Should the Elgin Marbles be returned? Greece’s argument, put forward recently by the country’s foreign minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is well rehearsed: the Marbles, he claimed, were ‘essentially stolen’ from their rightful owners by Lord Elgin at the turn of the 19th century – and they belong in the Acropolis, not the British Museum. Only when the looted sculptures are reunited with their siblings in Athens, we’re told, can the ensemble reveal its authentic meaning. The reality is rather more complex. The case for the British Museum returning the Marbles to Athens – albeit by the legal fiction of a ‘loan’ – is weak.
The facts are these. The Acropolis, on which the Parthenon stands, had been used by the Ottomans as a strategic military base for centuries. In 1687, under siege by the Venetians, a gunpowder store in the Parthenon exploded, destroying part of the building. The Ottoman authorities cared so little that the antiquarian debris was still littering the ground more than a century later when Elgin’s agents arrived on the scene. They found Ottoman soldiers destabilising the remaining sculptures by prising out the lead from the clamps holding the marble blocks together, in order to make bullets. Elgin had secured from the highest official in Constantinople authorisation to take away ‘any pieces of stone with old inscriptions, and figures’.
Elgin didn’t nick the Marbles; he rescued them
Now aware of the vulnerability of the sculptures, he persuaded the city governor, in the presence of an official from the sultan’s court, that this open-ended permission extended to those, too. The work of removing the Marbles then proceeded in full public view over two-and-a-half years from 1801. The last shipment to London left nine years later. Had the authorities objected, they could easily have stopped it. But they didn’t. Elgin didn’t nick the Marbles; he rescued them.
Even if we discount the history, what of the supporting argument – put forward by Geoffrey Robertson, KC, in his book-length case for the prosecution, Who Owns History? – that, since they represent ‘the essence of Greekness’, the Marbles should now be returned to Greece? That essence is supposed to be democracy, yet in the ‘democracy’ that Periclean Athens supported when the Parthenon was built, 30,000 citizens elected representatives to the legislative assembly, which ruled over 300,000 unenfranchised women and slaves. That was far more like England’s medieval parliament than today’s democratic one.
And whereas contemporary Greeks may project onto the Parthenon’s sculptures an embodiment of their own ideals, their original meaning to ancient Athenians was imperial triumph and to ancient Spartans and Corinthians, imperial oppression. The Marbles have no single, authentic meaning. They meant contrary things to ancient Greek peoples. They mean something different to contemporary Greeks. And they mean something different again to international visitors to the British Museum, where their juxtaposition to art from all over the world provokes fresh insight into human cultures.
If the curators of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens want to display what the original Parthenon looked like, with all its parts together in a glorious whole – ‘reuniting this one work of art’, as Lord Ed Vaizey put it last month on the Today programme, echoing Mr Mitsotakis – then modern visual technology stands ready to project it.
The case in favour of keeping the Elgin Marbles in London is a strong one. Returning them to Athens out of a misplaced sense of colonial guilt would serve to entrench the ‘decolonising’ left’s narrative more deeply in our institutions and public opinion. That, in turn, would increase Britain’s vulnerability to further unjustified claims.
One coming down the tracks at speed is the demand for compensation for slavery. In September, it was reported that the Caribbean Community (Caricom) Reparations Commission will seek £15.48 trillion in reparations from Britain. The present Conservative government is reassuringly resistant. When asked in April whether he would commit Britain to ‘reparatory justice’, the Prime Minister firmly declined, adding that ‘trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward, and it’s not something that we will focus our energies on’.
But resistance may well weaken, should Labour enter No. 10 next year. In his tendentious argument for reparations, Britain’s Black Debt, the Caricom commission’s chairman, Sir Hilary Beckles, made sure to name-check recent Labour ministers or shadow-ministers by quoting them at the beginning of most chapters. It was a Labour MP, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who put the question about reparations to the Prime Minister back in the Spring. And, since the Autumn, the Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien has been funding a slavery-reparations campaign in parliament through the office of another Labour MP, Clive Lewis.
Any prime minister who wants to shield British taxpayers from opportunistic claims for reparations will treat the truth about Britain’s imperial history with the greatest care. And any PM who cares about Britain’s historical record, will veto the British Museum’s return of the Elgin Marbles until the strong case against it has been answered. Keir Starmer has complacently declared that he won’t stand in the museum’s way. Rishi Sunak has signalled that he is made of sterner stuff.
Nigel Biggar is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and author of the bestselling Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), whose paperback edition, with a new Postscript, will come out in February
The British Museum is the best home for the Elgin Marbles
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29.12.2023
Should the Elgin Marbles be returned? Greece’s argument, put forward recently by the country’s foreign minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is well rehearsed: the Marbles, he claimed, were ‘essentially stolen’ from their rightful owners by Lord Elgin at the turn of the 19th century – and they belong in the Acropolis, not the British Museum. Only when the looted sculptures are reunited with their siblings in Athens, we’re told, can the ensemble reveal its authentic meaning. The reality is rather more complex. The case for the British Museum returning the Marbles to Athens – albeit by the legal fiction of a ‘loan’ – is weak.
The facts are these. The Acropolis, on which the Parthenon stands, had been used by the Ottomans as a strategic military base for centuries. In 1687, under siege by the Venetians, a gunpowder store in the Parthenon exploded, destroying part of the building. The Ottoman authorities cared so little that the antiquarian debris was still littering the ground more than a century later when Elgin’s agents arrived on the scene. They found Ottoman soldiers destabilising the remaining sculptures by prising out the lead from the clamps holding the marble blocks together, in order to make bullets. Elgin had secured from the highest official in Constantinople authorisation to take away ‘any pieces of stone with old inscriptions, and figures’.
Elgin didn’t nick the Marbles; he........
© The Spectator
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