Returning the Parthenon Marbles to Athens would only feed the beast of nationalist myth: let them tell their story in London

First published in The Art Newspaper on 13 July 2022. The text below is the author’s submitted version; the published version may differ slightly after editing. (Working title: “Exceptional consequences”.)

It was with a bit of surprise that I read Prof. Wallace-Hadrill declare on these pages not to know what story the Elgin Marbles could possibly tell in their London home. Their presence there is the fruit of a life-defining toil, plus more than two centuries of resolute defence by their dedicated stewards. If we followed Susan Pierce, striving to understand “the nature of our relation to the objects which come from the past, and to perceive how they affect us”, we would easily discover that there is actually more than one story worth telling behind such effort and determination.

One could talk about how the Elgin Marbles excited the imagination of poets, painters, sculptors, since the very moment the sculptures set foot in Britain. Without them, how different could the production of Keats, Byron, Shelley, Flaxman, Rossi, Westmacott have been! How much poorer would London itself look, without the visible products of this inspiration. The broken and rugged materiality of those “marble men and maiden overwrought” brought about the end of the long love affair with the ideal beauty of classicism, the dial of the artist compass moving away from the rigid aestetic of forms and towards the quest for the sublimity of nature.

This tectonic shift brough us also the amazing rediscovery of what the classical world really was, as opposed to the idealised version of it that was so popular during the neoclassical period. The celebrated certainties of the antiquarians crumbled, challenged by Greek originals that required a more structured, more scientific approach to the science of the study of antiquity. One could say that European scientific archaeology was born there and then.

Moreover, and it is a fact often overlooked, the relics from Athens, Phigaleia, and Aegina, once translated to their new homes in London, Paris, and Munich, became the inextinguishable fuel of the newborn philhellenism. And it was that fire, that indignation at the fact that the very cradle of our civilisation could lay neglected and ignorant of its own greatness, that sparked a crescendo of publications, fundraisers, international help, and ultimately human sacrifice on the altar of the liberty of the Greeks.

But all this epic is, for Wallace-Hadrill and the supporters of repatriation, not only worthless but even a history of barbarism. In their narrative, Lord Elgin is once again, as he was since Byron’s day, the rapacious archetype of those Scoti who came to complete “quod non fecerunt Gothi”: destruction and pillage. And it is this stain that they seek to erase from the record, cleansing the history of the Acropolis on the path set by Leo von Klenze, the German architect who inspired the removal from the sacred rock of all that did not conform to his ideal of classical Athenian greatness. And then comes the reconstruction, a project still ongoing well beyond the Venice Charter, so that no memory of Christians, Franks, Turks and Venetians may be elicited by the ruins themselves.

This effort to rewind the course of history, to amend the “mistakes” of the past, is pursued against the academic effort to truly understand what the Parthenon once was. While archaeologist and classicists try to shake an athenocentric perspective on the Greek world that is no more than a historiographical construct produced by a biased selection of which written sources survived the middle ages, yet repatriationists and the Greek government want us to look at the Parthenon as the epitome of an entire civilisation. While they attack the British Museum as a tool of imperialist oppression, they conveniently omit to inform the public about the ruthless imperialism that produced the wealth used to build the Periklean program. And the fact that in Elgin’s times the majority in Greece didn’t really care about the fate of the Parthenon (or any other ancient monument) gets conveniently forgotten behind the tale of a Greece with “no voice”.

Not having a case, they have now grown tired of contesting the legal ownership of the sculptures. Never mind the legal case, they argue, there is a moral one! It is apparently justice itself requiring the disecta membra of the temple on the Acropolis to be reunited if not on the building, at least close by.

And yet I ask how moral can it be to keep accusing Elgin of having “stolen” the marbles when there is not a shred of evidence of such a crime (let alone an actual verdict) and plenty of testimonies to the contrary? How moral can it be to brush aside all the evidence that does not fit the narrative, to hide the weaknesses and the missteps of the Greeks of the time, and replace it with the shiny propaganda born out of the War of Independence?

How moral can it be to attack John Williams, the deputy director of the British Museum, for asserting the documentable (and logical) truth that “much of the frieze was in fact removed from the rubble around the Parthenon”? If the tree is known by its fruits, allow me to doubt the morality of such a case.

Let’s stop lending our ears to the charming sirens that want us to be “classy” and “modern” and choose, following Aristotle, historical truth over an emotive friendship. Let’s immerse ourselves in the amazing stories -our stories- that the Elgin Marbles can only tell us in Bloomsbury. Declaring that they are only “stones of no value” to us and sending them to Athens would only feed the beast of ideology and nationalist myth.