Historical Truth is an Odyssey

First published in Classical Wisdom on 19 August 2026.

While we are all mesmerised by the new Nolan retelling of the tale of Odysseus, the debate rages on matters of historical truth, the limits of storytelling, and poetic licence.

Hollywood’s most cerebral director is a natural match for literature’s most cerebral hero, especially when we consider Odysseus in his role of narrator of his own adventures to an audience thirsting for adventure. The central section of the Odyssey — Books 9 to 12, in which Odysseus recounts to the Phaeacians his encounters with Cyclopes, sirens, enchantresses, and winds in a bag — is not, on any careful reading, a factual account.

Homer signals as much at the very outset: the hero’s crew was destroyed, he tells us, because they heedlessly devoured the sun-god’s cattle. But that is strikingly different from what Odysseus says happened. The two accounts contradict each other, and Homer’s comes first.

By the time Odysseus opens his mouth to the court of Alcinous, the alert reader has already been told that what follows is not the whole truth. Juvenal, writing in the early second century AD, identified the mechanism precisely: Odysseus stirred his listeners to anger and laughter alike as a mendax aretalogus — a lying virtue-signaller, to use a translation our own age might find disconcertingly contemporary — before naming the decisive reason he could get away with it.

The Ithacan’s tale was all his own, with none to bear him witness.

No surviving companions, no contradicting testimony, no check on the account except the credulity of his hosts. Lucian was blunter still: the Phaeacians were simple folk, and Odysseus fooled them to the top of their bent.

Odysseus is not merely the founding hero of Western literature. He is its founding unreliable narrator. And the particular form of his unreliability turns out to illuminate, with uncomfortable precision, two centuries of the most consequential cultural argument in the modern world.

Consider another captivating narrator: Byron.

Lord Byron — poet, philhellene, and the most eloquent prosecutor of Lord Elgin ever to take the stand — is routinely invoked as a kind of disinterested moral witness: the conscience of the age, catching a Scottish earl red-handed on the Acropolis. It is a flattering role, and Byron, never a man to undersell himself, was happy to play the part of the hero-narrator.

But no part of his tale survives contact with the actual history of those events, or, for that matter, with Byron’s own candid words about himself.

The self-assessment appears in Don Juan, Canto III, stanza 87. Byron has just sketched a court poet paid to satirise or flatter as occasion demands — one who praised the present and abused the past, who lied with facility whenever well enough compensated. He then steps back from this portrait of the hired versifier to offer a general reflection on the tribe:

And feeling, in a poet, is the source
Of others’ feeling; but they are such liars,
And take all colours — like the hands of dyers.

The stanza sits within a sequence that also contains The Isles of Greece, his great lament for Greek subjugation. It is characteristic Byron: soaring emotional commitment and cool self-awareness occupying the same breath. He weeps for Greece, then reminds us that poets weep strategically.

This is not false modesty. It is an accurate self-portrait from a man whose attack on Elgin — in the notes to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage — was constructed not from firsthand witness but from French dinner-table politics.

Byron arrived in Athens in 1809, eight years after Elgin had obtained his firman and the bulk of the removals had already occurred. He never saw the firman. He never met Elgin. What he did have, in some quantity, was the company of Louis Fauvel, the French consul in Athens and an enthusiastic antiquities collector in his own right, who had every professional and patriotic reason to want a British rival’s reputation destroyed. The young Byron who absorbed this influence was not yet the passionate philhellene of later legend. He tells us himself that Fauvel “frequently declared in my hearing that the Greeks do not deserve to be emancipated” — and Byron duly agreed: “The Greeks will never be independent... and God forbid they ever should!”

So much for The Isles of Greece! This is not the voice of a disinterested moral witness. This is a twenty-something Whig, absorbing his French friend’s politics over dinner and reaching for a villain. After all, who needs a hero if there is no monster?

And yet — and this is where Byron becomes genuinely invaluable — his own unguarded writings quietly demolish the case built in his name. He notes that Elgin performed “the robbery of ruins from Athens to instruct the English in sculpture.” He concedes, almost in passing, that the sculptures are, “as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon.”

He confirms, treating it as settled background fact, that Lusieri and Fauvel, “contest the privilege of plundering the Parthenon, and triumph in turn, according to the tenor of each succeeding firman.” He is not arguing that the firmans existed. He takes them as common knowledge — the unquestioned framework within which the events unfolded — while condemning what was done under them.

His travelling companion John Galt confirms having seen the original Turkish firman in Athens in 1810. Another companion, John Cam Hobhouse, tells us that the real distress in Athens concerned not the Parthenon sculptures at all but the Caryatid — the single pillar-maiden removed from the Erechtheion and replaced, memorably, with a pile of bricks. The ghost stories, the talk of marble weeping in the night: all the Caryatid, never the Parthenon.

A witness for the prosecution who was never in the room, testifying from a crime scene reconstructed from French dinner-table politics, a poet’s appetite for a good villain, and — by his own admission — a professional licence to lie beautifully.

And yet it is Byron’s version, not Hobhouse’s, not the parliamentary Select Committee’s, not the testimony of those who actually watched the firman do its work in Athens, that survived as the popular truth. “The tale was all his own, with none to bear him witness” — or rather, with none whose testimony was interesting enough to compete poetically.

The firman itself is rather less romantic, and considerably more decisive. The document also known as the Hunt letter— named after Philip Hunt, Elgin’s chaplain and agent in Athens — is an Italian translation of the authorisation letter from the deputy Grand Vizier. Its paper, calligraphy, language, and wording are consistent with comparable Ottoman administrative authorisations of the period; scholars on both sides of the restitution debate accept its authenticity.

Moreover, Ottoman internal documents published by the historian Edhem Eldem in 2011 corroborate it independently, recording as established administrative fact that, “figure-bearing stones of this kind have previously been given to the English.” The Ottomans’ own internal records confirm what Elgin and Hunt said happened.

The key clause — repeated twice, as Ottoman custom required — was rendered in the authorised 1816 English parliamentary translation as permission to take away, “any pieces of stone with old inscriptions and figures” within the Acropolis. Not some pieces. Any pieces. Within one territorial boundary, “nel Castello di Acropoli” (in the Acropolis castle), with no further restriction on what may be removed or from where. The legal principle is elementary: nullum crimen sine lege. You cannot accuse a man of exceeding a limit that was never written.

Nor is the reading of this document disputed by Byron’s friends. Edward Dodwell — who called the removal “insensate barbarism” and “devastating outrage” — wrote nonetheless that Hunt “was empowered by his firman to take away any [sic!] antiquities he chose from the Acropolis of Athens.”

He adds something more significant still: that at the time, the Turks and Greeks of Athens, “loudly and openly blamed their sovereign for the permission he had granted. I was on the spot at the time.” The Greeks present in Athens in 1801 did not accuse Elgin of exceeding his authority. They blamed their own Sultan for granting it. This is not a concession extracted from a sympathetic source. It is what a hostile witness admits against his own apparent interest — the most reliable category of testimony the historical record supplies.

And yet, there are those who deny the Ottomans the authority to grant that permission. The Ottoman Empire was not -as too often is repeated- an occupying force in Athens in 1801. By that date it had governed the city for three hundred and forty-three years — longer than the United States has existed. In international law, occupation is a temporary wartime condition. What the Ottomans exercised in Athens was sovereignty: they were the legitimate government, the owners of the stones, and they gave their permission clearly. The 1816 parliamentary Select Committee, having examined the document, the witnesses, and the circumstances of the removal in full, cleared Elgin of every allegation of illegal acquisition and established that he had acted entirely in a personal capacity, at his own expense, without state support or imperial commission. He eventually sold the sculptures to the government for £35,000 — much less than it had cost him to rescue them.

So why does the theft narrative persist? Not, it turns out, because the evidence supports it, but because the alternative to Byron’s version requires someone to do something far less glamorous than simply writing a curse: it requires embarking on an Odyssey of your own, reading the ledgers, visiting places distant in space and in time, confronting monstrous biases.

The claim that Elgin bribed his way to the firman dissolves, on close inspection of those ledgers, into a currency misreading — piastres converted as pounds, inflating fifteenfold what was really pocket-money— and in any case the payments recorded post-date the main removals by years.

The claim that he wanted the sculptures for his Scottish house rests entirely on Edward Daniel Clarke, another friend of Byron’s who was openly hostile to Elgin and who offered no documentary evidence. The single letter that critics routinely invoke contains a remark they invariably omit: “These reflections only apply to unworked marble.”

Byron himself — who relied on Clarke and had every incentive to use the mansion story against Elgin — rejected it, saying Elgin had acted to, “instruct the English in sculpture.”

And the claim that underlies all the others — that the Greeks of 1801 had a deep, continuous, sacred attachment to the Parthenon that Elgin violated — is not an allegation that collapses under counterargument. It collapses under the testimony of the Greeks themselves. “Our people do not have any idea, not even of their ancestors,” wrote Georgos Sakellarios, a leading voice of the Greek Enlightenment, in 1796, five years before Elgin’s men set foot on the rock. Adamantios Korais, no friend of foreign meddling, was still complaining in 1810 that the publication of ancient Greek writers was “totally new to us.”

The Acropolis in 1801 sat inside a working Ottoman military fort that ordinary Athenians were not permitted to enter. Its Orthodox priests told their flocks that pagan statuary was the devil’s handiwork. Hobhouse reports that local people supposed the sculptures “will be bettered by a removal from the country of the tyrant Turks” — and if they could earn wages helping load the carts, so much the better.

The formalisation of the idea that a nation was mourning its soul started soon afterwards. The new Kingdom of Greece, founded in 1832, needed a usable past more urgently than it needed ancient marble. Leo von Klenze, the Bavarian architect imported to give the young state its monumental face, decided which centuries counted as “the remains of the glorious past”, and which ones were to be purged as mere “remains of barbarity”. Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos supplied the master narrative: an unbroken line running from Pericles to the modern Greek.

Almost two centuries after the facts, Melina Mercouri, the famous actress and politician, decided to launch the claim onto a global stage: “You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are the essence of Greekness”: feeling, with no detour through the firman, the testimony of eyewitnesses, or the inconvenient historical record. Another bard singing her song, a Siren — the half-woman, half-bird creature whose beautiful chant is artfully designed to draw the sailors’ attention away from the only thing they should be looking at: the lethal rocks beneath the water. The power of a Siren song is that its emotional force can overwhelm other considerations. What it drowns out, in this case, is the entire evidentiary record: the firman, Dodwell, the parliamentary committee, Hobhouse, Galt, the Greek Enlightenment writers on their own people’s indifference to ancient marble, and Byron’s own inadvertent corroboration of the permissions he spent two cantos condemning. Add to this Turkey’s 2024 intervention at UNESCO, denying the firman’s existence while its own Ottoman internal archives confirm the contrary, and the picture is complete: a Siren song amplified by a chorus of interested parties, each contributing a verse, none troubling themselves with the score.

Odysseus knew how to deal with this: he had himself bound to the mast, so that he could hear the song in full, even enjoy it, and still sail past it. He did not refuse to listen, but he refused to let the listening steer his ship.

That is the only available posture for anyone reading seriously about the Elgin Marbles in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Go watch Nolan’s Odyssey. Hear Byron’s thunder. Admire Mercouri’s tears. They are all genuinely moving performances, and the philhellenism that underlies them is not at all contemptible — it was, after all, the same philhellenism fired by those Marbles arriving in London that helped arm and fund the Greek war of independence a generation later. But hear the song, and then sail on past, unmoved in the one place that matters.

Isocrates, writing some two thousand years before Byron, offered the key to the interpretation: “the title of Greek belongs not to those who share a common blood but to those who share a common culture.” And Shelley, in the grip of that philhellenic fever the Marbles had helped ignite, put it more bluntly: “We are all Greeks.”

The Elgin Marbles are not a foreign trophy. They are our share of a common inheritance — no less ours for also being Greece’s — and the historical evidence supports this view.

The Phaeacians, remember, were simple folk. We need not be.