The Elgin Marbles: Should they be Returned to Greece?

  • Christopher Hitchens
Verso: 1998. Pp.137 £11 $17,(pbk)
Frieze frame: the Elgin Marbles saga rolls on. Recent instalments include the start of work on a splendid Athens museum where the marbles could be exhibited to full advantage. Credit: BRITISH MUSEUM

The Elgin Marbles controversy, usually presented as a prize example of misplaced Greek emotionalism, in fact tells one far more about the British. The past two years have witnessed further instalments in this saga, which p rovide the occasion for a reissue of Christopher Hitchens's short but powerful book of 1987, with the addition of a new foreword.

When it first appeared, a reasonable response to the book was that those who supported the return of the marbles to Greece had won the actual argument hands down. The heated and abusive language that they had once used against Lord Elgin had long since been usurped by their opponents. The retentionists, however, still seemed to hold all the high cards: possession of the objects, governmental and popular support, fear of awkward precedents and the serious constitutional obstacles to implementation.

A few of these elements have now changed. A Channel 4 (London) television broadcast by William G. Stewart in 1996 drew a startling response: among nearly 100,000 listeners who called in, more than 92% now favoured restitution. Work has begun on a splendid new museum in Athens where the marbles can be exhibited to full advantage. Above all, the British Labour Party — which, in opposition, had publicly supported restitution from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s — came to power in May 1997. But word had earlier gone out that this former policy might be repudiated, and within hours it was. Is the debate therefore back at its starting point, when the first recorded proposal for the return of the marbles was put to the House of Commons in 1816?

Hitchens will have none of this. A high spot of the original book was (and remains) the shameful, ranting interview given by the then director of the British Museum in 1986, full of accusations of “cultural fascism”. But the new foreword shows, from the most recent utterances of politicians in favour of retention, a return to an older vein which — in outraged propriety, historical inaccuracy and sheer complacency — has lost nothing over nearly 200 years. For them, Elgin is still the altruistic saviour, the Greeks still unreliable denizens of an insecure third-world country. But Hitch ens is no longer con tent merely to appeal to the historical record: instead, “morally certain” that the time will come when the marbles return home, he ends the foreword with an imaginary picture of that day.

For what readership, though, is Theodore Vrettos's book intended ? It seems to belong to that late twentieth-century genre, ‘faction’ or ‘docudrama’, where extensive citation (indeed, at times pages of quotation) of contemporary documents alternates with mainly romantic speculations (“A glass of Portuguese brandy lay untouched on the small oak table ⃛”), often without a clear transition between the two — a kind of half-way house between Flashman and Antonia Fraser. All but the last few pages are set in the lifetimes of Lord and Lady Elgin. In so far as the book has a climax, it is not the removal of the marbles from the Acropolis (which is over before we are half-way through), but the trial of Robert Fergusson for adultery with Lady Elgin in 1808: one is left with the feeling that this is really the “affair” to which the book's title refers.

The research is haphazard — several of the extended quotations are misattributed — but it is rather the lack of background knowledge that is unsettling. No doubt there are readers who will be content to be told that Robert the Bruce was “the first king of Scotland”, or that Sir Sidney Smith was besieging Napoleon in Acre rather than the other way round, but are they the kind of readers who will buy a book on this subject ?

The brief concluding section is almost entirely taken up with what is certainly the most interesting episode of the past 200 years, the brief flirtation of the London government, civil service and British Museum early in 1941 with the proposal to return the marbles to Greece once the Second World War was safely won.

Here Vrettos's account is fuller than Hitchens'. Alone in continental Europe, Greece still bore arms against the Axis powers, and the of fer to return the Elgin Marbles was seen as the right gesture for its British allies to encourage it to maintain that heroic stand. Remarkably, the Foreign Office seems to have been the moving spirit behind the idea, and for a moment it looked as if a way could be found around the legal, practical and scholarly obstructions to such an action. (Moral arguments played no part: Lord Elgin's action was still held to have been “right in every way”.)

Although Vrettos is on record as having taken up a position on the larger question elsewhere, he avoids doing so here (except perhaps in the emotive phrasing of his sub-title). The main service of his book is to bring out fully the profound sadness of the whole Elgin episode. Here was a typical aristocrat of his time, whose appointment to the Embassy at Constantinople, at a uniquely favourable political juncture, had given him the opportunity of greatness. Instead, he had to watch the disappearance in succession of his nose (eaten away by an infection), of his fortune, of his career prospects (through his internment by the French), of his wife's affection and, above all, of his reputation in perpetuity.

It was his misfortune that an act of destructive appropriation, which otherwise might have been remembered only by scholars, attracted uniquely widespread condemnation, with Byron's voice not merely soaring above the contemporary chorus in Britain, but speaking to Greeks as well, and to every later generation in both countries.

The kind of internationalist spirit that protested then is still quietly at work today: it will never go away. In the long run, there can only be one end to such a story.

The Elgin Affair: The Abduction of Antiquity's Greatest Treasures and the Passions it Aroused

  • Theodore Vrettos
Secker and Warburg/Arcade: 1997. 238pp £17.99$26.95