Last week Heinrich, who as a resident of London has seen virtually none of the tourist attractions around town, accompanied me to the British Museum. It’s an amazing building chock full of artifacts from all over the world and various time periods. I have my doubts about whether it’s really okay to raid ancient Egyptian tombs and steal their burial goods, thus depriving the dead of essentials like bowls, combs, and protective amulets. But there are more pressing present day controversies. (Although if I were stuck in the afterlife without a bowl, I might think it was fairly pressing.) For many years, Greece has been asking the British Museum to return the “Elgin marbles” that were taken from Athens during the Ottoman Empire some two hundred years ago. Recently, the issue has made it into the news again with a book written about the topic by Christopher Hitchens, and the construction of an impressive new museum in Athens in which to safely display the marbles. Britain argues that the marbles were legally removed, and that to return them is a slippery slope leading to the disintegration of major art collections in museums around the world.
I was first drawn to the controversy because it struck me as amusingly arrogant to rename the Parthenon after some British ambassador who happened to be a grabby art enthusiast, as though through the renaming alone the appropriation would become legitimate. Which is not to say that Elgin didn’t save the marbles from an uncertain fate. The Parthenon was already partially destroyed after being used by the Ottomans to store ammunition, not the best use for a spectacular ancient Greek temple. To paint Elgin as motivated by purely altruistic urges of preservation and the public good, however, is contradicted by the fact that he first hoped to keep the marbles in his private collection before being forced to sell them to the British Museum when he ran out of money.
My opinion wasn’t formed, however, until I saw the marbles in situ at the museum.
Not exactly mind-blowing. It looks like a bunch of carved rocks stuck to a wall. Passing by without reading anything, you wouldn’t necessarily know the marbles came from a building at all, let alone a temple. And then there’s this display:
Bits and pieces, without a hint of the narrative that made them meaningful. One of the placards below reads, “Poseidon, god of the sea, was placed just right of centre as Athena’s opponent. A fragment of his powerful torso is in Athens.”
There is an aspect to this argument that reminds me of the expression my mother used to use when she thought I was being stupid. “You’re just biting off your tongue to spite your face,” she’d say with great verve. As a kid, I never got it. Now I know just what she meant.