Greeks Go for All the Marbles In Effort to Get Back Artifacts

Jonathan Williams, a curator who oversees the British Museum's European department, praises the new Athens museum as "an extraordinary achievement." But he adds, "The position of the trustees essentially remains that the current distribution in Athens and London provides an important opportunity for different stories about this monument to be told."

This is a slight variation on the museum's formal argument about possession of the marbles, articulated on its Web site. There the emphasis is on the international importance of the sculptures, the number of visitors who see them in London (6 million a year, the museum estimates) and the excellent quality of British stewardship.

"The sculptures from the Parthenon have come to act as a focus for Western European culture and civilization, and have found a home in a museum that grew out of the eighteenth-century 'Enlightenment,' whereby culture is seen to transcend national boundaries," reads a museum statement.

It is a strange use of the word Enlightenment, and a rather galling association of imperial plundering with universal, transnational values. The marbles "transcend national boundaries" in part because Lord Elgin used the Royal Navy to spirit them out of Greece. And while Elgin's gusto for all things classical certainly marked him as a man of the Enlightenment, his removal of the marbles also involved dubious legal dealings and an arrogant disregard for the integrity of the building. It was baldly colonialist behavior by a man who figured Britain, as a great power, simply deserved to own the marbles no matter the cost or the consequences.

And yet, Lord Elgin may have been one of the most hapless imperialists of his time. When he set out in 1799 as the British representative to the Ottoman Empire (which controlled Greece at the time), he planned only to make plaster casts and drawings of the marbles in Athens. His stated goal was the elevation of British taste in art and architecture, not the expansion of England's collection.

Actually taking the marbles was an act of opportunism, justified by a very loose and liberal reading of a short phrase in the legal permission he secured to work on the Acropolis ("and when they wish to take away some pieces of stone with old inscriptions, and figures, that no opposition be made"). The phrase "some pieces" became, in the event, everything that he could get his hands on, and the most infamous act of artistic pillage in history.

At the time, France and England were engaged in a long series of wars that would end only with Napoleon's rustication to the remote island of St. Helena in 1815. Both countries were hungry for antiquities. Napoleon was stuffing the Louvre in Paris with the best world art that conquest could assemble. The French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire told his agents in Athens, "Take all you can. Do not neglect any opportunity to pillage anything that is pillageable."

Arguments in Elgin's defense have run like this: The marbles would have been stolen anyway; the British appropriation of them secured them against neglect and dispersal; and the Turks, at the time, showed little or no interest in saving these vital works. Even the art-loving Venetians had done serious damage to the legacy of the Greeks when they blasted the Parthenon into roughly the shape we know it today while firing on a Turkish ammunition dump in 1687. Elgin had sound reasons to believe he was acting in the best interests of the art.

But Elgin could never have anticipated the writings of Lord Byron, the romantic poet, who fell in love with Greece (and Greek boys) shortly after the marbles were stripped off.

"Dull is the eye that will not weep to see/Thy walls defaced," wrote Byron of the Parthenon in his first great poem, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." And he made no mistake about the culprit, Lord Elgin, whom he derided as a hardhearted Scotsman with a barren mind. The poem made Byron famous and confirmed Elgin as a scoundrel in much of the popular imagination.

And in many ways, it laid the groundwork for the modern preservation movement, and ultimately, Tschumi's new museum. When seen simply as functional objects, there's no reason not to update, change or tear down buildings depending on the needs of the moment. Byron was making an argument about preserving a building, as an object with historical and aesthetic integrity, for entirely emotional and sentimental reasons. His poem suggested that some buildings have poetic, even sacred, qualities that transcend time and function.

Which is essentially the argument that the Greeks, and Tschumi's building, are making today. Elena Korka, director of prehistoric and classical antiquities at the Greek Ministry of Culture, says that the Greek position on the marbles' repatriation has evolved over the years.