with his “uncompromising enthusiasm,” striding around and exclaiming, “De Greeks were godes! de Greeks were godes!”

Haydon’s own fascination with the Marbles and his advocacy for them were contagious, even overwhelming. Roughly ten years older than Keats, who was twenty-one at the time of their “bromance,” and further embarked on his artistic career of ambitious large-scale historical and biblical paintings, Haydon perhaps represented to Keats a kind of artistic seriousness and commitment to aspire to.

Archibald Archer (1791–1848), Temporary Elgin Room at the Museum in 1819, by public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Oil on canvas. British Museum. 1872: given by Dr. John Edward Gray.

Haydon’s expertise on the Marbles and his passion for them seem to have made as much of an impression as the sculptures and marble reliefs. In particular, Haydon would have pointed out to Keats that their beauty lay in their anatomical truth, how the artists understood the inner structures of the human body, whether it was the bones in a woman’s forearm or a muscle flexed in the armpit of a struggling torso, details that would hardly have been lost on Keats, who had not only studied anatomy in his surgical training, but still had daily experience of it at Guy’s Hospital. Haydon might have called the pediments “eagles” as a translation of the Greek word, aetôma (as happened during the Parliamentary Committee) or pointed out the missing eagle under Zeus’s throne. He might have recounted some of the Marbles’ misadventures: one shipment, on Lord Elgin’s brig the Mentor, sank in 1802 in rough seas off Kythera. The humans aboard were unscathed, but seventeen crates of sculptures ended up at the bottom of the “billowy main,” rescued over the next two years with the help of hired Greek sponge divers brought in from Symi and Kalymnos. And Haydon would have waxed lyrical about the perfection glimpsed through the fragmentary: “In the most broken fragment, the same great principle of life can be proved to exist, as in the most perfect figure,” Haydon had observed, according to a note in Felicia Hemans’ long poem, Modern Greece, also from 1817.

When Keats and Haydon visited the Marbles at the beginning of March in 1817, it was also exactly one year on from the meetings of the House of Commons’ Select Committee and Parliamentary debate on whether to purchase the Marbles. The Committee had been formed to assess the artistic and monetary value of the Marbles, and also whether Lord Elgin had had the legal authority to remove them in the first place.

Haydon had been furious at the snub of not being invited to testify and had taken to the pages of Leigh Hunt’s Examiner to fulminate, in particular targeting Richard Payne Knight, whose testimony had held that the Marbles were of only the second rank, and that the lot was worth, on the open market, a fraction of Elgin’s asking price (£73,600). Haydon’s screed was entitled “On the Judgment of Connoisseurs Being Preferred to that of Professional Men” and contained the zinger, “No man will trust his limb to a connoisseur in surgery.”

If in no part of Keats’s Elgin Marbles sonnet does he describe the Marbles directly, instead evoking the overwhelming emotion of encountering them, there does seem to be a description of them in a more ambitious poem a couple of years later, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which those emotions are recollected in tranquility:

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

The southern frieze has many blocks that depict people leading animals to sacrifice, and, in particular, block S XLIV depicts a heifer bellowing at the sky, and other parts of the poem have counterparts in the frieze. It may be assumed that the figures in Keats’s poem are sacrificing an unmated female animal (a heifer) to a virgin goddess, Athena perhaps.

Interestingly, Keats’s Grecian urn does not appear to be a red- or black-figure painted terracotta vase, but marble and carved, like the Parthenon frieze in relief (and not unlike the sculpted marble Townley Vase, also in the British Museum’s Greek and Roman collection at that time, and which, in its depiction of the wedding of Bacchus and Ariadne, features the god and his bride as well as men and maenads):

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought

After his first visit to the Marbles, Keats would often return to the British Museum to gaze upon them. His friend (and portrait taker) Joseph Severn reminisced that “He went again and again to see the Elgin Marbles, and would sit for an hour or more at a time beside them rapt in revery.”

Perhaps as he began truly to “see” the Marbles, the suggested narratives unfolded that would find themselves instead on a Greek pot. That poem’s Cold Pastoral of unheard melodies concludes, oddly enough, with an utterance, and that in the voice of the urn itself:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

The voice Keats hears, imagining what the Grecian urn would say, sounds not unlike Haydon’s.

Rock and Ruin

The Elgin Marbles, as Keats refers to them, consist of roughly half of the Parthenon’s surviving ornaments: 247 feet of 524 feet of the frieze; 15 of the 92 metopes;¹ and 17 pedimental figures, as well as architectural elements from the Parthenon (such as a Doric capital²), and from other buildings on the Acropolis, such as a Caryatid from the Erechtheion. These were removed from the Acropolis by agents of Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin (1766–1841), mostly in a frenetic burst of activity from 1801–1803; an injunction against further “excavations”—Elgin’s agents were planning to remove the western frieze—was issued by the Ottoman governor of Athens (the Voivode) in 1805.³

It would take another decade to ship all the Marbles out of Greece to England.

Our only ancient description of the sculptures comes from Pausanias, a second-century A.D. travel writer: “As you enter the temple that they name the Parthenon, all the sculptures you see on what is called the pediment refer to the birth of Athena, those on the rear pediment represent the contest for the land between Athena and Poseidon.”⁴ He also mentions a portrait sculpture of Hadrian, the Roman emperor of an earlier generation.

Pausanias tells us nothing whatsoever of the frieze, which, at forty feet above the ground, would not have been viewable up close by visitors. This clearly depicts some sort of sacrificial procession. Until recently, the assumption by most scholars was that it displayed the Panathenaic procession, a mid-August festival held in honor of Athena’s birthday (with a grander version every four years) that culminated in offering a newly woven robe (a “peplos”) to the olive-wood statue of Athena Polias, “protectress of the city.” (It is fascinating to consider that this festival to a virgin goddess falls so close to the Christian festival for the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on August 15, an important religious holiday observed all over Greece.) This theory of the frieze’s subject was first put forth only in 1787, by the travelers and artists James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, when they propose tentatively of block E IV: “May we not suppose this folded cloth to represent the peplos?”

There are potential problems with this reading of the frieze: the frieze includes elements of the procession that are unknown to us from written accounts (which, admittedly, postdate the frieze, as Jenifer Neils and others point out, and may represent later developments) and does not include elements of the procession we would expect. Where is the ship on wheels that carried the new peplos on it like a gorgeous sail? Where are the armed hoplites? Why, instead, are there anachronistic chariots?

The depiction of ordinary citizens outside of a mythological or quasi-legendary-historical program on a temple frieze would be highly unusual, if not unique, in antiquity.⁵ (Might it even be arguably sacrilegious? Phidias, for instance, the sculptor who oversaw the temple’s decoration, was accused of impiety, and imprisoned, for supposedly including portraits of Pericles and himself on the shield of the massive chryselephantine statue of Athena.) This received view of the frieze has been challenged by Joan Breton Connelly, who suggests in her brilliant and heterodox The Parthenon Enigma that it is, instead, like essentially all other temple friezes, mythological in nature, depicting the sacrifice by the legendary king Erechtheus of one of his three daughters. Another view, put forth by Chrysoula Kardara, holds that the frieze represents the first Panathenaic festival, safely set in the semi-mythological past.

It is worth noting that these Marbles taken from the Parthenon were fragmentary, not so much because of the “rude / Wasting of old time,” but the violent intervention of man. The Parthenon had stood virtually intact from its completion in 432 B.C.—aside from the destruction of the original roof of Parian marble (prized for its pure whiteness and semi-translucence) in a fire in the third or fourth century A.D., perhaps when the Temple was attacked by the Germanic Heruli tribe, or by Visigoths (or even angry local Christians), and the removal and destruction of some sculptures, particularly from the eastern pediment, when it was converted into a Byzantine church around A.D. 600—for over two thousand years.

That changed in a flash on the night of September 26 or the wee hours of the 27th in 1687, when a Venetian general, Francesco Morosini (c. 1619–1694), at war with the Ottoman Turks, fired on the Temple with his cannons from the Philopappos Hill opposite.⁶ (Morosini, a flamboyant character, was always draped in red from head to toe and never went into battle without his beloved cat, Nini.) Morosini’s Swedish artillery commander, Count Koenigsmark, scored a direct hit, and as the Turks on the citadel were using the building as a powder magazine, it exploded, blowing out the center of the building, killing 300 people, many being women and children who had been sheltering there, and bringing down an avalanche of tons of marble columns and entablature. Adding insult to injury, Morosini then attempted to wrench statues from the damaged monument, including the horses of Athena and Poseidon, to bring them back as spoils to Venice, as Doge Enrico Dandalo had done in the Fourth Crusade with the bronze horses of Constantinople; when the tackle slipped, the stone steeds smashed to the ground.

A building that had stood for over two millennia, successively functioning as pagan temple, a Byzantine and then a Latin church, and a splendid mosque, was now reduced to a picturesque ruin.

1. The northern, western, and eastern metopes were already badly damaged, probably by early Christians—the southern metopes were best preserved, perhaps because it was harder to get to them on the steep side of the rock. Elgin thus takes nearly half of the well- preserved metopes.

2. So large it had to be sawn in two to get it through the gates of the citadel. It now resides in a corner of the British Museum.

3. On the advice of the French ambassador Guillaume Brune, who had got wind of the plan, which would have involved dismantling the western porch, the best-preserved part of the building. William St. Clair, Who Saved the Parthenon?: A New History of the Acropolis Before, During and After the Greek Revolution (Cambridge, 2022).

4. Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. by W. H. S. Jones (London, 1918), Vol. 1, pp. 17–29.

5. Although, for another point of view, see recent work by Clemente Marconi.

6. There is another theory, though, that the temple was destroyed by a mortar shell, fired not from Philoppapos Hill but closer to the temple, deliberately aimed to come down through the thin roof, rather than the thick walls—a piece of the shell thought to be from this event is displayed at Eton college: https://aristotleguide.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/blowing-up-the-parthenon/.

As Poetical in Piccadilly

Haydon had wanted the government to acquire the Marbles and had hoped they would benefit British artists and the British public at large, forming the basis of a new school of art; Keats likely would have been of that view. But Keats would have been well aware that many saw their removal from the Parthenon as despoliation and a crime; this had played into the debates of the previous year, but also was a view vehemently expressed by Lord Byron in the second canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a wildly popular bestseller that Keats was certain to have digested. The first two Cantos came out in 1812 and went through ten editions in the next three years. Byron became a celebrity overnight: “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”¹

One of the things Byron could not forgive Elgin for was being Scottish (Byron had Scottish connections) and, like Byron, a lord. Here Byron dismisses him as a “Pict”:

XII

But most the modern Pict’s ignoble boast,

To rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared:

Cold as the crags upon his native coast,

His mind as barren and his heart as hard,

Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared,

Aught to displace Athena’s poor remains:

Her sons, too weak the sacred shrine to guard,

Yet felt some portion of their mother’s pains,

And never knew, till then, the weight of Despot’s chains.

XIII

What! shall it e’er be said by British tongue,

Albion was happy in Athena’s tears?

Though in thy name the slaves her bosom wrung,

Tell not the deed to blushing Europe’s ears;

The ocean queen, the free Britannia, bears

The last poor plunder from a bleeding land:

Yes, she, whose gen’rous aid her name endears,

Tore down those remnants with a harpy’s hand,

Which envious Eld forbore, and tyrants left to stand.

XV

Cold is the heart, fair Greece! that looks on thee,

Nor feels as lovers o’er the dust they loved;

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see

Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed

By British hands, which it had best behoved

To guard those relics ne’er to be restored.

Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,

And once again thy hapless bosom gored,

And snatch’d thy shrinking Gods to northern climes abhorr’d!

Byron, who left England in 1816, never to return, would not live to see the Marbles in their British Museum setting; he was not, for that matter, much interested in antiquities the way many of his contemporaries were. (In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, he dismisses the Marbles as “Phidian freaks”; elsewhere he remarks, pointedly, that he is “not a collector.”) But he does seem to have seen the collection in London, in the cold damp shed where Haydon first encountered them, at Elgin’s house at the corner of Park Lane and Piccadilly.

Having acquired the Marbles at great personal expense—or at any rate, at the expense of his now ex-wife’s considerable fortune—and although he listed them as of “no value” to hustle them through customs—Elgin now needed to demonstrate their aesthetic and financial worth to sell them at a good price to the government and extricate himself from debt.

Elgin hit upon linking the “unloved Parthenon statues to the wildly popular sport of boxing” and gained a little income by charging for admission.² In 1808, one scheme involved having the English national champion, the six-foot-two prize-fighter Bob Gregson, pose naked for two hours in attitudes similar to the sculptures’, so people could compare physiques. The implication was that a fit British body in fighting form was the natural modern expression of idealized Greek masculine beauty.

Consider for a moment the scene: men (and possibly women?) of society being able to admire—or ogle—a “ripped” and naked body at close quarters in a dim shed against a convenient backdrop of respectable cultural significance. Imagine, say, Jane Austen’s Captain Wentworth, still disappointed in “the year eight,” happening upon this spectacle, alongside Regency bucks like Rawdon Crawley. It’s a scene worthy of Bridgerton. Celebrities, including the renowned Shakespearean actress Mrs. Siddons, flocked to the Marbles in the shed; the actress, famously, was supposed to have been moved to tears in their presence.

Elgin followed up the success of this with other popular “happenings,” including actual boxing matches in the makeshift museum between some of the most famous boxers of the day. One show in July 1808 boasted three pairs of celebrity fighters, including John Gully, a popular prizefighter; John Jackson, who was not only the prizefighting champion of Britain, but Byron’s personal trainer; Jem Belcher, a bare-knuckle fighter who had been Champion of All England; and Dutch Sam, the “Man with the Iron Hand,” whose physique was considered especially symmetrical and Grecian.

Byron no doubt witnessed at least one of these events—Byron numbered many pugilists among his friends, not only his trainer, but the heavyweight boxer Tom Cribb, who also participated in one of these bouts. He immortalizes the titillating sex-saturated atmosphere—part art opening, part underground rave, part nightclub—in his verse diatribe against Lord Elgin’s removal of the sculptures, The Curse of Minerva:

Be all the bruisers cull’d from all St. Giles’,

That art and nature may compare their styles;

While brawny brutes in stupid wonder stare,

And marvel at his lordship’s “stone shop” there.

Round the throng’d gate shall sauntering coxcombs creep,

To lounge and lucubrate, to prate and peep;

While many a languid maid, with longing sigh,

On giant statues casts the curious eye;

The room with transient glance appears to skim

Yet marks the mighty back and length of limb;

Mourns o’er the difference of now and then;

Exclaims, “These Greeks indeed were proper men!”

Draws slight comparisons of these with those,

And envies Laïs all her Attic beaux.

When shall a modern maid have swains like these!

Alas! Sir Harry is no Hercules!

And last of all, amidst the gaping crew,

Some calm spectator, as he takes his view,

In silent indignation mix’d with grief,

Admires the plunder, but abhors the thief.

Byron’s own notes to the poem explain the boxer’s marveling at the “stone shop” thus: “Poor [Tom] Cribb was sadly puzzled when the marbles were first exhibited at Elgin House; he asked if it was not ‘a stone shop?’—He was right; it is a shop.”

I think also that there can be little doubt that the “calm spectator” at the end of the satirical scene, where it is the audience rather than the Marbles that is so closely observed, is Byron himself, astounded into melancholy speechlessness, admiring the “plunder” and abhorring the “thief.”

The Curse of Minerva, perhaps rightly, is referred to as a “libellous poem,” not so much because Byron excoriates Elgin, but because not only does Byron bring up Elgin’s deteriorating nose, rumored to be from syphilis (“When Venus half avenged Minerva’s shame”)—if Byron’s Elgin resembles a villain from fiction, it might be Voldemort—but he also promulgates gossip about Lady Elgin’s adultery from the very public Elgin divorce of 1808, even suggesting that at least one of their five children was illegitimate:

Be all the sons as senseless as the sire:

If one with wit the parent brood disgrace,

Believe him bastard of a brighter race

Byron perhaps knew this to be a bridge too far, and, at the intercession of a friend of Elgin’s, did not officially publish the poem.

Yet the first fifty-odd lines of the poem contain one of the most beautiful descriptions in literature of the panoramic view at sunset from the rock of the Acropolis, with the accuracy of an eyewitness: the sweep from Mount Hymettus to the Saronic Gulf, and including details such as a minaret (“Her [the moon’s] emblem sparkles o’er the minaret”); one had projected from the Temple itself in Morosini’s time. In Byron’s time, the Parthenon’s ruins contained a functioning mosque, as it had also been, earlier, an Orthodox and then a Roman Catholic church, complete with bell tower, dedicated to Our Lady of Athens—the Virgin of Athens—a title that the ancients would have found indistinguishable from Athena’s own. The Parthenon’s minaret of course is long gone, but one of the secrets of the building is that the spiral staircase that went up to it still exists, as far as the architrave, climbing up to a ghostly muezzin in the sky. The part of the minaret that protruded from the architrave was demolished in 1832 under the new Ephorate (Superintendency) of Antiquities after Greece had won its independence.

This description of the Acropolis view, the best part of a poem that is mostly political harangue, Byron thought well enough of to repurpose wholesale for the beginning of the third Canto of his poem The Corsair. But The Curse of Minerva Byron circulated only privately in an edition of eight, though it was more widely pirated and distributed.³

It appears that Byron was inspired to write The Curse of Minerva in part after reading a manuscript of John Galt’s mock-epic the Atheniad. Galt (1779–1839), a Scottish novelist and entrepreneur as well as one of Byron’s first biographers, became friends with Byron and John Cam Hobhouse (1786–1869) on their travels; they were all in Athens together. Galt writes in his autobiography, “the rape of the temples by Lord Elgin was at that time the theme of every English tongue that came to Athens.” His Atheniad ingeniously depicts the sinking of Elgin’s brig, the Mentor, as both a punishment to Elgin and an opportunity to reanimate the Neptune/Poseidon of the pediment. It also has Minerva/Athena avenging herself on Elgin directly by taking away not his nose, but his wits: she leaves him writing nonsense. (The Memorandum that Elgin will publish in 1810 is perhaps already making the rounds?)

Still, as with Byron’s Curse of Minerva, the poem has its “nose” imagery, certainly there to tweak Elgin’s own ruined structure. As they read Elgin’s writings

At home the sages, struck with sad surprise,

Gaze on the page with nostrils, mouth, and eyes—

With mouth apert [sic] and nostrils wide and round,

The senseless slaves of wonder still are found.

The poem seems to give Byron both the germ of the idea for The Curse of Minerva and its poetic form.

Horace Smith, a poet in Leigh Hunt’s circle, as well as a stockbroker—he helped manage Percy Bysshe Shelley’s finances—got in on the action too, publishing with his brother James seven Spenserian stanzas on the subject, “The Parthenon. On the Dilapidation of the Temple of Minerva at Athens,” in their 1813 Horace in London. Like Galt’s and Byron’s poems, it was a curse, or a prophecy. Here, though, it is not Elgin’s nose (or his wits) that will suffer, but his sex life:

And Hymen shall thy nuptial hopes consume.—

Unless like fond Pygmalion thou canst wed

Statues thy hand could never give to bloom,

In wifeless wedlock shall thy life be led,

No marriage joys to bless thy solitary bed.

Still, as Freud says, “Comparisons between nose and penis are common.”

The Smith brothers predict that “Poets unborn shall sing thy impious fame.” Horace Smith’s own fame has sunk to nearly nothing: he is mostly remembered for competing in a sonnet contest with Shelley on the subject of a statue of Ozymandias; his effort, “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below,” did not win. (The contest may in fact have been partly inspired by the British Muse-um’s acquisition of the colossal head known as Memnon the Younger.) But the Smith brothers were correct about Elgin’s notoriety with poets yet unborn.

Byron’s rage at Elgin is, as Galt’s and Smith’s, over the damage to the Temple in situ; he has little interest in the Marbles themselves (although, in one of his notes, Byron is among the first to object to calling them the “Elgin collection”—“I suppose we shall hear of the ‘Abershaw’ and ‘Jack Sheppard’ collection,” he quips, invoking the names of legendary highwaymen). But there is something melancholy in thinking of Byron seeing the Marbles in the damp and dirty shed on Park Lane before he sets foot in Greece the next year and first sees the ruined and picked-over Parthenon. Having viewed the Marbles in this decidedly squalid, if not lurid, situation seems to have haunted him, and he writes to his publisher John Murray from Ravenna in 1821:

There are a thousand rocks and capes, far more picturesque than those of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves; what are they to a thousand scenes in the wilder parts of Greece, of Asia Minor, Switzerland, or even of Cintra in Portugal, or to many scenes of Italy, and the Sierras of Spain? But it is the “Art,” the Columns, the temples, the wrecked vessel, which give them their antique and their modern poetry, and not the spots themselves. Without them, the spots of earth would be unnoticed and unknown; buried, like Babylon and Nineveh, in indistinct confusion, without poetry, as without existence: but to whatever spot of earth these ruins were transported, if they were capable of transportation, like the obelisk, and the sphinx, and the Memnon’s head, there they would still exist in the perfection of their beauty and in the pride of their poetry. I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture; (who are as capable of sculpture as the Egyptians are of skating); but why did I do so? The ruins are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less so without them. Such is the poetry of art.

1. Thomas Moore, Esq, The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life (London, 1832–33), 17 volumes.

2. Fiona Rose-Greenland, “The Parthenon Marbles and British national identity,” opendemocracy.net, October 25, 2013.

3. See Appendix E for the full text of The Curse of the Minerva.

Imperishable Columns, Immortal Dinner

A few months before the meeting of the Select Committee, in January 1816, London had been celebrating a “National Day of Thanksgiving” for the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. No one seems to have been more excited about this than William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who wrote a slew of celebratory sonnets and odes, including his Thanksgiving Ode, January 18, 1816. Throughout these poems, the Napoleonic Wars are mapped onto the Persian invasions of Ancient Greece. Napoleon is likened to an Eastern despot on the ancient Persian model and Britain to freedom-loving Athens, defending liberty at Marathon. The Parthenon erected under Pericles and ornamented by Phidias, we might remember, was the resplendent replacement of a humbler earlier Parthenon under construction, burned to the ground by Xerxes.

This is most explicit in his Pindaric “Ode Composed in January, 1816,” where English painting and sculpture will match Athens’ famed painted stoa (among whose frescoes was one depicting the Battle of Marathon) and her crowning Temple, the Parthenon, in commemorating the defeat of an ambitious tyrant:

Victorious England! bid the silent Art

Reflect, in glowing hues that shall not fade,

Those high achievements; even as she arrayed

With second life the deed of Marathon

Upon Athenian walls;

So may she labour for thy civic halls:

And be the guardian spaces

Of consecrated places,

As nobly graced by Sculpture’s patient toil;

And let imperishable structures grow

Fixed in the depths of this courageous soil; . . .

The “imperishable structures” in the 1827 version of the poem were in the original the more explicitly military “imperishable trophies” but eventually became, by 1845, “imperishable Columns.” (Is it coincidence that around this time the façade of the British Museum, with its forty-four massive columns—inspired by the forty-six columns of the Parthenon—was being completed?) The Periclean Parthenon was a constant reminder to the Athenians of the Persian threat and ultimate defeat. Very soon, then, after Napoleon’s own defeat, Wordsworth begins the process whereby Britain models herself as the new Athens, the Parthenon and her sculptures therefore as much a reminder of Waterloo as Marathon or Salamis.

Byron and Shelley were both appalled by these bombastic poems, and mocked lines from them in their own verses. (Byron’s nickname for Wordsworth was “Turdsworth.”) But Haydon would have been delighted, of course, being in complete accord about the connection of ancient and contemporary art. On December 28, 1817, Haydon hosted one of the most famous literary dinner parties of the nineteenth century, in his painting room. The guests included Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, a doomed young explorer headed out to find the source of the Niger, named Joseph Ritchie (“and pray, who is the Gentleman we are going to lose?” Lamb apparently quipped, when told Ritchie was going to penetrate the African interior), and Haydon’s young friend, John Keats. Lamb, Wordsworth, and Keats all had “cameos” in Haydon’s large-scale painting, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem—with its oddly prosaic and middle-aged Christ and dominated in the center by a dark, strangely proportioned donkey—which was in progress and on display. (The actress Mrs. Siddons, with whom Haydon was on friendly terms, would later declare that “The paleness of your Christ gives it a supernatural look.”)

Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846) Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 1814–20, oil on canvas. Mount St Mary’s Seminary, Cincinnati.

The evening of poetry, amateur phrenology, and drunken hilarity became known as the “Immortal Dinner.”

In-valuable

“You have lost your labour, my Lord Elgin; your Marbles are overrated; they are not Greek, they are Roman of the time of Hadrian.”

This was the discouraging comment by the antiquarian and connoisseur Richard Payne Knight with which Elgin was accosted almost immediately upon his arrival in England after he had been released from imprisonment by Napoleon in France.

This would have been bad news to Elgin, who was already “not less than £90,000”¹ in debt (arguably over half a billion pounds in today’s terms²), and was desperate to sell his collection to the British government.

Among other obstacles to the sale, Byron’s accusations—and the accusations of other British travelers in their published writings—had to be addressed. The Memorandum set the tone for the conversation: among other things, it offered an exculpatory protestation of selfless motive. The prospect of Britain’s purchasing the Marbles had come up in 1815 but was mooted while Parliament dealt with the more pressing matter of Waterloo; it came up again in 1816. A Select Committee—the Committee Haydon was furious not to be invited to testify before—was formed to address four concerns and claims:

The First . . . relates to the Authority by which this Collection was acquired:

The Second to the circumstances under which that Authority was granted:

The Third to the Merit of the Marbles . . .

The Fourth to their Value as objects of sale . . .

The second two concerns are no longer at issue, but the first two, far from being “old hat,” continue to haunt all discussions.

The merit and the value—whether to buy them—and if so, for how much, putting a price on the “poetry of art”—were the subject of questions to many members of the Royal Academy of Arts. For Parliamentary Committee minutes, these make for surprising reading, like Platonic dialogues on the nature of art, value, and authenticity.

The Marbles were, from the beginning, truly invaluable—no one knew what kind of price to put on them, aside from Elgin’s expenses, which included bribes paid, interest, and other costs in obtaining them, such as, for instance, the £5,000 for sea salvage after the shipwreck of the Mentor.

For one thing, they were far from perfect, they were “maimed,” “mutilated,” “broken”—as Byron puts it, “Misshapen monuments and maim’d antiques” and “mutilated blocks of art.” (“Restoration” of damaged sculpture was the standard of the day. Elgin had originally looked into having them restored by the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova; thankfully, he refused to lay a finger on them, protesting it would be “sacrilege in him or any man to presume to touch them with a chisel.” His protégé, the English sculptor John Flaxman, also declined the job.) It was pointed out in the proceedings of the Committee that, going by how much it had cost Elgin to get some misdirected French-extracted parts of the frieze out of customs, their value would be “no more than twenty-four or twenty-five pounds a piece.”

The questions put to the Artists and “Connoisseurs” reveal that the Marbles’ artistic value was also unclear: were they of the “first rank” of ancient Art, or not? Were they as good specimens in their way as the Vatican’s (second-century Roman copy) Apollo Belvedere or the elaborate (and restored) Laocoön? Were they of high antiquity (did they have “age value” as we might say now) or were some from the Roman era? Were they the work of Phidias, both executed and designed by him, or merely from an anonymous workshop? What had been paid for similar collections?

Apollo Belvedere. Marble, circa 130–140 B.C., modeled after Greek bronze original, 330–320 B.C., attributed to Leochares. Museo Pio Clementino, Cortile Ottagono. By Livioandronico2013 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36412498.

For the most part, the artists answered that they were of the first rank, better than the Apollo Belvedere and of high antiquity, but not everyone thought so.

Payne Knight, leading member of the Society of Dilettanti, arbiter of the “picturesque,” and expert on Priapic cults (as well as being Haydon’s nemesis), who had confronted Elgin on his arrival back in England, when queried by the Committee, replied that he thought they were a mixed bag, of second rank, certainly not Phidias’s, and that some were potentially Roman. He valued them at a mere £25,000. “The value I have stated,” he added, “has been entirely upon that consideration of a school of art; they would not sell as furniture; they would produce nothing at all.” Perhaps Knight was aware that Elgin had originally intended them to furnish his newly-expanded and renovated house in Fife, Broomhall.

Few of the other art experts agreed with him, however. The Marbles were established as “first rank” and of the “highest antiquity,” vindicating Haydon’s assessment, and his vitriol.

1. “Letter from Elgin to Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, 31 July 1811.”

2. See Appendix A for more on this subject.

Another Painter

For all that Haydon thought the Marbles would lead to a new school of art and improve the arts of Britain, they do not seem to have done much to improve his own painting. If Keats would achieve in his short life artistic immortality, an irrefutable position high on the slopes of Parnassus, Haydon would fail spectacularly.

At the age of sixty, in a state of despair and debt, Haydon attempted to take his own life. First botching a gunshot to the head, which missed the brain (ironic for a student of anatomy), he finally succeeded by slitting his own throat and spattering the unfinished canvas of one of his unpopular historical paintings with his own blood in the process. Charles Dickens said of him, “he most unquestionably was a very bad painter” and, of his Nero painting, that it was “quite marvellous in its badness.” When he exhibited his historical painting, The Banishment of Aristides in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, only 133 people visited his exhibit during Easter Week, compared to 12,000 people who paid to view “General Tom Thumb,” the three-foot-four-inch-tall American circus performer, during the same period at the same venue. Haydon is perhaps better known today for his engaging Autobiography; his true genius lay in writing.

A painter even more intimately bound up with the Marbles, the Italian Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1755–1821), was almost diametrically opposite in his view of paintings—his impulses were anti-Romantic; rather than painting from the imagination (as Haydon tended to do with his historical and mythological paintings), he believed one should “faithfully imitate nature.” Byron reckoned him “an Italian painter of the first eminence.” A court painter for the king of the Two Sicilies, he specialized in landscapes and architectural studies—portraying, for instance, an erupting Vesuvius, but as a contemporary observation, not as, say, a backdrop for a history painting of the destruction of Pompeii. He might have continued making these exquisite paintings, but in 1799 he became the head of a set of artists Lord Elgin hired to make drawings and molds of ancient art and architecture in Greece. (Elgin’s first choice had been the young J. M. W. Turner, but, in a decision that might have radically changed the course of events, not to mention careers, Elgin decided Turner’s asking salary, £700 per annum, was too high.)

Giovanni Battista Lusieri (ca. 1755–1821), The Southeast Corner of the Parthenon, Athens, 1803. Watercolor. Mary Hamilton Campbell, Lady Ruthven Bequest 1885. Photo credit: © National Galleries of Scotland/Art Resource, NY.

In the end, Lusieri would live in Athens the last twenty years of his life and was the agent who oversaw the physical removal of the sculptures from the Parthenon, as well as excavating and collecting antiquities from all over Attica. He was the cicerone every English traveler seems to have engaged for the Acropolis; he pops up in John Galt’s Atheniad as “Dontitos”:

Dontitos, chieftain of the cords and crew,

That from their frames the sacred sculptures drew.

Had he not spent two decades in Elgin’s employ, he might be remembered now not as the despoiler of the Parthenon, but as a minor master—his surviving paintings have a precision and delicacy and clarity of observation, a truth and beauty, that Haydon was not able to approach. One of his most exquisite paintings, now held by the National Galleries of Scotland, is the study of archaeological finds from a tomb supposed at the time to be Aspasia’s. It consists of a perfect bronze vessel nestled inside a broken marble vase: a Grecian urn.

“Characteristics . . . of an Intellectual European”

From the moment Haydon first glimpsed the Marbles in 1808, he was struck by the artists’ knowledge of anatomy, which seemed a revelation. Not everyone thought ancient Greek artists worked out of this knowledge: Anthony Carlisle, Anatomy Professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, denied it. This enraged Haydon. How could he then “teach a Science to Students that they may excel in the Art, at the same time inferring it’s of no use by telling them the Greeks, the greatest Artists, did excel without it!” But it wasn’t enough that the anatomy of the Marbles was correct, Haydon went further: the arch of the foot, the placement of the ankle, the set of the pelvis, the “low, full, and vigorous” calves of the legs; the anatomical proportions of the idealized Greek figure exhibited “characteristics . . . of an intellectual European.”

Almost from the get-go, the Marbles were pressed into the service of race theory. Their whiteness—both the literal whiteness of the Marbles (which had in ancient times been painted in bold colors) and their perceived racial “whiteness”—was at issue. In the summer of 1811, around the same time Elgin had to let go of his house at Park Lane and cart the Marbles to an even more ad hoc situation on the grounds of Burlington House, the arrival of a ship at Liverpool caused something of a commotion; per the Times of London, “the brig Traveller, lately arrived at Liverpool from Sierra Leone . . . [is] perhaps the first vessel that ever reached Europe, entirely owned and navigated by Negroes.”

The captain, Paul Cuffee, a freeborn biracial American (his mother was Wampanoag and his father Ashanti) with a crew of formerly enslaved African Americans, arrived from Sierra Leone, where he was investigating the founding of a colony of black Americans who desired to emigrate to Africa. He had come to Liverpool, in the wake of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, to meet with the directors of the African Institution. Leigh Hunt, in the pages of his Examiner, hailed this “feat” as evidence that the “inferior animal character” of the black race was a result of the condition of slavery, and that with abolition, someday Captain Paul Cuffee (a successful merchant who had founded the first interracial school in the United States) could be welcomed as “one of the forerunners of an equal race of beings.” Six weeks of debate ensued in the pages of the Examiner; among the interlocutors were Leigh Hunt and “An English Student,” who happened to be none other than Keats’s friend, the painter Benjamin Haydon.

Haydon took a hard line. Compared to the “intellectual European” proportions of the Marbles, in particular the arched foot, “In examining negroes, I soon perceived them to sink from these characteristics . . . and approach those of the brute.” The brute in question was a dead lioness Haydon had got his hands on, whose (four) “feet” were decidedly flat; he had been making studies and plaster casts of an African American sailor known to us only as Wilson. (It turns out making a plaster cast of a live human being is rather a different operation from making plaster molds of ancient statuary; as the plaster hardened and constricted around his chest, Wilson could no longer breathe, and he lost consciousness. Luckily, Haydon smashed the mold and extracted him before the unfortunate man died.)

The African’s foot fell, according to Haydon, somewhere on the spectrum from lion and monkey to the European perfection of the Marbles. Haydon concluded the exchange with the opinion that “I deny the negro that power of conquering his brutality . . . because I suspect . . . he is without the intellectual power.” (He would come to issue a retraction, but only thirty years later.)

Haydon was only a dabbler in race theory. Robert Knox (1791–1862), the infamous Scottish Anatomist—he was the model for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—who lectured extensively about his theory of race (as laid out in his 1850 The Races of Men, subtitled, as it happens, “A Fragment”), was also obsessed with the Marbles, asserting “The superiority of the Elgin marbles to all others,” and going into extensive detail about their anatomic knowledge: “The left deltoid is sculptured so as beautifully to display the varying position of the head of the humerus,” etc.

Knox held some curious beliefs about the ancient Greeks; among them was that they had been a mix of native Pelasgic peoples improved by invasions of Saxons and Scandinavians. The people who now inhabited Greece had reverted to the “Asiatic type.” Among the modern Greeks, “The grand classic face has all but disappeared, and in its place comes out a people with a rounded profile; the nose large and running into the cheeks, like the Jew; the chin receding; the eyebrows arched. Anti-classic in all things, how Greece has fallen . . .” Where could one find the Classic type of face and physique one saw in the Marbles and other exempla of Greek art? Why, in England! “For the streets of London abound with persons having this identical facial angle; and it is in England and in other countries inhabited by the Saxon or Scandinavian race that women resembling the Niobe, and men the Hercules and Mars, are chiefly to be found.”¹

One problem with studying anatomy in Britain in the early 1800s was that bodies to dissect legally were in short supply. Until the Anatomy Act of 1832, cadavers could only be lawfully acquired in the form of executed convicts, and as executions had sharply declined, there was a dearth of raw material. To supply this shortfall, “resurrection men” snatched corpses from recent graves, a business so profitable that certain resurrection men—the infamous William Burke and William Hare—decided to skip the “middleman” and hasten the inevitable for people living on the fringes of society. Knox was their client, as immortalized in the nursery rhyme:

Up the close and down the stair,

In the house with Burke and Hare,

Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,

Knox the man who buys the beef.

Hare and Burke’s killing spree inevitably drew scrutiny when, in 1828, they murdered a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman (Mary Paterson) and deposited her body, almost still warm, with Robert Knox, who, far from being concerned and suspicious, was so pleased with the specimen he proceeded to preserve her in whisky. Artists flocked to draw her and medical students to study her. Her beautiful proportions, no doubt in combination with her deathly whiteness, predictably led to comparisons with the Marbles: “A model worthy of Phidias.”²

1. Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (Lebanon, 2015).

2. Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox, the Anatomist (London, 1870).

“The More Beautiful the Whiter It Is”

The insistence on the whiteness and purity of the Marbles—and indeed their “chasteness”—attended them from their debut into London society. Felicia Hemans (1793–1835), the leading female English poet of her day, is remembered now mostly for her schoolroom recitation chestnut, “Casabianca,” which begins “The boy stood on the burning deck” (itself now perhaps remembered because of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Casabianca,” which begins, “Love’s the boy stood on the burning deck”), set during the pivotal 1798 Battle of the Nile, when Horatio Nelson defeated the French fleet. In 1817, she published her long poem Modern Greece (originally titled Modern Greece and the Elgin Marbles) in 101 ten-line stanzas. The poem describes picturesque Greek settings and relates legends of modern Greece (such as the Dance of Zalongo, a mass suicide of women and children to avoid Ottoman enslavement), but its conclusion is that Elgin has rescued the Marbles, and it rehearses Haydon’s argument (and the one put forth by Elgin and the Committee) that bringing them to London will foster a new flowering of English artistic genius:

And who can tell how pure, how bright a flame,

Caught from these models, may illume the west?

What British Angelo may rise to fame,

On the free isle what beams of art may rest?

Deem not, O England! that by climes confined,

Genius and taste diffuse a partial ray;

Deem not th’ eternal energies of mind

Sway’d by that sun whose doom is but decay!

Shall thought be foster’d but by skies serene?

No! thou hast power to be what Athens e’er hath been.

Their flame is “pure” and “bright.” “Pure” and “chaste” occur many times in the poem, twice in tandem: “The pure intelligence, the chaste repose,” “Each pure chaste outline exquisitely flows.”

The whole poem is perhaps an answer to Byron’s anti-Elgin stanzas in Childe Harold, her choice of the patriotic Prior stanza (a Spenserian stanza with an extra line), a way to differentiate herself from Byron’s stanza choice. Byron, who had approved of some of her earlier poetry, was not impressed. In September of 1817, he writes to his publisher, John Murray: “Modern Greece—good for nothing; written by some one who has never been there, and not being able to manage the Spenser stanza, has invented a thing of its own . . . Besides, why ‘modern’? You may say modern ‘Greeks,’ but surely ‘Greece’ itself is rather more ancient than ever it was.”

(Ironically, at least to us, from our distant vantage point, Hemans had published, just the year before Modern Greece, in 1816, a longish poem hailing the “Restoration of Art to Italy,” celebrating the 2nd Treaty of Paris in 1815, post Waterloo, in which France was required to return art to Italy—and other nations—that had been looted by Napoleon in his conquests, much of which was in the Louvre. It marked the first case for art restitution in international law: previously, the spoils in military conquest were considered fair game.)

One of the aspects that made the Marbles and other Greek statues “chaste” was not just their purity of line, but the vacant eyes and white surface that lacked the flesh tones of human skin, which would have been troublingly erotic. The fact that the ancient Greeks had indeed painted their statues, including the Marbles, was beginning to dawn on the English—it is mentioned even in the Report of the Select Committee—but was met with cognitive resistance. As John Nicholas Fazakerley, a member of the Committee, observed regarding the marbles taken from the Aphaia Temple site on the Greek island of Aegina by Charles Robert Cockerell and Baron Otto Magnus von Stackelberg in 1811 and sold to Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (for roughly 8,000 pounds):

And there was one particularity in them which has seldom been remarked in other monuments of antiquity, which was, that it goes to corroborate an idea that has been entertained, that the Ancients painted their statues, and employed gilding on parts of the face; in the eyes of some of them there are remains of painting and gilding, which much added to their value as matters of curiosity.

That the Parthenon Marbles had been just as garish beggared belief. Even by 1868, when their original coloring was considered fact rather than conjecture, overtly insisting on it could still stir up controversy. When the popular Dutchborn artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) displayed his painting, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends, which portrays Phidias giving a sort of private art opening to Pericles and Aspasia of the then-new frieze, richly colored, including dark Mediterranean skin tones, it was criticized for its “bad archaeology” and “fairground colours.”

Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) displayed his painting, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends. 1868, Oil on panel. Birmingham Museums Trust. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Critics were still evidently under the sway of the pioneering Hellenist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who theorized that the color white was superior for sculpture. As he wrote in his seminal 1764 The History of Art of Antiquity:

As white is the colour which reflects the greatest number of rays of light, and consequently is the most easily perceived, a beautiful body will, accordingly, be the more beautiful the whiter it is.

PART II

“It Gives the Dirt a Polish”

The insistence on the Marbles’ whiteness and purity in the end is what did them the most damage since their wresting from the Temple itself. Cleaning them was of concern almost from their first arrival in England.

For one thing, there was the London air. The pristine sea-rinsed and mountain-cleansed air of Athens, a small preindustrial town in 1801 of about 10,000 souls, would have been scarcely any more polluted than in Pericles’ time (Athens’ air quality would not become noticeably polluted until the 1950s); whereas industrial, coal-fueled London, nicknamed “The Old Smoke,” had already been plagued with air pollution for centuries. As early as 1661, the diarist and translator John Evelyn published a pamphlet on the problem of London’s coal smoke entitled Fumifugium.

One can imagine it was that much worse by 1804, when the Marbles began to arrive. In 1819, Shelley could write “Hell is a city much like London— / A populous and a smoky city.” Byron describes his Spanish hero Don Juan—like the Marbles, a traveler from sunnier climes—laying eyes on London for the first time in Canto X (published 1823) of the eponymous poem:

A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping,

Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye

Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping

In sight, then lost amidst the forestry

Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping

On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy;

A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown

On a fool’s head—and there is London Town.

Smoke and fog were the Victorian novelist’s métier, as perhaps best exemplified by Dickens’ opening of Bleak House, which wallows for several paragraphs in the dirtiness of London: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”

The porous Marbles were subject to damp and cold in the sheds as well as London’s soot, smoke, and smog. Even when they had been removed (after the government’s purchase of them) to the British Museum’s Temporary Elgin Room, the gas-burning stoves used to warm the ad-hoc wooden gallery left a greasy coating. When the sculptures were finally put behind glass, the hermetically sealed cases became petri dishes for a rare fungus.

As early as 1849, only thirty-two years after the Marbles had been installed in the British Museum, there was a parliamentary inquiry on air pollution and the condition of the Marbles. Edward Hawkins, the Keeper of Antiquities, gave evidence about the deteriorating “appearance” of the Marbles. Asked whether the deterioration was “remediable,” he responded:

No, I do not see how it is remediable in the London atmosphere. The atmosphere of London is loaded with smoke from coal, which has a certain quantity of oil mixed with it; it clings to the objects, and it is almost impossible to keep it off; the very process of cleansing them almost makes matters worse, because it gives the dirt a polish.

In 1858 a series of irate letters appearing in the Times complained about the cleaning of the Marbles (described as “vandalism”), which were now to be washed continually (rather than periodically) with fuller’s earth (“clay water”).

By 1890–1891, a controversy concerning the Marbles and London’s air pollution reached the public more generally, and not just within England, but as far afield as America and Greece itself. The philosopher and historian Frederic Harrison published an editorial in the Nineteenth Century titled, “Give Back the Elgin Marbles.” He addresses the usual reasons given for holding on to them:

Every one of these assertions is a sophism, and the precise contrary is in every case true. They would be much more safe from the hand of man on the Acropolis than they possibly could be in London; and whilst the climate and soot of Bloomsbury are slowly affecting their crumbling surface, the pure air of the Acropolis would preserve them longer by centuries. Athens is now a far more central archaeological school than London [the British School at Athens had been founded in 1886]; and the art students of the world would gain immensely if the ornaments of the Parthenon could be seen again together and beneath the shadow of the Parthenon itself. The Parthenon Marbles are to the Greek nation a thousand times more dear and more important than they ever can be to the English nation, which simply bought them. And what are the seventy-four years that these dismembered fragments have been in Bloomsbury when compared with the 2,240 years wherein they stood on the Acropolis?

He goes on, in a passage that rings as true now as then:

Of course the man in Pall Mall or in the club armchair has his sneer ready—“Are you going to send all statues back to the spot where they were found?” That is all nonsense. The Elgin Marbles stand upon a footing entirely different from all other statues. They are not statues: they are architectural parts of a unique building, the most famous in the world; a building still standing, though in a ruined state, which is the national symbol and palladium of a gallant people, and which is a place of pilgrimage to civilised mankind.

(We might reasonably assume the man in Pall Mall and the club armchair is a member of the private Athenaeum Club, founded in 1824 by John Wilson Croker, who had insisted, at great and controversial expense, on installing an exact replica of the frieze running around the outside, white figures picked out by a backdrop of blue as if made for Phidias by Wedgwood.)

Perhaps Harrison’s piece would have been the end of the matter, but it triggered a sarcastic response (written with the assistance of British Museum authorities) from the editor James Knowles titled, “The Joke About the Elgin Marbles,” which culminates:

The collection includes, by common consent, the highest works of art ever produced by man. Its mere cash value is at present reckoned in millions, and the safe custody of it is a trust for which England is responsible to all future generations. Mr. Harrison satirically exhorts the English public to hand over this possession, gratuitously and unasked, to the mixed little population which now lives upon the ruins of ancient Greece . . . [Knowles embarks on a slippery slope argument—that the logic requires they also return enemy standards taken in war.] But hold! ’tis not alone the flags of conquered nations we have rent and torn and sliced away from their old and rightful owners. It is the actual countries themselves! What cannot the platform Pharisee say of Gibraltar, Malta, India, Burmah, Hong Kong, the Cape, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, IRELAND? . . . This is the logic of “giving back the Elgin Marbles.”

It was this last gambit perhaps, with IRELAND in all caps, that stirred the poet and British-diplomat-cum-Irish-nationalist Roger Casement, then traveling in the Congo, to fire off a sonnet in response. (Casement’s visit to the Congo, where he became friends with Joseph Conrad and witnessed unspeakable atrocities committed against the indigenous population by colonizers, radicalized him as a humanitarian and early investigator into human rights abuses.) The sonnet’s focus is the situation of the Marbles, in particular regarding their environment. The natural iambic pulse of Harrison’s title opens the sonnet:

Give back the Elgin marbles; let them lie

Unsullied, pure beneath an Attic sky.

The smoky fingers of our northern clime

More ruin work than all the ancient time.

And concludes by picturing them among the tinkling sound of goat bells and bees, pastoral melodies that would not have been unheard in the Athens environs even in the 1890s:

Ah! let them hear again the sounds that float

Around Athene’s shrine on morning’s breeze,—

The lowing ox, the bell of climbing goat

And drowsy drone of far Hymettus’ bees.¹

The lowing ox and the drowsing bees are also, by a sleight of poetic magic, the frieze brought back to life: that lowing ox, for instance, from block S XLIV that also made a cameo, as a heifer, in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; and some of the members of the procession of the northern frieze are bearing honeycomb. Mount Hymettus has always been famed for its honey (and bees). An infant Plato, set down on the slopes of Mount Hymettus while his parents sacrificed to the Muses, was found to have honey bees settled on his lips, a mark of his future eloquence.

Block XLIV (fig. 132-136) from the South frieze of the Parthenon, ca. 447–433 BC. British Museum, CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons. © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons.

Casement would be hanged for treason in 1916 for his involvement in the Easter Rising—doubtless Mr. Knowles would have approved or even rejoiced at this sentence—and lends his name to a refrain in a Yeats poem: “The ghost of Roger Casement / Is beating on the door.”

The months-long exchange that began in the Nineteenth Century, and spilled over into other publications, would perhaps have been all but forgotten, but “The Joke About the Elgin Marbles” stirred up vexation in the Greek-speaking world: particularly, in a letter writer (and largely unknown poet) by the name of C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933), who would be discovered for anglophones by E. M. Forster; Cavafy’s collected prose contains at least two letters on the subject, both scathing.

Regarding Knowles’s sneering article, Cavafy writes: “Aridity in style and prolixity of cheap wit render its perusal a heavy task even for those to whom the restitution of the Elgin Marbles is of direct interest,—I mean the true friends of Hellas and of the unity of Hellenic tradition.” He goes on calmly to address and poke holes in Knowles’s arguments one by one, including such preposterous suggestions as that the Greek government might sell them off piecemeal. He concludes that “it is not dignified in a great nation to reap profit from half-truths and half-rights; honesty is the best policy, and honesty in the case of the Elgin Marbles means restitution.”

With Cavafyian precision and astuteness, he singles out for attention Knowles’s phrase “the mixed little population which now lives upon the ruins of ancient Greece,” “which is treading on slippery ground as, although I know nothing of Mr. Knowles’ ability in historical criticism, it is doubtful whether he is able to prove a theory, in attempting to support which even the renowned Fallmerayer failed.”

Cavafy is alert to point to Fallmerayer’s theory as being behind Knowles’s (and Knox’s for that matter) assertion that the current Greeks can have little to no racial continuity with the architects and builders of the Parthenon, a theory that again and again is trotted out as reason for the British (the true inheritors of Periclean Athens) to retain them and to undermine Greek claims.

Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer is a divisive figure, a brilliant scholar and writer, and a founder of modern Byzantine studies, but whose racial ideas of the 1830s have continued to fuel racist attitudes towards the Greeks, especially among historians, archaeologists, and Classicists themselves, who are not always aware of the troubling history of the theory.

His Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters, which appeared in 1830, put forth that:

The race of the Hellenes has been wiped out in Europe. Physical beauty, intellectual brilliance, innate harmony and simplicity, art, competition, city, village, the splendour of column and temple—indeed, even the name has disappeared from the surface of the Greek continent. . . . Not the slightest drop of undiluted Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece.

This would provide Nazism’s white supremacy with some of its pseudo-scholarly basis, and during the Nazi occupation of Greece, allowed “classically educated officers . . . [to] excuse their atrocities against the Greeks as done to an inferior, not a noble, race.”²

Something strange happens, too, seeing these arguments translated and some words (such as “βλούμσβουρύ”) transliterated into Greek, a repositioning of the argument, a taking back of ground. Seeing Knowles’s phrase about the “mixed little population” translated into Greek, you realize what a Cavafyian phrase it is—Cavafy’s poems, such as “Returning from Greece,” are full of mixed populations living on the ruins of ancient Greece and Greek culture, but who at the same time are absolutely the heirs to that Hellenic civilization. Or consider “A Town in Osroene,” set in Southeastern Anatolia, and voiced in an inclusive first person plural, which concludes, in Evangelos Sachperoglou’s translation:

We are a mixture of races here: Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Medes.

Such is Rhemon, too. Last night, though, when

His sensuous face was illumined by the moon,

Our mind went to Plato’s Charmides.

The mixed-race youths nevertheless achieve the Platonic Greek ideal of beauty. The Charmides of this poem refers to the beautiful young man (with a lovely face and, seen naked, a perfect body) who, in his eponymous dialogue, is Socrates’ interlocutor. The dialogue is a meditation partly on age and beauty, if ostensibly on “self-restraint.”

When, in Plato’s dialogue, Charmides enters the wrestling school with his young entourage, we are told that “they all gazed at him as if he were a statue.” (The word for statue here is ἄγαλμα.) In Cavafy, it is the moon—and a brush with death—that marbleizes the chiseled features.

The displeasure in Athens and Greece stirred up by these debates of 1890 and 1891, perhaps brought to larger Greek attention by Cavafy’s letters, manifested itself in the Athens Council deciding to request the Marbles’ return; news of this request reached the London Standard and the New York Times.

A third option was proposed by the philosopher and historian Edwyn Bevan: England should keep the Marbles (maybe Athens would even volunteer the remaining Marbles in their possession to complete the set?) and Britain would return the lone Caryatid, as her share of the porch’s weight on the Erechtheion was still being held up by the pile of bricks the Elgins had left in her place. Everyone had to admit that the result was not cosmetic. The monument was “spoilt in the same way in which a row of teeth is spoilt by one discoloured tooth.”

Perhaps the male gaze has tended to look at the gap left by the missing Caryatid, variously replaced by Elgin’s heap, and later a terracotta replica, then, after German occupation, a “block of wood,”³ as unsightly. In contrast, Virginia Woolf on her first visit to Athens in 1906, when she was in her early twenties, herself a maiden, gives us empathy. Standing “where the great Statue used to stand,” Woolf gives us a glimpse of what the Caryatid herself would have seen:

She looked straight through the long doorway, made by the curved lines of the columns, & saw a long slice of Attic mountain & sky & plain, & a shining strip of the sea.

1. Many sources on the internet give “Hymettus’ breeze,” but this is clearly wrong—no poet, no matter how mediocre, will rhyme “breeze” with “breeze,” breezes do not drone, and Hymettus was famed for bees and honey.

2. Robert Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land (Ann Arbor, 1991).

3. Mr. Julian Snow, in the House of Commons, 24 October 1950; so described from a visit to Athens three years before, in a speech proposing the return of the Caryatid from the British Museum as a token of encouragement to Greece after its bloody civil war.

Mountain and Monument

Pentelic marble, of which the Parthenon and its ornaments are constructed, comes from Mount Pentelikon (Pendeli), one of the mountains that ring the city of Athens. The Parthenon is an autochthonous outgrowth of Attica’s geology. Today, the ancient quarries are still in use but, since 1976, may contribute marble only to the ongoing renovations on the Acropolis itself, which began in earnest in 1975, shortly after the fall of the military junta and the restoration of democracy to Greece.

Should you want to purchase fresh-cut Pentelic marble, you would have to do so from the commercial Dionysos quarry, on the far side of the mountain from the city. The website of the marble company Marmara Nikolaki describes the special qualities of Dionysos marble (“He is the King of the Marbles. In fact, it is the best marble in the world”):

Pentelic marbles contain schism, a property that facilitates the extraction of boulders and is particularly perceived during the mechanical treatment of the rock. They have thin sub-saccharide tissue and high consistency, normal fracture resistance and easily polish.

It is white in color, of great purity, without barking and scattered veins.

When the Pentelic marbles are exposed to the atmospheric agents, a golden superficial coating is created, which makes the statues made of this marble very impressive.

Pure white when it is first excavated, in the elements it mellows to a tawny leonine patina. The Parthenon at sunset can seem like molten gold; at other times it looks like brushstrokes of paint against the sky. Lit up at night, until recently, it had the golden glow of a harvest moon; a change to LED lighting in 2020 at first made the Temple appear colder and whiter.

The Parthenon seems somehow to be a live thing, almost breathing on the hill. Its marmoreal perfection is not a deadness, but a kind of potential energy. Part of that is its position, against the ever-changing sky; sometimes the massy clouds seem more substantial than it does. Under the moon, it gains in hugeness and solidity. But part of this is the design itself (by master architects Ictinus and Callicrates), the “entasis,” whereby in order to appear straight from a distance, the massive columns are all slightly curved; if their axes were extended upward from their platform, they would meet one and a half miles above the earth: The Parthenon, for all its near-golden ratio of proportions (the proportions of the Temple are all variations on 9:4), contains hardly any straight lines.

In 1906, Virginia Woolf writes: “The ravages are terrible, but in spite of them, the Parthenon is still radiant & young. Its columns spring up like fair round limbs, flushed with health.” She describes it under the changing light as “White & blue & tawny red,” as “Stalwart & red & significant,” as “ashy pale.”¹

In 1932, at roughly Mrs. Dalloway’s age, Woolf visited the Parthenon again. “My own ghost met me, the girl of 23.” After her own weathering by time, she is surprised to find the Parthenon “more compact & splendid & robust than I remembered. The yellow pillars . . . gathered, grouped, radiating there on the rock . . . crowds flying as if suppliants (really Greek schoolchildren). The Temple like a ship, so vibrant, taut, sailing, though still all these ages.”² As Joan Breton Connelly observes, the Parthenon was indeed more splendid than Woolf had remembered, having undergone extensive (albeit highly controversial) reconstruction between her two visits under the direction of Nikolaos Balanos from 1922 to 1933.

Connelly also points out that the Marbles that still stand on the Parthenon have continued to change over the millennia, not just due to the rude wasting of old time, but by a molecular rearrangement and harmonization of their structure. Manolis Korres, the longtime head of the half-century-old Parthenon restoration project, has discovered that:

after centuries of constant pressure exerted by the blocks upon one another, granules of marble have fused from one slab into the next, creating a solid mass of stone. Korres calls this erpismos, or “snaking,” within the crystalline structure of the marble, the arrangement of individual granules deformed into an undulating path.

The quarried Pentelic marble has again become a solid thing, monument metamorphosing back to mountain.

1. Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909, ed. by Mitchell A. Leaska (New York, 1990)

2. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie (New York, 1982), Vol. 4: 1931–1935.

Duveen’s Deep Clean

Were Byron alive in the 1930s, the name “Duveen” would have caught his satirical eye: it rhymes so conveniently with “clean.” The Marbles’ natural tawny patina was of no interest to Joseph Duveen (1869–1939), a successful if ethically dubious art dealer cum “philanthropist.” In 1929, Duveen proposed a new gallery for the Marbles to the British Museum—the eponymous Duveen Gallery—and donated a million pounds to that end. One of his stipulations was that the lavish and elegant new gallery would have the same precise dimensions as the Parthenon building. Once the gallery was completed, in 1938, the Marbles would be given a second London coming out, in a swanky opening that was to have been inaugurated by none other than King George VI.

But before the opening, Duveen was adamant about the whiteness of the marbles. Duveen specialized in selling old European masters, stripped, touched up, and re-varnished, to American millionaires. (At the suggestion of Duveen Brothers, a restorer even cut down the oval Thomas Gainsborough portrait of Lady Horatio Waldegrave into a more saleable rectangle.) Lord Crawford, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Museum, remarked of Duveen in his diary, “Duveen lectured and harangued us. . . . I suppose he has destroyed more old masters by overcleaning than anybody else in the world, and now he told us that all old marbles should be thoroughly cleaned—so thoroughly that he would dip them into acid.” Duveen wanted them “with the London grime removed and in their first purity. They will be luminous.”

The Marbles of course had not been purely white almost since they were quarried.

Duveen’s workmen were given free rein and little to no museum supervision to go about the task of whitening the Marbles and set about it with copper tools, “carborundum,” i.e., silicon carbide (“the hardest substance, next to diamonds, known at that time,”¹ 9.4 on Mohs scale, with diamond being a 10), and even copper chisels. Anyone who has cherished a cast iron skillet would stand aghast at how the marbles were “cleansed,” Duveen’s preferred term.

William St. Clair has unearthed many of the archives surrounding the cleaning, the subsequent scandal, and the cover-up. Some of the most moving items from this archive are “Pencilled Notes, in his Own Hand, of Macmillan’s Questioning of the Labourers, and of the Foreman Mason”: Lord Macmillan being the British Museum Trustee who chaired the secret investigation into the damage. These notes read like found Modernist poems or fragments of an ancient tragedy:

Sinclair/Used copper tools from June 1937

Holcombe

Daniels known to you for some months—not a good slab for Duveen to see not white enough recleaned

Sd. slab white

H. gave me some money for shifting big figures £1 among 7. 3/- H. 2/-

Supposed to be from Daniels only time 3 or 4 months H. “see if you could brighten it up” (before Daniels spoke to me)

Daniels praised my efforts

Sd. I was getting it whiter.

The “private and confidential” report of the British Museum’s Board of Enquiry in 1938 concluded that “The damage which has been caused [by the cleaning] is obvious and cannot be exaggerated.” The head of Selene’s horse (the subject of one of Haydon’s first sketches of the Marbles, and witness to a level of sharp detail no longer available to the modern viewer) is described as having been “skinned.” The assistant keeper, R. P. Hinks, took the fall and was successfully pressured to resign.

(In 1999 a colloquium was convened at the British Museum for Greek and British conservators to discuss the infamous scouring and the Museum’s lack of transparency, “Cleaning the Parthenon Marbles.” [One notes that Elgin’s name itself has already been “scrubbed” from the title.] “Patina, epidermis, and crust were among the various terms employed to describe the surface and changes that it has undergone,” words that suggest respectively marble as art object, living animal, and mineral. “In the small difference of two letters between ‘rubbed’ and ‘scrubbed’ lies the conflict between those who view the over-cleaning as unfortunate but not of devastating consequence and those who decry the ruination of Phidias’s figures.”²)

Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846), Head of the Horse of Selene. 1809, chalk drawing. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Marble statue from the East pediment of the Parthenon: Horse of Selene. © Trustees of the British Museum.

As it happened, there was no splashy opening of the gallery in the wake of the cleaning “catastrophe” and scandal. The king canceled his participation, and Duveen suffered a fatal stroke. Some of the Marbles were briefly displayed in the new setting but with a guardrail (not part of the original plan of the gallery) to keep viewers at a distance. War broke out shortly thereafter, necessitating the Marbles’ removal—some to a museum vault, some to the Aldwych station of the London Underground for their own safety. (The gallery was damaged in the bombing.) The Marbles were not back on display until 1949, some years after the end of the war; the Duveen Gallery itself would not reopen until 1962, once public outrage had died down and the scandal was nearly forgotten, and with no ceremony at all. Despite the British Museum’s website’s assertion that the Marbles have been on permanent display since 1817, for a decade the Marbles were kept from the scrutiny of the public eye.

In 1937, as war was brewing, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was given a preview tour of the Marbles and the glamorous new purpose-built gallery by Duveen himself; Chamberlain wrote to his sister Ida: “Lord Duveen took us to see . . . the new galleries at the Brit Museum for the Elgin Marbles. I think he has made sure that the latter will never leave London but of course some day they may be bombed out of existence.”

1. William St. Clair, “The Elgin Marbles: Questions of Stewardship and Accountability,” International Journal of Cultural Property, 8(2), pp. 391–521.

2. Claire L. Lyons, “Conference report. Cleaning the Parthenon Sculptures. British Museum, London, England (November 30–December 1, 1999),” International Journal of Cultural Property, 9(1), 2000, pp. 180–184.

Lost in Translation

The debt-ridden Lord Elgin had attempted to sell the Marbles to the British Government in letters to Prime Minister Spencer Perceval as early as 1811 but ran into difficulties: rumors swirled around his acquisition of them, mostly to do with whether he had abused his position as Ambassador to the Sublime Porte to obtain undue influence. (Did he own them as a private citizen, for instance, or did they come into his possession in his official capacity as Britain’s ambassador?)

After all, Elgin had become ambassador in 1798, just months after the Battle of the Nile, at a time when the Ottoman regime would have been most grateful to the English for their stymieing of Napoleon in Egypt. To give a sense of the importance of the British victory to the Ottomans: Sultan Selime III awarded a diamond “chelengk” to Horatio Nelson, the first non-Ottoman so honored with this military jewel. It is described in a letter by an eyewitness thus:

The Aigrette is a kind of feather, it represents a hand with thirteen fingers, which are of diamonds and allusive to the thirteen ships taken and destroyed at Alexandria, the size that of [a] child’s hand about six years old when opened; the center diamond, and the four round it, may be worth 1,000 each, and there are about 300 others well set.¹

Some descriptions say that a clockwork mechanism allowed the central diamond star to rotate. (Often depicted pinned to Nelson’s bicorn hat, the storied ornament was stolen from the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich by the infamous cat burglar George “Taters” Chatham in 1951, and is considered lost, probably having been broken up and sold piecemeal.)

Elgin’s stalled negotiations with the government over the sale of the collection suffered a further setback when Perceval was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons on May 11, 1812.

In order to sell the Marbles to Parliament, Elgin realized he had to refute Byron’s (and others’) charges of sacrilege and pillage and ease the Parliament’s mind that they were not receiving stolen property; “the old charges of spoliation and breach of ambassadorial duty by bribery.”² To this end, he—or rather, in all likelihood, his chaplain, the Reverend Philip Hunt—composed a Memorandum, both explaining Elgin’s rationale and listing the objects in the collection: half moral justification, half auction catalogue. In the words of the Memorandum, Elgin had been “impelled, by a stronger motive than personal gratification, to endeavour to preserve” the Marbles.

Elgin’s claims to legality in their removal were largely based on written permission in the form of a “firman”³ from the Ottoman Sublime Porte (then under Sultan Selim III) to the governor of Athens, produced at the beginning of July 1801, before Elgin had ever set foot in Greece, much less set eyes on the Parthenon. When the Committee asks, “The Fermauns granted to your Lordship were not . . . permissions to take particular pieces, one from the city and one from the citadel, and so on?,” Elgin replies, “I had never been at Athens, and could not specify any thing.”

Asked to produce the firmans by the Committee, Elgin replies first that “I have retained none of them,” and when the Committee presses, “In point of fact, your Lordship has not in England any copy of any of those written permissions?” Elgin replies, “None.” He has left them all in Athens, he says, with his agent Lusieri.

And that might have been an end to the drama of the firman; Parliament could have chosen simply to take him at his word. But two weeks later, Dr. Philip Hunt, Elgin’s chaplain and right-hand man, is called for examination.

Asked by the Committee, “Did you ever see any of the written permissions which were granted to him [Elgin] for removing the Marbles from the Temple of Minerva?”

“—Yes,” Hunt answers and rattles on at length:

“I advised Lord Elgin to apply to the Porte for a fermaun . . . and as I had been before deceived with respect to the pretended contents of a fermaun, I begged that this might be accompanied by a literal translation; the fermaun was sent with a translation, and that translation I now possess” and adds, before being asked, “It is left at Bedford, and I have no means of directing any person to obtain it; I would have brought it if I had been aware I should have been summoned by this Committee before I left Bedford.”

This “literal translation,” or at least an English rendering of the Italian translation, is entered into the Committee minutes in the Appendix.⁴ (The Italian original, in fact itself a mere summary, resurfaced in the 1960s.) The important passage is at the very end:

Elgin and his five artists should be allowed access to the Acropolis to erect scaffolds and model with chalk or gypsum “the ornaments and visible figures thereon,” or to measure fragments, or to excavate “in search of inscriptions among the rubbish; that they be not molested by the said Disdar (or commandant of the citadel) nor by any other persons . . . and that no one meddle with their scaffolding or implements, nor hinder them from taking away any pieces of stone with inscriptions [sic] or figures.” (Quite a lot was already on the ground, including some elements of the frieze.)

This may be interpreted in assorted ways, but it would be a stretch that permission to model with chalk or gypsum the ornaments visible on the building also allowed for ornaments to be removed from said structure (damaging the structure in the process), or that the permission to excavate and search through the rubbish for stones with inscriptions or figures refers to removing anything not among the rubble already scattered over the ground.

It is very similar to what Hunt has said it contained, “permission to view, draw, and model the ancient temples of the idols and the sculptures upon them, and to make excavations, and to take away any stones that might appear interesting to them.”

“Any stones” is rather different from “any pieces of stone,” but, at any rate, the Committee appendix has an N.B. appended to the translation:

“N.B.—The words in Italian rendered in two places ‘any pieces of stone,’ are ‘qualche pezzi di pietra.’”

Someone, perhaps even the clerk compiling the minutes, knows enough Italian, it would seem, to know that “qualche” does not mean “any,” but rather “some.”⁵ Some pieces of stone.

The whole is such a shaggy dog story that it is tempting to believe, as some do, no such Turkish document ever existed. Hunt’s Italian original, translated by an Antonio Dané, but in the hand of Bartolomeo Pisani, the British Embassy’s interpreter, has turned up, although oddly without the signet signature described in the English translation included in the appendix of the Select Committee’s report; research by Turkish academics through the extensive Ottoman archives in 2019 has not uncovered any record of such an Ottoman document.⁶

On the other hand, we do seem to have one eyewitness to the original “firman”—none other than Byron’s friend and fellow Elgin-mocker, John Galt. In his Autobiography, he relates:

This same rape [Elgin’s removal of the Marbles] is curious in many particulars. I saw the firman on which Lord Elgin commenced the dilapidation of the Temples, and as I did not understand Turkish, the person who read it to me said it was only to remove a stone.

“Only to remove a stone” has potentially traveled quite far from “take away any pieces of stone,” perhaps by the intermediate jump of “some.” Like a red wheelbarrow, so much depends on the translation of, potentially, a single word.

(Incidentally, Galt made a gambit for a group of the Marbles himself in 1811. Galt was aboard the same vessel as the penultimate shipment of Marbles leaving Greece. He had got wind from Lusieri that Elgin might not have the money to get them through customs in Malta, and plotted to buy them up cheap, but Elgin’s agent seems to have got the funds together just in time, and Galt’s “patriotic cupidity” was frustrated.⁷)

Regarding the sweep of authority granted by the firman, the Select Committee had asked Elgin’s chaplain Philip Hunt,

Do you imagine that the firmaun gave a direct permission to remove figures and pieces of sculpture from the walls of temples, or that that must have been a matter of private arrangement with the local authorities of Athens?

Hunt: “That was the interpretation which the Vaivode [the civilian governor] of Athens was induced to allow it to bear.”

1. Martyn Downer, Nelson’s Lost Jewel, 2021, The History Press.

2. From William St. Clair’s Lord Elgin & the Marbles: The Controversial History of the Parthenon Sculptures.

3. Technically, a firman must be signed by the Sultan—not the case with this letter. Whatever else, “firman” is a misnomer in this debate.

4. See Appendix D of this book for the full translation from the 1816 Committee Appendix.

5. I am grateful to Gregory Dowling for this insight.

6. Ömer Erbil, “Turkish Researchers Debunk UK’s Elgin Marbles Claim,” Hürriyet Daily News, March 28, 2019.

7. From Galt’s Autobiography:

Here was a chance of the most exquisite relics of art in the world becoming mine, and a speculation by the sale of them in London that would realize a fortune. The temptation was too great. My correspondents at Malta were Messrs. Struthers, Kennedy, and Co., to whom I wrote to pay the bills upon receiving the stones, &c., &c., and I shipped myself on board the vessel that I might see her safely to Hydra, where she was to put herself under the protection of a man of war. Accordingly that evening we sailed with our precious cargo, and next morning arrived at Hydra, from which the vessel was conveyed to Malta. But on her arrival there, the agent for the earl paid the bills, and my patriotic cupidity was frustrated.

Shanghaied to Bloomsbury

When Keats visited the Marbles in 1817, they had only recently arrived at their respectable address in Bloomsbury, exhibited in the British Museum’s Temporary Elgin Room, designed by the architect Robert Smirke. From a painting of the period, we see that the frieze circled the room at a little above eye level, while pedimental statues (as well as the lone Caryatid and other non-Parthenon Marbles) were displayed higgledy-piggledy about the middle of the room, with Selene’s horse’s head set on the floor.

Haydon must have brought with him the sense of wild discovery of having stumbled upon hitherto unknown great masterpieces in a damp shed in the yard of a nobleman’s house, leaving Keats reeling, but Keats also witnessed them at the beginning of their “museumization” and gentrification. Their purity and chasteness (again, going hand in hand with their “whiteness”) were coupled to a proto-Victorian respectability. Byron had witnessed them as backdrops to louche aristocratic scenes of boxing and flirting in 1808, but by 1822, in his 13th canto of Don Juan, he could describe a grim society gathering as:

But all was gentle and aristocratic

In this our party; polish’d, smooth, and cold,

As Phidian forms cut out of marble Attic.

Many authors and poets have perceived something vaguely melancholic about Greek sculpture languishing in this prosaically respectable corner of London.

A. E. Housman first visited the British Museum as a fifteen-year-old in 1875, writing to his beloved stepmother, Lucy Housman (whom he addresses affectionately as “Mamma”), “Yesterday I went to the British Museum & spent most of my time among the Greeks & Romans.” This would, of course, have included the Elgin Saloon. He teases her a little: “I looked at your Venus—the Towneley [sic] Venus in the alcove, but I do not admire her” and adds, unsurprisingly to us, perhaps, “What delighted me most was the Farnese Mercury.” After Housman had spectacularly failed at Oxford and found himself a patent clerk in London, he would have had more opportunity to visit the British Museum, which was scarcely a thirteen-minute walk away from the offices on Chancery Lane. This time, visiting the Greek and Roman rooms was not an opportunity for a family letter, but a poem, “Loitering with a vacant eye.” While he doesn’t describe the Marbles themselves (instead it is a standalone statue), it is interesting that he identifies with the Greek sculpture in the museum; they are both displaced persons, suffering from exile and homesickness. Housman looks at the statue, and the statue looks back:

“Well met,” I thought the look would say,

“We both were fashioned far away;

We neither knew, when we were young,

These Londoners we live among.”

Still he stood and eyed me hard,

An earnest and a grave regard:

“What, lad, drooping with your lot?

I too would be where I am not.

I too survey that endless line

Of men whose thoughts are not as mine.

Years, ere you stood up from rest,

On my neck the collar prest;

Years, when you lay down your ill,

I shall stand and bear it still . . .”

The “collar” that presses on the neck of the statue is surely the yoke of slavery and oppression, of being “owned” by others—not unlike the “Ottoman yoke” that Greece had freed itself from, with help from philhellenes like Byron and the Great Powers. But perhaps it also had a parallel in the collar Housman would have worn to work as a clerk. There is something rather unbearable (although the poem is about “bearing up”) in realizing that the statue is right . . . he will be standing there long after Housman’s suffering in life had ceased.

Thomas Hardy, in his “Christmas in the Elgin Room,” has the statues speak, as Housman’s did, in the first person. As a Hardy poem, it seems cousin both to “Channel Firing” (in the voices of the dead who are disturbed by the noises of war) and maybe also to his Christmas poem, “The Oxen.” While, on one level, the poem is about how the pagan gods have been replaced by Christianity, on another level it is about the sadness and homesickness of the Marbles in cold and gloomy London.

They are roused by the Christmas bells:

“And what, then, mean such clangs, so clear?”

“—’Tis said to have been a day of cheer,

And source of grace

To the human race

Long ere their woven sails winged us to exile here.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“O it is sad now we are sold—

We gods! for Borean people’s gold,

And brought to the gloom

Of this gaunt room

Which sunlight shuns, and sweet Aurore but enters cold.”

They are in “exile,” they have been purchased for “gold,” the room is “gaunt,” shunned by the sun, cold, and they miss being “Radiant” on “Athenai’s Hill.” The “woven sails,” though of course a perfect straightforward depiction of sail cloth, also, in the words of the statues, seem to me to harken back to the intricately woven peplos for Athena’s statue that was attached to the mast of a ship-wagon in her sacred procession.

“Bloomsbury” is not only the statues’ address at the Museum, but seems to be shorthand for their domestication, a downturn in their fortunes that is less Greek tragedy than Victorian plot twist. James Elroy Flecker, perhaps best known now for his popular musical piece of Orientalism, “The Golden Journey to Samarkand,” published “Oak and Olive” in the same volume (1913). It describes wanting to be in Greece when in England and vice versa. The stanza that rises above this charming but slight piece, that seems to vibrate with emotion, is this one:

And there’s a hall in Bloomsbury

No more I dare to tread,

For all the stone men shout at me,

And swear they are not dead;

And once I touched a broken girl

And knew that marble bled.

We know, of course, exactly which hall in Bloomsbury and which stone men. There is a pivot to the personal in the last two lines, with the “I,” who has touched “a broken girl.” The “broken girl” is presumably the lone Caryatid Elgin had extracted from the Erechtheion’s Porch of the Maidens. Though not part of the Phidian frieze of the Parthenon, she is perhaps as storied as the frieze and, of course, as a single standalone human figure more easily personified. Flecker brings her to life with “And knew that marble bled.”

There might even be something more personal behind it. Flecker had met his future bride, a Greek woman, Helle Skiadaressi, in 1910, on board a ship to Athens, during his diplomatic career in the Levant. Had they visited the Museum together? One wonders what her feelings would have been, looking on the displaced Caryatid. Some exchange (an argument even) seems to have happened there, in a place where Flecker could contemplate ancient and modern Greek womanhood side by side. Later in the poem, where he says, “Oh well I know sweet Hellas now,” the similarities of “Hellas” with “Helle” resonate in the background.

(I would propose Byron as alone among poets in being unsusceptible to sentimentalizing a single Caryatid, since he had once actually compared a Greek maiden—Haidee in Canto 2 of Don Juan—to a statue, only to chuck the idea at once: Statuary were “A race of mere imposters, when all’s done— / I’ve seen much finer women, ripe and real, / Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal.”)

Later, John Heath-Stubbs would express the dissonance for anglophone writers of viewing the Acropolis in Athens while being aware of the Marbles in London. In his (1963) “Parthenon,” he writes of seeing the ruin that it is, “the model / Of every second-rate ‘classical’ building— / Church or museum” and

Off-white like a sea-worn shell,

Like a bird’s skull,

Under remorseless light;

Denuded the colour and gold

Long since; the centaurs and heroes

Shanghaied to Bloomsbury.

It seems very small:

And She has departed.

Despite the Marbles being “shanghaied” to Bloomsbury, writers have had a tendency to remarry what man has put asunder—Herman Melville’s 1891 poem “The Parthenon,” written in the same period as the “Give Back the Elgin Marbles” controversy, inserts a stanza on the frieze, the most complete and perfect of the stanzas, the most animated, and the most “standalone,” in four sections on views of the Temple:

III.

The Frieze

What happy musings genial went

With airiest touch the chisel lent

To frisk and curvet light

Of horses gay—their riders grave—

Contrasting so in action brave

With virgins meekly bright,

Clear filing on in even tone

With pitcher each, one after one

Like water-fowl in flight.

Refreshingly, the American imagination here has not insisted on anything’s being “chaste”: the virgins are instead “meekly bright” and, in an Ovidian metamorphosis, “take flight.”

On the Tack of Caring for Greek Sculpture

Towards the end of E. M. Forster’s novel, A Room with a View, about a group of English travelers who have met in Florence, the heroine Lucy Honeychurch comes up with the harebrained idea of traveling to Greece with a pair of adventurous spinsters, the “Miss Alans.” (Perhaps if she had gone, she might have ended up an adventurous spinster herself.) Published in 1908, A Room with a View must be set somewhat earlier, given that the vicar, Mr. Beebe, has “never heard” of Housman’s wildly popular 1896 A Shropshire Lad. Mr. Beebe explains the wildness of the plan to Freddy and Mr. Vyse, Lucy’s soon to be ex-fiancé.

Then you don’t see the wonder of this Greek visit. I haven’t been to Greece myself, and don’t mean to go, and I can’t imagine any of my friends going. It is altogether too big for our little lot. Don’t you think so? Italy is just about as much as we can manage. Italy is heroic, but Greece is god-like or devilish—I am not sure which, and in either case absolutely out of our suburban focus . . . The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for me. There the contrast is just as much as I can realize. But not the Parthenon, not the frieze of Phidias at any price . . .

For Mr. Beebe the frieze is again ineffable, as it was to Keats; and Greece itself is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Yet the “frieze of Phidias” is of course a good deal closer to home than Italy, and the set of Italophiles have met up at the National Gallery, a fifteen-minute walk away from the British Museum. Lucy Honeychurch, on a rainy day in London, where she has gone to visit the Miss Alans “in their beloved temperance hotel near Bloomsbury,” proposes ducking in to the British Museum to her mother, who refuses. “If they must take shelter, let it be in a shop. Lucy felt contemptuous, for she was on the tack of caring for Greek sculpture . . .”

In the end Lucy marries, abandons the Athens trip, and perhaps can give up on trying to “get up the names of the goddesses and gods.”

The idea that one ought to care for Greek sculpture, and particularly these, has already crept into the conversation by the Victorian era. By 1951, forty-three years after A Room with a View, E. R. Dodds can begin his seminal The Greeks and the Irrational with this anecdote:

Some years ago I was in the British Museum looking at the Parthenon sculptures when a young man came up to me and said with a worried air, “I know it’s an awful thing to confess, but this Greek stuff doesn’t move me one bit.” I said that was very interesting: could he define at all the reasons for his lack of response? He reflected for a minute or two. Then he said, “Well, it’s all so terribly rational, if you know what I mean.” I thought I did know.

This museum visit, which perhaps was shortly after the damaged Marbles had returned to public view in 1949, cannot be further from Keats’s and Haydon’s.

Greek Poets and the Marbles

As becomes clear flipping through a Greek anthology of poems about the Parthenon, The Parthenon in Poetry: An Anthology (ELIA, 2009), edited by Dr. Liana Giannakopoulou, Greek poets have not tended to address their sonnets and odes to the Marbles in Bloomsbury—after all, many would not even have the opportunity to visit London to view them—but to the ruined Parthenon itself, which still presides over Athens, the nation’s capital since 1834. Perhaps there is also among the Greeks a deeper historical sense.

When there is outrage at the Parthenon’s damaged state—not by time, but by the hands of men—it tends to center not on Elgin, but on Morosini’s blowing up of the Temple in 1687, the “Venetian’s fire” or “the cannons of Morosini,” the moment the building went from being a useful structure to a ruin. The rapacious Elgin is less a threat than mass tourism and cheap souvenirs.

Even so, at least a few major Greek poets have been inspired by the Marbles as well as the building. Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951), the first Greek poet nominated for the Nobel Prize (although he never won it), was deeply influenced by John Keats, so much so that he wrote a poem entitled “Yannis Keats,” which effectively makes Keats an honorary Greek poet and brings him to Greece, a place Keats was never able to visit in life. In fact, in the poem, Sikelianos transforms himself and Keats into the Homeric road-trip buddies, Telemachus and Peisistratus, palling around at Nestor’s palace and later at Sparta. They end up attending a sacrifice, as if walking into Keats’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

At dawn, we’d attend the sacrifice to the gods,

The ritual slaughters

Of the three-year-old heifers, and hear the single cry

That rose from his three daughters

When the axe thwacked, and the black-fringed, slow-rolling eye

Drowned in a swoon

Of darkness, and the gilt horns were rendered idle,

A hazy half moon.

—my translation

Sikelianos’ sonnet about the Marbles, however, could not be more different from Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.” The poem’s title is “Zoophoros,” the Greek for “frieze.” These two words, denoting the same thing, stand at opposite poles of connotation. Even though the English “frieze” is not etymologically related to “frigid” or “freeze” (rather, the source is “Phrygian” and refers to a band of fancy embroidery), it is a cold, static, icy word. Zoophoros (or “zôphoros”), however, literally means Zodiac—or “animal-bearing”; it brings out the animation of the band of sculptures, which do indeed read a bit like a comic strip, showing us not just a continuous file of animals and people, but different moments in time (getting the horses and riders ready, for instance). Keats reels before the unimaginable chasm of time between Pericles and us; Sikelianos brings the horses and riders to life in the continuous present. The sonnet combines close observation—the veins on the horses’ bellies are clearly visible on the Marbles, an anatomical detail that no doubt delighted Haydon—with an imaginative leap.

Color reenters the frieze, like traces of paint, and the frieze itself ceases to be individual blocks and becomes cells of animation, a rhythm of movement; the heat and the sounds of Greek summer—after all, the Panathenaic procession occurred mid-August—seem to fill the cool galleries of the British Museum:

Kicking their steeds’ flanks with the red apples

Of their heels, right where the bulging vein

Forks and ramifies, and the sweat dripples

In rivulets down to the hooves from the belly,

Driving them with palms slapped on the withers

Where the hair is parted so the mane

Falls on either side like swan feathers,

And crowned themselves with hats or wreaths, they urge

Them on—Heat splits the earth—The cicada’s throb

In the olives heralds airy victory—

Here comes the procession, the ceremonial robe;

And then with a fair and following breeze, they surge

Past, abounding wave of horses, dancing—

Galloping, cantering or prancing . . .

—my translation

Kiki Dimoula (1931–2020) has a poem from her first book, Erebus (1956), about seeing the Marbles in the British Museum. She had lived in London for seven months at that period, perhaps accounting for the low, dark skies that cloud the collection, whose title, after all, means “Darkness,” and in particular, the thick, foggy gloom of the Underworld.

In the “British Museum,” the speaker, who we may presume is a Greek woman in London, is drawn to the other displaced Greek woman in the hall, that “broken girl,” the lone Caryatid, who was displayed alongside the Marbles for much of their English history.

Rika Lesser and Cecile Inglessis Margellos’s translation begins:

In the chill of the Museum room

before my eyes: stolen, fair

sole Caryatid.

The poem imagines a connection between the Caryatid, her “dark sweet gaze” fixed on the figure of Dionysus, chiseled in an attitude of voluptuousness, two steps away, his gaze fallen on her “strapping waist.” (A Caryatid has to be a sturdy girl after all, if she is to bear weight.) She suspects “An everlasting idyll / unites them.” This “everlasting idyll” surely harks back to Keats’s “Cold Pastoral,” where desire is ever kept in check: “Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,” but is also “For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d.”

The poet imagines Dionysus (the figure sometimes identified as Theseus) rising from his place, carefully, so as not to arouse the suspicion of the other statues, “with wine and with caresses” to “undo the Caryatid’s chastity.”

It is telling where the English takes liberties with the Greek. The word Lesser and Margellos translate as “chastity,” systole, means rather “modesty,” or “reserve” or “bashfulness” perhaps. (The principal meaning of systole, as in English, is “contraction” but comes to mean a shrinking back—a combination perhaps of Byron’s “shrinking Gods” and Keats’s “maidens loth.”) This may not seem like a huge difference, but chasteness—sexual cleanness and purity—is a word and concept that the anglophone imagination has attached consistently to the Marbles since their arrival in England. Systole is less about purity and cleanliness than about how a woman, or a Caryatid for that matter, carries herself; here Dimoula’s Caryatid is a proper Greek girl, full of desire but not willing to make the first move. Notably, in the Greek, Dionysus does not “undo” this modesty, like a chastity belt, but merely “bends” it; the Caryatid, eternally upright, has an opportunity to yield a little, to let down her elaborate hair.

But in the second half of the poem, Dimoula imagines a darker possibility. Maybe she is wrong, and

Some other tie may bind them

more strongly, more woefully

In the Greek, this “woefully” is instead adjectival: a tie or relationship that is “more painful.”

She imagines them on winter evenings and August nights stepping down from their high pedestals

and with nostalgia’s sighs and tears

erecting passionately in memory

Parthenons and Erechtheions they’ve lost.

There are slight echoes of Cavafy throughout the poem, in English heard most clearly here, with its plural Parthenons and Erechtheions of memory harkening back a bit to Cavafy’s plural “Ithakas,” and also perhaps to the line “and bid farewell to the Alexandria you are losing” in “The God Abandons Antony.”

Dimoula’s ending, though, is rather different; Lesser and Margellos have switched the last two lines (perhaps to chime with Cavafy). A literal version might go:

with the sighs and the tears of nostalgia,

those Parthenons and Erechtheions of which they have been deprived

in their memory with passion they erect them.

In Greek, though, the primary meaning of “nostalgia” is not a sentimental yearning for an idealized past, but the ache of longing to return home, “homesickness.” Note that they have not “lost” their Temples, they have been “deprived” of them, a violence less accidental and more purposeful. In the Greek, the ending is also less despondent and more, well, passionate, ending not on loss and dejection, but reconstruction. If the Marbles cannot return to the Acropolis, the Marbles, in the poet’s mind, will build and reduplicate their Temples in London.

Enchanted Bodies

Dimoula’s imagining of the pain—and the groans and tears—of the removed statues is reminiscent of older tales, two of them the most uncanny stories from British travelers to Athens at the time of Elgin’s undertaking. John Cam Hobhouse (1786–1869), who had spent some months in Athens in 1809 with Byron, relates the following:

Some Greeks, in our time, conveying a chest from Athens to Piraeus, containing part of the Elgin marbles, threw it down, and could not for some time be prevailed upon to touch it, again affirming, they heard the Arabim [the spirit] crying out, and groaning for his fellow-spirits detained in bondage in the Acropolis.

This is certainly a colorful and curious story about the ignorant and superstitious natives. Bondage here seems to suggest Greek oppression under the “Ottoman yoke.” In this case, far from looting the statues, Elgin is “liberating” them.

Hobhouse adds that, conveniently: “the Athenians consider the condition of these enchanted marbles will be bettered by a removal from the country of the tyrant Turks.” This is his published account; his diary from the same period lacks that rhetorical flourish and has a slightly different tenor:¹

And some Greeks . . . declared they heard an Arabim groan and scream most piteously within them [the trunks where the statues were packed]. Some of these statues, they say, have been heard to bewail at leaving their friends and fellow marbles in the Acropolis.

What is common to both accounts is the belief that the statues are groaning in distress, but the reasons given for that distress are almost diametrically opposed. (It was a not uncommon Christian belief from Byzantine times that pagan statues were possessed by demons: damage to extremities such as feet was sometimes done to hobble their potential movement.²)

Frederick Sylvester North Douglas (grandson of the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Frederick North) in 1813 published an account of impressions traveling through Greece from 1810 to 1812, including three weeks spent in Athens (not long after Hobhouse’s account).

While Douglas was touring the Acropolis, an “illiterate servant” of the Disdar (the chief military officer on the citadel of the Acropolis) observing Douglas’ admiration of the standing Caryatids, and his “regret” for the “bad taste that has removed one of them,” turned around and told him

that when the other κορίτσια (girls) had lost their sister, they manifested their affliction by filling the air at the close of evening with the most mournful sighs and lamentations, that he himself had often heard their complaints, and never without being so much affected as to be obliged to leave the citadel till they had ceased; and that the ravished sister was not deaf to their voice, but astonished the lower town, where she was placed, by answering in the same lamentable tones.

It has occurred to me that there might even be some truth to this story. The Erechtheion had stood largely unmolested for twenty-two centuries. Removing the load-bearing Caryatid, and replacing her with an ad hoc support, would have resulted in some shifting of the ancient stones. Who is to say that, in the evenings as the air cooled and a breeze rose up, the sound of the weight contracting and the structure resettling would not have produced some very eerie sounds?

1. For a full account of Hobhouse’s Elgin note and discrepancies with the diary, see: Eleonora Vratskidou, “Hobhouse: A note on Lord Elgin’s Pursuits in Greece (1813),” Translocations. Anthologie.

2. Cyril Mango, “Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 17, 1963, pp. 53, 55–75. John Pollini, “Christian Desecration and Mutilation of the Parthenon,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Athenische Abteilung, 122, 2007, pp. 207–228.

A Centaur at the Wedding

Although it is often said that Elgin intended to “rescue” the Marbles from the Turks, the “natives,” the elements, and, perhaps most worryingly, the French—and who knows but that this last motive did have some bearing later, when Elgin refused to sell them to Napoleon—his original plan was to use them to furnish his newly-renovated Scottish mansion. In July 1801, his mind is abuzz with plans for the interior decoration of Broomhall, the expanded house he plans for himself and his twenty-three-year-old bride, Lady Elgin, the beauty and heiress Mary née Nisbet, to be paid for at her expense.

It is through Lady Elgin’s money and energy, and even supervision, that the bulk of the Marbles are eventually removed, packed, and shipped. Lively and unconventional as well as beautiful, she excited the admiration of both Sultan Selim III and of Napoleon, received an ode in Persian to her beauty by the poet and travel writer Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, and was an early promoter of the small pox vaccine.¹

Elgin writes of Broomhall from Constantinople to Lusieri, the painter he has employed in Athens:

This 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.

The Hall is intended to be adorned with columns—the cellars underneath are vaulted expressly for this . . . one can easily multiply ornaments of beautiful marble without overdoing it; and nothing, truly, is so beautiful and also independent of changes of fashion.

These reflexions only apply to unworked marble. You do not need any prompting from me to know the value that is attached to a sculptured marble, or historic piece.

Elgin has yet to arrive in Athens (he will never see the Parthenon with the Marbles attached), where his mania for collection reaches a kind of fever pitch.

By October, Elgin is giving Lusieri shopping lists:

The first on the list are the metopes, the bas-reliefs, and the remains of the statues that can still be found. . . . Would it be permissible to speak of a Caryatid?

The fact that Elgin demurs a little at the Caryatid indicates, I think, that even Elgin realized taking a supporting column might be crossing a line. As if Lusieri is down at a supermarket and might forget milk, Elgin adds, “Do not forget some capitals on the Acropolis.”

He concludes with the ecstasy of a collector on the hunt: “To sum up, the slightest object from the Acropolis is a jewel.”

On January 5, 1802, Lusieri writes to Elgin that “If I cannot get the Pandroseum [the Erechtheion] entire, I do not despair of one of the Caryatids”; and on the eleventh, “Without a special firman it is impossible to take away the last [that is, the entire Erechtheion]. The Turks and the Greeks are extremely attached to it, and there were murmurs when Mr. Hunt asked for it.”²

In September of 1802, the ever-loyal Lusieri in Athens can write proudly to Elgin of having obtained a metope with a centaur carrying off a woman. He confesses (there is almost a thrill of transgression here): “This piece has caused much trouble in all respects, and I have even been obliged to be a little barbarous.”

And a little later: “send a dozen marble saws of different sizes to Athens, as quickly as possible. I should require three or four, twenty feet in length . . .”

1. Susan Nagel, Mistress of the Elgin Marbles: A Biography of Mary Nisbet, Countess of Elgin (New York, 2004).

2. A. H. Smith, “Lord Elgin and His Collection,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 36, 1916, pp. 163–372.

The Temple of the Cari-Something

Lady Elgin was an enthusiastic partner in the venture and supervised removals, packaging, and loading cargo, on Elgin’s behalf. Although young and pregnant with her third child, she was in some ways left balancing the whole weighty operation on her well-coiffed head. She boasts of the superior efficiency of women, writing to Elgin in May 1802:

I am now satisfied of what I always thought; which is how much more Women can do if they set about it, than Men. I will lay any bet had you been here you would not have got half so much on board as I have.

As for getting the other things you wished for down from the Acropolis it is quite impossible before you return. Lusieri says Capt Lacy was upon his first coming here against the things being taken down, but at last he was keener than any body & absolutely wished you to have the whole Temple of the Cari-something, where the Statues of the Women are—

Like Lusieri, she craved Elgin’s approval, “How I have faged [i.e., fatigued] to get all this done, do you love me better for it, Elgin?”

The Elgins (plural) would be remembered in the rueful and rhymed Latin inscription some traveler placed on the Parthenon:

Quod non fecerunt Goti,

hoc fecerunt Scoti

(That which the Goths did not do, the Scots did.)

Another traveler scrawled on a remaining Caryatid, “Opus Phidiae” (the work of Phidias), and on the brick column with which Elgin had replaced the Caryatid, “Opus Elgin.”

PART III

Eyewitnesses

As it happens, we know quite a bit more about Lusieri and the harvesting of the troublesome metope. We have accounts from several eyewitnesses that day, from their diaries, letters, and published accounts. The first account even becomes a footnote to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a bit of evidence to support Byron’s poetic claim that the locals were dismayed, when he writes “Her sons, too weak the sacred shrine to guard, / Yet felt some portion of their mother’s pains.”

The note had been suggested to Byron by Cambridge professor Edward Daniel Clarke in a letter, after he first reads the poem:

When the last of the Metopes was taken from the Parthenon, and, in moving of it, great part of the superstructure with one of the triglyphs was thrown down by the workmen whom Lord Elgin employed, the Disdar, who beheld the mischief done to the building, took his pipe from his mouth, dropped a tear, and, in a supplicating tone of voice, said to Lusieri, Telos!—I was present.

The Disdar was the military official in charge of the fortified citadel—the Acropolis. “Telos” is the Greek for “end” or here, “enough” or even “stop!”—unchanged from the ancient Greek (ΤΕΛΟΣ), it would have been perfectly intelligible to Phidias or Pericles. Ultimately, though, as Clarke informs us, the Disdar, a poor man, is induced to allow further “dilapidation” in exchange for bribes.

Clarke’s longer published account in his own Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa gives more detail but, with a slip of the passive voice, makes the smashed entablature sound almost like an accident:

Some workmen, employed under his direction for the British Ambassador, were then engaged in making preparation, by means of ropes and pulleys, for taking down the metopes, where the sculpture remained the most perfect. The Disdar himself came to view the work, but with evident marks of dissatisfaction; . . . We confessed that we participated [in] the Mahometan feeling in this instance, and would gladly see an order enforced to preserve rather than to destroy such a glorious edifice. After a short time spent in examining the several parts of the temple, one of the workmen came to inform Don Battista [Lusieri] that they were then going to lower one of the metopes. We saw this fine piece of sculpture raised from its station between the triglyphs: but the workmen endeavouring to give it a position adapted to the projected line of descent, a part of the adjoining masonry was loosened by the machinery; and down came the fine masses of Pentelican marble, scattering their white fragments with thundering noise among the ruins. The Disdar, seeing this, could no longer restrain his emotions; but actually took his pipe from his mouth, and, letting fall a tear, said in a most emphatical tone of voice, “Telos!” positively declaring that nothing should induce him to consent to any further dilapidation of the building.

Given Clarke’s letter to Byron and Lusieri’s own account, it is not an accident at all—the loosening has been on purpose, and the smashed masonry, collateral damage. This is even clearer in Edward Dodwell’s eyewitness account of the same event:

During my first tour to Greece I had the inexpressible mortification of being present when the Parthenon was despoiled of its finest sculpture, and when some of its architectural members were thrown to the ground. I saw several metopæ at the south-east extremity of the temple taken down. They were fixed in between the triglyphs as in a groove; and in order to lift them up, it was necessary to throw to the ground the magnificent cornice by which they were covered. The south-east angle of the pediment shared the same fate; and instead of the picturesque beauty and high preservation in which I first saw it, it is now comparatively reduced to a state of shattered desolation.

Robert Smirke, an architect and artist who made some accomplished sketches of the Parthenon, deeply moved by viewing the Greek temples in person, was another eyewitness to the extraction of sculptural elements from the building. In a letter he writes:

It particularly affected me when I saw the destruction made to get down the basso-relievos on the walls . . . men . . . labouring . . . with iron crows to move the stones of these firm-built walls. Each stone as it fell shook the ground with its ponderous weight with a deep hollow noise; it seemed like a convulsive groan of the injured spirit of the Temple.

Among his designs and buildings would be the Temporary Elgin Room, in which Keats would first view the sculptures, and, in 1823, with the Greek revolution well underway, the massive Neoclassical façade of the British Museum on Great Russell Street, with its forty-four Ionic columns, approximating the forty-six Doric columns of the Parthenon. (Smirke was a pioneer in the use of concrete foundations.) The Museum’s pediment is tricked out with allegorical sculptures by Richard Westmacott (professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy and a pupil of Canova, he had also testified for the Select Committee) that symbolize the progress of civilization. At the apex stands a Classical female figure holding a globe and a spear. Representing a world-conquering view of civilization and science, her purview overlaps neatly with Athena’s own: wisdom, warcraft, and technology. Smirke, in short, witnessed both the dismantling of one Temple and the construction of the new, secular temple out of the intellectual spolia of the first.

It seems ironic that these troublesome metopes portray the barbarous centaurs, drunk on wine, seizing and carrying off the women of the Lapiths at a wedding: rape is one of the frequent metaphors used by Elgin’s detractors for his exploits. In the catalogue of items Elgin wants to sell to the British government, Lusieri’s barbarously acquired metope is listed thus:

4. A Centaur is carrying off a Woman

Carrots and Sticks

The “inducements” that Clarke and Philip Hunt himself suggest were used in persuading the Disdar and Voivode and the British consul included both carrots and sticks.

Some such gifts sent along by Elgin to his agent Lusieri in 1802 included:

Three silver telescopes.

Three telescopes in yellow mounting.

One with a foot to rest on a table.

A green narghile [hookah] with a yellow foot,

and also with a foot of green crystal, which are exchanged.

One ditto, white—with a yellow foot,

and also one of white crystal.

A small green ditto.

A gold watch.

A compass.

Two crystal bottles, to hold ice and cool the water.

Two crystal covered glasses.

Four yellow cups etc. porcelain.

Three covered cups.

Two covered Wedgwood cups.

Three little pieces of Wedgwood, together forming an inkstand.

A box of instruments with one handle which serves for all the pieces.

A gun, that you must have cleaned.

But Hunt began his stay in Athens wielding a “stick”—the firman that was to permit the travelers’ unmolested access to the citadel for the purposes of sketching, measuring, and molding. When he discovered the Disdar was charging Elgin’s artists and other visitors a steep five guineas a day (equivalent to over ten weeks of a laborer’s wages in Britain) to have access to the rock, he was furious.

Philip Hunt writes to Lord Elgin, July 23, 1801, immediately upon his first arrival in Athens:

. . . When the Vaivode had read the letters, and perceived the determined tone with which we spoke, he became submissive in the extremest degree, and assured us he was highly mortified to find that the Disdar had presumed to treat any Englishman with disrespect, or demand money on any pretext. On wishing to see the Disdar’s Son, difficulties were started about his being absent; but on declaring my resolution to know really where the blame attached, the poor miscreant came in bare-footed and trembling; attempted to deny the fact complained of by Mr. Dodwell’s party [the complaint was exorbitant fees for artists’ access to the Acropolis and disrespectful behavior by the soldiers]; but on my repeating what had happened both to Mr. Nesbitt and myself, the Vaivode and Mou Basheer [an Ottoman enforcement official] told him he was exiled; I then interceded for him on promise of his future good conduct, and he was pardoned. The Mou Basheer however hinted to him that as he was young and strong he might find employment in the Gallies of the Sultan on a second complaint.¹[24]

The threat of enslavement seems to have done the trick with the ailing Disdar’s son. The first metope, allegedly already loose and in danger of falling to its destruction, is removed from the Parthenon, with the help of a British ship carpenter and five of the crew, on July 31, eight days later.

1. A. H. Smith, “Lord Elgin and His Collection,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 36, 1916, pp. 163–372.

Regretted by All

Curiously, the Select Committee was also intent on discovering the attitude of the locals, and especially the local Greeks—were they disturbed by the removal of the Marbles? Did they care? This seems to expand the concern beyond mere legality, instead tentatively dipping a toe into ethical waters, and it perhaps reflects on Byron’s own take, that the Greeks “felt some portion of their mother’s pains.”

Byron backs up what seems mere rhetorical flourish with not one but two anecdotes in his prose notes: one was the famous eyewitness story of Edward Daniel Clarke. The other comes out in an aside:

At this moment (January 3, 1810), besides what has been already deposited in London, an Hydriot vessel is in the Pyræus to receive every portable relic. Thus, as I heard a young Greek observe, in common with many of his countrymen—for, lost as they are, they yet feel on this occasion—thus may Lord Elgin boast of having ruined Athens.

Readers of Cavafy may have a strange sensation reading this passage about a young Greek’s feelings as a vessel is going to be loaded with Greek “plunder” to be shipped to an imperial power—the mirroring points of coincidences with Cavafy’s “On an Italian Shore” are many, if it is set, rather, after the destruction and looting of Corinth in 146 B.C. (plundered by the Romans under Lucius Mummius of its sculpture, to furnish their own stately homes).

Cavafy explores the melancholy feelings of an idle pleasure-loving “Italiote” Greek youth in Magna Graecia watching Greek plunder being unloaded on the other side. From James Merrill’s pitch-perfect translation:

Today, however, wholly      contrary to his nature,

he’s lost in thought, dejected      there on the shore he sees

with bitter melancholy      ship upon ship that slowly

disgorges crates of booty      from the Peloponnese

Greek booty      Spoils of Corinth.

It is tempting to wonder whether Cavafy had not read Byron’s anecdote and mulled over it, recasting it in a more distant historical context; many of his poems are inspired by such footnotes to history. Byron’s poetical works, as well as his letters (in English), were among the books in his personal library.

In one of the many ironic coincidences that attend the history of the Marbles, Byron was aboard the same vessel, the Hydra, as Elgin’s last shipment of Marbles when it left Greece in 1811. Also on board were Lusieri, and a teenager, Nicolo Giraud—a relation of Lusieri’s, perhaps his wife’s brother—with whom Byron had an intimate, almost certainly sexual, relationship.

The answers about local reaction given to the Committee by persons who were on the ground in Athens around the time of Elgin’s project vary. Philip Hunt, Elgin’s henchman and the initiator of the Marbles’ removal, responds when asked whether the removal caused “any discontent or sensation among the people of Athens,” “I had no personal knowledge that it did.”

In fact, Hunt himself records in a letter in July 1801, as the removals commenced, that the British consul in Athens, Spyridon Logothetes, was distinctly uneasy:

I found our consul extremely timid . . . As Archon of Athens, perhaps, he did not enter con amore into the idea of taking the sculptures from the Parthenon; and ventured to hint that the Voivode [the Ottoman governor of Athens] durst not extend the Firman to such a point.

For that matter, Hunt was in possession of a letter from January 1803, from Ioannes Benizelos (1735–1807), author of a History of Athens and a high-ranking member of Athenian society, regretting the Marbles’ removal. He writes to Hunt (in old-fashioned Greek) of “the last deplorable stripping of the Temple of Athena on the Acropolis . . . The temple is like a noble and wealthy lady who has lost all her diamonds and jewelry. Oh, how we Athenians must take this event to heart . . .” It is perhaps the first evidence in Greek of Greek uneasiness with the operation.

At the Committee, William Hamilton, who had been in Athens during some of the removals, replies to the question, “No unpleasant sensation whatever; they seemed rather to feel it as a means of bringing foreigners into the country, and of having money spent amongst them.” Once the Parthenon removals had ended, Lusieri, it should be pointed out, was still paying wages to dozens of local workmen for various archaeological excavations about Attica up until 1813.

John Bacon Sawrey Morritt, who had been in Athens in 1795, shortly before the operations, responded, “They were decidedly and strongly desirous that they should not be removed.” Morritt would be in a position to know, for he had tried to detach and carry off marbles from the Parthenon himself to Rokeby, his hall in Yorkshire; his redecoration plan was thwarted by the Turkish authorities. As he wrote in a letter from Athens at the time, “you are in a perfect gallery of marbles in these lands. Some we steal, some we buy, and our court is much adorned with them.” He adds, huffily, of his foiled plans for some metopes from the Parthenon: “Scruples of conscience had arisen in the mind of the old scoundrel [the Disdar] at the citadel.”¹

Of course, public opinion could shift in such a period, but the idea that the removal of the Marbles created no “sensation” among locals and residents is belied by several eyewitness accounts from the period of their removals in 1801 to 1803, and even some years after, from 1809 to 1810, the period when Byron first visited Athens. As John Galt writes in his autobiography, “the rape of the temples by Lord Elgin was at that time the theme of every English tongue that came to Athens.” This, of course, regards only the English visitors. Hobhouse (in Athens at the same period, traveling with Byron), though decidedly pro-Elgin—and an avid collector of ancient marble statues himself—agrees and expands this to include both Frankish (i.e., Western European) and Greek locals:

It was, however, during our stay [1809] in the place, to be lamented, that a war more than civil, was raging on the subject of my Lord Elgin’s pursuits in Greece, and had enlisted all the Frank settlers and the principal Greeks on one or the other side of the controversy.

Shortly thereafter, describing a tour of the Acropolis, he writes that he notices places in the marble that turn out to be “marks of the separation.” Mr. Lusieri “showed the places in the pediment whence the two female colossal statues, the Neptune, the Theseus, and the inimitable horse’s head, still remembered and regretted by all at Athens, had been removed.”

1. The Letters of John B. S. Morritt of Rokeby: Descriptive of Journeys in Europe and Asia Minor in the Years 1794–1796, ed. G. E. Marindin (London, 1914).

Turks and Greeks

The Memorandum advertises that Elgin, who had never been to Athens when he requested the firman—and whose total stay in Athens amounted to fifty-nine days—was concerned about the danger posed to the Marbles by the Turks. “Besides, it is well known,” asserts the author of the Memorandum, “that the Turks will frequently climb up the ruined walls, and amuse themselves in defacing any sculpture they can reach; or in breaking columns, statues, or other remains of antiquity, in the fond expectation of finding within them some hidden treasures.” Other accusations against the Turks include grinding down broken marbles for mortar and firing at the tympanum for sport.

Eyewitness accounts of English travelers (Clarke and Dodwell respectively) from the time of the Marbles’ removal insist, however, that the Turks regarded the building with reverence. In Clarke’s words:

Lusieri told us that it was with great difficulty he could accomplish this part of his undertaking, from the attachment the Turks entertained towards a building which they had been accustomed to regard with religious veneration, and had converted into a mosque.

Edward Dodwell, a young painter from a wealthy Irish family, writes in his Classical and Topographical Tour through Greece, after admitting that the Turks were indifferent to or would make use of marbles fallen from the building, adds that:

But the metopæ of the Parthenon were out of their [the Turks’] reach; and I never heard an instance of their firing at them, which it is said they did as an amusement. On the contrary, the Parthenon is regarded with respect not only by the Greeks but by the Turks; for it was dedicated to Saint George,¹ when it became a Christian church; and was converted into a mosque when Athens fell under the Turkish dominion.

Earlier, he wrote:

nor have I any hesitation in declaring, that the Athenians in general, nay, even the Turks themselves, did lament the ruin that was committed; and loudly and openly blamed their sovereign for the permission he had granted! I was on the spot at the time, and had an opportunity of observing, and indeed of participating, in the sentiment of indignation which such conduct universally inspired. The whole proceeding was so unpopular in Athens, that it was necessary to pay the labourers more than their usual profits before any could be prevailed upon to assist in this work of profanation.

Both Dodwell and Clarke, for all that they deplored the dismantling of the Parthenon and its subsequent forlorn spectacle, were themselves avid collectors of antiquities and had no compunction about acquiring separated or freestanding statuary. When Byron says, “I am not a collector,” we must understand him to be an unusual British traveler indeed! Elgin’s crime was perhaps, to Dodwell and Clarke, a matter of degree rather than kind, and of maiming a well-known monument, depriving future tourists of the pleasure of viewing and sketching it “intact.”

Clarke, for instance, had managed, with the help of Lusieri and bribes, to obtain permission to remove a statue of Demeter (now thought by archaeologists perhaps to represent a priestess of her cult) from Eleusis. This was, then, both “legal” and also morally repugnant. The locals honored it in the name of “Saint Demetra”: a saint otherwise unattested in Greek Orthodoxy. Arguably, this object has been “venerated over a longer continuous period than any other from the ancient world.”²

As “Eleusinian” Clarke, a Cambridge mineralogist, himself says of the Caryatid, “the inhabitants of the village still regard [it] with a very high degree of veneration. They attributed to its presence the fertility of their land; and it was for this reason that they heaped around it the manure intended for their fields.”

I found the goddess in a dunghill buried to her ears. The Eleusinian peasants, at the very mention of moving it, regarded me as one who would bring the moon from her orbit. What would become of their corn, they said, if the old lady with her basket was removed? I went to Athens, and made application to the Pacha, aiding my request by letting an English telescope glide between his fingers. The business was done.

This statue fragment comes up again and again in the accounts of travelers: Cornelio Magni mentions it in his travelogue of 1674—showing that even then it was thought worth a visit—and observes with wonder that sailors from Provence were wont to visit it and hail it as a fellow countrywoman.³

Clarke coveted it principally because others had failed to get it. He perhaps should not have been surprised when it was shipwrecked off Beachy Head (and had to be salvaged at great expense); the superstitious locals had predicted as much.

The colossal (Clarke estimated it weighed two tons) yet faceless statue fragment, torn from the fields, now sits, little remarked on by visitors, in a high alcove of the Greek and Roman Gallery at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.⁴

As Lusieri had put it in a letter to Elgin, “This fragment which is very much injured is more interesting to antiquaries than to artists.”

1. Dodwell is perhaps conflating accounts here—the Parthenon became a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary; the nearby temple of Theseion was dedicated to Saint George.

2. William St. Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles: The Controversial History of the Parthenon Sculptures, Third Revised Edition (Oxford, 1998).

3. Gratitude to Gregory Dowling for his translation.

4. Her sister Caryatid, excavated ninety years later and in a higher state of preservation, is a centerpiece of the newly-refurbished museum at Elefsina (Eleusis).

A Light-Filled Mosque

The Parthenon had been converted from a Roman Catholic church into a mosque in the 1460s, after Athens, until recently a Florentine duchy, was secured by Turahanoglu Ömer Bey for the Ottoman Empire. According to the Greek historian Michael Critobulus, when Mehmed the Conqueror, a “wise man and Philhellenist and great king,” entered the city, he admired the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and praised Athens as the “city of the philosophers.”¹

While I am ignorant of any firsthand Turkish assessments of the Parthenon from the early nineteenth century, we do have an eyewitness account of an Ottoman traveler in Greece around 1667–1669, when the building was still intact.

Evliya Çelebi, courtier, musician, explorer, travel writer, exclaimed of the “light-filled mosque” that there was “not such a resplendent mosque anywhere else on earth; because no matter how many times you enter it, you will always discover some new example of artistry and workmanship.” Of the dizzying array of sculptures, he wrote, “The human mind cannot indeed comprehend these images—they are white magic, beyond human capacity. One with the intellect of Aristotle would be dumbfounded at the sight of these statues and proclaim them a miracle, because to a discerning eye they seem to be alive.” He concludes with a prayer that the Parthenon “remain firm on its foundations until the end of time. Amen, O Helper of men!”²

1. Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (Princeton, 1978).

2. An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi, trans. and commentary by Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim (London, 2011).

Turks, Travelers, and Time

Only a handful of years after Çelebi’s visit, in 1674, we have an Italian account of what the still-in-one-piece monument looked like by Cornelio Magni, who was traveling with the French Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, the Marquis de Nointel. (The same party seems to have included the artist Jacques Carrey, whose detailed drawings of the Parthenon are among the only evidence we have for some elements, since destroyed.) Magni’s account describes the pediments—here he is on the Western pediment:

Above all these stands out the great simulacrum of a Jove with a ruined right hand, very broad legs, a sign that here must have been situated his Eagle. . . . In the middle of the Chariot, or Biga, Minerva sits majestically in a triumphant pose, followed by figures, some half-naked and some clothed, which form a jubilant procession.

Of the program of metopes depicting the war of the Lapiths and the centaurs, he remarks, “Many of these figures are whole, and others lack heads, arms, hands, legs and feet: but all those that remain are endowed with the art of miracle.” He deals out blame equally among time, Turks, and travelers for the damage some have suffered: “True it is that, from the devouring power of time, and the instability of Governments, and the blind superstition of the Turks, and the indiscreet curiosity of Foreigners, these great works are left so lacerated that . . . they bring tears to the eyes of those who, enchanted by such excellent manufactures, have a great veneration for their perfection and antiquity.”

The frieze on the walls of the cella (the Temple’s inner chamber) seemed, however, to be considerably more intact:

Between the interior order and the exterior of the Colonnades there rises a great wall of white marble well connected . . . encrusted by a frieze of bas-reliefs, on which one can see many Sacrifices, with an infinity of tiny figures, in very low relief but of perfect workmanship: these have been spared the injuries of the others . . . so that they remain more entire than the former.

This Italian account was only published in 1688, however, a year after Morosini’s “lucky shot” had reduced the Parthenon to ruin, scarcely twenty years after Evliya Çelebi had prayed for its foundation to stay firm forever.

“Detached Heads”

The knocking off of heads is a theme of the history of the Marbles. The catalogue of objects Elgin offered for sale contained a whole subsection of “Detached Heads,” with thirteen items, beginning with: “Portrait, larger than nature, with long beard and deeply cut eyes, a diadem round the hair; perhaps Sophocles.”

But the fate of a particular Marble head—the supposed head of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, mentioned in Pausanias—became a minor theme of the Committee proceedings. It was the focus of two questions—the alleged callous treatment of the Marbles by the Turkish authorities and the high antiquity of the Marbles.

It is first introduced in the testimony of Elgin’s private secretary, William Hamilton, who tosses off this anecdote at second hand: “I understood that one of the heads of the figures that are still left, was broken off by a Turk, and dashed in pieces on the marble pavement.”

In one of those curious coincidences that cluster around the Marbles, Hamilton also happens to be the man who took possession of the Rosetta stone in Egypt in 1801, as part of the Treaty of Alexandria with the defeated French. We think of the stone as displaying three scripts and two languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic Egyptian, and ancient Greek. But in fact there is a fourth script and third language (and second monarch) inscribed on it. Along the left- and right-hand edges of the stone, scarcely legible painted Latin characters announce in English: “Captured in Egypt by the British Army 1801” and “Presented by King George III.”

Lord Aberdeen, an avid antiquities collector (he appears to have attempted to acquire the frieze in Athens himself), was asked, “Was the head upon the second figure?” when he was there in 1803:

It was when I arrived at Athens, and was destroyed while I was there; I believe in the hope of selling it to some traveler, it had been knocked off, and falling on the pavement, was broken to pieces.

We have another account of this event altogether from Dodwell, who relates this in his A Classical and Topographical Tour through Greece, published in 1819, a few years after the Committee proceedings:

The head of the male figure in the western tympanon, which is said to have been knocked off by a Turk, is in my possession. I received it four years afterwards from a soldier of the garrison, who assured me that it was detached by a sailor, who was however neither a Greek nor a Turk; and the same thing was told me by the British agent, who was present at the time it was broken off.

Here we meet Dodwell the collector.

What a strange thought that this “head of Hadrian” is not smashed at all when the Committee is meeting, but is in someone else’s hands. The Committee admits this much in its own report: “The head of the emperor Hadrian still exists,” the report admits, confirming Dodwell’s own account and going some way to refute the charges of cavalier destruction by the Turks.

The head has since been lost. Presumably it still exists somewhere, perhaps among the random heads that languish in the storerooms of the museums.

Or perhaps it is to be found, heavy and unputdownable, in George Seferis’ poem Mythistorema:

I woke with this marble head in my hands.

Interlude: Washed Away

Lusieri, alone of all the travelers connected to Elgin, stayed on in Athens and eventually died there. He built himself a house on the northeastern side of the Acropolis, on Stratonos Street in the neighborhood now known as Anaphiotika. (In fact, his was one of the houses torn down to make housing for the workmen from Anafi who had migrated to Athens to construct King Othon’s palaces.) We know its precise location because it is marked on a map of Athens made in 1820, shortly before the Greek Revolution broke out, attributed to Kyriakos Pittakis, who would become Greece’s first Ephor of Antiquities.

Lusieri continued to excavate and dig up treasures for Elgin throughout the Attica region, keeping meticulous financial records of payments to workmen and landowners, but alas for archaeologists, few records of which things were found where. In 1807, however, when he had to flee Athens for a period of two years, the numerous treasures in his house were confiscated by the Voivode of Athens, and much of the collection sent to Ali Pasha. (Byron readers will remember Ali Pasha, the Lion of Ioannina, from the colorful description of his court in Childe Harold. He is also memorialized in a 15,000-line poem in the Greek vernacular, the Alipashiad, composed by his court poet, Haxhi Shehreti, an Albanian Muslim.)

Ali Pasha, in turn, intended to bestow some 120 of the Greek vases on Napoleon.¹

We know the details of Lusieri’s death, in 1821, just as the Greek Revolution was breaking out, second hand from the English poet and unfailingly generous poetic patron, Richard Monckton Milnes. Milnes, a persistent albeit failed suitor of Florence Nightingale and author both of such literary volumes as the Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats and erotica such as the pornographic Rodiad, on the pleasures of flagellation, writes about Lusieri’s death in a footnote to his 1834 Memorials of a Tour in Some Parts of Greece: Chiefly Poetical. He gives this account—perhaps apocryphal—as an example of the continued anger of the local population regarding Elgin’s actions:

Signor Lusieri, the active agent in this business [the removal of the Marbles], died by the breaking of a blood-vessel. The feeling of the people ran so high against him, that he thought it necessary to barricade his house at night, particularly as he lived quite alone. The day of his death, the neighbourhood, surprised at his non-appearance, forced the door, and found him extended on the floor, his blood about him, and a huge black cat seated on his breast, which the people to this day believe to have been the avenging spirit, the punisher of his crimes, or else the form assumed by his own black soul; according to this latter notion, the animal was instantly killed.

(This beast met a very different fate from Morosini’s beloved cat, Nini. After its death, Morosini affectionately had Nini embalmed, along with a mouse between its paws, to carry on its favorite pastime in the afterlife. Nini and his or her mouse are still on display at the Museum of Natural History in Venice.)

Lusieri had been a successful painter when he met Elgin and, at forty-five, already in his prime. He would later muse that, had he not begun working for Elgin, he might have achieved fame as a major artist.

Lusieri’s bad luck dogged him even after his death: most of his Greek watercolors sank to the bottom of the sea—half a life’s work washed away—in 1828 with the HMS Cambrian, a ship that had seen action at the pivotal Battle of Navarino. His gravestone of Pentelic marble can be found in the garden of St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Athens, on the Street of the Philhellenes, where it weathers, with its almost illegible Latin inscription, eroding to anonymity, propped in a corner.

1. Tatiana Poulou, “Giovanni Battista Lusieri, Lord Elgin’s Unknown Agent and His Excavations in Athens,” 200 Years: The Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum, New contributions to the issue (Athens, 2016).

Mercouri

In 1981, the actress and singer Melina Mercouri (1920–1994), perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for her starring role in her husband Jules Dassin’s film Never on Sunday (ironically, perhaps, a story about the corrupt decadence of modern Greece viewed from the standpoint of an anglophone philhellene), became, under the PASOK government, Greece’s first female culture minister; she would also become its longest serving, surviving all of Andreas Papandreou’s many cabinet reshuffles.

On July 29, 1982, she kicked off her campaign on the world stage for the return of the Marbles, addressing the International Conference on Cultural Policies, organized by UNESCO in Mexico. Her moving speech checked such boxes as Elgin’s idealism-cum-condescension, patriotic fable, Byron’s friend Hobhouse, and the great Greek poet of the Left, Yiannis Ritsos. (“These stones cannot make do with less sky.”)

The Greeks loved her for this campaign and activism, quite apart from her acting; the Acropolis Metro Station is decorated with a famous photograph of her holding a summer bouquet, standing below the Parthenon on the Acropolis, so that she seems of a piece with one of the sturdy corner columns. In her fawn-colored trench coat, the same pale tawny color as the Pentelic marbles, with her weathered statuesque beauty, she could be a Caryatid on holiday, letting the wind run through her faded blonde hair and clutching the fresh flowers of the eternally recurring Greek spring.

The entrance of the Acropolis Metro Station, one of the newer ones—the original line of the Athens Metro was begun roughly the same time as the London Tube—boasts casts of some of the statues of the east pediment, while in the ticket hall there is a hugely enlarged copy of a watercolor from 1836 by Bavarian engineer Wilhelm von Weiler which shows the old Makriyannis Military Hospital (one of Athens’ first Neoclassical buildings, and which von Weiler himself had designed), with the Acropolis and Parthenon in the background—you can see the since-demolished Frankish tower and just make out the little mosque. In the middle ground, soldiers in fezzes are helping a wounded veteran (complete with turban and fustanella) of the recent War of Independence, and in the foreground, staffage in the form of a charmingly exotic group of women in native dress and camels. (The Acropolis Museum stands next to the Military Hospital and the Weiler Building, which now serves as administrative offices.) Along the corridor of the train platform runs a copy of the northern and the western frieze, containing blocks from both the British and Acropolis Museums. I have spent more time meditating on the frieze in that station as I wait for a train than in any book or museum. I have a favorite block, W XII, the one where a horse is scratching its muzzle on its near fetlock. This block, as it happens, resides not in London, but in Athens; it is one Keats never saw.

In Mercouri’s later speech at the Oxford Union, similar to the UNESCO one, she makes her case for their return, relating two anecdotes; one concerning the Parthenon during the Greek War of Independence, and one an anecdote from Byron’s traveling companion John Cam Hobhouse.

During the War of Independence, she relates, “The Turkish soldiers besieged on the Acropolis ran short of ammunition. They began to attack the great columns to extract lead to make bullets. The Greeks sent them ammunition with the message: ‘Here are bullets, don’t touch the columns.’” This is the sort of patriotic fable that is easy enough to dismiss as just that, and historians have tended to doubt its veracity from the get-go; the first version of this story appears only some forty years after the alleged events.

But Hobhouse is an unlikely ally to invoke for the return or reuniting of the Marbles, as, even though a friend of Byron and staunch supporter of Greek independence, he was also sympathetic to Elgin’s cause and one of Elgin’s earliest apologists.

In Hobhouse’s two-volume memoir, A Journey Through Albania, and Other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, During the Years 1809 and 1810 (1813), he vigorously defends Elgin, and the British, from the charges of unscrupulous acquisition of the Marbles in a ten-paragraph note. Hobhouse adds, however, “Yet I cannot forbear mentioning a singular speech of a learned Greek of Ioannina, who said to me, ‘You English are carrying off the works of the Greeks our forefathers—preserve them well—we Greeks will come and re-demand them.’”¹ Hobhouse’s account is nearly contemporary with events, and he not only has no reason to lie, he has many reasons to omit it.

It is of course this anecdote that Mercouri uses in her UNESCO Parthenon speech, fulfilling in effect the old man’s prophecy. But she adds a coloring phrase, the learned Greek of Ioannina had made this remark “in a voice trembling with bitterness.”

Interestingly, if one goes searching for the Ritsos quotation from the UNESCO speech, one will not find this exact line in his poems at all. Instead, she seems to be mis-remembering and conflating the first two lines of his important poem “Romiosini” (a difficult to translate word meaning in effect “Greekness,” but a Greekness of a distinctly non-Western cast):

These trees cannot make do with less sky.

These stones cannot make do under foreign footsteps.

Or in the 1972 translation by N. C. Germanacos:

these stones are not content beneath an alien heel.

1. If I had to guess, I would say the Learned Greek of Ioannina is almost certainly the esteemed schoolmaster Athanasius Psalidas, whom Hob-house and Byron met and conversed with there. Byron refers to him in a note to Childe Harold as being in “high repute” among the Greek “literati,” and Hobhouse mentions Psalidas as being in possession of the only library “though a small one” they saw.

“Memorably to Camera”

Mercouri’s campaign for the Marbles’ return (now many prefer to talk about “reuniting” rather than “returning” them) tends somehow to embarrass English speakers; media accounts characterize her as “feisty” and “emotive.” Professor Mary Beard (a current British Museum Trustee) describes Mercouri’s 1983 visit to the British Museum as weeping “memorably to camera” and equates this with the celebrated tragedienne Mrs. Siddons “predictably (and histrionically)” weeping on viewing the Marbles when they first arrived in England.

I would add, however, that although it is fair to assume that the celebrated and formidable Mrs. Siddons did visit the Marbles, which were the talk of the town, the suggestion that she wept while doing so (much less “predictably” or “histrionically”) stems as far as I know only from a description in Elgin’s own propagandistic, hyperbolic, and ghost-written Mem o randum, as a sort of testimonial:

It may be added, on the subject of these impressions and opinions, that one of the groups of female statues so rivetted and agitated the feelings of Mrs. Siddons, the pride of theatrical representation, as actually to draw tears from her eyes.

This is the only source I can track down, and all others, including A. H. Smith’s important “Lord Elgin and His Collection,”¹ point back to this quotation in the Memorandum. People do of course sometimes weep when encountering art, and we have many accounts of people feeling overwhelmed—Keats’s poetic swoon, for instance—in the presence of the Marbles; it seems eminently plausible. (And Mrs. Siddons was famously emotive.) But what interests me is that with each iteration this anecdotal encounter becomes stagier and more dramatic; as of this writing, Sarah Siddons’ Wikipedia page casually asserts that the actress was most famous for playing Lady Macbeth—(Haydon describes attending one of her private readings from the play)—and for “fainting at the sight of the Elgin marbles in London.” Fainting? The footnote leads back to Hunt and Smith.

One can track down some brief footage of Mercouri from a BBC documentary, touching a horse of the frieze, with a tear glittering in her eye. As the Chicago Tribune describes it: “Mercouri also paid a dramatic visit to the British Museum and—in the best theatrical tradition—stroked a horse on the frieze with tears in her eyes and told reporters jostling around her the marbles were in ‘beautiful exile’ in London.”² But then what I find are increasingly outlandish scenarios, such as archaeologist (and staunch Marbles “remainer”) Dorothy King’s anecdote from 2004:

In 1981, the Greek actress Melina Mercouri decided she wanted to enter politics. She was advised to find a national cause to champion, so she turned up at the British Museum, camera crew in tow, and demanded that the Elgin Marbles be returned to Greece. . . .

Mercouri, ever the diva, threw herself on her knees in a gallery at the museum and kissed the floor, proclaiming her love of the Parthenon. A curator, ever the English gentleman, helped her up, whispering: “These are beautiful sculptures, Mrs. Mercouri, but the Elgin Marbles are in the next room.”

This is a story that is “too good to check” (in the parlance of journalists) but absurd and easy to disprove. Mercouri knew the Duveen Gallery well; she had filmed a vital scene from the 1962 film Phaedra, directed by her future husband Jules Dassin, in the Duveen Gallery, only just reopened. In it she can be seen gazing at Anthony Perkins (the Hippolytus to her Phaedra) against the backdrop of the Dionysus figure; her eyes brim with something inscrutable: melancholy, wariness, submerged desire. The Duveen Gallery serves here, as the Elgin Saloon did in Victorian literature, as a conveniently anonymous place for a public-meeting-cum-private-assignation, with the added irony of a Greek woman abroad in a room with displaced Greek sculpture. Dimoula’s Caryatid and Dionysus seem almost to prefigure the scene.

Anthony Perkins in still from Phaedra. 1962, directed by Jules Dassin.

In a BBC film about the Marbles, Mercouri can be seen informally debating (with passion and exasperation, but no tears) with the director Sir David Wilson, who insists she will ruin the British Museum. “It is part of a monument, a unique monument!” she exclaims of the Parthenon. “There are many unique monuments,” Wilson begins, before Mercouri exclaims, incredulously, “There are many Parthenons in the world?!” (I am put in mind again, with the startling plural, of Dimoula’s “Parthenons and Erechtheions.”)

That Mercouri might have been genuinely moved instead of (or as well as) playing to the camera is for some reason unthinkable. Is it that she was a celebrity dabbling in politics, a fading movie star, a woman of a certain age, a lecturing matron? Of course, Mercouri was not, it might be pointed out, a dabbler in politics—she came from a political family; her grandfather was a mayor of Athens, her father an MP and public order minister: “I think that I was a political animal from when I was a very young girl, and I drank the political milk from my mother.” Her tomb, topped with an austere Neoclassical stele, overshadows Papandreou’s own in Athens’ exclusive First Cemetery.

Duveen Gallery. Room 18. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The campaign was treated, at any rate, with sarcasm by Sir David Wilson, then Director of the British Museum, who dryly likened her request to visit the Marbles in an official capacity to a burglar preparing to “case the joint.” (A nod, no doubt, to her role in the Academy-Award winning 1964 museum heist film Topkapi, in which she played a cat burglar and jewel thief—not unlike “Taters” Chatham—who robs the Topkapi Palace of the emerald-encrusted dagger of Sultan Mahmud I.) In a televised debate with her, he accused her of “cultural fascism.”

Mercouri had had, of course, direct experience of genuine fascism. She had been in her early twenties when Greece was occupied by the Nazis, and her father founded a resistance organization. An Athenian, she would have witnessed the Nazis enter Athens in 1941. She would have seen the flag with the Nazi swastika flying on the Acropolis in front of the Parthenon and would have rejoiced when two young men, Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas, scaled the rock and tore it down. She would have experienced the bitter-cold famine winter of 1941–42 in which tens of thousands of her fellow Athenians died of starvation.

But her memories of fascism would have been even more recent than that. Just over a decade before, Greece had been under a right-wing military dictatorship (1967–1974); Mercouri, in self-imposed exile during the Junta, was stripped of her citizenship for her outspoken criticism of the regime. She had famously retorted: “I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek. Those bastards were born fascists and they will die fascists.”

Occupying Germans hoist a war flag over the Acropolis in 1941. (Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-165-0419-19A Photo: Bauer)

For Mercouri, the Acropolis and its temples and ornaments were beloved cultural artifacts, but also symbols of the birth and, maybe more importantly, the rebirth, of Democracy.

In 1986, Mercouri would give her speech at the Oxford Union, complete with the bullets anecdote and Hobhouse’s man from Ioannina (now merely a “heart-sick Greek man”). Mercouri had been invited to Oxford by a student of Classics sympathetic to her cause, a charmingly glib Homer-quoting fellow with a mop of white-blond hair by the name of Boris Johnson. In order to make the after party “go with a swing,” he wrote to the Greek Embassy’s press attaché, “we are in search of cheap ouzo and retsina,” adding, “I was informed it might be feasible to obtain it through the embassy. Could you possibly advise?”³

1. A. H. Smith, “Lord Elgin and His Collection,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 36, 1916, pp. 163–372.

2. Katerina Syrimi, “Greece to Britain: Return Our ‘Soul,’” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1985.

3. Helena Smith, “Letters Show How Boris Johnson Backed Return of Parthenon Marbles,” The Guardian, July 3, 2022.

Losing the Marbles

Mercouri and her “vociferous” campaign are one of the irritants around which James Merrill’s long, late poem, “Losing the Marbles,” empearls its nacreous layers. I was reminded by the sculptor Meredith Bergmann, in her astute and rewarding reading of the poem “‘Losing the Marbles’: Merrill and Sophrosyne,”¹ that Merrill himself gives us the 1985 origin story of the poem in his Collected Prose:

. . . we were talking about memory lapses, a topic increasingly relevant to everyone present. John Brinnin quoted Lady Diana Duff Cooper, who stayed young and beautiful for nearly ninety years. It seems that whenever a fact or a name slipped her mind, she would shrug and say cheerfully, “Oh well—another marble gone!” In a flash the image of the Acropolis in Athens appeared on my inner screen, and with it the history of Lord Elgin in the early nineteenth century, removing and carrying off to London most of the Parthenon sculptures. I remembered that individual consciousness had virtually begun in Greece; I thought of the periodic angry efforts made by the modern Greek government to get the marbles back from England and so forth . . . I suspected that I’d presently find myself embarked upon “Losing the Marbles” and shamelessly said so . . . For my birthday a month later one of that evening’s guests gave me a little bag of marbles from the supermarket. That present in turn gave me the last section of my poem.

Merrill (1926–1995), a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, and son of a founding partner of Merrill Lynch, lived in Athens from 1962 to 1972, the last five of those years under Greece’s military dictatorship. In his long poem in seven sections (which progress from morning till night), “Losing the Marbles,” Merrill spins a meditation on memory and mortality out of that oldest joke about the Marbles.

Talking about forgetfulness and death (“These latter years, Charmides, / Will see the mind eroded featureless”)—the AIDS crisis and AIDS dementia loom in the background—the speaker and an old friend exchange ideas of “heaven.” Merrill’s is:

. . . to be an acrobat in Athens

Back when the Parthenon—

Its looted nymphs and warriors pristine

By early light or noon light—dwelt

Upon the city like a philosopher,

Who now—well, you have seen.

Much of the Marbles debate in poetry and prose is telescoped here. Merrill is matter-of-fact that the Marbles are “looted.” “Nymphs” is a curious choice for the virgins and matrons of the frieze, or the Amazons or Lapith women for that matter, or even the goddesses of the pediments. But it makes sense as a sort of shorthand and effortlessly collapses Keats’s “Grecian Urn” with the Marbles, as Keats’s imagination had no doubt done too. “Pristine” is a lovely word here, I think, not cold chastity or white purity, but having a sense at once of freshness and ancientness, unspoiled, original. The philosopher here, given that the addressed person in the poem is dubbed “Charmides,” must be Socrates, as the nod is to Plato’s dialogue. And acrobat? Merrill seems to be walking up along the architrave, in danger, as the Marbles were once Morosini had made a ruin of the Temple, of succumbing to gravity.

Like Keats’s Elgin sonnet, the poem is a meditation on mortality and art, on the eternal and the rude wasting of old time; in addition, it is about erosion and forgetfulness as a kind of surprising grace. The puns come thick and multiva-lent in the first section:

These dreamy blinkings-out

Strike me as grace, if I may say so,

Capital punishment,

Yes, but of utmost clemency at work,

Whereby the human stuff, ready or not,

Fumbles, one last drum-roll, into thyme . . .

“Capital” punishment is many things at once—“capital!” as an approving adjective and a nod to the capitals of columns, reinforced by the second pun of “drum-roll” (circus imagery also pervades) itself tumbling into the pungent pun of thyme and time. And its usual sense of fatality is there too, but in a sort of paradox, since the dreamy blinkings-out are here a kind of “clemency,” a stay of execution.

Mercouri’s campaign is referred to in the first section without yet naming her personally; rather it is the reaction of the raging Athens press, “Breathing fire to get the marbles back.”

Sections three and five present, first, a lacunose poem supposedly found in a papyrus, as though fragments of Sappho, and then the poem completely restored. So in the fragmentary version—Merrill’s “erasure” of his own poem—the subject is the body, but also “scornful . . . Ch[arm]ides”—here the charming and statuesque Charmides, briefly dis-armed, like a male Venus de Milo, becomes instead “Chides.” When the poem is fully restored (in elaborate syllabic stanzas reminiscent of Greek lyric meters), the Charmides stanza stands thus:

he had joined an elite scornful—as were, Charmides, your first, chiseled verses—of decrepitude in any form. Now, however, that their figures also

Although not, at first glance, directly about the Marbles, they are, in a Keatsian way, about the pregnant possibilities of fragment and the limitations of perfection. Peering closer, we do see nods to Marbles and statuary. Charmides’ verses are, as Charmides’ Platonic beauty was, “chiseled,” and this poem ends with a reference to “harbor, palace, temple, all / having been quarried out of those blue foothills.”

Section four, between the fragmentary and restored poem, is more directly affected by the Greek news.

Besides, Art furnishes a counterfeit

Heaven wherein ideas escape the fate

Their loyal adherents—brainwashed, so to speak,

By acid rain—more diatribes in Greek—

Conspicuously don’t. . . .

“[B]rainwashed . . . By acid rain” reminds us of the “mind,” those Marbles at the beginning that will be “eroded featureless.”

By the ’70s and ’80s, acid rain in Athens was a serious concern for those sculptures remaining on the Acropolis, as the acidity made the surface of hard marble brittle and crumbly; in 1979, the remaining five Caryatids were removed from the Erechtheion and placed in the protective environment of the old Acropolis Museum, then located on the Acropolis itself. The elements of the western frieze that remained on the Temple (the first two of the sixteen blocks were removed by Elgin) were given a sheltering cover in 1978 and finally removed from the building in 1992 and 1993.

“[D]iatribes in Greek” refers, of course, to the Greek media breathing fire for the Marbles’ return, the rude rants and hectoring lectures. But it is also worth noting that “diatribe” is itself a conspicuously Greek word, διατριβή, which now means dissertation or thesis, but that Plato uses for “discussion,” in the sense of passing—or maybe frittering—the time away. (Remember that Merrill had been living in Greece and in Greek.) “Diatribe” comes from “dia-tribe”—to rub through. A diatribe is, in and of itself, a kind of erosion. For διατριβή, the standard lexicon Liddell and Scott gives for its first definition: “A wearing away, esp. of Time”—time wasting—the rude wasting of old time.

The “diehard few” who embark on the QE2 for London, where they can drop by Bloomsbury and the British Museum, consider their own lost marbles

Of long ago, removed and mute, like stars

(Unlike vociferous Melina, once

A star herself, now Minister of Stunts).

This is the kind of satirical heroic couplet, gleefully snide and ending on the twist of an ingenious rhyme that Byron might have exulted in. The faded movie-star-cum-drama-queen has joined the circus of acrobats and funambulists, and if Mercouri is past her prime, it is worth remembering that Merrill is only a handful of years younger. Their lives nearly overlap, and they will die within a year of one another.

“Between the elegiac and the haywire”—Merrill contemplates almost from a place outside of space and time as the marble is laying down its crystalline structures, “shifting dregs of would-be rock” that might contain “Glints of a future colonnade and frieze”:

Do higher brows unknit within the block,

And eyes whose Phidias and Pericles

Are eons hence make out through crystal skeins

Wind-loosened tresses and the twitch of reins?

The punniest phrase in the poem is perhaps its most central:

All stone once dressed asks to be worn.

This is a kind of palindromic or chiasmic pun—“dress” doing double duty one way (worked and appareled), and “worn” doing double duty the other way (arrayed and abraded). From the moment the Parthenon and its ornaments were sculpted and erected and put on public view, at the time as much an expression of Athenian imperial might as democracy, they are destined to erode and fade and disintegrate, even if it be over millennia. Merrill seems to go beyond the idea of museumization of the Marbles or the campaign for their return; what Merrill seems to want is that the Marbles be both as they were before, that is, left in situ and never removed, and allowed to erode, even in the acid rain, as he also seems to accept the “grace,” the amnesty, of amnesia.

The sixth section presents a scholar filling in the lacunae of a fragmented text, the gaps themselves a kind of lapse of memory:

Then filled the sorry spaces

With pattern and intent,

A syntax of lit faces

From the impediment?

Only in Merrill, and only in such a poem, could an impediment also be a pediment.

The recovered words of the poem also seem somehow to be conflated with the looted Marbles, which are recovered at the same time. He imagines the triumphant return of the “belated Few,” which are forgotten words, or faces of lost friends, but also the Marbles, returned to Athens, “acrobat” reappearing as “saltimbanques”:

No matter these belated

Few at least are back. And thanks

To their little adventure, never so

Brimming with jokes and schemes,

Fussed over, fêted

By all but their fellow saltimbanques—

The seventh section seems the least to do with the Marbles, even though it is to do with marbles, both mental and physical. A friend remembers his joke (borrowed from Lady Duff Cooper) and brings Merrill a bag of children’s marbles for his birthday. Yet the ending, poolside, far from Athens, somehow manages to restore all the Marbles to the Temple, if not the mind:

Here and now were becoming a kind of heaven

To sit in, talking, largely mindless of

The risen, cloudy brilliances above.

The poem comes full circle: we are reminded that Merrill’s heaven was to be back when the Parthenon was pristine and philosophers conversed—such as older Socrates with the beautiful youth Charmides. That ancient past is now conflated with the here and now, which becomes its own temple. The risen, cloudy brilliances could be stars, perhaps the Milky Way, in the heavens, but at the same time are perhaps the Marbles, restored to their original brilliance and, in a rewinding of time’s palindrome, risen back to their pediments and the cella walls.

Merrill manages in the imagination to do what Mercouri fails in her lifetime to accomplish, not only bringing the Marbles back and reuniting them, but setting them against the Attic heavens.

1. Meredith Bergmann, “‘Losing the Marbles’: Merrill and Sophrosyne,” Contemporary Poetry Review, December 2, 2013.

The White Line

As with all complex achieved works of art, there are resonances and ironies in Merrill’s poem that extend beyond the frame of the poem. If the Marbles, especially the frieze, are the images that animate the background of this poem, the text he has taken for his sermon on grace and forgetfulness is, of course, Plato’s dialogue Charmides, which concerns “sophrosyne”—self-restraint, modesty, measure. That Mercouri’s “vociferous” demands seem instead immoderate—and certainly the Athenian press lacks, then as now, any restraint—is part of the conscious point of the juxtapositions.

But did Merrill consider any further irony of the Charmides? The dialogue, though set in the present tense, depicts a past event; Socrates has just returned from the Battle of Potidaea, which Plato’s readers would know as a harbinger of the Peloponnesian War that would end Athens’ hegemony. (Among the inscriptions Elgin removed from Athens, from those that had been collected in the courtyard of the British Consul, where they were serving to decorate a fountain, was one bearing the names of the Athenians who fell at the Battle of Potidaea.)

Plato’s readers would also know that the young and beautiful Charmides—Plato’s uncle, in fact, on his mother’s side—here quizzed on his self-restraint by Socrates—would in time become one of the ten governors of the Piraeus who in 404–03 assisted the Thirty Tyrants in forming their own junta over an Athens defeated by oligarchic Sparta. Although a touch-stone dialogue for homoerotic desire, it is also an ironic essay on power and the fragility of democracy. For Plato, the Parthenon was not a ruin, it still glittered new and intact on the holy rock; but the Athens of Pericles, who had himself died of plague early in the war, certainly was.

Looking back at Plato (as Merrill perhaps intends us to), I am also struck by something earlier in the short passage where Socrates compares the beautiful youth to a statue. Just as Charmides enters, Socrates remarks (here in the translation of Rosamund Kent Sprague):

You mustn’t judge by me, my friend. I’m a broken yardstick as far as handsome people are concerned, because practically everyone of that age strikes me as beautiful.

This is true of course of middle age—I feel that way myself—how do the young not realize how beautiful they are? Benjamin Jowett’s 1892 translation, however, is closer to the Greek, and to the point:

Now you know, my friend, that I cannot measure anything, and of the beautiful, I am simply such a measure as a white line is of chalk; for almost all young persons appear to be beautiful in my eyes.

Socrates talks of measurement not just of beautiful people, but of “the beautiful.” His judgment that all young persons are beautiful to him is exactly the pitch of age looking back upon erotic beauty that Merrill strikes in his poem.

Jowett also explicates the slightly obscure proverb—as Sprague attempts to do with her “broken yardstick”—but even he very slightly misses the mark. The line (στάθμη) in question is specifically the line that is drawn against a carpenter’s rule or mason’s square. If the mark is white, as it is here, it is useless when measuring, as the scholiasts remind us, not chalk, but white marble, that is to say, Parian or Pentelic marble, a costly material where exact measurement is important both practically and economically: measure twice, cut once. Further, there is the word ἀτεχνῶς, not fully picked up in any of the translations—“simply,” yes, but in the sense of “artless,” “without skill”—without “techne,” the know-how of the craftsman. “I am as artless as a white mark on white marble.” The diction and imagery of the passage have to do not only with sculpture, but also with the stoneworker’s shop (one thinks back to Byron’s “stone shop”). Hardly surprising when we remember that Socrates’ father, Sophroniscus (the name, which might be translated “little man of moderation,” “Soberman,” is closely related to sophrosyne, the subject of the Charmides dialogue) was, according to later biographies, a stonecutter, mason, or marble worker. Socrates himself was supposed to have been a stonecutter before taking to philosophy to earn his bread; this proverb from the stone shop seems, therefore, delightfully apt.

If I may be allowed a step further, Socrates’ father, in the previous generation, could quite plausibly have overlapped with, and therefore conceivably worked on, Pericles’ Parthenon building project; Socrates evidently knew Pericles’ circle through his father’s connections. The Parthenon would, after all, have been the principal work in Athens for stone-cutters, masons, and sculptors, painters, engineers, riggers, teamsters, muleteers, and others, not only for the decade and a half, between 447 and 432 BC, when the Acropolis was erected and decorated. (The Temple was completed in a jaw-dropping nine years; the ornaments took only another five to finish. Compare the restoration of the Parthenon, which has been ongoing since the mid-’70s.) “[F]ull employment,” as Connelly reminds us, would have continued through the construction of the Propylaia, the Erechtheion, and the Temple of Athena Nike, “thanks to Perikles’s vision . . . well past his death, into the last decade of the fifth century.” (One thinks forward to how Elgin’s agents become major employers in Athens in the nineteenth century, this time for the Temple’s partial dismantling.)

And there is the further curious coincidence that this Charmides shares a name with the father of Phidias, master sculptor/designer of the frieze; presumably they were not kin, but it is hard not to shake that the connection is felt somehow, perhaps in the simile. Certainly Oscar Wilde seems to pick up on these various adumbrations in his long, bizarre, erotic poem, “Charmides,” about a Greek youth who rapes a virginal statue of Athena, a literalizing, perhaps, of the metaphor of Elgin’s “rape” (in the words of John Galt) of the Temple.

Old Drums

Another American poet, W.D. Snodgrass (1926–2009), writing a decade before Merrill’s “Losing the Marbles,” expressed in his poem “Coming Down from the Acropolis” an anxiety about the symbolism of the Temple and the Marbles as celebrating Democracy to the tourists, even while Greece remained under an oppressive dictatorship, the Military Junta of 1967–1974. “Of course the temple roof is gone; its stone images / Stripped,” he remarks, placing no blame on Venetians or Scots. The cradle of Democracy is infantilized, reduced to a domestic image: “White marble, ordinate and clean as /

Nursery furniture.” Snodgrass, like many Greek poets of the twentieth century, deplored the detritus of tourism around the sacred rock, observing “Cigar butts underfoot, / Used Kodak wrappers, orange peels, old drums of marble.” (Compare Nicholas Calas’s 1933 poem “Acropolis,” translated by David Ricks: “Nothing to be seen round here / but straight fallen columns / of marble or others / of roll-film, Agfa, Kodak.” He then further conflates those tubes of negatives with the cylindrical cannons of Morosini.)

In the conclusion of the poem, Snodgrass manages to telescope a history of Athenian decline, from Pericles’ Golden Age to Athens’ loss of hegemony after the disastrous Peloponnesian war, and its period under oligarchy and tyrants, a history that would have been all too familiar to Plato—who, born in democracy, would be sold into slavery in his old age—while criticizing Snodgrass’s own complicit government:

In those public squares where excellence defined itself,

Impotent crowds brag of their freedom, argue policy;

They cringe under a tyrant-clown propped up in place

By our own CIA. How quick, how easy the decline,

How quickly they forgot, hot for a different vision.

They chose and, choosing, took the thief, the liar,

And felt at home with that. Phidias, whose hand carved it,

Died in their jails. They turned from Pericles, turned

On their own; Greek fought with Greek or sold

His skills to strangers, to his enemies. And all the time,

We both knew that our own state would choose the same.

Yet by the time this poem appeared as a broadside (in 1976), democracy had in fact been restored. The funeral of George Seferis in 1971, in the Plaka neighborhood beneath the Acropolis near where Byron and Lusieri had resided, attended by thousands who sang his poem, “Denial,” which has been set to music by Theodorakis and had become a cryptic anthem of resistance, was an indication of swelling public discontent. By 1974, the Junta had collapsed. But it is worth keeping in mind that is in the light of fragile democratic renewal that the Parthenon and its Marbles meant so much to a voluble culture minister, Melina Mercouri. Only Greeks born since 1974 have lived a life entirely unshadowed by dictatorship.

PART IV

Bullets, Again

In 1832, only sixteen years after the Select Committee, the city of Athens would belong to the new nation of Greece. In 1834, Greece’s teenaged philhellene King Othon (the Hellenized name for Otto of Bavaria) would choose the modest town of Athens (with a population of a mere 4,000 souls) as the new capital. In the same year, the Greek parliament passed an innovative law declaring that “all antiquities within Greece, as works of the ancestors of the Hellenic people, shall be regarded as national property of all Hellenes in general.” A movement to protect antiquities had begun earlier, however, even before the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1821. Dodwell (1819) writes that

The Constantinopolitan patriarch has been induced by the Greeks, who are fondly anticipating the regeneration of their country, to issue circular orders to all the Greeks not to disturb any ancient remains; and neither to assist nor connive at their destruction nor removal, under pain of excommunication.

The first Ephor of Antiquities in the new Greek state was none other than Kyriakos Pittakis, the Greek fighter who is the subject of Melina Mercouri’s “here are bullets, don’t touch the columns” anecdote.

The bullets story—which may well be a political fable à la George Washington and the cherry tree—first appears in 1859 (nearly forty years after the supposed events) in a letter from the writer and politician Aristotelis Valaoritis to the poet Andreas Laskatos, in which anecdote the Greeks are under the command of the leader Odysseus Androutsos (incidentally the brother-in-law of Byron’s colorful associate, John Trelawny, who had married Androutsos’s thirteen-year-old sister). Androutsos, however, was not yet in Athens at that time.

The anecdote is popularized in 1863 by Alexandros Rangavis, a poet, politician, and professor of archaeology, in the funeral oration for his frenemy and colleague, Kyriakos Pittakis, and in which Pittakis is the hero of the story. A crucial difference, though, is that Pittakis was indeed present at the historical siege.

If the story is apocryphal, let us say it is an allegory; that even if it is not literally true, it conveys a truth. That Pittakis was a veteran of the siege is true; that he was anxious for the columns is also. He oversaw the first reconstruction of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis (the Porch of the Maidens had been badly damaged in the second siege of 1826–1827) and the reconstruction of Mycenae’s famed Lion Gate, a monument, like the Parthenon, of grandeur and weighty antiquity.

Richard Monckton Milnes’s account in 1834 of an Athens after the revolution, of a free Athens in the nascent nation state, seems to support elements of the bullet anecdote:

[O]ne can scarcely judge what the effect will be when the layers of stone, which have been thrown down for the sake of the lead which attacht them together, are again erected into columns and the miserable mosque in the middle swept away.

Milnes also bemoans the insults to the Caryatids and Erechtheion made by foreign travelers—especially British midshipmen (“they come actually armed with chisels for the purpose”), taking souvenirs, he claims, of an ear or a nose, or parts of the Erechtheion frieze. (No one would appreciate the susceptibility of noses to insult and ruination more than Elgin.) “Now that Athens is once more Greek, let us hope that these things will be put a stop to.”

He speaks with some hope of “Signor Pettachi [Pittakis], to whose intelligence the government has intrusted [sic] the antiquities of Athens” and who “has discovered, and concealed from the barbarian occupants, many important specimens [of fallen statuary] in his daily walks on the acropolis, and which will now see the sun.”

As for the learned man of Ioannina, surely there were cultured and educated Greeks who cared for the antiquities, but what about illiterate peasants?

As it happens, we do have a story about an illiterate peasant and ancient statues, and in his own voice. Yannis Makriyannis—John Longjohn, as it were—(1797–1864), was born into a poor family; at seven, he was sent to a rich man as a foster child, who put him to work and beat him. He joined the fight for Greek independence in 1821, eventually becoming one of its leading generals. He suffered lifelong injuries from when he was in charge of defending the besieged Acropolis in 1826. But he is known as much for his contribution to Greek literature as for his military exploits. In 1829, he began to write his famous memoirs, a project he would continue working on until 1850. He taught himself to write, producing a “pure Demotic,” unspoiled by the fussy artificial Greek taught in schools, in crude phonetic Greek without capitals, diacritical marks, word spaces or punctuation—in fact, something like early Greek inscriptions. (His Memoirs begin, “For I am illiterate and cannot keep order in my writings.”) Yet the Nobel laureate George Seferis (1900–1971) reckoned Makriyannis the greatest prose stylist of Modern Greek. Seferis relates one of Makriyannis’ anecdotes of the war:

“I had two wonderful statues,” he also notes, “a woman and a young prince, intact—you could see their veins they were so perfect. When they sacked Poros, some soldiers had taken them and were to sell them in Argos to some Europeans; they were asking for one thousand talara . . . I took the soldiers aside and spoke to them: ‘Even if they give you ten thousand talara, don’t allow for these statues to leave our homeland. These are what we fought for.’ (II 303)

“You understand,” Seferis points out. “This isn’t Lord Byron, or a scholar or an archaeologist talking; this is the son of Roumeli shepherds, his body covered in wounds.”

Perhaps Elgin’s exploits are one of the many catalysts for the valuing of antiquities in Greece, by locals and foreigners alike—Makriyannis was only four years old when the sculptures started to come down. But it is clear that this memoir, not finished in Makriyannis’ lifetime and published only in 1907 (the second volume in 1983), is not a performance for Westerners.

Seferis himself, as many modern Greek writers, can feel an ambivalence about, even an animus towards, the Classical past, how it can overshadow and suffocate the present. In Seferis’ posthumously published novel, Six Nights on the Acropolis, the protagonist Stratis “had the impression that the Acropolis was new until that night and that two thousand years of compacted time had suddenly exploded and had turned it to rubble.” Again, to the Greek imagination, the catastrophe is not Elgin—who is a late addition to the Parthenon’s insults, a minor villain—but the Venetian cannonball. It is the explosion and not the dismantling that resonates. (The blowing up of the Parthenon, and therefore the crushing weight of the Classical past, is a recurrent fantasy in the literature of Greek Modernism. The avant-garde writer Nicholas Calas, who declared “art is a gun powder keg, and the proof is the Parthenon,” asks the reader, “Do you prefer Pheidias or Morosini? The car or the accident?”).¹

The Acropolis as Western tourist attraction also hangs over modern Greek literature like a cloud of nefos, the Athenian smog. Seferis in one of his late essays recalls a nightmare he had in which the state is selling off its monuments to the highest bidder; an American toothpaste company has bought the Parthenon and is polishing its columns to look like giant toothpaste tubes. (The commodification of the Parthenon and the Acropolis remains a concern: recently the Greek government has begun offering exclusive “private tours” of the site at a whopping five thousand euros per group of up to five.²)

At the same time, Seferis is associated with marble and fragments and statues: these images haunt his Mythistorema (the standard Greek word for “novel,” but also literally Myth-history), a poem engaged with the Odyssey in twenty-four brief sections, nodding to the Odyssey’s twenty-four books, “numbered” in Greek by the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. Published in 1935, it comes after his diplomatic stint at the Greek consulate in London from 1931–1934. Early on in his post, Seferis lived in Hampstead and referred in his diaries to “Keats, my neighbor.” He notes that he spends his time trying to learn the language, and that “I often had to rush out of my house to see again a fragment of the Greek marbles, especially—for reasons I won’t dwell on—the one of the Ilissus.”³ Is Mythistorema haunted by these urgent visits to the “sunless museum” in Bloomsbury? It is hard not to think so. Here (in the translation of Edmund Keeley), we find such phrases as “carved reliefs of a humble art” and “the other life, / beyond the statues,” “the smiles, so static, of the statues,” “mutilated” hands, and, perhaps most famously:

I woke with this marble head in my hands;

it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down.

Marble statue from the West pediment of the Parthenon (West pediment A) thought to represent the river-god Ilissos. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The homecoming stanza, 23, though on one level evoking Ithaka, on another perhaps evokes Seferis’ home near Smyrna doubly lost to him, first when his family fled to Athens when he was a teenager, and then the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, in which cosmopolitan Smyrna was effectively destroyed. It could also be describing the Acropolis, renewed:

A little farther

we will see the almond trees blossoming

the marble gleaming in the sun

the sea breaking into waves

Greek light and the sea—the billowy main, the sun.

1. Vassilis Lambropoulos, “Unbuilding the Acropolis in Greek Literature,” Classics and National Cultures, ed. by Susan A. Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia (Oxford, 2010).

2. See https://experiences.hhticket.gr/product/the-acropolis-experience/

3. George Seferis, “Letter to a Foreign Friend,” trans. by Nanos Valaorites and appended by Edmund Keeley, Poetry, 105:1 (Oct. 1964), pp. 50–59.

An Intellectual Clockwork

What did Elgin leave behind for the people of Athens, besides the diminished Parthenon? What did he want his name on?

A town clock.

In 1806, Elgin had promised the authorities at Athens a town clock, as a token of his gratitude for the Marbles. In 1813, around the time Elgin’s agents were having difficulties obtaining a firman to excavate at Olympia, the clock arrived. This clock was one of the only such clocks in all of the Ottoman Empire (a clock at Thebes might be the only other); Ottoman cities told the time by the muezzin calls to prayer of the mosques. Christian churches were not permitted bells, for instance. (“Turkey contains no bells, and yet men dine,” as Byron notes in Don Juan.)

Hugh William “Grecian” Williams, a Scottish landscape painter famous for his Greek landscapes picturesque with ruins, published his Travels in Italy, Greece, and the Ionian Islands: In a Series of Letters, Descriptive of Manners, Scenery, and the Fine Arts in 1820. In it, he deplores Elgin’s actions on the Acropolis as detrimental to future travelers, including artists. He also remarks on the curiosity of the clock:

In 1812, the Turks allowed Lord Elgin to put up a clock with a Latin inscription, purporting it to be a present from his Lordship to the people of Athens; but they had to build a tower for it, an expence at which they murmured considerably. A clock in a town, under subjection to Turkish government, was said to be a circumstance before unknown . . .

Engraved on a marble slab taken from the Parthenon itself is a Latin inscription:

TOMAS COMES

DE ELGIN

ATHENIEN. HOROL. D.D.

S.P.Q.A. EREX. COLLOC.

A.D. MDCCCXIV

The inscription announces that Lord Elgin has given the clock as a gift to the Athenians, and the “Senate and People of Athens” (a rather Roman-sounding phrase) have erected the clock tower, in 1814. Yet Latin, as William St. Clair points out, was “the one language that the multilingual inhabitants of a multicultural empire could not read.”

Milnes goes further than Williams:

The bitterest part perhaps of the whole Elgin affair was the insulting compensation attempted to be offered; it was in the shape of a huge town-clock, to contain which the inhabitants themselves were put to the expense of an ungainly wooden tower. Does the inscription, recording so pompously the gift of Lord Elgin, owe its existence to the fine irony of the citizens, or the blind vanity of the donor?

Elgin’s clock tower was burned down in the War of Independence and the clock destroyed; the tower was rebuilt in stone with a new Bavarian clock. (In the interregnum, a cannon was fired every day at noon from the Acropolis to tell citizens the time.) At various points the tower served as a barracks, a storehouse, or a prison, and, as one of the tallest structures in the lower town, a landmark.

A Greek poem from 1884, by the (once) popular romantic and nationalistic poet Achilleas Paraschos, predicts the clock tower’s fate:

On the Clock of the Agora

Set fire to it, burn it, to the four winds,

Scatter its dust. Let no sign of it remain.

It is a shame it has stood for so many years . . .

Tear it down. You don’t know what it is worth to the nation.

To the nation? To all people, to art, to wisdom,

Every diamond stone, what diamond it cost us:

A starry cloudless thought of Ictinus, of Phidias! . . .

—my translation

The rebuilt clock tower and neighboring church did burn to the ground in a market fire a few months later, on August 9; the last chimes were heard at two in the morning. The leaping flames were spectacularly visible all over Athens. Almost immediately, the area was opened up as an archaeological site; eventually four iron clock hands and Elgin’s marble inscription, broken into pieces, were discovered and handed over to the appropriate authorities. The find is stored in the National History Museum, with the marble inscription displayed in a corner of one of the galleries. It is the single object I saw there whose label was in Greek only, rendering it somewhat invisible to foreign visitors. The label asserts that the city erected the tower for the timepiece so that it could be called the “Market Clock” instead of “Elgin’s Clock,” because “it was not pleasing to the Athenians to remember Elgin’s deeds.”

Meanwhile Milnes concludes his excursus in words that speak as much to our time and the depredations of the natural world as to early nineteenth-century Athens:

I have often thought how like the situation of all the world, now-a-days, is to that of these Athenians; they are losing all things of beauty and grandeur that they possess, and receiving in return some worthless intellectual clock-work.

Polarizing Celebrities

It has occurred to me that Byron and Mercouri—though one might not want them at the same dinner party (or, actually, might one?)—share certain qualities and roles in the adventures and discourse of the Marbles. Charismatic artistscum-celebrities who gave their all for political causes, they lacked in their passion a certain “sophrosyne”; both regularly are treated with a degree of condescension by the anglophone world, while being appreciated in Greece for many of the same reasons. (Even the redoubtable Mary Beard cannot resist some digs at Byron—for his unheroic death in Messolonghi for instance, and she dismisses his slight, macaronic, wildly popular lyric “Maid of Athens, ere we part”¹ as “ghastly doggerel.”)

And both had I think, for all their intentions, a polarizing effect on the controversy around the Marbles. Byron’s intemperate and sometimes outright libelous assertions about Elgin had a way of inflaming the discourse. And Mercouri’s efforts, ironically, seemed to have hardened the UK’s and British Museum’s status quo position.

Keats too had his effect; he is the first poet to set them firmly in a museum, to claim them in a way not only for Britain, but specifically for the British Museum. He also forever attaches Elgin’s name to them, in a way the museum itself has not.

One thinks of Keats’s earlier (and better) sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” It ends on a thrilling note of discovery—even with the historical error (of Cortez for Balboa)—but we might consider that in this case discovery is also the beginning of conquest and empire:

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

1. In one of the many Marbles coincidences, the “maid of Athens” is supposed to be about Teresa Makri, the sister-in-law of Kyriakos Pittakis.

Ringing the Changes

Periodically, when the question of the Marbles’ return is back in the news, a flurry of op-eds, pro and con, inundates British papers. When against, these articles ring the changes on Knowles’s “The Joke About the Elgin Marbles” of 1891: that it is a slippery slope that will result in the loss of all the holdings of the British Museum, or of all British museums; that Elgin got them fair and square and spent a lot of money doing so; that he rescued them from Greeks or Turks or the French; that Greece cannot look after them; that the Greeks aren’t even really Greek anyway; that the Marbles are so convenient around the block on Great Russell Street, and so inconvenient in far-off Athens. The ever-expanding stretch of decades that has passed in the interim has also tended to harden the sense that the Marbles are permanent fixtures of the British Museum. (In 1986, Sir David Wilson, then the Director of the Museum, declared on the BBC that “To rip the Elgin Marbles from the walls of the British Museum is a much greater disaster than the threat of blowing up the Parthenon.”) An addition to Knowles’s catalogue includes the rather cynical twist that as they cannot be returned to the Parthenon building itself, there is no point in simply moving them from one museum to another.

The slippery slope fallacy makes the least sense (Mercouri rightly dismissed it as “blarney”)—museums regularly decide on returns and even loans on a case-by-case basis. The British Museum will still be packed to the gills with ancient Greek art—it has more than it can ever display: as Cavafy says in 1891, “the Elgin Marbles serve no other purpose than that of beautifying the British Museum, which even without them is full of objects of the greatest beauty and value.” (The museum has not even fully catalogued its holdings, as the recent scandal of insider theft—purportedly by a onetime head of the department of Greek and Roman antiquities—of roughly 2,000 items over a thirty-year period at the museum brought to light. Ironically, these were fenced under the eBay handle, “sultan1966,” as if deliberately nodding to the Melina Mercouri flick Topkapi, about the heist of a sultan’s jeweled dagger—though the movie actually came out in 1964. Maybe “sultan1964” was “taken.”) By now, the case for returns and reparations has outstripped the fate of the Marbles themselves: the fear that museums will have to return, say, the Benin Bronzes (as many museums, if not the British Museum, are starting to do), or that Egypt will ask for the Rosetta stone, has come to fruition even as the Marbles have stayed put. The original Act of Parliament in 1816 whereby the Marbles were purchased required that they remain together as a collection in the Museum, be known as “The Elgin Collection,” and stay in the Museum in perpetuity, and that an Elgin always be seated among the Trustees; but this centuries-old act has been subject to modifications over the years, such as the British Museum Act 1963, which changed the makeup of the Trustees. The new UK Charities Act, going into force now, may have further repercussions, potentially allowing museums to return objects when there is a “moral obligation.”¹

The thought experiment, whereby if Elgin had not rescued them, they would have been destroyed by the Turks or, much more likely, swiped by the French, is impossible to prove or disprove. Arguably Elgin’s interference in the Parthenon heats up the market for antiquities and souvenirs (and the desire to chip off the odd nose), but it is clear that it was already at a fever pitch when he began, English and other European travelers trying to take anything that was not (or even that was) nailed down. And these experiments can go both ways: suppose he had left the Marbles at the bottom of the sea, after the shipwreck of the Mentor, to be ravaged by salt and sea worms? (I remain struck by the irony that the character of Mentor in the Odyssey represents one of the guises in which the goddess Athena herself manifests.)

Had Elgin’s agents not been stopped in their tracks by the firman of 1805, based on the concerns of the French Ambassador, they would have proceeded to dismantle the western porch of the Temple to get at the western frieze. As the French archaeologist and painter (and a collector himself) Louis-François-Sébastien Fauvel writes, “Elgin would have taken everything if Marshal Brune [the French Ambassador in Constantinople], whom I told about the vandalism, had not obtained an order that stopped him. That one can still see any sculptures [on the building] is due to that ambassador.”

And as it happens, we do know what became of the Marbles left on the Temple. The Parthenon survived the two sieges of the Acropolis during the Greek War of Independence. Not only did Greek rebels and philhellenes try to avoid inflicting major damage on the Parthenon (human collateral was another matter), so did the Ottomans. In the case of the Greeks, the Parthenon was already a nascent national symbol and attracted classically-educated philhellenes to the cause. In the case of the Ottomans, there was a sensitivity to the Parthenon’s stature in “Europe.”

Once again, we have an Englishman ask for an Ottoman firman regarding the Marbles, but this time, for the Temple’s protection. Lord Strangford, the then British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, writes a letter to a high Ottoman official as Turkish troops prepare to battle for Athens, recommending the securing of such a firman. The copy he sends to the British Foreign Secretary for ex post facto approval reads so (translated from the French):

The English Ambassador . . . ventures to recommend to the benevolence and protection of the Ottoman Government the famous monuments of antiquity and Masterpieces of art that have for so many centuries made this town the object of Europe’s universal admiration . . . he has the honour to ask His Excellency . . . to arrange for the issue of Firmans . . . for the preservation of the Town and the beautiful monuments of its ancient glory.²

As Reverend Robert Walsh (the Irish chaplain to Lord Strangford’s ambassadorship—as Philip Hunt had been to Elgin’s) puts it, in 1836, “It is to the credit of the Turks that they have strictly complied with these orders [for the protection of the monuments], and to the Greeks that they have followed their example: these venerable remains have been preserved, though the combatants have had alternate possession of them.”

The Temple and remaining ornaments had not only survived, but had come through relatively unscathed. In May of 1840, Irish poet Aubrey Thomas de Vere (1814–1902) observes of the Parthenon:

Its western front . . . is almost wholly uninjured. The pillars are perfect, the architrave and cornice equally so . . . The pediment has sustained but little damage, and still retains possession of the two colossal statues which resisted all Lord Elgin’s efforts to remove them.

Further, de Vere gives a delightful sketch of the remaining western frieze, infused with tropes of the “guest/host” relationship, of strangers and hospitality:

Though we possess in the British Museum so large a part of it [the frieze], another portion still holds its ground where it has a better right to be, and the western end of the cella, at least, continues undefrauded and inviolate. The members of the frieze which remain are exactly the same in spirit as those on which your eye rests . . . at home; and the hospitality which you had afforded to those strangers “from a far countree” made me feel, when I saw their companions, as if I were meeting old friends.³

He goes on to list “priests,” “venerable elders,” “beautiful matrons,” “warriors holding horses by the head, or balanced on them with a pliant grace,” and, in a nod to Keats, “youths dragging forward bulls that plant their feet resolutely before them, as if they smelt their own blood on the ground, and low against the skies.”

He has effortlessly conflated—or reunited—the frieze in London with the one in Athens.

1. Duncan Howitt-Marshall, “New Charities Act May Compel Museums to Return Cultural Artifacts,” Greece Is, September 29, 2022.

2. William St. Clair, Who Saved the Parthenon? (Cambridge, 2022).

3. Aubrey Thomas de Vere, Picturesque Sketches of Greece and Turkey, Vol. 1 (London, 1850).

A Tale of Two Cities, Two Museums

Athens is hardly far-flung now—cruise ships and cheap flights busing in tourists from the UK and all over the world have resulted in, if anything, hyper-tourism. For many people, including the Greeks themselves, London is not more convenient. (Brexit, perhaps, makes it less so.)

Told that they had nowhere appropriate to house the Marbles (a variation on “the Greeks cannot take care of them”), the Greeks adopted a “build it and they will come” approach, constructing a state-of-the-art new museum (designed by the Swiss-French architect Bernard Tschumi in collaboration with Michael Photiadis) at the southeastern base of the Acropolis (so facing, as it happens, the side of the Parthenon where Elgin’s agents shattered the cornice to extract metopes). It opened to the public in June of 2009; within the year, Greece would be enmeshed in an economic and debt crisis in which the imagery of broken columns, and the rhetoric of selling off monuments, would become commonplace in German, US, and UK publications.¹

Numbers of visitors to the new Acropolis Museum do not yet rival numbers to the British Museum, but they are growing. (The British Museum receives a little over six million visitors per year, the new Acropolis Museum, around two million.) Not every visitor to the British Museum even enters the Duveen Gallery, there is so much else to see; every visitor to the Acropolis Museum, however, surely goes to see the Parthenon Gallery at the top of the Museum, following a journey through chronologically arranged finds from the Acropolis. The argument that the British Museum is free to visitors, whereas the Acropolis Museum charges for tickets, may soon be undermined by policy: Sir Mark Jones, the interim director of the British Museum in the wake of the theft scandal, has proposed that, to make up for funding shortfalls, tourists be charged twenty pounds for tickets to publicly funded museums that would remain free for British citizens.

As the Acropolis Museum’s website states, “The Museum’s exhibition culminates in the third-floor gallery, which has been specially designed to accommodate the sculptures of the Parthenon.” The Parthenon Gallery looks out at the Acropolis, with floor-to-ceiling windows of the Attic sky, bright blue, or slate grey, or marbled with huge brilliances, with direct sightlines to the Acropolis and its Temples, so that the mind can hold both together. The frieze is displayed as it was in the Parthenon, facing outward rather than facing in (as it is currently in the Duveen Gallery), and without the exits that interrupt the somewhat randomly positioned and abridged version of the frieze in London. The British Museum’s fragments of the rectangular frieze are presented divided between two parallel walls, with the eastern section along the wall opposite the entrance, northern and southern elements divided between the walls, and elements of the much-abbreviated western frieze next to the entrance; they can be taken in as a sort of “whole” by a seated viewer in the middle of the room. Originally, though, the Ionic (that is to say, continuous) frieze would have been experienced in flashes by observers in motion, walking around the building,² perhaps not unlike the flickering cells or cabinet cards in early animation; in the Acropolis’ Parthenon Gallery, the viewer is likewise encouraged to experience the frieze by moving along and around it, effectively taking part in the procession. As Sergei Eisenstein put it, in his “Montage and Architecture,” the Acropolis could be viewed as “the perfect example of one of the most ancient films.”³

Perhaps most importantly, this floor of the Acropolis Museum is exactly aligned with the Parthenon. The eastern pediment, which depicted Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus, faces and is touched by the light of dawn. The western pediment, which Pausanias tells us depicted Athena’s battle with Poseidon for possession of the city, looks out towards the molten sunset, Salamis, and the sea. Both these positions and the light would have been planned for by the architects and sculptors of the pediments. It is thought, for instance, that on the western pediment Poseidon’s trident and Athena’s spear—maybe even her olive tree—would have been made of bronze; light bouncing off them would have dazzled at sunset. (We know, for instance, that the spear tip and the crest of the helmet of Phidias’s colossal bronze statue of Athena Promachos—“first in the fight”—on the Acropolis could be seen by sailors rounding the cape at Sounion.)

The absent Marbles, those currently in the Duveen Gallery and some in several other countries too,⁴ as well as some fragments lost or destroyed even since Elgin’s time, are supplied, where possible, with plaster casts (made in the 1830s and later purchased by Greece); their whiteness differentiates them from the original stones. Here, the color white indicates not purity or chastity, but absence and, in a surprising inversion, inauthenticity.

1. Johanna Hannink, The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity, Belknap Press, an imprint of Harvard University Press, 2017.

2. Robin Osborne, “The Viewing and Obscuring of the Parthenon Frieze,” The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 107, 1987, pp. 98–105.

3. Eisenstein, Sergei M., Yve-Alain Bois, and Michael Glenny. “Montage and Architecture.” Assemblage, no. 10 (1989): 111–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3171145.

4. On March 24, 2023, the Acropolis Museum repatriated three Parthenon fragments returned by the Vatican Museums.

A Creative Act?

One of the most recent justifications is the strangest of all. In 2019, Hartwig Fischer, the then Director of the British Museum, when asked by a Greek newspaper, Ta Nea, about the potential return, or reuniting, of the Marbles, said, “We don’t return, we don’t lend the Parthenon Marbles, Greece is not the legitimate owner,” adding a new twist. “When you move a cultural heritage to a museum . . . this shifting is also a creative act.”

One might add that it takes another step—a Keats, for instance—to complete such a creative act. In Fischer’s sense, though, too, Morosini’s destruction of the building was also a creative act (one of which Greek avant-garde writers would approve!), turning a functional structure, in a flash, into a picturesque ruin, the stuff of Byronic backdrops. Also, if Fischer is right, then this creative act of Elgin and the British Museum is over two hundred years old—its creative energy is entirely depleted, as is clear even from E. R. Dodds’s 1951 anecdote of the blasé young man in the British Museum. But should the Marbles return to Athens and be placed in the Acropolis Museum, this is also a creative act and a fresh, exciting one; one that shows them in a new light; in this way, though, the new light is just like the old light, the Attic light.

Milnes seems to have foreseen much of this debate in 1834 as the Greek nation emerged from its chrysalis. While he feels that, for the present, the Marbles could not be in a safer place (the British Museum) and that Elgin’s actions had unwittingly protected them from the Acropolis sieges during the War of Independence:

It would indeed be highly honourable to the English nation, if they should consummate the good work, of which they have been the unconscious instruments, by the restoration to the Greeks of these, their proudest ancestral trophies, as soon as a settled state of affairs ensures to them due care and reverence. Unless things turn out strangely for the worse, Greece, in the lapse of a few years, will be no longer the remote corner of Europe, living a merely historic life in the memories of other nations, and visited by rare and adventurous travellers, but as common a resort of the wise and the frivolous . . . as Rome or Parthenope [Naples]. Under these circumstances, to retain in the chambers of a museum those archetypes of art, to which we have not even the plausible title of conquest, would be a petty and selfish nationality. If they cannot again adorn the front of their antient [sic] home, let them at any rate display their wonders under a native heaven, be surrounded with the forms and associations of their native nature, and let the words spoken round them be in their native tongue.

The idea that the statues long for the light is of long standing, even if, as a British friend points out, the frieze, as opposed to the metopes and pedimental figures, under its roof of Parian marble slabs, was never intended to be seen in direct sun. And it’s a curious personification, the idea that the statues care what language is spoken round them—presumably the Marbles in the British Museum have got as used to English and every other world language as they had been to Greek,

Turkish, and Albanian, also spoken through the centuries in Athens. Now, there is also the babel of tourists. But it is a persistent one: Mercouri was said to “give a voice” to the Marbles, unable to speak for themselves.

Divided Narratives

The relatively new talking point of the British Museum is that having the frieze in two museums allows for the telling of two stories, multiplying its meaning: one, a universal tale about art and the progress of mankind (in London), and another, a local and nationalistic one (in Athens).

Their website asserts that there is a positive benefit to the Marbles’ being kept disunited:

The Trustees of the British Museum believe that there’s a great public benefit to seeing the sculptures within the context of the world collection of the British Museum, in order to deepen our understanding of their significance within world cultural history. . . . Both museums together allow the fullest appreciation of the meaning and importance of the Parthenon sculptures and maximise the number of people that can appreciate them.

This is a “world cultural history” that is strangely outside of time. Cultural history somehow exists apart from human history—the history of the museum itself, of the struggle between the British Museum and the Louvre for imperial conquest, how Nelson’s victory over Napoleon’s fleet in the Battle of the Nile triggered events that brought the Rosetta stone to English shores, and arguably the Younger Memnon of Shelley’s Ozymandias fame, and Elgin’s collection of Marbles. And how the Marbles were wrenched from their centuries as children of “slow time”¹ back into the tides of politics and history of human generations with Elgin’s removal.

How is it the best thing is to keep the two groups of Marbles from the monument forever asunder, even Athena’s torso and her right breast? This would certainly seem to go against the perception of the original Select Committee that understood their value was in the collection’s being kept whole—one presumes that had Elgin removed all the surviving sculpture, this would have simply strengthened their belief that

this Collection, if divided, [would be] but little adapted to serve for the decoration of private houses. It should therefore be considered as forming a Whole, and should unquestionably be kept entire as a School of Art, and a Study for the formation of Artists.

The Marbles in the Duveen Gallery do tell a story, a very human story about “world cultural history,” but perhaps it is not the story the Museum thinks that they do.

1. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” stanza 1: “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time . . .”

Begging the Question

I have had the opportunity, since beginning this book in Greece’s strict pandemic lockdown, to visit the Marbles both in Athens and in London several times. When the Duveen Gallery was open (it was closed for “refurbishment” at least once when I went by, due to a persistently leaking roof), I was again able to wander up and down this elegant gray hall, admiring its perfect Periclean proportions.

Next to the Duveen Gallery (Room 18) is a sort of side gallery, 18a and 18b, which displayed a timeline of the Athenian Acropolis throughout its history. There hung the painting of the Temporary Elgin Room, and along a wall ran plaster casts of elements of the missing western frieze, which you could touch. At one end hulked an enormous Doric column capital coming up to eye level. It was with a shock I realized that this is original to the Parthenon, the very column capital removed by Lusieri, a thing so large it had to be sawn in half to get it through the garrison gates of the Acropolis.

Elgin’s removals of the Marbles featured as a little blip on the Acropolis timeline, at 1801, where, somewhat to my astonishment, I read,

1801 Lord Elgin acquires sculptures from the Parthenon.

The Ottoman Sultan grants permission for Elgin to remove sculptures from the Parthenon and other ancient buildings.

There are good and persuasive points to be made about the legality of Elgin’s actions—the firman to ship the Marbles out of Athens argues for at least ex post facto legitimacy. But not even Lord Elgin would thus beg the question.

In 1811, Elgin, who ran into bureaucratic trouble selling the Marbles, approached Robert Adair, who had been head of the British delegation at the Sublime Porte in 1808–1810.

Adair writes to Elgin, on July 31, 1811:

In answer to your Lordship’s enquiry . . . I was directed by the Sec(retary) of State for foreign affairs to apply to the Turkish government, I have to inform your Lordship that Mr Pisani more than once assured me that the Porte absolutely denied your having any property in those marbles. By this expression I understood the Porte to mean that the persons who had sold the marbles to your Lordship had no right so to dispose of them.¹

(Pisani, you might remember, is the interpreter at the British Embassy in Constantinople who negotiated the original firman in 1801.)

Paradoxically, Elgin will use this argument—that the Sublime Porte denied that Athenian authorities had the right to dispose of the Marbles—in a letter to then Prime Minister Perceval on the very same day, in order to clear himself of the charge of having received undue favors from Constantinople. (As we have noted, his having become Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in the immediate wake of the 1798 Battle of the Nile meant Elgin was open to charges of having leveraged his official position in light of warming British-Ottoman relations.)

I had no advantage from the Turkish government beyond the Firman given equally to other English travelers. My successors in the Embassy could not obtain permission for the removal of what I had not myself taken away. And on Mr Adair’s being officially instructed to apply in my favour, he understood, “The Porte denied that the persons who had sold those marbles to me had any right to dispose of them.”

In his own defense, Elgin baldly states in this letter that the firman his agents handed to the Voivode and Disdar in Athens did not give them permissions further than other English travelers; that is, the standard permission to draw and model the Marbles.

1. Theodore Theodorou, “Robert Adair’s Letter to Elgin,” with a draft of the letter trans. by Leonora Navari. First published in Greek in Ta Istorika, 20, Athens, 2003, pp. 509–517. http://www.adairtoelgin.com/

A Breakthrough?

There was a period when Greece was not overly exercised about official “ownership” of the Marbles. (This returned to “red line” status when the Mitsotakis government was facing elections.) In 2001, Culture Minister Evangelos Venizelos suggested that the Marbles—or even some of them (“qualche”?)—could be returned as a short-term loan for the 2004 Olympics: “We are not interested in the legal form of an agreement. The form of ownership is not important to us. In principle, we would not exclude anything from the discussion.” In return, Greece would fill the Duveen Gallery for that period with newly discovered objects and statues uncovered during the Athens Metro construction. When this was rebuffed, Venizelos proposed in 2002 to Sir John Boyd, then Chairman of the British Museum’s Board of Trustees, that the Marbles might be returned on a long loan, to a new museum, and that the gallery could be considered an “annex of the British Museum.” The Duveen Gallery would again be filled with treasures. Having long been told, also, that the Marbles in the British Museum cannot be separately loaned out, Greece was startled to learn of a short-term loan of the river god Ilissos to the Hermitage in 2014. (The statue—the one Seferis used to rush out of Hampstead flat to visit—was spirited away in secret.)

It is easy to forget that several times such a breakthrough has almost happened. At first, when Greece became a free nation, British authorities sent back many pieces of assorted ancient buildings of Athens taken by Lord Elgin’s agents “to secure, at the foundation of the new nation state, the goodwill built up by British support during the Revolution.”¹ In 1941, to encourage Greece’s wartime resistance, a draft was prepared by the British Foreign Office regarding a scheme “to return to Greece [after the war, and providing a new museum was built for them] the Elgin Marbles, including the Caryatid and the Column from the Erechtheum.”² In 1982, talks were on the brink of a breakthrough when Mercouri’s campaign seems to have overshadowed or possibly derailed them. And in 1994, Greece evidently considered “agreeing to the low profile return of certain free-standing figures from the Parthenon rather than continue to press for the return of all fragments of the frieze.”³

In 2021, to mark the bicentennial of the start of the Greek War of Independence, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had again asked for the “temporary repatriation” of the sculptures; in return, Greece would send objects to the Duveen Gallery that had never before left Greece. The response of then Prime Minister Boris Johnson (an advocate of reunification in his Oxford Union days) was that the Marbles were legally acquired and owned by the British Museum. Currently, though, serious talks are underway. George Osborne, the current Chair of the British Museum Board of Trustees, has evidently been in conversation with the highest authorities in Athens about a potential “Parthenon partnership”; a breakthrough seems more tantalizingly imminent now than ever. The recent election of a Labour government in the UK may also shift the deadlock.

1. William St. Clair, Who Saved the Parthenon? (Cambridge, 2022).

2. British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles. “Position of the Foreign Office in 1941,” Appendix 1: The Foreign Office recommendations, 2001.

3. Martin Bailey, “Declassified Documents Reveal Near Return of Elgin Marbles,” The Art Newspaper, January 31, 2000.

Room 19

What I have not been able to visit since the start of the pandemic is the British Museum’s Caryatid; Room 19 remained closed during my visits. Even when the room was re-opened, I somehow missed the room’s limited opening hours. (The British Museum’s hours are from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., but Room 19 is only open from 11 to 3, owing to staff shortages.) But I have been able to visit her on Google Street View. She is displayed two rooms away from the Duveen Gallery (though there was a time when she was displayed with the other Marbles of the Elgin collection), a reminder that not all “Elgin” Marbles are Parthenon Marbles. She stands alone, wedged under a low ceiling beam modeled to suggest the Erechtheion’s entablature, in a corner in a room that contains, among other fifth-century Athenian artefacts, ornaments and architectural elements from buildings on the Acropolis, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Nike. (In 1834, when Greece suggested some of the pieces of the Nike Temple be returned to be used toward reconstruction of the building, British authorities refused.¹)

Even in Google Street View, one can zoom in on the wall label (a caption sometimes called in curatorial parlance a “tombstone”) which, like others in the Museum, is pitched so that rhetoric against the Marbles’ return is presented subtly woven in with neutral information:

The Caryatid came to the British Museum in 1816 with Lord Elgin’s other marbles. Her sisters, much corroded after nearly two more centuries of weathering, were removed from the building in 1978. They can now be seen in the Acropolis Museum.

Caryatid from the Erechtheion Temple in the British Museum. Photo credit: Frans Sellies. Copyright © Frans Sellies.

I marvel somewhat at this sentence: the Caryatid “came,” as if of her own accord. The “other marbles” points to the difficulty, ultimately, with either the term “Elgin” or “Parthenon” Marbles—she is not, after all, of the Parthenon, though she was certainly removed by Elgin’s agents from the Acropolis. Like her “sisters,” it points out, she is in a museum, (and thus cannot be “returned” to the building.) The Museum, as nearly everyone does, gives the statue gendered she/her pronouns. The unsaid here is that the chaste maiden has been rescued (rather than abducted or ravished, the opposing rhetorical flourish) from the corruption—moral perhaps as well as physical?—of remaining for another two centuries in Athens.

Certainly her sisters have been through things she has not—further vandalism by visitors, two brutal sieges, during which the Erechtheion was materially damaged, and German occupation, as well as the acidic pollution that, in the 1970s, began to turn their marble surfaces to friable gypsum. (During my first visit to Athens as a student in 1988, I saw, in the old museum atop the Acropolis, two of the Caryatids placed in sealed cases filled with inert gasses, designed to stabilize their surface.)

But she is also an architectural element, not a purely decorative one, and while elegant sculptures as individuals and charming as a group, the “stone sorority” represents no Phidian frieze of inestimable artistic value. What is the reason, then, for keeping her? Does she inspire artists? Does anyone miss her in the Duveen Gallery? Does anyone seek her out there in Room 19?

Even the British Museum cannot help but anthropomorphize her and her sisters, a family group.

1. William St. Clair, Who Saved the Parthenon? (Cambridge, 2022).

“Scattered to the Light”

The lone Caryatid continues to inspire contemporary Greek poets and poems, such as Anna Griva’s (b. 1985) “Caryatids.” Griva inverts many of the expectations of a Greek (and especially a Greek woman) poet contemplating the Caryatid standing in the British Museum and brings in some of the contemporary concerns of Greece as a locus of immigration and asylum seeking. It begins:

My friend Maria

came here from the Congo ten years ago.

Her sisters remained back in their country.

She is homesick for them and talks constantly

about their games and their laughter

back when they would run barefoot through the jungle

and gathered fruits of all different colors.

Maria dreams of the day when she will return there.

“I am like that Caryatid of yours, the one in exile,”

she said to me one day, and this comparison

struck me as strange.

How did a statue become a symbol of displacement?

How did it become a sisterly memory?

How did it define

beyond borders and languages,

the longing for home?

I think one of the many small, carefully calibrated shocks of juxtaposition the poem performs is inverting the expectations not only of the speaker but of the reader, especially in a Greek poem, with such a title, that it is not a Greek identifying with the statue, wrenched from her sisters, alone in a foreign clime, but an asylum seeker in exile in Greece, parted from her own sisters in Africa.

We might brace ourselves for some comment on the whiteness of the Marbles, or the contrast of dark skin and white marble, but Griva foils this expectation—the word “white” never enters the poem, which instead contains many-colored fruits against the hint of green jungle, although there is a suggestion perhaps of paleness in “pearls.” Instead the marble’s hardness and sparkle, but ultimately also its vulnerability, become the focus. The poem continues:

A girl who lives all by herself

in a strange place

wants to show she is stone,

marble unbroken

sparkling

But it takes only a blow

to turn it into fragments,

innumerable pearls

that glow.

One beauty

scattered to the light.

—my translation

The girl tries to become stone, but the stone, subject to breaking, proves itself organic (the contrasted smooth, soft glow of pearls, which might suggest laughter—the pearls in a smile—or the roundness of tears).

The end makes me think of Winckelmann’s assertion about beauty and whiteness, “the colour which reflects the greatest number of rays of light.” Here, instead, it is beauty itself that, scattered to the light, glows. The sisters, too, are one beauty, a string of pearls, scattered by the exigence of migration.

The association of the Marbles with exile and refugees, so topical here, turns out to be an old one.

Would It Be Permissible to Speak of a Caryatid?

The Select Committee’s recommendation to Parliament was to purchase the Marbles, albeit at the fire-sale rate of £35,000, potentially a fortune for an individual, but less than half the asking price, which was what Elgin reckoned he had incurred in expenses.

At the time, however, even this low price was controversial: Parliament was contending with failing harvests, a bread shortage, and public unrest. The eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora beginning in April of 1815, the largest volcanic eruption in human history (ten times more powerful than the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa), had thrown up enough dust and ash into the atmosphere to lower the global temperature and bring on “incessant rain,” in Mary Shelley’s phrase, in northern Europe; 1816 became known as the “year without a summer.” (The hazy yellow skies of that period inspired the impressionistic landscape canvases of J. M. W. Turner; Mary Shelley began Frankenstein during that cold, damp summer in Geneva.)

And there were the pensions of military veterans to pay from the recent Napoleonic wars. A famous cartoon of the time by George Cruikshank has John Bull buying stones instead of bread. Lord Castlereagh is shown against a background of broken statues, “Here’s a Bargain for you Johnny! Only £35,000!! . . . Never think of Bread when you can have Stones so wondrous Cheap!”

In the end, Elgin never even got hold of the sum; it was seized by his creditors. Elgin, ruined in more ways than one, fled to France to escape his debts and would die in Paris in 1841.

The Committee writes in its recommendation:

In contemplating the importance and splendor to which so small a republic as Athens rose . . . it is impossible to overlook how transient the memory and fame of extended empires, and of mighty conquerors are, in comparison of those who have rendered inconsiderable states eminent, and immortalized their own names by these pursuits. But if it be true, as we learn from history and experience, that free governments afford a soil most suitable to the production of native talent . . . no country can be better adapted than our own to afford an honourable asylum to these monuments of the school of Phidias, and of the administration of Pericles; where secure from further injury and degradation, they may receive that admiration and homage to which they are entitled, and serve in return as models and examples to those, who by knowing how to revere and appreciate them, may learn first to imitate, and ultimately to rival them.

Haydon, though nobody had asked him, would have approved this sentiment, that ultimately it is the poets and the artists who raise a country to greatness.

I am struck by the word “asylum,” as if the sculptures were human refugees, fleeing an unsafe country, and granted protected residence until such time, perhaps, as it is safe to return. It is a Greek word, much associated with Athens and her temples through the Athenian playwrights; Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women could as easily be translated The Female Asylum Seekers. “Asylum” meant that, once inside a temple’s precincts, the asylum seeker could not be seized. Asylum means “inviolable,” “without right of seizure.” To violate this right was sacrilege.

I am also struck by the word “serve”—as with refugees today, the sculptures are expected, in return for their safety, to express their gratitude, to be useful to their new society. This, I think, they have been, inspiring, especially in the scandal and excitement of their first arrival, poets and painters, sculptors and novelists. London itself was changed, both by the Parthenon and its several sculptures, not to mention the Caryatid, as architects were inspired by drawings of and sometimes visits to the Temple, as well as casts and the originals of the Marbles: Neoclassical façades, columns and pediments, unlikely friezes, sturdy structure-supporting lasses are seemingly everywhere once you start to look.

In fact, of course, the Marbles cannot be returned to the nation of Greece. The Hellenic Republic, which recently celebrated its 200th birthday in 2021—1821 marked the beginning of the War of Independence—has never had custody of them. What a grand, brave, celebrated gesture giving them to Greece as a present would have been and could still be. What a stroke of brilliance in diplomacy and public relations for post-Brexit Britain.

Perhaps, after their two hundred years of service to the British public, it is time to let the Marbles go. For two hundred years, some eight generations, London has had possession of them. This is a good, long time—a dizzying leap into the future from the point of view of young Keats, almost twice as far from him as Morosini’s explosion was to Elgin.

But should it last forever? During the original House of Commons debate, the MP Hugh Hammersley had proposed an amendment that, although it was not adopted, looked forward to a time when the nation of Greece might come into being. It continues to resonate:

Great Britain holds these marbles only in trust till they are demanded by the present, or any future, possessors of the city of Athens; and upon such demand, engages, without question or negotiation, to restore them, as far as can be effected, to the places from whence they were taken, and that they shall be in the mean time carefully preserved in the British Museum.

Even the Committee was awed by the vicissitudes of time—nations rise and empires fall. In the space of the Marbles’ sojourn in Britain, world wars and civil wars and cold wars have been fought. Britain has obtained a lease for Hong Kong, and that lease has expired. Species and glaciers have disappeared, new diseases have come into being. When old age shall this generation waste, they shall remain, in midst of other woe than ours . . . The challenges that will face us in the next century, much less the next two centuries, of climate chaos will be staggering and unlike anything the human race has faced before. Are we to say that never—never—will the Marbles be again seen in their birthplace? This strikes me both as hubristic and depressing.

The seagoing nations of Greece and Britain are on more of an equal footing now than ever and retain close and friendly ties. But what better way for a post-Brexit Britain to display large-mindedness, its good faith, generosity, its participation in the brotherhood of nations, to recall its position as foremost among the liberty-loving philhellenes than this magnificent gesture? Far from breathing fire, one of Greece’s recent slogans about the Marbles has been simply “Why not?” And I think that is the question. Why not let this collection return to the city of its birth, to reengage with the monument and the rock from which it was taken? The purposes for which Parliament purchased them from Elgin have been fulfilled—they have inspired, they have taught, they have been preserved from the shadow of destruction.

But I think the debate about the fate of the Marbles is not ultimately between Greece and Britain; from the start it was really between Britain and itself, something to take up with its own conscience. This has always been the case, from the very beginning, where it is largely English travelers, British writers and poets and artists and architects, who set the terms of this debate, a case perhaps in which the poets really are “unacknowledged legislators,” in Percy Shelley’s phrase. Greece cannot compel the Marbles be returned, nor I think ultimately would it want to. It would like them to be given out of a spirit of generosity and like-mindedness, not grudgingly and unwillingly. A sacrifice, such as the ones that the pious people on the frieze are going to, emptying their town, must be voluntary and joyful.

I am reminded that just as “frieze” in English feels frigid and static, and “zoophoros” in Greek, vivid and animated, so the English “statue” comes from the Latin “stare”—to stand; a stiff, rigid word, it is etymologically kin to “status quo” and “statute of limitations.” Whereas “agalma,” the Greek word for statue (the modern word is unchanged from the ancient one, the one used by Socrates) instead means “that wherein one delights, a glory, delight, ornament: a pleasing gift, especially for the gods.”¹

As of this writing, change seems to be afoot. An advisory body called the Parthenon Project (parthenonproject.co.uk), founded by Greek business man John Lefas, chaired by a former UK Culture Minister, Lord Ed Vaizey, and including in its membership conservative peers (as well as the actor, writer and activist Stephen Fry and honorary Greek citizen, the novelist Victoria Hislop), aims to change the conversation and arrive at a “win-win” solution to this intransigent debate. Deputy Director of the British Museum Jonathan Williams also wants to “change the temperature.” In Greece, too, there is hope that King Charles III as a philhellene (and himself half-Greek by birth) might have a role to play. Someday, I would like to believe, the Marbles will be reunited in Athens. It will happen.

If so, what “story” will the Duveen Gallery tell? For a while I think there should be an exhibit that tells its own story, a story that is intricately woven with British history and identity and British letters: it should be the story of Keats and Byron and Park Lane and boxing, of the shipwreck of the Mentor, which underwater archaeologists continue to excavate, discovering new finds. It should be the story of Lord and Lady Elgin and of the “firman”—the Italian summary copy of which is now owned by the Museum. It should be the story of other things that Elgin took from Greece—altars and medals and the bronze burial bowl and gold myrtle branch rumored to be from the tomb of Aspasia. Many of these objects are in the British Museum already but stored in basements and not on display. Perhaps the Getty would lend the marble “Elgin Throne,” an object wrenched from the little Russian church on Philhellenon Street. Maybe the Vatican would lend the Apollo Belvedere, whose stock has come so far down in the world since it was reckoned the most beautiful statue in existence. It will contain Haydon’s famous sketches of the horse head of Selene, which the Museum owns, and early plaster casts of the Marbles themselves. There is even a consortium that aims to carve exact replicas in Pentelic² marble using 3-D machining devices. These exact marble copies could be exhibited in the gallery with a light display suggesting all their glorious original color, along with Alma-Tadema’s popular and once controversial painting. It should be the story of British travelers and their reactions, and of the artist G. B. Lusieri, a better painter than Benjamin Haydon, many of whose extant exquisite paintings and sketches are in the National Galleries of Scotland or still owned by Broomhall, Elgin’s estate. It should be the story of the dodgy art dealer cum misguided philanthropist Duveen, yes, and the cleaning—with the copper tools on display. It should be the story of Virginia Woolf and her lifelong interest in both the Marbles and the Parthenon. It should be the story of the Turkish traveler, Evliya Çelebi, and his travel book. And it should be the story of Greeks, and their responses, in literature, politics, and art. The Acropolis Museum, likewise, might enrich its exhibits with the history of the Parthenon post-Pericles, as church and mosque and fortress, and of the Acropolis, once crowned with a Frankish tower, Ottoman houses, and a minaret.

Why not reunite the Marbles? And if so, why not now? Perhaps the idea just takes some adjusting to. Maybe start with a single step.

In the gallery at the new Acropolis Museum, earlier proposals had left the spaces for the “lost Marbles” empty, or marked by veils or curtains, but this was thought to be a rhetorical step too far, too “emotive,” too histrionic, too shrill. The rhetoric of the naked white casts is now left to speak for itself, as are the ongoing reconstructions on the Temple above, which continues to repair the main damage of Morosini, while marks of other man-made destruction are left conspicuously in evidence.

The five Caryatids from the Erechtheion Temple at the Acropolis Museum in Athens. Photo credit: Isidoros Andronos/Shutterstock. Copyright © Isidoros Andronos.

But it is a different case with the five sisters, the “fat Maidens,” as Virginia Woolf wrote of them in her journal, admiring their vigor and strength. The five remaining Caryatids, removed from the Erechtheion in 1979 to protect them from acid rain (six exact concrete replicas now support the porch) are situated in a mezzanine of the Museum, in a large space. Over their heads is only the lightness of air—their stoic days of holding up are over. They stand in such a way that it is as easy to view them from the back as from the front, each sporting her matching yet unique intricate hairdo, the thickness of their tresses a way of buttressing the load-bearing neck. They were recently cleaned with lasers, so that no material touched the stone; the process was done transparently, during visiting hours, in full view of the curious public. Their missing sister is not represented by a plaster cast, she is not represented at all.

There is just an empty pedestal, waiting for her.

ΤΕΛΟΣ

1. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, revised and augmented by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford, 1940).

2. Bafflingly, the British Museum did not give permission to the consortium to take measurements and gave no reason (at the time) for their refusal. Later, they claimed a backlog.

APPENDIX A

Word Problems

MONEY, MATH, AND MARBLES

Money is a kind of poetry. —Wallace Stevens

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. —Oscar Wilde

So pleasant it is to have money! —Arthur Hugh Clough

If there is one thing poets like to talk about, it is money. If you gather a group of poets together, the topic of prize purses, dollars per line, advances and royalties, teaching salaries, entry fees, and fancy grants will come up after the first glass of wine or pint of beer. This is probably partly because poetry is not seen as a money-making venture, and poets have been complaining about poverty since at least cobwebs-inmy-wallet B.Y.O.B. Catullus. The ancient Greek poet Simonides, famous for his miserliness, is thought to be the first poet to charge by the word. (The archaic bards of Homer were instead rewarded for an evening of drawn-out performance.) The scholiasts tell us that the Theban poet Pindar asked so much for a single victory ode that some potential customers were disgusted and went to a sculptor instead. When the sculptor’s estimate also gave them sticker shock, they returned to commission the poet. (The first words of that Pindar ode are, “I am not a sculptor.”) No doubt a group of sculptors, or painters for that matter, will get on a similar topic of finances within a few minutes, given the much more serious expenses of tools, studios, and materials. As this is a book about writers and artists and the sale of art, the issue of money cannot be ignored. But given the complexity of relative costs and values of currencies over time, this seems something better addressed in this appendix than the text.

Outside of being a governess, writing for publication was one of the only respectable ways for a woman of gentility to earn her own living in nineteenth-century Britain. And yet being a lady poet or novelist was, even so, somewhat suspect. Felicia Hemans, in her lifetime “second only to Byron in popularity and sales,”¹ was referred to by Byron dismissively as “Mrs. Hewomans.” A precocious young poet, her first book would be published to much acclaim when she was fourteen. (Shelley approached her by letter; given his penchant for marrying teenaged girls, it is probably for the best that her mother discouraged this correspondence.) She wrote prolifically through her life, supporting her five children with her pen after her husband abandoned her. Although she was only eight years old when the first metope of the Parthenon was being taken down in Athens in 1801, in 1816, hearing much of the popularity of the Marbles in London, perhaps reading about the parliamentary debate in the Examiner, she got an idea for what she hoped would be a best seller, along the lines of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. She wrote to Byron’s publisher, John Murray:

I’m told that a poem on the Elgin Marbles would be likely to be popular at present, and some of my friends have recommended me to attempt one.

She sent her long poem, Modern Greece, to Murray in early 1817. The poem sold out an edition of 500 copies, over the next few years, but wasn’t a huge success. Murray split the modest profit of fifty-two pounds with the poet. This was nothing to the profit of, say, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (836 pounds). Murray had paid 500 pounds outright for the copyright to the first cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Byron, however, a male aristocrat, affected indifference to being paid for his literary productions. This doesn’t mean he didn’t care for money. As he put in a letter, “I have imbibed such a love for money that I keep some sequins in a drawer to count, and cry over them once a week.” (Sequins, I might point out, are here not shiny disks of decoration, but specifically the small golden coins of Venice.)

Yet the prolific Hemans, who was also publishing in quarterlies and supplements, who had to shift for herself, made a living handily with her writing. We know that she was able to keep her whole family afloat, in modest but comfortable middle-class circumstances (albeit in Wales, not in the urban center of London), for about 100 pounds a year.²

In these pages on the Marbles, monetary amounts have come up only occasionally, but with significant import. When Lord Elgin tries to sell his collection, including the Marbles, to the British government, he asks for roughly 74,000 pounds (by his estimate, merely covering his expenses in acquiring, shipping, and storing them), and is ultimately paid 35,000 pounds, leaving him considerably out of pocket. Elgin’s agents are incensed that his artists in Athens were being charged five guineas a day (a guinea being worth a pound and a shilling, or twenty-one shillings) for access to the citadel, and this outrage leads the agents to contrive greater influence over the Disdar.

But it isn’t a simple matter to determine what these amounts mean in today’s terms. In an earlier version of this essay, I adhered to an extremely conservative estimation, one which could be seen, as kindly pointed out to me by the Oxford professor of economic history, Avner Offer, as rather wide of the mark. I am grateful for conversations with him, and the opportunity to correct and clarify my earlier ignorance.

The relative value of one pound in 1801 to today can be calculated in a number of ways, with wildly different results. The useful website Measuring Worth (MeasuringWorth.com), frequently cited by academics, says that “In 2023, the relative value of £1 from 1801 ranges from £90.24 to £7,320.00.” To determine this you could, for instance, compare the price of bread, the pound’s purchasing power. Or, if time is money, you could look at relative wages by the week, month, or year. Or you might look at the cost of a building project, or the price of valuable property, something that is likely to hold its value even though currency fluctuates. Plugged into this calculator, the British government’s payment of £35,000 for Elgin’s collection in 1816, gives us a range from £3,258,000 to £220,700,000. Three and a quarter million pounds is clearly far too low, while 220 million may seem vast but is perhaps not out of the ballpark when talking about unique historical antiquities. Which is closer?

In the case of the Marbles, we happen to have at least one very convenient real estate sale from the year before their sale to the British government as a point of comparison; indeed, one sale is not unrelated to the other.

In 1811, when Elgin had had to let go of his place on Park Lane and Piccadilly, William Cavendish, the ailing 5th Duke of Devonshire, gave Elgin permission to situate the unwieldy collection temporarily on the western grounds of Burlington House, his historic mansion on Piccadilly. Unluckily for Elgin, the Duke died even as the Marbles were in the process of being carted from one house to the other. The 6th Duke of Devonshire (known as the “bachelor duke,” he was a friend of Canova and Dickens, and had tried unsuccessfully to marry Caroline Ponsonby, who instead became Lady Caroline Lamb—yes the one who had famously called Byron “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”) nevertheless allowed them to remain until he decided to sell the house in 1815. The pressure and the expense of moving the Marbles yet again (itself a small fortune) no doubt played into Elgin’s urgency in selling them to the government, so that they could at last be safely housed in the British Museum. Elgin was also concerned that, with some of the Marbles in a make-shift shed, and others exposed to the elements, they were “decaying from the destructive dampness.” The lavish mansion, with its Palladian refinements among the grandest houses in London (“It seemed one of those edifices in fairy-tales, that are raised by genii in a night’s time,” in Horace Walpole’s description), sold for £70,000. Now owned by the British government, the building houses the Royal Academy of Art, and various additions and wings are home to learned societies such as the Geological Society of London, the Linnean Society of London, the Royal Astronomical Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Let us remember, then, that only a year later Elgin was asking for around £74,000 for his entire collection (which included a great many more things than the Marbles: for instance, the double urn and the golden branch that Lusieri had painted so exquisitely, a marble altar from Delos currently languishing in the British Museum’s basement, a giant Egyptian diorite scarab beetle sculpture, and a rare tortoise-shell lyre, the sight of which evidently struck a plangent chord with Keats³). His asking price was thus roughly the price of such a fashionable mansion in London.

Another house on Piccadilly sold in 1802 (when Elgin first arrived in Athens) for closer to the amount Elgin ended up receiving. This was Melbourne House, the residence of Byron’s wife’s aunt, Lady Melbourne, and of her daughter-in-law, the infamous Lady Caroline Lamb. Sold for 34,000 pounds,⁴ it was almost immediately divided up into “sets” (apartments). The Albany apartment complex remains an exclusive and fashionable address to this day. A single unit sold in 2017 for seven million pounds, with others valued at three million. There are seventy-five such units. In a very exclusive sort of word problem, this easily puts the worth of the building in the neighborhood of between a quarter and half a billion pounds in today’s terms. The 35,000 pounds the government paid Elgin for his collection would have been enough for Elgin to purchase a fashionable mansion of this sort in London. (In the event, since Elgin was in £27,000 pounds of debt⁵ beyond even his outlay of expenses, all of the money went immediately to Elgin’s creditors.)

Elgin’s asking price was mostly against his expenses, among them £5,000 for “cost of the Mentor and Salvage Operations.” What did this involve? The undertaking, overseen by Sir William Hamilton, lasted two full years and entailed destroying the deck of the sunken ship to get at the cargo and bringing in sponge divers from the islands of Symi and Kalymnos to retrieve the sunken crates (at about twenty meters down), as well, no doubt, as cranes, carts, and other equipment. Who knows what this would cost today—sponge divers tend to be hard to come by—but we do know that running the ongoing archeological “dig” of the wreck (which continues to produce interesting finds), a different kind of salvage, involving divers and archaeologists, costs around €15,000 (£12,422) for a twenty-day season each August.⁶

When we look at the fee of five guineas a day that Philip Hunt so objected to for the artists’ working on the Acropolis, we might think of this in terms of time. By the Measuring Worth website, this is the equivalent value of eleven weeks and one day of average manual wages in Britain at the time. We might also look at what Elgin was paying his artists. Elgin had intended for the budget of his project of drawing and taking casts of the Acropolis structures to cost him at most £620 per year in combined salaries to the artists—we will remember that Turner turned him down for the low salary offer. (In the end, the expenses for the artists cost Elgin closer to £3,700 a year over three years.) Five guineas a day was nothing to sneeze at, a not insignificant addition to the ever-lengthening tally of expenses.

When Elgin first pitched the sale of the Marbles to the government in 1811, he claimed to be in over 90,000-pounds-worth of debt, owing to a combination of financial disasters, including his divorce and his ever-more-expensive albatross of a project, the Marbles. What might a sum of that size look like? Well, for one, we know that Byron, who planned to pull up stakes and leave England for good, sold his hereditary estate Newstead Abbey in 1816 for £94,500.⁷ This included 3,200 acres as well as a grand house, if a crumbling-abbeycum-country-pile in need of considerable and expensive repairs. He might have raised an eyebrow at Heman’s famous description of “The Stately Homes of England”:

The stately homes of England

How beautiful they stand!

Amidst their tall ancestral trees,

O’er all the pleasant land!

Money is the golden thread through the larger narrative, as it usually is. Other “figures” loom large at the edges of our story. Byron was among those who were instrumental in securing for the Greek provisional government the London war loan that was crucial to the cause of independence. A disbursement of £470,000 on a loan with a nominal value of £800,000 was sent to Zante (Zakynthos) in 1824.⁸ The first installment of the loan, in 30,000 English gold sovereigns and 50,000 Spanish silver dollars, arrived in April of 1824, aboard the Florida; a second installment with 40,000 gold sovereigns arrived a few weeks later. Disastrously, however, the Florida arrived to find Byron had died six days before in Messolonghi. Byron had put his money where his mouth was for the freedom of Greece (in more ways than one—he had given a personal loan of £4,000 to the provisional government), and had paid with his life. The merchant vessel would return to London with most of Byron’s body aboard (his lungs and larynx—his inspiration and voice, as it were—stayed in Greece), embalmed in 180 gallons of spirits. The outcome of the war hung in the balance.

What was £470,000 worth in 1824? Well, it was loaned against “the whole of national property” of Greece. Admittedly, Greece, aside from a few enclaves like Messolonghi, was not yet independent, so that might be merely notional, but in theory the loan was against all of Greece, the whole shebang, the Parthenon, her remaining sculptures, and her columns into the bargain. The security for the loan was—everything.

Some things, like liberty, are beyond price. But there is always a cost.

1. Wilson, Frances, “The Italy of Humans,” London Review of Books, Vol. 22, No. 22, 16 November 2000.

2. Feldman, Paula R. “The Poet and the Profits: Felicia Hemans and the Literary Marketplace.” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 46, 1997, pp. 148–76. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30210372.

3. Franklin, John Curtis, “Once More the Poet: Keats, Severn, and the Grecian Lyre.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 2003, Vol. 48 (2003), pp. 227–240. Published by: University of Michigan Press for the American Academy in Rome.

4. “Albany,” in Survey of London: Volumes 31 and 32, St James Westminster, Part 2, ed. F H W Sheppard (London, 1963), British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols31-2/pt2/pp367-389.

5. See William St. Clair’s Lord Elgin & The Marbles: The controversial history of the Parthenon sculptures, Chapter 22, “The Marbles are Sold,” for further information on Elgin’s expenses and the sale.

6. Sweet, Michael, “Diving the Mentor,” Neos Kosmos, 20 November 2019, https://neoskosmos.com/en/2019/11/20/life/diving-the-mentor-revealing-thesecrets-of-elgins-ship/.

7. Becket, J.V. and Alvy, Sheila, (January 2002), Byron and Newstead, University of Delaware Press.

8. “Greece’s Loans from the United Kingdom in 1824–1825: Myths and Truths,” by Nikos Apostolidis & Constantinos Velentzas, 07.04.2020, eKathimerini. https://www.ekathimerini.com/society/251400/greece-s-loans-from-the-united-kingdom-in-1824-25-myths-and-truths/.

APPENDIX B

A Modern Timeline of the Parthenon and the Marbles of the Acropolis

(INCLUDING KEY DATES OF PRIMARY CHARACTERS)

1687

26 September, during a siege of the Acropolis, a “lucky” cannon shot by Swedish field marshal Königsmarck, under the command of the Venetian Francesco Morosini, blows up the Parthenon, which was being used by the Turks to store explosives.

1766

20 July, Thomas Bruce, who will become the 7th Earl of Elgin, is born at Broomhall House, Fife.

1788

22 January, George Gordon (later to become Lord Byron) is born in London at Holles Street.

1795

31 October, John Keats is born in Moorgate, London.

1798

Napoleon sets out to occupy Egypt, an Ottoman province under the control of the Mamluks (local military caste), landing in Alexandria June 1st.

1–3 August, Battle of the Nile: Sir Horatio Nelson defeats Napoleon in a naval battle, thwarting French ambitions.

December, Lord Elgin is appointed British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte of Selim III, Sultan of Turkey

1799

March, Lord Elgin marries the young, beautiful Mary Nisbet, who happens to be one of the wealthiest heiresses in Scotland.

The Elgins arrive in Constantinople.

1801

Anglo-Turkish forces expel the French from Egypt.

The Rosetta Stone is seized from the French with the Capitulation of Alexandria (under the supervision of William Hamilton) and taken to London.

Elgin’s agents apply for “firmans” (official court permissions) from the Sultan for Elgin’s artists to draw and model the ancient buildings on the Acropolis. A document (though not technically a firman) of limited permission is granted in May.

31 July, the first metope is removed from the Parthenon by Lusieri and his men.

1802

April, the Elgins set foot in Athens for the first time.

17 September, Elgin’s brig, the Mentor, founders off the Greek island of Kythera in stormy weather, sinking with seventeen crates of antiquities, including many of the Marbles. Everyone aboard survives. It will take two years to salvage the cargo, under the direction of William Hamilton, Elgin’s private secretary.

The Rosetta Stone is deposited in the British Museum.

Choiseul-Gouffier’s metope, which had long lain in the cellars of the Louvre, is “restored” and put on prominent display (where it remains today) at Napoleon’s urging.

1803

Lusieri removes one of the Caryatids from the Erechtheion.

18 May, after war breaks out again between France and Britain, the Elgins are detained in France.

1804

January. First main shipment of Marbles arrives in England. The Marbles are first stored at the house of the Duchess of Portland in Westminster, and then moved nearby to the house of the Duke of Richmond.

In Athens, permissions under which Lusieri is working on the Parthenon are rescinded. He is obliged to cease work on further removals.

1805

Voivode of Athens orders a complete ban on all excavations and removals.

Lady Elgin, who is pregnant with her fifth child, is allowed to leave France for England on humanitarian grounds.

1806

June, Elgin is released from France and returns to England, but remains under parole. (He must return to France if the French government so requests. This results in Elgin’s ineligibility for public office in Britain.)

1807

First Elgin divorce trial, in London.

Elgin rents a large house (Gloucester House) at the corner of Piccadilly and Park Lane, with grounds on which he builds a shed, fifty-foot square, as a temporary museum for the Marbles. The museum is ready in June.

1807–1809 Anglo-Turkish War (Ottomans victorious)

1808

Second Elgin divorce action, in Edinburgh. Elgin marriage is dissolved by private act of parliament.

The prizefighter Bob Gregson poses naked in various attitudes with the statues in Elgin’s ad hoc museum for two hours.

1809

Byron and his friend Hobhouse set out on their Grand Tour, visiting Greece for the first time. Byron works on his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, including scathing stanzas on Elgin and his actions, in Athens.

1810

Elgin sets out on his first, unsuccessful attempt to sell his collection, including the Marbles, to the British government, with the publication of the first edition of his Memorandum. Elgin remarries.

1811

Byron pens The Curse of Minerva in Athens (17 March), another attack on Elgin; it is circulated privately.

Last shipment of the Marbles leaves Greece on the Hydra. Byron returns on same ship.

Elgin’s Park Lane house is sold. The Marbles are moved to the yard on the west side of Burlington House in Piccadilly.

1812

Last shipment of Elgin’s Marbles arrives in Britain.

March, the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are published. The book is an immediate bestseller, Byron an instant celebrity. Byron writes he “awoke to find myself famous.”

11 May, assassination of Spencer Perceval, UK Prime Minister, by a disgruntled merchant—only UK PM to have met such an end.

1815

The eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora begins in April of 1815. This will lower global temperatures and lead to the incessant rain of the “year without a summer” in 1816, crop failures, etc. Byron and the Shelleys hole up in Switzerland, where the teenaged Mary Shelley will write Frankenstein.

18 June, Battle of Waterloo

20 November, The Second Treaty of Paris. After Waterloo, this treaty provided for the return of looted artwork to Italy and other nations from the Louvre.

1816

February, Select Committee of Parliament debates the potential purchase of the Marbles by the government.

April, Byron separates from his wife, Annabella.

24 April, Byron leaves England for good.

July, The British Museum Act provides for the purchase of the Elgin collection including the Marbles (for 35,000 pounds, less than half Elgin’s asking price) and their custody in the British Museum.

1817

The Marbles go on display in the Temporary Elgin Room at the British Museum. Visitors break attendance records.

March, Keats sees the Marbles for the first time, visiting them in the Temporary Elgin Room designed by Robert Smirke in the British Museum, with his friend, the painter Benjamin Haydon. Keats writes his sonnet on the Elgin Marbles.

The popular writer Felicia Hemans, leading female poet of the day, publishes “Modern Greece,” a long pro-Elgin political poem.

1821

23 February, Keats dies in Rome.

War for Greek Independence breaks out (traditional date: 25 March)

The colossal “Younger Memnon” head—perhaps a prompt for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”—is acquired by the British Museum

1821–1822, first siege of the Acropolis, Greeks besieging Turks. Greeks victorious.

1822

8 July, Shelley dies in Italy.

1824

5 January (Christmas Eve by the Greek Calendar),

Byron arrives in Messolonghi, Greece, to a hero’s welcome. 22 January, Byron composes his last poem (“On this Day I Complete My 37th Year.”)

19 April, Greek Easter Monday, Byron dies in Messolonghi of a fever and bad doctoring. Easter celebrations are curtailed. Official mourning period declared in Greece.

A merchant vessel, the Florida, arrives in Zante with the first installment of the London war loan (in which Byron was instrumental). Byron’s body sails back to England on it.

1826–1827

Second siege of the Acropolis, Turks besieging Greeks. Greeks persuaded by British General Richard Church to peacefully surrender (in part to save the Parthenon.)

1827

Battle of Navarino, critical battle in the Greek War of Independence. Allied forces (Britain, France, Russia) defeat the Ottomans.

1830

Greece emerges as an independent nation state.

1832

Greece is established as an independent kingdom, under King Otto, a Bavarian teenager.

“Permanent” Elgin Room/Saloon completed in British Museum. Neo-Classical British Museum façade is designed by Richard Smirke.

1834

Capital of Greece is moved to Athens. A program of Neo-Classical building commences.

1841

Lord Elgin dies in Paris, bankrupt.

1846

The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, Keats’ friend, successfully commits suicide after a botched attempt.

1852

Completion of British Museum façade (designed by Smirke) with its columns and pediment.

1865

Construction of “old” Acropolis Museum begins in Athens.

1937–1938

Controversial deep cleaning of Marbles at the British Museum in preparation for their exhibition in the new purpose-built Duveen gallery.

1940

Duveen gallery damaged in the Blitz; the Marbles, however, have been safely stored in the disused Aldwych tube station.

1941

17 April, Nazis occupy Athens. They are surprised to find museums empty; ancient statuary has been hidden.

1944

12 October, Nazis leave Athens.

1946–1949

Greek civil war; the Right is victorious.

1949

The Marbles go back on display at the British Museum.

1962

6 June, Duveen gallery of the British Museum reopens.

1967

Greece falls under a military dictatorship.

1974

Greece reestablished as the Hellenic Republic.

1979

Remaining five Caryatids removed from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis and placed in the old Acropolis Museum. They are replaced with replicas on the building.

1982

Greek culture minister Melina Mercouri requests return of the Marbles (only the Marbles of the Parthenon, not the full Elgin collection) at UNESCO conference in Mexico.

1993

Western frieze (with exception of the two blocks already in the British Museum) removed from the Parthenon and stored in the Old Acropolis Museum.

2009

New Acropolis Museum completed and opened in Athens.

APPENDIX C

Architectural Elements of the Parthenon

The Parthenon after the 1687 explosion and the construction of the small post-1720 Ottoman mosque in the celia. Edward Dodwell, 1805. Taken from John Travlos’ Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens (Hacker Art Books, 1970 and Praeger, 1971), page 457, fig 577.

Architectural Elements of the Parthenon. Original image by F. Banister. Uploaded by Mark Cartwright, published on 25 October 2012. Public Domain via Flickr.

APPENDIX D

Translation of the Italian Translation of the Firman, as Listed in the Appendix to the 1816 Special Committee Report

Entered into the 1816 Committee report, this text purports to be a translation from the Italian of the “Fermaùn or Official Letter” that gave Elgin’s men access to the Parthenon.¹ The original Italian translation of the Turkish document—itself never found—resurfaced in 1962, and is now in possession of the British Museum. It lacks the seal described here in the Committee index.²

No. 10.—Translation from the Italian of a Fermaùn or Official Letter from the Caimacan Pasha (who filled the office of Grand Vizier at The Porte, during that Minister’s absence in Egypt) addressed to The Cadi or Chief Judge, and to the Vaivode or Governor of Athens, in 1801.

After the usual introductory compliments, and the salutation of Peace,—“It is hereby signified to you, that our sincere Friend his Excellency Lord Elgin, Ambassador Extraordinary from the Court of England to the Porte of Happiness, hath represented to us, that it is well known that the greater part of the Frank (i.e. Christian) Courts are anxious to read and investigate the books, pictures or figures, and other works of science of the ancient Greek philosophers: and that in particular, the ministers or officers of state, philosophers, primates and other individuals of England, have a remarkable taste for the drawings, or figures or sculptures, remaining ever since the time of the said Greeks, and which are to be seen on the shores of the Archipelago and in other parts; and have in consequence from time to time sent men to explore and examine the ancient edifices, and drawings or figures. And that some accomplished Dilettanti of the Court of England, being desirous to see the ancient buildings and the curious figures in the City of Athens, and the old walls remaining since the time of the Grecians, which now subsist in the interior part of said place; his Excellency the said Ambassador hath therefore engaged five English painters, now dwelling at Athens, to examine and view, and also to copy the figures remaining there, ab antiquo: And he hath also at this time expressly besought us that an Official Letter may be written from hence, ordering that as long as the said painters shall be employed in going in and out of the said citadel of Athens, which is the place of their occupations; and in fixing scaffolding round the ancient Temple of the Idols there; and in moulding the ornamental sculpture and visible figures thereon, in plaster or gypsum; and in measuring the remains of other old ruined buildings there; and in excavating when they find it necessary the foundations, in order to discover inscriptions which may have been covered in the rubbish; that no interruption may be given them, nor any obstacle thrown in their way by the Disdar (or commandant of the Citadel) or any other person: that no one may meddle with the scaffolding or implements they may require in their works; and that when they wish to take away pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon, that no opposition be made thereto.

We therefore have written this Letter to you, and expedited it by Mr. Philip Hunt, an English gentleman, Secretary of the aforesaid Ambassador, in order that as soon as you shall have understood its meaning, namely, that it is the explicit desire and engagement of this Sublime Court endowed with all eminent qualities, to favour such requests as the abovementioned, in conformity with what is due to friendship, sincerity, alliance and good will subsisting ab antiquo between the Sublime and ever durable Ottoman Court and that of England, and which is on the side of both those Courts manifestly increasing; particularly as there is no harm in the said figures and edifices being thus viewed, contemplated, and designed. Therefore, after having fulfilled the duties of hospitality, and given a proper reception to the aforesaid Artists, in compliance with the urgent request of the said Ambassador to that effect, and because it is incumbent on us to provide that they meet no opposition in walking, viewing, or contemplating the figures and edifices they may wish to design or copy; or in any of their works of fixing scaffolding, or using their various implements; it is our desire that on the arrival of this Letter you use your diligence to act conformably to the instances of the said Ambassador, as long as the said five Artists dwelling at Athens shall be employed in going in and out of the said citadel of Athens, which is the place of their occupations; or in fixing scaffolding around the ancient Temple of the Idols, or in modelling with chalk or gypsum the said ornaments and visible figures thereon; or in measuring the fragments and vestiges of other ruined edifices; or in excavating, when they find it necessary the foundations, in search of inscriptions among the rubbish; that they not be molested by the said Disdar (or commandant of the citadel) nor by any other persons, nor even by you (to whom this Letter is addressed;) and that no one meddle with their scaffolding or implements, nor hinder them from taking away any pieces of stone with inscriptions or figures. In the above-mentioned manner, see that ye demean and comport yourselves.

(Signed with a signet.)

SEGED ABDULLAH KAIMACAN

N.B.—The words in Italian rendered in two places “any pieces of stone” are “qualche pezzi di pietra.”

1. Taken from the “Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Earl of Elgin’s collection of sculptured marbles; &c,” by Great Britain. Parliament (1816). House of Commons. Select Committee on the Earl of Elgin’s Collection of Sculptured Marbles; pp. xxiv–xxvi. Accessed via the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/gri_33125008272383/page/XXIV/mode/2up

2. See Williams, Dyfri. “Lord Elgin’s firman.” Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 21, Issue 1, May 2009, Pages 49–76, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhn033

APPENDIX E

Lord Byron’s The Curse of Minerva

Pallas te hoc Vulnere Pallas Immolat et pœnam scelerato ex Sanguine Sumit.

—Aeneid, lib. xii

Athens: Capuchin Convent, March 17, 1811.

Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,

Along Morea’s hills the setting Sun;

Not, as in northern climes, obscurely bright,

But one unclouded blaze of living light;

O’er the hushed deep the yellow beam he throws,

Gilds the green wave that trembles as it glows;

On old Ægina’s rock and Hydra’s isle

The God of gladness sheds his parting smile;

O’er his own regions lingering loves to shine,

Though there his altars are no more divine.

Descending fast, the mountain-shadows kiss

Thy glorious Gulf, unconquered Salamis!

Their azure arches through the long expanse,

More deeply purpled, meet his mellowing glance,

And tenderest tints, along their summits driven,

Mark his gay course, and own the hues of Heaven;

Till, darkly shaded from the land and deep,

Behind his Delphian rock he sinks to sleep.

On such an eve his palest beam he cast

When, Athens! here thy Wisest looked his last.

How watched thy better sons his farewell ray,

That closed their murdered Sage’s latest day!

Not yet—not yet—Sol pauses on the hill,

The precious hour of parting lingers still;

But sad his light to agonizing eyes,

And dark the mountain’s once delightful dyes;

Gloom o’er the lovely land he seemed to pour,

The land where Phœbus never frowned before;

But ere he sunk below Cithæron’s head,

The cup of Woe was quaffed—the Spirit fled;

The soul of Him that scorned to fear or fly,

Who lived and died as none can live or die.

But lo! from high Hymettus to the plain

The Queen of Night asserts her silent reign;

No murky vapour, herald of the storm,

Hides her fair face, or girds her glowing form;

With cornice glimmering as the moonbeams play,

There the white column greets her grateful ray,

And bright around, with quivering beams beset,

Her emblem sparkles o’er the Minaret:

The groves of olive scattered dark and wide,

Where meek Cephisus sheds his scanty tide,

The cypress saddening by the sacred mosque,

The gleaming turret of the gay kiosk,

And sad and sombre ’mid the holy calm,

Near Theseus’ fane, yon solitary palm;

All, tinged with varied hues, arrest the eye;

And dull were his that passed them heedless by.

Again the Ægean, heard no more afar,

Lulls his chafed breast from elemental war:

Again his waves in milder tints unfold

Their long expanse of sapphire and of gold,

Mixed with the shades of many a distant isle

That frown, where gentler Ocean deigns to smile.

As thus, within the walls of Pallas’ fane,

I marked the beauties of the land and main,

Alone, and friendless, on the magic shore,

Whose arts and arms but live in poets’ lore;

Oft as the matchless dome I turned to scan,

Sacred to Gods, but not secure from Man,

The Past returned, the Present seemed to cease,

And Glory knew no clime beyond her Greece!

Hours rolled along, and Dian’s orb on high

Had gained the centre of her softest sky;

And yet unwearied still my footsteps trod

O’er the vain shrine of many a vanished God:

But chiefly, Pallas! thine, when Hecate’s glare

Checked by thy columns, fell more sadly fair

O’er the chill marble, where the startling tread

Thrills the lone heart like echoes from the dead.

Long had I mused, and treasured every trace

The wreck of Greece recorded of her race,

When, lo! a giant-form before me strode,

And Pallas hailed me in her own Abode!

Yes, ’twas Minerva’s self; but, ah! how changed,

Since o’er the Dardan field in arms she ranged!

Not such as erst, by her divine command,

Her form appeared from Phidias’ plastic hand:

Gone were the terrors of her awful brow,

Her idle Ægis bore no Gorgon now;

Her helm was dinted, and the broken lance

Seemed weak and shaftless e’en to mortal glance;

The Olive Branch, which still she deigned to clasp,

Shrunk from her touch, and withered in her grasp;

And, ah! though still the brightest of the sky,

Celestial tears bedimmed her large blue eye;

Round the rent casque her owlet circled slow,

And mourned his mistress with a shriek of woe!

“Mortal!”—’twas thus she spake—“that blush of shame

Proclaims thee Briton, once a noble name;

First of the mighty, foremost of the free,

Now honoured less by all, and least by me:

Chief of thy foes shall Pallas still be found.

Seek’st thou the cause of loathing!—look around.

Lo! here, despite of war and wasting fire,

I saw successive Tyrannies expire;

‘Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,

Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.

Survey this vacant, violated fane;

Recount the relics torn that yet remain:

These Cecrops placed, this Pericles adorned,

That Adrian reared when drooping Science mourned.

What more I owe let Gratitude attest—

Know, Alaric and Elgin did the rest.

That all may learn from whence the plunderer came,

The insulted wall sustains his hated name:

For Elgin’s fame thus grateful Pallas pleads,

Below, his name—above, behold his deeds!

Be ever hailed with equal honour here

The Gothic monarch and the Pictish peer:

Arms gave the first his right, the last had none,

But basely stole what less barbarians won.

So when the Lion quits his fell repast,

Next prowls the Wolf, the filthy Jackal last:

Flesh, limbs, and blood the former make their own,

The last poor brute securely gnaws the bone.

Yet still the Gods are just, and crimes are crossed:

See here what Elgin won, and what he lost!

Another name with his pollutes my shrine:

Behold where Dian’s beams disdain to shine!

Some retribution still might Pallas claim,

When Venus half avenged Minerva’s shame.”

She ceased awhile, and thus I dared reply,

To soothe the vengeance kindling in her eye:

“Daughter of Jove! in Britain’s injured name,

A true-born Briton may the deed disclaim.

Frown not on England; England owns him not:

Athena, no! thy plunderer was a Scot.

Ask’st thou the difference? From fair Phyle’s towers

Survey Bœotia;—Caledonia’s ours.

And well I know within that bastard land

Hath Wisdom’s goddess never held command;

A barren soil, where Nature’s germs, confined

To stern sterility, can stint the mind;

Whose thistle well betrays the niggard earth,

Emblem of all to whom the Land gives birth;

Each genial influence nurtured to resist;

A land of meanness, sophistry, and mist.

Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain

Dilutes with drivel every drizzly brain,

Till, burst at length, each wat’ry head o’erflows,

Foul as their soil, and frigid as their snows:

Then thousand schemes of petulance and pride

Despatch her scheming children far and wide;

Some East, some West, some—everywhere but North!

In quest of lawless gain, they issue forth.

And thus—accursed be the day and year!

She sent a Pict to play the felon here.

Yet Caledonia claims some native worth,

As dull Bœotia gave a Pindar birth;

So may her few, the lettered and the brave,

Bound to no clime and victors of the grave,

Shake off the sordid dust of such a land,

And shine like children of a happier strand;

As once, of yore, in some obnoxious place,

Ten names (if found) had saved a wretched race.”

“Mortal!” the blue-eyed maid resumed, “once more

Bear back my mandate to thy native shore.

Though fallen, alas! this vengeance yet is mine,

To turn my counsels far from lands like thine.

Hear then in silence Pallas’ stern behest;

Hear and believe, for Time will tell the rest.

“First on the head of him who did this deed

My curse shall light,—on him and all his seed:

Without one spark of intellectual fire,

Be all the sons as senseless as the sire:

If one with wit the parent brood disgrace,

Believe him bastard of a brighter race:

Still with his hireling artists let him prate,

And Folly’s praise repay for Wisdom’s hate;

Long of their Patron’s gusto let them tell,

Whose noblest, native gusto is—to sell:

To sell, and make—may shame record the day!—

The State—Receiver of his pilfered prey.

Meantime, the flattering, feeble dotard, West,

Europe’s worst dauber, and poor Britain’s best,

With palsied hand shall turn each model o’er,

And own himself an infant of fourscore.

Be all the Bruisers culled from all St. Giles’,

That Art and Nature may compare their styles;

While brawny brutes in stupid wonder stare,

And marvel at his Lordship’s ‘stone shop’ there.

Round the thronged gate shall sauntering coxcombs creep

To lounge and lucubrate, to prate and peep;

While many a languid maid, with longing sigh,

On giant statues casts the curious eye;

The room with transient glance appears to skim,

Yet marks the mighty back and length of limb;

Mourns o’er the difference of now and then;

Exclaims, ‘These Greeks indeed were proper men!’

Draws slight comparisons of these with those,

And envies Laïs all her Attic beaux.

When shall a modern maid have swains like these?

Alas! Sir Harry is no Hercules!

And last of all, amidst the gaping crew,

Some calm spectator, as he takes his view,

In silent indignation mixed with grief,

Admires the plunder, but abhors the thief.

Oh, loathed in life, nor pardoned in the dust,

May Hate pursue his sacrilegious lust!

Linked with the fool that fired the Ephesian dome,

Shall vengeance follow far beyond the tomb,

And Eratostratus and Elgin shine

In many a branding page and burning line;

Alike reserved for aye to stand accursed,

Perchance the second blacker than the first

“So let him stand, through ages yet unborn,

Fixed statue on the pedestal of Scorn;

Though not for him alone revenge shall wait,

But fits thy country for her coming fate:

Hers were the deeds that taught her lawless son

To do what oft Britannia’s self had done.

Look to the Baltic—blazing from afar,

Your old Ally yet mourns perfidious war.

Not to such deeds did Pallas lend her aid,

Or break the compact which herself had made;

Far from such counsels, from the faithless field

She fled—but left behind her Gorgon shield;

A fatal gift that turned your friends to stone,

And left lost Albion hated and alone.

“Look to the East, where Ganges’ swarthy race

Shall shake your tyrant empire to its base;

Lo! there Rebellion rears her ghastly head,

And glares the Nemesis of native dead;

Till Indus rolls a deep purpureal flood,

And claims his long arrear of northern blood.

So may ye perish!—Pallas, when she gave

Your free-born rights, forbade ye to enslave.

“Look on your Spain!—she clasps the hand she hates,

But boldly clasps, and thrusts you from her gates.

Bear witness, bright Barossa![37] thou canst tell

Whose were the sons that bravely fought and fell.

But Lusitania, kind and dear ally,

Can spare a few to fight, and sometimes fly.

Oh glorious field! by Famine fiercely won,

The Gaul retires for once, and all is done!

But when did Pallas teach, that one retreat

Retrieved three long Olympiads of defeat?

“Look last at home—ye love not to look there

On the grim smile of comfortless despair:

Your city saddens: loud though Revel howls,

Here Famine faints, and yonder Rapine prowls.

See all alike of more or less bereft;

No misers tremble when there’s nothing left.

‘Blest paper credit;’ who shall dare to sing?

It clogs like lead Corruption’s weary wing.

Yet Pallas plucked each Premier by the ear,

Who Gods and men alike disdained to hear;

But one, repentant o’er a bankrupt state,

On Pallas calls,—but calls, alas! too late:

Then raves for * *; to that Mentor bends,

Though he and Pallas never yet were friends.

Him senates hear, whom never yet they heard,

Contemptuous once, and now no less absurd.

So, once of yore, each reasonable frog,

Swore faith and fealty to his sovereign ‘log.’

Thus hailed your rulers their patrician clod,

As Egypt chose an onion for a God.

“Now fare ye well! enjoy your little hour;

Go, grasp the shadow of your vanished power;

Gloss o’er the failure of each fondest scheme;

Your strength a name, your bloated wealth a dream.

Gone is that Gold, the marvel of mankind.

And Pirates barter all that’s left behind.

No more the hirelings, purchased near and far,

Crowd to the ranks of mercenary war.

The idle merchant on the useless quay

Droops o’er the bales no bark may bear away;

Or, back returning, sees rejected stores

Rot piecemeal on his own encumbered shores:

The starved mechanic breaks his rusting loom,

And desperate mans him ’gainst the coming doom.

Then in the Senates of your sinking state

Show me the man whose counsels may have weight.

Vain is each voice where tones could once command;

E’en factions cease to charm a factious land:

Yet jarring sects convulse a sister Isle,

And light with maddening hands the mutual pile.

“’Tis done, ’tis past—since Pallas warns in vain;

The Furies seize her abdicated reign:

Wide o’er the realm they wave their kindling brands,

And wring her vitals with their fiery hands.

But one convulsive struggle still remains,

And Gaul shall weep ere Albion wear her chains,

The bannered pomp of war, the glittering files,

O’er whose gay trappings stern Bellona smiles;

The brazen trump, the spirit-stirring drum,

That bid the foe defiance ere they come;

The hero bounding at his country’s call,

The glorious death that consecrates his fall,

Swell the young heart with visionary charms,

And bid it antedate the joys of arms.

But know, a lesson you may yet be taught,

With death alone are laurels cheaply bought;

Not in the conflict Havoc seeks delight,

His day of mercy is the day of fight.

But when the field is fought, the battle won,

Though drenched with gore, his woes are but begun:

His deeper deeds as yet ye know by name;

The slaughtered peasant and the ravished dame,

The rifled mansion and the foe-reaped field,

Ill suit with souls at home, untaught to yield.

Say with what eye along the distant down

Would flying burghers mark the blazing town?

How view the column of ascending flames

Shake his red shadow o’er the startled Thames?

Nay, frown not, Albion! for the torch was thine

That lit such pyres from Tagus to the Rhine:

Now should they burst on thy devoted coast,

Go, ask thy bosom who deserves them most?

The law of Heaven and Earth is life for life,

And she who raised, in vain regrets, the strife.”

SOME ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began with thoughts towards a blog post during pandemic lockdowns, which then wandered down many a labyrinthine rabbit warren of the mind. Many people, more than I name here, were helpful in listening to my ramblings, taking an interest in early drafts of the piece, encouraging lines of questioning, adding information, finding errors and typos, playing Devil’s advocate, reining me in, taking mutual delight in odd discoveries. Among vital early readers of this in draft were Gregory Dowling (who also provided help with Italian sources), Sofka Zinovieff, Margot McPherson, and Rachel Hadas. COVID lockdown walks on the Hill of the Muses across from the Acropolis with Anne McCabe and Robert McCabe and their dog Anax involved helpful discussions and conversations on the topic. (The McCabes also happen to be the custodians of a passport/firman that belonged to Byron!) As the piece grew and became awkwardly “too long for an article, too short for a book,” I began to despair of doing anything with it. But along came Paula Deitz and Ron Koury of the Hudson Review, who took the early version of the piece in toto for their 75th anniversary issue. Besides their editorial advice, the Hudson Review’s fact checker, Katherine Seger, put me through my paces on many an issue, and helped correct a host of errors and clarify more than a few confusions. The New York Society Library hosted an event where I was able to present my thoughts to a discerning public. Ashley Cooper listened to me read through proofs on a drive from Cooperstown to New York City, laughing at the right places, and pointing out some padding and infelicities. Paul Cartledge also helpfully read through the piece many times at lightning speed with corrections and clarifications out of his vast knowledge of things Classical and Parthenonical. Jennifer Neils, Parthenon expert extraordinaire, likewise apprised me of some missteps. Avner Offer patiently walked me through the economic side, and brought the sales of Burlington House and Melbourne House—historic houses that touch on the lives of many of the characters here—to my attention as a useful point of comparison for prices and values. That errors no doubt remain, and new ones doubtless have sprouted, hydra-headed, where others were cut off, is entirely due to me and my own amateur enthusiasms for these topics. On the site formerly known as Twitter, a few kind souls volunteered out of the blue to read the piece in draft and offered feedback, including among others Nalini Jones, Vera Sideraki, and Thomas Jardine. Other encouraging readers include Brady Kiesling, David Mason, and Barnaby Philips. Geoffrey Bakewell patiently entertained queries from me about Plato and Socrates. John Kittmer gave me the helpful perspectives of a former UK ambassador to Greece, as well as a friend. John Psaropoulos of course bore the brunt of the book in progress, reading drafts and proofs, listening to rants and rhapsodies, bucking up the despondent, moderating the monomaniacal. As this book is inevitably the product of many years of work and conversations, I will certainly have forgotten to name some of those who contributed their time, thoughts, and expertise—thank you!—consider this a gesture to the Unknown God. And thanks last but certainly not least to the Paul Dry Books team, who saw in the Hudson Review piece an actual book and nudged me along to make it happen; and to Ian Koviak for the fresh perspective of the cover design. Here it is!

SOME SOURCES CONSULTED

(This is an incomplete list, but a good place to get started. The sine qua non of all Elgin & the Marbles sources is William St. Clair’s Lord Elgin & the Marbles; his Who Saved the Parthenon? ranks a close second.)

Barkan, Elizar and Ronald Bush. 2002. Claiming the Stones, Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity. Palisades, CA: Getty Research Institute Publications.

Beard, Mary. 2003. The Parthenon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Byron, George Gordon and Thomas Moore. 1832. The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life, by Thomas Moore, Esq. 17 vols. London: J. Murray.

Cavafy, C. P. 2003. Τα πεζά (1882–1931). Edited by Michalis Pieris. Athens: Ikaros Publishing.

Çelebi, Evliya (1611–1682). 2011. An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi. Edited, translated, and with commentary by Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim. London: Eland Publishing.

Clarke, E. D. 1818. Travels in Various Countries of Europe Asia and Africa (Second Part). London: T. Cadell and W. Davies.

Connelly, Joan Breton. 2014. The Parthenon Enigma: A New Understanding of the West’s Most Iconic Building and the People Who Made It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

de Vere, Aubrey. 1850. Picturesque Sketches of Greece and Turkey, Vol. 1. London: R. Bentley.

Dimoula, Kiki. 1956. Erebus.

———. 2012. The Brazen Plagiarist: Selected Poems. Translated by Rika Lesser and Cecile Inglessis Margellos. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Dodds, E. R. 1951. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dodwell, Edward. 1819. A Classical and Topographical Tour through Greece, during the Years 1801, 1805, and 1806, vol. II. London: Rodwell and Martin.

Downer, Martyn. 2021. Nelson’s Lost Jewel. Cheltenham: The History Press.

Eisner, Robert. 1993. Travellers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel to Greece. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Flecker, James Elroy. 1913. “Oak and Olive.” In The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker (1916) edited by J. C. Squire. 176–78. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.

Forster, E. M. 1908. A Room with a View.

Giannakopoulou, Liana. 2009. Ο Παρθενώνας στην ποίηση: μιαανθολογία (The Parthenon in Poetry: An Anthology). Athens: ELIA/MIET.

Great Britain. House of Commons. 1816. “Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Earl of Elgin’s collection of sculptured marbles; &c.” Report: xxiv–xxvi. https://archive.org/details/gri_33125008272383.

Griva, Anna. 2017. Σκοτεινή κλωστή δεμένη. Athens: Gabrielidis Publishers.

Hall, Edith and Henry Stead. 2020. A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939. London: Routledge.

Hanink, Johanna. 2017. The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press.

Hardy, Thomas. 1923. Collected Poems. London: Macmillan.

Haydon, Benjamin Robert. 1926. The autobiography and memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846). New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Hitchens, Christopher. 2008. The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification. London: Verso.

Hobhouse, John Cam. 1858. Travels in Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in 1809 and 1810, 2 vols. London: John Murray.

Housman, A.E. 1896. A Shropshire Lad.

Hughes-Hallet, Penelope. 2012. The Immortal Dinner. London: Vintage.

Hunt, Philip and A. H. Smith. “Lord Elgin and His Collection.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 36 (1916):163–372. https://doi.org/10.2307/625773.

Jenkins, Ian. 2007. The Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum. London: The British Museum Press.

Jenkyns, Richard. 1981. The Victorians and Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Keats, John. 1994. The Complete Poems of John Keats. New York: Modern Library.

Lambropoulos, Vassilis. 2010. “Unbuilding the Acropolis in Greek Literature.” In Classics and National Cultures, edited by Susan A Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lyons, C.E. 2005. Conference report. Cleaning the Parthenon Sculptures. British Museum, London, England (November 30–December 1, 1999). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Magni, Cornelio. 1688. Relazione Della Città d’Athene, colle Provincie dell’Attica, Focia, Beozia, e Negroponte, ne tempi che furono queste passeggiate da Cornelio Magni L’Anno 1674. Translations by Gregory Dowling.

Makriyannis, Yannis (1797–1864). 1907. Ἀπομνημονεύματα (Memoirs). With a preface by Giannis Vlachogiannis. Athens: Giannis Vlachogiannis.

Mango, Cyril. “Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): 53–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/1291190.

Melville, Herman. 2019. Complete Poems (LOA #320). Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: Library of America.

Merrill, James. 2002. Collected Poems. Edited by J.D. McClatchy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

———. 2004. Collected Prose. Edited by J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Milnes, Richard Monckton. 1834. Memorials of a Tour in Some Parts of Greece, chiefly poetical. London: Edward Moxon.

Minogue, Tom. “Comparing 4 Versions of Elgin’s Memorandum on His Pursuits in Greece.” TomMinogue.com, March 24, 2023. https://www.tomminogue.com/tom/?p=2879.

Nagel, Susan. 2004. Mistress of the Elgin Marbles: A Biography of Mary Nisbet, Countess of Elgin. New York: William Morrow.

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A. E. Stallings is an American poet, translator, and essayist who lives in Athens, Greece. She has published five collections of poetry: Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), Like (2018), and a selected poems, This Afterlife (2022). Her verse translations include Lucretius’s The Nature of Things and Hesiod’s Works and Days, both with Penguin Classics, and a translation of the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (Paul Dry Books, 2019). In 2023, she was named the University of Oxford’s 47th Professor of Poetry. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Stallings is married to the journalist John Psaropoulos, and has two children.