A Greek epic that's lost its marbles
Allowing nationalistic emotion to override the priorities of art and scholarship with regards to the Elgin Marbles does the Greek authorities no favours.
As Athena can count the Parthenon as a home, she naturally takes great interest in it. The latest flare-up of the dispute between Britain and Greece over the Parthenon sculptures — familiarly known as the Elgin Marbles — reminds her that the ancient Greeks excelled in epics as well as architecture.
It is now 44 years since the former actress Melina Mercouri, then the Greek Minister for Culture, launched a campaign to return the sculptures to Athens from the British Museum, where they have been on display since 1817. Famously, she cried in front of the marbles for the benefit of journalists — a kind museum curator having pointed her in the right direction, as she had failed to recognise them.
For decades, most of the debate revolved around the question of whether or not the museum had legal title to the sculptures, which it purchased from Lord Elgin. Given the failure to marshal a definitively convincing argument that the British do not hold them legally, Athena thinks the issue of title is a rabbit hole that is best avoided, but this did not stop the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, declaring last month that ‘Greece cannot accept any arrangement that would require it to recognise the British Museum’s ownership of the sculptures’.
'Nobody would seriously contemplate cutting what survives of the tapestry in two and displaying half in London and half in Bayeux and claiming this was an adequate way to understand it'
He was responding to a remark by the director of the British Museum, Nicholas Cullinan, that the current loan by the French Government of the Bayeux Tapestry to the UK might provide a model for a loan of the sculptures to Athens. Mitsotakis was having none of it: ‘Nobody would seriously contemplate cutting what survives of the tapestry in two and displaying half in London and half in Bayeux and claiming this was an adequate way to understand it. Yet that is exactly what happened to the Parthenon sculptures. A single masterpiece was divided.’
This, sadly, is typical of the tendentious way the Greek authorities have approached the issue. There is no ‘single masterpiece’ in the case of the sculptures — only fragments of a whole that can never be reconstituted because a large part was irrevocably destroyed in 1687 by the explosion of a powder magazine.
Mitsotakis’s comment emphasises yet again that for the Greek authorities the issue of legal possession is more important than the possibility of seeing the marbles in Athens, which the British Museum would facilitate on the basis of a loan agreement. There seems to Athena to be no sound reasons why the Greek argument remains fruitlessly focused on issues of legal ownership rather than the aesthetic and scholarly benefits of seeing the sculptures in Athens.
Last month, it was reported that Greece’s Central Archaeological Council had refused a request by the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt for the loan for an exhibition of nine fragments from the Parthenon on the grounds that they would be shown alongside pieces lent by the British Museum. Allowing nationalistic emotion to override the priorities of art and scholarship does the Greek authorities no favours.
