Sir: Gavin Stamp's is really an extraor- dinary performance ('Keeping
our Marbles', 10 December). He has rounded up every argument ever advanced against returning the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, yet he is ignorant of the most elementary fact about their acquisition. Whether or not they were looted, they were certainly not bought, and nobody with any knowledge of the subject has ever claimed they were.
Where does this leave Mr Stamp? Not, one fears, looking a very convincing an- tagonist. In his eagerness to use all the arguments he has heard, he fails to notice that some of them are mutually incompati- ble. If you believe that the Marbles belong to Europe, if not the world, and that Lon- don is a much more convenient city than Athens (for whom? one wonders), then it does not make a lot of sense to declare that the Greek claim would be much more con- vincing if it were the intention to put the Marbles back on the Parthenon itself.
It would be tiresome to refute all these arguments one by one. Mr Stamp purports to see an artistic logic and historical justice in the Elgin Marbles being in the British Museum. But can serious attention be paid to the historical views of anyone who believes that modern Greece is 'an Anglo- German invention'?
The very case for the return of the Marbles is, in part, an artistic one: it cannot be denied that they will gain enormously from being seen in close proximity to the building of which they were once a part. But it is also, and overwhelmingly, a moral one. The Parthenon occupies a cen- tral place in the modern Greeks' idea of themselves and their culture, and some 95 per cent of its exiled sculptures are in the British Museum. The only decent and honourable response to the recent request is to make casts and restore the originals to Greece.
Graham Binns Eleni Cubist
The British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles, I3a Hillgate Street, London W8
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