Was the Parthenon in danger? The evidence before Elgin

The short answer

Yes. By 1801 the Parthenon had been a ruin for more than a century, and its sculpture was disappearing year by year. In 1674 the draughtsman working for the Marquis de Nointel drew some nineteen figures in the west pediment; when Elgin's artists arrived, William Hamilton counted "seven or eight" (Hamilton, evidence to the 1816 Select Committee, p. 23).

The losses had many causes: the Venetian bombardment of 1687, a failed Venetian attempt to take the pediment figures, lime-burning, reuse of fallen blocks as building stone, and travellers buying or breaking off what they could carry. Neither the Ottoman garrison nor the local Christian population treated the ruins as a national monument. For most people in Athens they were pagan remains, a quarry, or objects of superstition.

Elgin's project began as a rescue on paper: measured drawings and plaster casts. He turned to removal when his artists saw what was happening to the originals, and he said so at the time and before Parliament. The sections below set out the evidence, and the objections to it.

A ruin, not a temple

The Parthenon Elgin's men found in 1800 was not the building Pericles left. It had been a church from late antiquity and a mosque under the Ottomans. On the night of 26 September 1687, during the Venetian siege, "one of Morosini's artillery shells detonated a cache of gunpowder" stored inside, and "the resulting explosion destroyed the largest part of the building" (Acropolis Museum).

Morosini then tried to carry off Athena's chariot and horses from the west pediment. The rope gave way, and "the statues fell on the ground and broke into pieces" (Acropolis Museum). Richard Chandler, who visited in 1765, put it bluntly: Morosini "was ambitious to enrich Venice with the spoils of Athens, and by an attempt to take down the principal group hastened their ruin" (Chandler 1776, p. 50).

After 1687 the fallen blocks lay where they dropped. Chandler saw the Turks "breaking the stones, and applying them to the building of a new mosque … or to the repairing of their houses and the walls of the fortress", and predicted that "the whole structure will gradually be consumed and disappear" (Chandler 1776, p. 47).

DateEventSource
1674Nointel's draughtsman records the pediments, about 19 figures in the westHamilton 1816, p. 23
1687Venetian shell ignites the powder store; most of the building destroyedAcropolis Museum
1687–88Morosini's attempt to lower the west pediment group smashes itAcropolis Museum
1765Chandler sees fallen stones broken up for houses, a mosque and wallsChandler 1776, p. 47
1800Elgin's artists find seven or eight west pediment figures leftHamilton 1816, p. 23

Lime kilns and souvenirs

Marble burnt in a kiln gives lime for mortar, and sculpted marble burnt as easily as plain. Edward Dodwell, no friend of Elgin, wrote that after 1687 the fallen pieces "were exposed in scattered heaps to the slow but certain destruction of Turkish ignorance … others, and particularly the bas-reliefs, were burnt into lime; for the Turks are said to have preferred for that purpose a sculptured block to a plain one" (Dodwell 1819, I, p. 324).

Elgin told the Select Committee the same thing from his own experience: "the Turks have been continually defacing the heads; and in some instances they have actually acknowledged to me, that they have pounded down the statues to convert them into mortar". One householder "laughingly told me, that they were made into the mortar with which he built his house" (Report 1816, pp. 16–17).

The Committee's own report summed up Hamilton's evidence: "The Turks showed a total indifference and apathy as to the preservation of these remains, except when in a fit of wanton destruction they sometimes carried their disregard so far as to do mischief by firing at them." Visitors did worse: travellers "committed greater waste", tempting the soldiers "to bring them down heads, legs, or arms" (Report 1816, p. 3).

Travellers were part of the problem, and said so. Chandler records that his own party "purchased two fine fragments of the frieze, which we found inserted over door-ways in the town" (Chandler 1776, p. 51). Pieces of the Parthenon were already being sold, set into houses, or carried off one by one, without record.

Stone for walls and churches

The fate of the little Ionic temple on the Ilissos, often identified as the temple of Artemis Agrotera, shows how antiquities fared in Athens under Christians and Muslims alike. Stuart and Revett drew it in the early 1750s, when it served as a church, and their engravings are now our main record of it (Miles 1980, pp. 309–312).

In 1768 the traveller Johann Hermann von Riedesel reported that the temple "was sold by the Turks to the Archbishop of Athens, to be used as building material for a new church". The second edition of Stuart and Revett says it was pulled down in 1780 (some accounts say 1778) "at the order of the Voivode of Athens" for a wall against Albanian raids (Miles 1980, p. 311 and n. 13). The two accounts differ on the final use of the stone, but agree that the building was treated as a quarry, with the Church and the Ottoman governor both involved. By Elgin's time the temple "had so completely disappeared, that its foundation can no longer be ascertained" (Elgin, Memorandum 1811, p. 7).

The Archbishop also gave antiquities away. A marble seat of honour from the Panathenaic Stadium, made for Herodes Atticus in the 140s AD, had been moved to the Archbishop's residence in Athens "sometime before May 1801 when the Archbishop of Athens gifted it to Mr and Mrs William Hamilton Nisbet", Lady Elgin's parents. It stood at their house at Biel, in East Lothian, for more than 150 years and is now in the British Museum as the Biel Throne (British Museum, 2001,0508.1).

Idols in Christian eyes

To the Orthodox Christians of Ottoman Athens the sculptures were the work of pagans. The vocabulary shows it. In the Greek of the period "Hellenes" meant pagans, or a mythical race of giants, not one's own ancestors: the seventeenth-century writer Rodinos reserves the name "for pagans" and never uses it of his own people, who called themselves Romioi (Kaplanis 2014). The Ottoman order of 1801 calls the Parthenon "l'antico tempio degl'Idoli", the ancient temple of the idols (Italian translation of the firman).

A church could value the stones of a temple more than the temple itself, as the sale of the Ilissos temple to the Archbishop shows. The Parthenon had been a church for nearly a thousand years before it became a mosque, and that conversion reshaped the building around a Christian liturgy.

One common claim needs care. The defacement of the east, north and west metopes is often blamed on Christian zeal at the time of the conversion. The most recent study finds "no evidence that the Parthenon metopes were defaced when the building was converted to a church", and dates the damage anywhere between antiquity and the seventeenth century (Anderson 2017, pp. 255, 258–259). This page does not rely on it.

Talismans and spirits

Where statues were valued, it was often as magic, not as art. John Cam Hobhouse, Byron's companion, recorded "a curious notion prevailing amongst the common Athenians" that the sculptures "are real bodies, mutilated and enchanted": "the spirit within them is called an Arabim, and is not unfrequently heard to moan and bewail its condition". Porters carrying one of Elgin's cases dropped it, "affirming, they heard the Arabim crying out, and groaning for his fellow-spirits detained in bondage in the Acropolis" (Hobhouse 1813, p. 348).

At Eleusis in 1801 Edward Daniel Clarke found villagers who "attributed to its presence the fertility of their land" in a battered statue they took for Demeter, and "believed that the loss of it would be followed by no less a calamity than the failure of their annual harvests" (Clarke 1816, VI, p. 601). When an ox broke loose and butted the statue, "a general murmur prevailed" (pp. 619–620). They predicted the ship carrying it would sink, and Clarke admits the Princessa was lost off Beachy Head with the statue aboard (p. 623, note).

Other travellers reported the same pattern: a woman on Salamis kept an ancient piece as "a talisman, effectual against evil spirits", and ancient fragments were built into houses and churches as "protective and apotropaic objects" (Hamilakis 2011, pp. 55, 57). This was a kind of care, and the archaeologist Yannis Hamilakis presents it as an indigenous archaeology. But a statue kept as a charm against evil spirits is protected for its supposed power, not for its form, its date or its place in a building. Nothing in that tradition would have stopped a lime-burner, and nothing in it recorded what was lost.

A past forgotten

The Athenians of 1800 did not, on the whole, see the Parthenon as the work of their ancestors. In folk tales the ancients were "either giants or diminutive creatures", living in o kairos ton Ellinon, the time of the Hellenes (Hamilakis 2011, p. 55). Popular usage "perceived Hellenes as mythical people with supernatural powers" (Kaplanis 2014). The Christian population called itself Romioi, Romans, after the Byzantine empire.

The idea of the monuments as a national inheritance came later, and largely from outside. The Philomuse Society of Athens, founded in 1813–14, counted among its members "not only Greek notables" but English and French travellers (Maufroy 2022). The first Greek ban on exporting antiquities dates from 1827, during the War of Independence, and the law of 1834 was the first to call them "works of the ancestors of the Greek people" (Galanakis 2022, pp. 163, 170). That is a generation after Elgin's men left the Acropolis.

The opposing view deserves a fair hearing. Hamilakis argues that "antiquities were important and meaningful to local people", and notes that the traveller Frederick Douglas criticised others for presenting Greeks as indifferent (Hamilakis 2011, p. 67, n. 27). That is true of particular objects in particular places. It does not show that anyone in Athens was able, or wished, to stop the loss of the Parthenon sculptures, and the record above shows that the losses went on.

Elgin's plan: a rescue on paper, then in fact

Elgin's project began as documentation. His agents Lusieri and Hamilton went first to Rome to hire "two of the most eminent formatori to make the madreformi for the casts", the moulds from which plaster copies are taken (Memorandum 1811, p. 4). The Ottoman order of 1801 itself authorised scaffolding round the temple, plaster moulds of "the same ornaments, and visible figures", and the measuring of ruined buildings (the Firman).

Elgin told the Select Committee: "My whole plan was to measure and to draw every thing that remained and could be traced of architecture, to model the peculiar features of architecture" (Report 1816, p. 16).

What changed his mind was what his artists saw. They "had the mortification of witnessing the very wilful devastation, to which all the sculpture, and even the architecture, were daily exposed, on the part of the Turks and travellers" (Memorandum 1811, p. 6). Statues thrown down in 1687 "had been absolutely pounded for mortar, because they furnished the whitest marble within reach" (pp. 7–8). So Elgin "felt himself impelled, by a stronger motive than personal gratification, to endeavour to preserve any specimens of sculpture, he could, without injury, rescue from such impending ruin" (p. 8).

He said the same under examination in 1816: "It was upon these suggestions, and with these feelings, that I proceeded to remove as much of the sculpture as I conveniently could: it was no part of my original plan to bring away any thing but my models" (Report 1816, pp. 16–17). The Committee accepted the account and concluded that Britain could give the sculptures "an honourable asylum … where, secure from further injury and degradation, they may receive that admiration and homage to which they are entitled" (Report 1816, p. 12).

The rescue was argued in public from the start, in 1811 and again in 1816, before the sculptures had become a national cause in Greece. It was not a justification invented afterwards.

Objections answered

"The Parthenon was respected; the sculptures on the building were safe." Dodwell wrote that the metopes "were out of their reach", that he "never heard an instance of their firing at them", and that the Parthenon "is regarded with respect not only by the Greeks but by the Turks" (Dodwell 1819, I, p. 325). The same Dodwell, a page earlier, describes the fallen sculpture being burnt into lime, and on the same page writes that "the world is certainly indebted to those who saved these fallen fragments". The figures still in place were not safe either: of the nineteen in the west pediment drawn in 1674, seven or eight remained.

"Elgin's men damaged the building." They did. Dodwell watched as "it was necessary to throw to the ground the magnificent cornice" (p. 322), and Clarke saw "a part of the adjoining masonry" loosened and fall when a metope was lowered (Clarke 1816, VI, p. 224). A rescue under the conditions of 1801 had costs, and they should be stated. They have to be weighed against what the record shows was being lost every year.

"The Ottoman authorities protected what was standing." John Morritt told the Committee that the Turkish government "certainly interfered to prevent any Marbles from being removed which were standing and in their places" (Report 1816, pp. 50–51). That protection was intermittent: it did not save the Ilissos temple, nor the pediment figures that fell and were burnt, and the architect William Wilkins observed that it was Elgin's activity that gave the sculptures "a value in the eye of the Porte" (p. 43).

"The sculptures would have survived in Athens anyway." Some scholars think so: Anthony Snodgrass found the counterfactual arguments "unconvincing" and pointed to the damage done by the British Museum's 1937–38 cleaning (Snodgrass 2003). The sculptures left on the building tell against him. They underwent "an awful process of disintegration in the course of the 20th century" through air pollution (Tinios 2002), and the Greek authorities finished taking the west frieze down to safety in 1993 (Acropolis Restoration Service).

Sources

Primary (open-access scans)

Secondary

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