THE ELGIN MARBLES: NATIONAL TREASURES OR ILL-GOTTEN GAINS? - PART ONE

 

THE ELGIN MARBLES: NATIONAL TREASURES OR ILL-GOTTEN GAINS?

 PART ONE: THE ELGIN MARBLES BEFORE LORD ELGIN

This article is an extended version of a talk I gave on 1 September 2021 at the Atkinson Museum, Southport, as part of their Ancient Worlds lecture series

The idea for this article (and the talk on which it was originally based) developed out of the work on Greek architectural sculpture which I used to do with my A-level Classical Civilisation students.  Every year we would spend weeks studying the sculptures from the Parthenon and other buildings on the Athenian Acropolis (the so-called ‘Elgin Marbles’), culminating in a visit to see these sculptures in the British Museum.  This inevitably drew us into the question of how these sculptures had ended up in the British Museum, and whether they should stay there or be returned to Greece.

East pediment of the Parthenon (Photo Credit: Trustees of the British Museum)

The debate over the Elgin Marbles is very emotive and often politicised -Tony Blair, for example, promised to return the marbles if he got elected as Prime Minister in 1997 but then promptly changed his mind after the election.  The cause of returning the marbles to Greece attracts plenty of celebrity interventions – although as a Classicist I find some of these interventions a bit frustrating, as some of the people who argue most vociferously for the return of the marbles often don’t seem to know – or care – very much about the statues themselves. In 2014 George Clooney gave a memorable interview on the ‘Pantheon Marbles’ in which he said that ‘even in England the polling is in favour of returning the marbles from the Pantheon’ - suggesting that he’d got a bit confused between the Parthenon in Athens and the Pantheon in Rome. Melina Mercouri, the former movie star who became Greek Minister of Culture in the 1980s, made it her personal mission to recover the Elgin Marbles.  Dorothy King, in her (anti-return) book The Elgin Marbles tells a wonderful story about Mercouri arriving in the British Museum with a camera crew and sinking to her knees the gallery, proclaiming that the sculptures represented the ‘symbol and the blood and the soul of the Greek people’, only to be quietly informed by one of the museum staff that the Elgin Marbles were actually in the room next door.

One of the difficulties in trying to reach a sensible solution is that there are a lot of myths and misconceptions floating around about how Lord Elgin acquired these sculptures and how they ended up in the British Museum.  Such misconceptions aren’t confined to Hollywood actors – I recently came across a statement in an academic work (published by a reputable university press) that Lord Elgin had ‘purchased the sculptures from the Greek Government’, which is about as far removed from what actually happened as it’s possible to get.

My objective in writing this article is therefore to try and bring some clarity to this debate by outlining what the Elgin Marbles are, why they’ve become so important to Greece’s national identity, and the extent of the damage these sculptures had already sustained before Lord Elgin’s intervention.  In my next blog I will look at how Lord Elgin obtained the sculptures and how the British Museum acquired them, before trying to evaluate some of the arguments for retaining the sculptures in the British Museum or returning them to Athens.

What are the ‘Elgin Marbles’?

What do we mean when we talk about the ‘Elgin Marbles’? The short answer is that they’re a collection of architectural sculpture and architectural fragments from the Athenian Acropolis, which were brought to Britain under the instructions of Thomas Bruce, 7^th Earl of Elgin, between 1801 and 1805.  They were purchased for the nation in 1816 and they’ve been on display in the British Museum ever since.

I think that at the outset it’s important to emphasise that the Elgin Marbles are architectural sculptures, designed as part of a building, rather than free-standing sculptures which could theoretically be displayed anywhere (this is a key point in the argument for returning them to Greece, so we’ll come back to this in the next instalment).  The sculptures come from various buildings constructed on the Athenian Acropolis (the natural rock outcrop in the centre of the city) in the 5^th century BC. The majority of the sculptures are from the Parthenon, but the collection also includes part of the frieze from the smaller Temple of Athena Nike and some architectural elements (including an Ionic column and a Caryatid – a female sculpture used in place of a column) from another temple, the Erechtheion.  Philip Hunt, Lord Elgin’s agent, apparently wanted to bring the entire Erechtheion back to London, but the British Navy didn’t have a ship big enough to carry it. 

 

Ionic column and Caryatid from the Erechtheion (Trustees of the British Museum)

The Greek Government first officially asked the UK to return the marbles in 196.  Since then there have been several further requests for the sculptures to be returned, notably in the run-up to the 2004 Athens Olympics and following the opening of the New Acropolis Museum in 2009.  

Given that there are lots of Greek sculptures outside Greece, and that some museums even have entire buildings from the ancient Greek world, this raises the question: what’s so special about these particular sculptures?  The Pergamon Museum in Berlin (definitely one of my favourite museums in the whole of Europe) displays – amongst other buildings – the city gate from Miletus and the massive Great Altar from Pergamon. The Glyptothek in Munich owns the full set of pediments from the Temple of Aphaia on the Greek island of Aegina.  As well as the Elgin Marbles, the British Museum also owns the entire frieze from the Temple of Apollo at Bassae in Arcadia – but as far as I know, there isn’t a British Committee for the Restitution of the Bassae Frieze.  

West pediment from the Temple of Aphaia, Aegina, c 510 BC (Glyptothek, Munich)

In considering what makes the Elgin Marbles such a special case, I think we firstly have to consider the sheer quantity and quality of sculpture on the Parthenon, which makes it unique within the ancient Greek world.  When it was built (447-433 BC) it was intended to be the biggest temple on the Greek mainland – even bigger than the Temple of Zeus at Olympia – and no expense was spared in decorating it with sculptures.  The Greek writer Plutarch (admittedly writing over five centuries after these events) said that Athens was accused by her own allies of ‘bedecking herself like a whore’.  

Most Greek temples of the period would have had sculptures in the pediments (the triangular gable-ends of the building), as well as in the frieze - either a Doric frieze with alternating triglyphs and metopes (a metope is a square stone slab, which can be left plain, painted or carved in high relief), or an Ionic frieze, a continuous ribbon of stone which could be carved in low relief.  

The Parthenon, however, had all three types of architectural sculpture: sculpted pediments, an interrupted Doric frieze and a continuous Ionic frieze.  As well as creating more space for sculpture, the decision to combine elements of Doric and Ionic architecture also conveyed a powerful political message, as Doric was the style associated with the Greek mainland and Ionic the style associated with the Greek cities on the islands and coasts of the Aegean. The building therefore promoted the idea that Athens had become the leader of the entire Greek world.  As well as mixing the Doric and Ionic orders on the Parthenon, the smaller temples on the Acropolis (the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike) were designed entirely in the Ionic order – which even at the time was regarded by Athens’s allies in the Aegean as a piece of rather cheeky cultural appropriation – especially as it was their money (as we’ll see shortly) which was being used to pay for these temples.  

The amount of sculpture on the Parthenon was mind-boggling.  Each pediment contained 22 figures, all roughly twice life-size. The continuous frieze was 524 feet long.  Whereas most temples just had a few carved metopes (the Temple of Zeus at Olympia only had 12 carved metopes, whereas the Hephaesteion in the Athenian Agora was considered quite flashy with 18), all 92 metopes on the Parthenon were carved in high relief – and each of these metopes was well over 3 feet square.  

Secondly, I think the key to understanding the importance of the Parthenon is that it was built as a piece of political propaganda (the Erechtheion was actually the more important building, in religious terms). The sculpture on the building is loaded with political messages about the power and wealth of Athens, and about Athens’s role in defeating the Persians in the Greco-Persian wars.  

The Parthenon was the centrepiece of a major rebuilding programme on the Acropolis, proposed by Pericles, the leading politician in Athens.  The reason the temples on the Acropolis had to be rebuilt is because they’d been destroyed by the Persians in 480 BC, during the Persian Wars.  Although the Greeks drove the Persians out of mainland Greece the following year, in 479, the Athenians left the Acropolis as a pile of rubble because they wanted as many people as possible to see how the Persians had desecrated their most sacred religious site.

Although there’s still some argument about whether an actual peace treaty (the Peace of Callias) was signed between Athens and Persia in 450 BC, the situation had certainly changed sufficiently for Pericles to argue that it was time to rebuild the temples on the Acropolis.  The money for this massive public works project would come from the Delian League treasury.  Founded in 478, the Delian League was originally billed by the Athenians as a voluntary organisation of Greek states, clubbing together to build a massive pan-Hellenic navy in order to see off any future threat from the Persians.  By 450 BC, however, the Delian League’s treasury had been moved from the island of Delos to Athens (supposedly to protect it from pirates) and the Delian League had metamorphosed into the Athenian Empire.  Its members now found themselves paying protection money to Athens; if you refused to pay, the Athenians would ‘send the boys round’ – the boys in this case being the massive navy that you’d helped to pay for.  Pericles argued that as it was the Athenians who had saved Greece from being subsumed into the Persian Empire (though I’m not sure what the Spartans would have thought of this claim), then Athens had the right to spend the accumulated cash.  

In rebuilding the Acropolis, it was decided to retain the foundations of one of the destroyed temples (rather like retaining the bombed-out ruins of Coventry Cathedral, or the bombed-out St Luke’s Church in Liverpool) and build new temples on either side of these ruins. On this model of the Acropolis (from the Cast Gallery at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford) the larger of the two temples is the one we know as the Parthenon.  The smaller temple, the Erechtheion, was built close to the edge of the Acropolis in order to fit beyond the ruins of the old temple.

 

We have to remember that in the fifth century BC, when the Parthenon was built, Greece was not a unified country in the modern sense – it was made up of nearly 2,000 independent city-states which were in constant competition with each other.  One of the ways in which the Greek states competed with each other was in building ever more grandiose or impressive temples.  The Parthenon sculptures were all about ‘bigging-up’ Athens – especially the sculptures in the two pediments, which depicted myths relating to the city’s patron goddess Athene.  

The news of Athene's birth reaches the other gods: Dionysus, Demeter & Persephone (Trustees of hte British Museum)

The East pediment, over the front door of the temple showed the Birth of Athene.  Zeus slept with the goddess Metis, the personification of Thought, but then panicked that her child might be powerful enough to supplant him (not an unreasonable fear, given that he’d supplanted his own father Cronos, who in turn had supplanted his own father Ouranos/Uranus).  His solution was to swallow Metis so that she couldn’t give birth.  Nine months later, Zeus complained of a severe headache – rather than giving him some paracetamol, Hephaestus split his head open with an axe, revealing the fully-grown, fully-armed figure of Athene. The centre of this pediment, which would have featured Zeus, Hephaestus and Athene, is now destroyed, but we can see the news of this extraordinary event rippling out towards the other gods in the corners.  In case you are wondering what the horses are doing here, the designer of the pediment cleverly managed to suggest that Athene was born at daybreak.  In the left-hand corner of the pediment we can see the chariot of Helios the sun-god rising above the horizon, whereas in the right-hand corner the tired horses pulling the chariot of Selene, the moon-goddess, are dipping below the horizon.  Each of the chariots originally had four horses. 

Horse of Selene, Parthenon East Pediment (Trustees of the British Museum)

The West pediment showed the story of the patronage contest, the foundation myth of Athens in which Athene and Poseidon competed to become the patron god of the city.  The competition was hosted by Kekrops, a mythical early king (he was half-snake from the waist down; part of his snaky bits from the pediment still survive). The two gods were each asked to give a gift to the city.   Poseidon stuck his trident into the ground, causing a spring to gush up from the rock, but unfortunately it turned out to be salt water. Athene stuck her spear into the rock, causing the world’s first olive tree to sprout up, fully-grown and in fruit.  As Athene’s gift was judged to be the most useful, she became the city’s patron, giving her name to the city.  In the fifth century BC (and beyond) visitors to the Acropolis would still be shown Athene’s olive-tree and the marks left by Poseidon’s trident.

 

Part of Kekrops's snakey-bit, fragment from the West Pediment of the Parthenon (Trustees of the British Museum)

The Parthenon’s continuous frieze also celebrated the power of Athens.  About half this frieze (247 feet of it) is now in the British Museum, another third is in Athens or other museums, and the rest has been destroyed.  There is still a lot of argument over what it depicts – there is a minor industry of academic articles on the subject - but the general consensus is that it depicts a modified version of the Panathenaic Procession, a grand festival held every year on Athene’s birthday (which would have been in August, in our terms) – so we can see how it links to the depiction of the birth of Athene on the east pediment. The frieze features cows being led to the grand sacrifice on the Acropolis which marked the culmination of the procession. These cows would have had a particular meaning to Athenian viewers, as they knew that each cow had been provided by one of the subject cities (the smaller Greek states) within the Athenian Empire. The cows on the frieze represent the power of Athens over other Greek states.  

Heifer being led to sacrifice, south frieze of the Parthenon (Trustees of the British Museum)

We can possibly indulge in a quick bit of speculation here: given that the Parthenon was intended to promote the power and wealth of Athens over other Greek states, would the Elgin Marbles be considered so important to the modern state of Greece if Athens hadn’t been chosen as its capital in 1834?  Athens wasn’t the biggest or most important city in Greece at that time, but was chosen as the capital because of its historical and cultural significance. King Otto, the Bavarian prince who became the first king of independent Greece, seriously considered other options, including Sparta.   

The third reason why the Parthenon is so important is that it serves the function of a highly-sophisticated war memorial.  John Boardman, who was the Professor of Classical Archaeology at Oxford for many years, came up with the theory that the frieze served as a war memorial for the 192 Athenians who had been killed fighting the Persians at the battle of Marathon. Boardman argued that if you count the adult male figures on the frieze (that is, the riders and the marshals, but not the charioteers, who were essentially taxi-drivers) there are exactly 192 of them.  If he’s right, this would explain why the gods on the east side of the frieze are facing towards the riders (rather than towards the ceremony in the centre of the east frieze), and it would also explain why many of the riders are nude (impractical and uncomfortable in real life, but associated with heroism in Greek art).    

Section of Parthenon frieze showing horsemen (Trustees of the British Museum)

The 92 metopes feature a different story on each side of the building

East:  Gods versus Giants

West:  Greeks versus Amazons

North:  The Trojan War (Greeks versus Trojans)

South:  Lapiths (a mythical Greek tribe) versus Centaurs

Parthenon, Metope 4 from the South Side: Centaur v Lapith (Trustees of the British Museum)

The four stories are linked by a common theme: that of the forces of civilisation (the Greek gods, or the Greeks themselves) battling against the forces of barbarism (Giants, Centaurs, Amazons, Trojans).  The Greeks usually avoided depicting real battles on temple sculpture, preferring to use mythical battles as metaphors – and all four of these mythical battles serve as metaphors for the Greco-Persian Wars.  Two of these stories feature Greeks fighting people from the East - the Trojans came from the area round Gallipoli and the Amazons were believed to live at the far end of the Black Sea, in the area we would now think of as Georgia.  On these metopes the Trojans and the Amazons would have been dressed as Persian soldiers, wearing Phrygian caps (like a Smurf cap), long sleeves and trousers – the Greeks saw trouser-wearing as a hallmark of barbarianism (bearing in mind that from their point of view, a ‘barbarian’ was anyone who didn’t speak Greek or worship the Greek gods).

These references to the Persian Wars might possibly help us understand why the Parthenon has become so important to modern Greek identity, as they’re a symbol of Greece retaining its freedom and independence in the face of a foreign power, in this case Persia.  For modern Greeks this may resonate with the history of the fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman Turks, which culminated in the Greek War of Independence (1821-33). 

Incidentally, the 14 metopes in the British Museum are all from the sequence showing Lapiths fighting Centaurs, from the South side of the building. This is because by 1800 these were the best-preserved (or least damaged) of all the metopes, possibly because the South side of the building, closest to the edge of the Acropolis, is the side that fewest people walk down – even if you watch the tourists on the Acropolis today, hardly anyone walks down the South side of the Parthenon.  

It’s worth pointing out that all these sculptures were originally painted. There have been various attempts to reconstruct the effect this would have had, including this detail from Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting of Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends (1868).  Note that Phidias (the sculptor who oversaw the programme of sculpture on the Parthenon) and Pericles have to stand on scaffolding, because the frieze would have been 40 feet above the ground.  A section of the Parthenon (now in the British Museum) still has traces of the original paintwork on it, which has been used to create a reconstruction of the colour-scheme.  

Detail from Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends (1868), Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

Section of Parthenon with paint traces, plus reconstruction (Trustees of the British Museum)

In order to understand why Lord Elgin took the sculptures from the Acropolis, we’re now going to look at the history of the Parthenon before Lord Elgin’s intervention in 1801.  One of the great things about the Parthenon is how it has been continually recycled as a place of worship: pagan temple, Christian church, Islamic mosque.  It had been used as a temple to Athene for almost a thousand years before it was converted to a Christian church in the 5^th century AD.  There are several examples of ancient Greek temples being converted to churches, and there is usually a logic to saint chosen for the dedication.  The Parthenon (‘the temple of the Virgin’) now became a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.  

The first serious damage to the sculptures on the Parthenon occurred during the process of its conversion to a church.  The construction a rounded apse at the eastern end of the building necessitated the removal of part of the east frieze, some of the east metopes and possibly the central figures from the east pediment (the Birth of Athene). Christian iconoclasts probably also defaced some of the other metopes at this time, on the grounds that they represented pagan myths. A bell-tower was added to the west end of the building.   In 1458 the Parthenon underwent another change of use when the Ottoman Turks conquered Athens and turned it into a mosque, adding a minaret to the bell-tower. 

In 1674 the remaining sculptures on the Parthenon were drawn by an artist employed by the French Ambassador to Constantinople (the artist may have been called Jacques Carrey, although this is now disputed). These drawings, now in the Louvre, provide a detailed record of the condition of the sculptures at that time, especially valuable given that many of the sculptures in the drawings have subsequently been destroyed:   of the 32 metopes Carrey drew from the South side of the building, only 18 still exist, 14 of which are the ones in the British Museum.  

In 1687, only thirteen years after these drawings were made, the Venetian navy bombarded Athens.  The Turkish garrison on the Acropolis were using the Parthenon as a powder-store; the building received a direct hit and the powder exploded, blowing off the roof, destroying the interior walls and bringing down many of the columns. Much of the sculpture in the centre of the two long sides of the building – the North and South sides – was destroyed, including the central metopes from the South side.

The powder-explosion, 1687

The damage to the building didn’t stop there. General Morosini, the victorious Venetian general, decided to take down some of the sculptures from the centre of the West pediment (the Patronage Competition) and take them back to Venice.  Unfortunately his lifting gear broke and the statues smashed to the ground – which is why we only have Athene’s right breast and Poseidon’s chest (the muscles on the front of his chest are still in Athens).

Parthenon West Pediment, fragments of Athene & Poseidon (Trustees of the British Museum)

Following the powder explosion the Parthenon was reduced to a shell; by 1738 a new, smaller mosque had been built inside the Parthenon, recycling blocks of marble from the damaged building.  

 

Drawing from 1765 showing the mosque inside the shell of the Parthenon.

During the 18^th century the sculptures left on the building sustained further damage – in 1749, for example, an artist called Richard Dalton drew 12 figures remaining on the West pediment (the Patronage Contest); by 1800 only 4 of these figures remained in place, 2 of which were now headless. The Turkish garrison on the Acropolis – and the local Greeks elsewhere in Athens - used the ancient ruins as a convenient source of building stone.  Smaller marble fragments, including some with sculptures on, were burnt to make lime for mortar or whitewash.  Lead was a valuable material for casting bullets from; when the Turkish soldiers realised that the ancient Greeks had used lead fittings to join marble blocks together and to attach sculptures to the building, they started dismantling walls and breaking off sculptures in order to recycle the lead. 

Another important source of damage, however, was tourism.  By the early 1800s, most of Europe was out of bounds to British tourists because of the Napoleonic Wars, so Grand Tourists who would have traditionally gone to France and Italy were starting to go to Greece instead.  These Grand Tourists (not just from Britain and Ireland, but also from Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Germany) were often seeking to build their own collections of antiquities at home, and were therefore only too keen to buy hacked-off heads and other fragments of sculpture from Turkish soldiers and officials.  If we compare the 1674 drawing of the fourth metope from the South side of the Parthenon with the metope as it is now (as acquired by Elgin in 1801) we can see that both the figures have lost their heads, as well as various limbs and the Centaur’s tail. 

Some of these fragments have gradually found their way into the British Museum and other museums, but many of them are still out there, gathering dust in private collections, without any information about their provenance.  For example, an entire section of the Parthenon frieze turned up in a garden in Essex in 1902.  Even Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse - who was no admirer of Lord Elgin - admitted after his own visit to the Acropolis that if the progress of destruction continued at this rate, then within a few years the Parthenon would barely have one stone standing on top of another.   

Section 2 of this Elgin Marbles blog will discuss how Lord Elgin acquired the sculptures from the Acropolis, and how they ended up in the British Museum, before going on to evaluate some of the arguments which have been put forward for keeping the sculptures in the British Museum or returning them to Greece.