The Parthenon Marbles - Past and Future

THE PARTHENON MARBLES -- PAST AND FUTURE

Reprinted from Contemporary Review. Copyright The Gale Group

I first saw the Parthenon in 1954 from the deck of an elderly liner named the Nea Hellas as she approached the dock at Piraeus. Two weeks earlier she had departed New York. After seven days at sea we touched at Lisbon, and then on to Naples where the view of Mt. Vesuvius from the harbour was not yet clouded in smog, and we took on a group of English tourists in search of the sun, for 1954 had been a year of almost continuous rain in Britain. They sprawled on the Nea Hellas' deck in various states of undress, while their white flesh seared bright red. But they were on the deck, sore but game, to watch the old liner enter harbour. The atmosphere was limpid, with the marvellous Mediterranean light which once bathed Athens. Rising above the city in the distance was the Acropolis and on it, the Parthenon.

Distance hid its scars, and it had many, for it was almost two and a half millennia old. It was begun in 447 B.C. when Athens was the leader of an alliance put together thirty years earlier to check the ambitions of the Persian Empire. By mid-century, it was clear that Persia's expansionism was well in check, and Athens redirected the revenues of her alliance into a building programme in Athens. As the history textbooks put it, the 'Delian League' which began as an ancient version of NATO, matured into the Athenian Empire, and the income from it financed the Parthenon. The cicerones who guide the hordes of tourists around the Acropolis nowadays like to refer to the Parthenon as the symbol of Athenian democracy. In fact, it is a monument to profitable imperialism.

But great works of art and architecture transcend the motives of their founders. Imperial Athens became a model for the ancient world. Less than two decades after the Parthenon was begun, Athens and her empire were plunged into a life-and-death struggle with her rival, Sparta and her allies, and when it was over, Athens had lost her empire, her navy and much of her prestige. But not all: Athens' reputation as the heartland of classical culture was something that Sparta could not take away. The Parthenon helped guarantee that. It may not have symbolized democracy, but it did come to symbolize what the classical heritage was all about.

The building remained more or less intact until the fifth century anno Domini. The Emperor Augustus had built a round shrine in front of it to put a Roman hallmark on Greece. The Emperor, Hadrian, had treated it kindly: it was he who restored the gold-and-ivory cult statue of Athena Parthenos -- Athena the Virgin -- for the original by the great sculptor Phidias had been damaged by fire beyond recall. Athena still had her followers long after Emperor Constantine I united the Roman Empire's future with the Christian religion. In Athens, paganism took a long time dying. When the cult statue of Athena was removed at last from the Parthenon in the fifth century, the head of the Neoplatonic Academy, whose house is now underneath Dionysios the Areopagite street, dreamed that Athena appeared to him and told him that since she had been ousted from her house, she must now move in with him. The Neoplatonic Academy remained faithful. Its philosophy had only a tenuous connection with Plato, but it kept the faith until 52 9, when the Emperor, Justinian, closed it down. For those who love lost causes, 529 is a notable year.

When Athena the Virgin vacated the Parthenon, the Virgin Mother of God moved in. An apse was built at the east end, and the sculptures of the east pediment, which showed the birth of Athena, were probably destroyed at that time. The west pediment's sculptures, which depicted the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the land of Attica, were more fortunate. The Turks took Athens in 1456 and built a mosque in the Parthenon and added a minaret, but the transformation did no great damage. In the 1670s, the French ambassador in Constantinople, the Marquis de Nointel, had his artist, Jacques Carrey, draw the Parthenon. It is usual to refer to Carrey as the 'so-called Jacques Carrey' which highlights our ignorance of the man. But his drawings feature in every art historian's attempt to reconstruct what the west pediment looked like on the eve of the great catastrophe, which took place in 1687.

In that year, Venice and the Ottoman empire were at war. A Venetian army was bombarding the Turkish garrison on the Acropolis, which was storing its gunpowder in the Parthenon, thinking it would be safe there. The Turks were reckless with gunpowder; a generation earlier, the Propylaea, as the great monumental entrance to the Acropolis is known, had suffered when gunpowder stored there was ignited by lightning. In 1687, a well-aimed shot from a Venetian cannon struck the Parthenon and the powder magazine exploded. I once had a Danish friend, now dead, who told me that his ancestor had aimed the ill-omened cannon, and claimed that it was out of penance that he became a professor of classics in a Canadian university. In fact, there seems to be some doubt about the identity of the man who aimed the cannon. An unnamed Hanoverian gunnery expert seems to be a prime candidate.

With the eighteenth century, the rediscovery of Greece began. In Britain the Society of the Dilettanti was founded in 1732. Its members were noblemen who had visited Italy where they ate and drank and acquired an appreciation of classical architecture. Europe still knew Greece through a Roman filter, for until Napoleon closed western Europe to Englishmen taking the Grand Tour, only the rare, eccentric traveller visited Greece which was an out-of-the-way corner of the Ottoman Empire. Roman classicism had inspired Palladian architecture which was favoured by the Whig ascendancy in Britain. The Dilettanti were not a Whiggish lot, and perhaps for that reason they wanted to promote Greek architecture through eyes uncorrupted by Palladianism. In 1748 they commissioned James Stuart, a painter-architect, and Nicholas Revett, an architect draughtsman, to visit Greece and produce drawings of as many of the ancient monuments as they could. Stuart and Revett's first volume of The Antiquities of Athens (1762) dealt with minor works and did not cause a great stir, but the second volume in 1787 was a revelation. The last volume appeared in 1794. Stuart and Revett founded the Greek Revival style, and though it was followed by many other 'revivals' such as the Gothic, the Romanesque and the Egyptian, the Greek Revival was the most successful of them all. It would ride the full flood of the nineteenth century romanticism and, in the United States, it became virtually the official architecture of the new republic.

The collectors soon followed. The French were in the forefront. Comte Marie-Gabriel de Choiseul Gouffler became Louis XVI's ambassador to Turkey in 1784. As a young man he had fallen in love with Greece and his pro-Greek sympathies nearly got him into trouble with the Sultan, but he smoothed ruffled feelings adroitly. His agent in Athens was Louis Fauvel who contrived to corner the antiquities market, and imported a wagon from Toulon which was the only conveyance in Athens sturdy enough to carry off large pieces of sculpture. If all had gone smoothly, the Parthenon Marbles', as the Greeks call them, would not be in the British Museum but in the Louvre, which does, in fact, have a small collection including a slab of the Parthenon frieze. But with the French Revolution, Louis XVI lost his head and Choiseul his job. Fauvel continued collecting, and Choiseul eventually returned to live in Paris where he died in 1817. His great collection was sold to the Louvre and to private collectors. But the greatest haul of Parthenon sculptures was to be made by Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, who was inadvertently to impart a new word to the French language: 'elginisme', which the Grand Larousse defines as a 'form of vandalism consisting of taking works of art from their countries of origin to put them in public or private collections'.

In fact, the French play a supporting role in the Elgin affair. On the 'ninth and tenth Thermidor of the sixth year of the First French Republic', 27-28 July, 1798 that is, the first fruits of Napoleon's plunder from Italy reached Paris. The Vatican and the Capitoline museums in Rome had yielded the Apollo Belvedere, the Venus di Medici, the Discobolus, the Laocoon and the Dying Gaul plus sixty or more other pieces. Much more was to come from the Netherlands, Prussia and the smaller German states, but it was Italy that was most thoroughly robbed. The bronze horses over the portal of San Marco in Venice were transported to Paris, and when the Arc de Triomphe was built, they were placed on top of it. They are Roman horses, and not Greek at all, but that was small comfort to the Venetians who attributed them to the great Lysippos.

Not quite two months before Napoleon's first shipment of Italian loot reached Paris, his great armada had set sail to conquer Egypt, and it, too, carried scientific experts, with the collection of artifacts on their minds. Napoleon did not expect British opposition, for Britain had withdrawn her fleet from the eastern Mediterranean two years before. France was on friendly terms with Turkey, and Egypt was at least nominally part of the Sultan's empire, though in fact it was ruled by the Mamelukes. But the Sultan recognized an insult when one was offered and when, on 1 August, Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, the Sultan was pleased and grateful. In Athens, Fauvel was sent to gaol. Lord Elgin, who arrived in Constantinople as a British ambassador, received a friendly reception.

It would be hard to prove that the French example influenced Elgin directly, but it was no doubt at the back of his mind. All the French artists had signed a petition presented to the Directory in October, 1796, which said, in part, that the 'more the (French) climate seems unfavourable to the arts, the more do we require models here to overcome the obstacles to the progress thereof ... The French Republic, by the strength and superiority of its enlightenment and its artists, is the only country in the world which can give a safe home to these masterpieces'. Elgin also sought models for English taste, but his initial purpose was to make drawings and plaster casts of the Parthenon Marbles. He engaged the court painter of the King of Naples, Giovanni Battista Lusieri, who was at work on a royal commission to sketch the antiquities of Sicily. The long-suffering Lusieri, who was to be on Elgin's staff for twenty years, became a victim of the Parthenon Marbles. So, as it turned out, did Lord Elgin himself.

The person most responsible for diverting Elgin's project from its original intention was his chaplain, Philip Hunt. Ottoman control in Athens was in the hands of the Voivode or governor, and the Disdar, the commander of the Acropolis garrison, and neither was inclined to cooperate with Elgin's men. A firman from the Sublime Porte was necessary. The first firman made its way slowly from Constantinople to Athens, but events had overtaken it by the time it arrived. A second was sought, and, the question of whether or not Elgin had a legal right to remove the Parthenon sculptures centres on this firman. It survives in Italian, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean of the time, and William St. Clair, in his new edition of Lord Elgin and the Marbles, has printed it in an appendix, with his translation. It clearly gave Elgin's party the right to measure, draw, make plaster casts of the sculptures, and to dig round the temple's foundations to find inscriptions. But it is the final clauses of the firman whi ch are controversial. They were inspired by Philip Hunt and they instruct the authorities in Athens not 'to make any opposition to the taking away of some pieces of stone with inscriptions, and figures, and in the aforesaid manner you should act and comport yourselves'.

On the basis of this vague authorization, Elgin took away 247 feet of the frieze that ran round the outside of the cella wall (originally it was 524 ft. long), fifteen metopes from the temple entablature, seventeen figures from the pediment and assorted architectural fragments. He also removed a caryatid from the Porch of the Maidens belonging to the Erechtheion a few steps north of the Parthenon ... In fact, Hunt contemplated taking away all of this exquisite temple, but the British Navy would have had to contribute a frigate if it were to be transported to Britain, and no ship was to be had. Hunt's acquisitive instincts far surpassed anything the Sublime Porte had in mind when it granted the firman. At Mycenae, Hunt cast a speculative eye on the Lion Gate, but it was too large to be moved. Louis Fauvel's wagon, which Elgin's agents commandeered while Fauvel himself was temporarily hors de combat, was the only vehicle in Athens which could transport heavy sculptures to the port. It was fortunate that the ea rly nineteenth century did not have modem moving equipment.

Elgin was not immune to the profit motive, but he made no money out of the 'Elgin Marbles'. When he sold them in 1816 to the British government, which bought them only after an exhaustive inquiry into the legitimacy of his ownership, he retrieved only about half his expenses. Bad luck clouded his later life. His career stalled. He lost his fortune on the Marbles. He also lost his wife to another man and the eighth Earl of Elgin, who became Governor-General of Canada, was to be the son of his second marriage. He lost his nose to syphilis, and though his ailment was probably misdiagnosed, it appears that he himself, at least, suspected syphilis. He also lost his reputation, for which Lord Byron was partly responsible, for in the controversy surrounding the removal of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens, Byron's voice carried special weight. He spoke for the Romantic Hellenism movement which was to colour the European view of Greece for the next two centuries. 'Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth/Immortal , though no more; though fallen, great!' he wrote in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. His brief poem, The Curse of Minerva is mere doggerel, but it was an effective anti-Elgin invective. Byron popularized what was a novel idea at the time, though it has by now gained international currency and informs the 1970 UNESCO convention on cultural property. It is that a country's art is its heritage. Art -- if it is old enough -- consists not merely of articles to be bought and sold at Sotheby's. It expresses the spirit of a people.

The debate on the purchase of the Marbles for the British Museum in 1816 took place against the backdrop of a bitter dispute in France. After Napoleon abdicated at Fontainebleau on 6 April, 1814, the Bourbons returned and the peace treaty did not mention the art treasures Napoleon had looted. The victors preferred to let Louis XVIII handle the question privately. But it was soon clear that Louis intended to return only those treasures which had not been displayed at the Louvre or the Tuileries, and after the Battle of Waterloo, the victors took a stronger line. They rejected a French effort to insert a clause in the Convention of Paris of 1815 which would guarantee the 'integrity of museums and libraries'. Yet the Convention did not explicitly demand the restitution of the looted treasures, and so the French cherished hopes of keeping most of them. They might have succeeded if the British delegation had not taken a strong line, and Prussia, Spain, the Pope and smaller states followed the British lead.

The French were incensed, for Britain had no direct interest: Napoleon had taken nothing from her. A rumour circulated in Paris that the Pope had promised the Prince Regent the Apollo Belvedere in return for British help in pressing the Vatican's claims, but the Apollo Belvedere went back to Rome. The British seemed motivated merely by Anglo-Saxon morality, which was not recognized as a virtue in France, and perhaps, too, out of a sense that Paris was an improper repository for great works of art. William Hamilton, who was one of Britain's representatives on the committee overseeing the return, hinted as much to the director of the Louvre, Vivant Denon. He told him that the Louvre was too near the Palais Royal, at the time the hub of Parisian prostitution, to be a centre for art study. Hamilton had been Lord Elgin's secretary. Tu quoque! France could reply.

What about the Elgin Marbles? It is little wonder that elginisme was accepted in the Grand Larousse.

The question of the repatriation of the Marbles began virtually at the same time that Britain decided to purchase them in 1816. During the parliamentary debate, one Hugh Hammersley proposed an amendment stating that Britain held the Marbles in trust, and when Athens demanded them back, Britain should return them. In fact, Greece did not officially ask for them back until 1983, by which time there was already a good deal of sentiment in the U.K. for their return. In 1983, Melina Mercouri, who became famous for her role as llya, the generous Athenian prostitute in the film Never on Sunday (1960), and then entered politics to become Minister of Culture (1981-89; 1993-94), held an emotional press conference in London on the Marbles. 'This is our history; this is our soul', she said. 'You must understand us... They (the Marbles) are the symbol and the blood and the soul of the Greek people'.

Mercouri played to the gallery and the gallery responded with playbacks. President Bill Clinton, who was met with riots protesting the bombing of Serbia when he visited Athens in 1999, stated that he was for the repatriation of the Marbles. In Britain, the Labour Party, in opposition, favoured the Marbles' return; once in power, its enthusiasm waned. A 1998 MORI opinion poll in the U.K. found a large majority in favour of the Marbles' return. When the European Parliament voted (15 January 1999) for the return of the Marbles by a slim majority, a third of the British members supported the resolution. William St. Clair, in the second edition of his Lord Elgin and the Marbles, revealed what insiders already knew, that in the late 1930s, the British Museum had subjected the Marbles to harsh cleaning to restore their whiteness, and in the process, some remnants of the original paint were removed. The Greeks who are sick of hearing foreigners gripe about the Athenian smog and the havoc caused by acid rain on ancie nt monuments, took note with some satisfaction. There is no easy solution for the nefos, as the Athenians call their smog.

Articles began to appear in law journals, for the Elgin Marbles case opens a can of worms in international law. Other treasures too have reached the world's great museums by dubious means and most were exported without any firman, not even one with ambiguous wording. The legal scholar who has concerned himself most with the Elgin Marbles is J. H. Merryman, Sweitzer Professor of Law at Stanford University and co-operating professor in the Stanford Art Department. He agrees that Elgin exceeded the terms of his firman, but points out that there were two additional firmans from the Sultan sanctioning the export of the marbles. As a lawyer, he is suspicious of all appeals to cultural nationalism, which are too close to the doctrines of Nazi Germany for his taste. If the Parthenon were actually being restored, Merryman would admit a moral argument for returning the Marbles to the temple whence they came, thus restoring its integrity, but the Greek plan is to transfer them from a museum in London to one in Athens. They cannot be exposed to the Athenian smog. The sculptures which Elgin spared have now been taken down and put in the Acropolis Museum here the remaining caryatids from the Porch of the Maidens now peer at visitors from behind glass. Is it more spiritually satisfying to see the Marbles in an Athenian museum gallery than one in London?

But lately the Greek argument has adopted a softer tone. Who owns the Marbles does not matter; what matters is location. In return for giving the Marbles a home in a new Acropolis Museum which will be ready in time for the 2004 Athens Olympics, God willing, Greece would pay for replicas to be exhibited in London, and would provide the British Museum with a permanent rotating collection of Greek art. Greece wants cooperation, not confrontation. The Greek Foreign Minister has assured other museum directors that they need have no apprehensions about other treasures taken from Greece before the War of Independence. Greece's ambitions extend only to the Elgin Marbles, and since she asks for possession rather than ownership, the Elgin Marbles case would establish no legal precedent.

The subtlety of the argument is truly Hellenic. But it does bring the problem closer to resolution. Greece has tacitly recognised that the exhibits of classical art in the British Museum are good ambassadors for Greece. The Elgin Marbles were always that. Their silent presence in the British Museum helped Greece win her freedom from the Ottoman Empire and expand her boundaries in the nineteenth century. Moreover the mission of the world's greatest museums has changed. No longer are they storehouses of artifacts. Rather, museum directors are impresarios who mount splendid exhibitions which draw thousands of visitors, and travel from museum to museum. As I write, an exhibition on Cleopatra VII of Egypt is drawing crowds to the British Museum, and from London, it will travel to the Field Museum in Chicago. Such exhibitions are international projects and often profitable ones. The Greek museums and the B.M. could make good partners.

But there is another reason why the Elgin Marbles case will probably soon be resolved. In the multicultural world of the future, classical art will matter less. The Duveen Gallery may someday house exhibits from Africa or Central America. As the Elgin Marbles become more the 'soul of the Greek people', as Melina Mercouri put it, they will become less the cultural heritage of the West. Greece will not entirely lose the special place it has in the affections of the western world, but attitudes will change.