Soothing the injured spirit of the Temple

The case for giving back the Elgin Marbles

I took my daughter to Athens for a short holiday at half-term. She is studying Ancient Greek at GCSE, which makes me immensely proud as I didn’t even get that far with Latin.

Delphi was wondrous but Mycenae was perhaps the most powerful: there is something about the place, as if one might close one’s eyes, touch the stone and travel back to the Age of Heroes. It is also salutary to ponder that this was once the largest city in Europe, just as Uruk, home to the written word, is now rubble

Yet the Parthenon, even though I’ve been before and it’s as crowded as Thermopylae on a bad day, is still magical, both up close and from a distance. It’s beautiful when lit up in the evening, and every time you catch it out of the corner of your eye, you feel a bit grateful.

There is, however, something missing from the great structure, a topic which our Greek tour guide managed to only bring up five times, which I felt very restrained – the Elgin Marbles. The Greeks have been pushing to get them back for years and now they might be in luck, as Keir Starmer’s government is said to be open to allowing the British Museum to loan them to Greece.

While legislation from 1963 makes it illegal for the Museum to permanently hand back the Marbles, part of the Parthenon Frieze, a loan would effectively be permanent – the Greeks would never hand them back again.

The British acquisition of the Marbles was controversial even at the time. In The Warm South, Robert Holland recalled how architect Robert Smirke witnessed the removal of the frieze ‘and as the heavy stone, dislodge by crowbars, sashed against the ground, he recorded that “it seemed like a convulsive groan of the injured spirit of the Temple”’. Travel writer Edward Dodwell also described his ‘inexpressible mortification’ at observing the destruction and the ‘shattered desolation’ of the remaining Parthenon. Lord Byron, perhaps the most famous of British Hellenophiles, naturally considered Elgin’s actions to be vandalism and looting.

Many British people down the years have agreed, and public opinion is quite firmly in favour of returning the Marbles, although I imagine that it’s not something many people care about that much. I tend to agree, although this is not something I have concrete views about; I wrote about this subject briefly, years ago, and have changed my mind more than once since; I will probably change my mind again tomorrow. What I think is all wrong is the tone, and that is why it may be unwise for the current government to be the ones handing them over, as looks increasingly likely.

I’m not in favour of giving back the Marbles because we’re a nation of imperialist looters and plunderers – quite the opposite. The British Museum has done an immense job in preserving the world’s heritage, and many of its items would have otherwise been destroyed.

In fact, the British have an unusual history of preserving things, as this thread by Sam Bidwell explains. ‘Objective study, cataloguing, and preservation is not the historical norm around the world,’ he writes: ‘Many now-famous sites were simply abandoned when they lost their original use.’

The British were the first to rediscover Ur, to properly study Petra, and uncovered ancient Amaravati Stupa in India. Arthur Evans discovered Knossos – and sort of ruined it. Many precious items are still with us only because the British took them, illustrated by the sad fate of the Mosul Museum, smashed up by ISIS in 2014 with immense loss to humanity. Similar tragedy befell Syria where Palmyra was destroyed, despite the courageous opposition of archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad. In London there is a small community of Assyrians, an Iraqi Christian minority who trace their descent to the ancient people of the same name, who are very attached to the British Museum and grateful that their heritage is safe here rather than in the old country; while their community has been destroyed in Iraq, they can still go and see what their ancestors built, and so will their children.

The British of the 18^th and 19^th century combined a huge sense of curiosity about the outside world with a high degree of social trust at home, one of the results of which was a sense that great objects of scientific or historical interest should be open to the public. When the British Museum opened in 1753, it was designed to be a ‘universal museum’, its collection bequeathed by Sir Hans Sloane ‘for the nation’.

As Bidwell wrote, this Museum was shaped by a number of unusual ideas not universally shared: ‘history as a “public good”, regardless of utility - preservation of history, rather than reconstruction or destruction - objective study of history as a craft - cataloguing, curating, and collecting.’