Keeping our Marbles

Gavin Stamp

Atier a certain tactful delay since Miss Mercouri's histrionic visit to London earlier this year, the Greek government has now sent the expected formal request for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens. I note that, as far as I am aware, no similar official letter has arrived in Paris asking for the return of the fragments of the Par- thenon in the Louvre, or in Bonn about the marble sculptures from the Temple of Athena at Aegina now in the Glyptothek in Munich. The Greek emotion in favour of the 'repatriation' of national art treasures seems very selective in its application, but the Greeks well know that the British are a wonderfully soft touch over this sort of thing. Traditional Hellenophilia, inculcated for generations in our public schools, com- bined with post-imperial guilt, makes us pathetically anxious to please, no matter what is the justice of the case. It is a far cry from Lord Palmerston sending gunboats to threaten Piraeus in the dubious case of Don Pacifico.

Arguments in favour of retaining the sculptures from the Parthenon acquired by Lord Elgin have considerable force. Museums would be very dull places if they only contained national treasures —

'Pm a member of the Church Militant Tendency.'

American museums would be almost empty — and the dispersal of cultural objects ought to help to promote international understanding. Certainly there is nothing dishonourable in our having the Marbles: they were bought not looted, and in the event poor Elgin made a considerable loss when he eventually decided to sell them to the British Museum for safe keeping and for public edification. Money talks, of course, and not always very pleasantly, but it is better to buy than to steal. The great collections in British country houses were all the results of purchase and, to be suc- cessful, a willingness to buy must be allied with a willingness to sell — as we are begin- ning to see in Britain with the threat of the alarmingly ample purse of the Getty Museum. The contrast with the Louvre, say, is marked. Napoleon was second only to the late Marshal Goering as a cultural magpie and when, after the downfall of the Emperor, the Allies demanded the return of much of the French loot to Italy, it had to be protected in the Louvre front further French theft by armed soldiers.

Miss Mercouri and the Greek govern- ment do not propose, it should be noted, to restore the Marbles to their original posi- tions on the Parthenon; if they did their claim would be much more convincing. Rather, the Marbles are intended for a new air-conditioned building which is yet to be erected. Athens is so vilely polluted that Greeks are meant to drive their cars into the city on every other day and the Parthenon has suffered more damage in recent years from the filthy atmosphere than during several centuries of Turkish indifference. So the Marbles will merely be transferred from one museum building to another, and from one where they arc well displayed to one where they will have to be protected behind glass.

It needs to be pointed out perhaps — cer- tainly to the British Museum's present Director — how very fine the setting of the Elgin Marbles is in London. Not only is Sir Robert Smirke's British Museum building itself, surely one of the finest Greek Revival structures in Europe, a tribute to the poten- cy of the Greek ideal in Western culture, but the gallery in which the Marbles are now displayed is an excellent example of 20th-century Neo-Classicism. Given by Sir Joseph Duveen and built in 1936-38, the grand monumental room was designed by John Russell Pope, the American architect of the National Gallery in Washington DC. The marbles can be seen, in the round and without intervening glass, mounted on plin- ths which are in muted, austere sympathy". It seems to me that listed building consent should be needed for their removal.

But there are more fundamental reasons why the Greek government's claim to the Elgin Marbles is unimpressive. Modern Greece, after all, has very little connection with the nation and people who carved the Marbles and who designed that refined and sophisticated building to which they were once fixed. Modern Greek bears hardly any relation to Classical Greek and the formal written language using ancient Greek words which was invented in the 19th century has now been abandoned. And racially — as our 'High Life' correspondent often has had occasion to observe — the present in- habitants of Greece are not descended from the race of Pericles. As with the rest of Europe, the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula has seen many migrations and population movements over the last two thousand years.

The modern Greek state, to which the Marbles now seem to mean so much, is real- ly a very recent invention: older indeed, than Albania or Bulgaria but no more respectable historically than, say, Belgium. Furthermore, this modern Greek state is, to a remarkable extent, a British invention. Complacent British liberalism is much to blame for those Romantic ideas of na- tionalism and self-determination which pro- moted the notion of Greek independence and which have caused so much trouble and bloodshed over the past two centuries. Romantic, philhellene Britons like Lord Byron Went out to help in the struggle to end Turkish rule and it was the defeat of the Turkish and Egyptian fleet at Navarino in 1827 by a combined British, French and Russian force which finally secured Greek independence.

Byron began the campaign of denigration of Lord Elgin for his part in the removal of the Marbles from Athens, but both men were interested in them and in Greece for the very same reason: an obsession with the culture and civilisation of Ancient Greece. Byzantine Greek culture, which was still a living force in Turkish Greece, was of much less interest. It was not Greeks who began to explore, record and protect the anti- quities of Classical Greece, but Westerners. The process begins in the 1750s with James 'Athenian' Stuart and Nicholas Revett undertaking the arduous and dangerous work of recording The Antiquities of Athens and their books allow us to ap- preciate how much these antiquities were damaged and in danger in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Stuart and Revett were followed by a succession of British, French and German architects and archaeologists, and this active philhellenism culminated in both the struggle for Greek independence and the purchase of the Elgin Marbles by the British government (in 1815) and of the Aegina marbles by the King of Bavaria (in 1811).

rr he West re-invented Ancient Greece, an ideal with which the nascent modern Greek state eventually identified itself. It was this ideal of Greek culture and society of the past which inspired archaeologists, artists, architects, connoisseurs and politi- cians, rather than the wretched actuality of Greece in the present. The enthusiasm generated by the revelation of the purity of Greek architecture and the sophisticated realism of the sculpture was quite extraor- dinary. The Elgin Marbles inspired artists like Flaxman; Greek temples became the ideal for a host of architects: Wilkins, Cockerel], Smirke, Hamilton, Playfair, Harrison, in Britain alone. The museum itself was a product of this obsession with the ancient world in the early 19th century. it is no accident that Smirke designed the British Museum, Schinkel the Old Museum in Berlin and von Klenze the Glyptothek in Munich all at the same time; and all are superb monumental essays in the Greek Revival, tributes to the power of the ideal of Classical Greece. And this obsession with Greece affected politicians; being then learned and educated men they were per- suaded both to support Greek in- dependence and spend public money on Smirke's huge building, designed as a wor- thy receptacle for the antiquities of Greece, Rome and the ancient world. There is an ar- tistic logic and historical justice in the Elgin Marbles being in the British Museum.

Perhaps it is fairer to say that modern Greece is an Anglo-German invention. Ger- mans were very active in the exploration of Greece and, in the event, it was the Ger- mans who made the new Greek state into a model of Greek ideals and Athens into a Neo-Classical-city. The first King of Greece was Otto of Bavaria, younger son of King Ludwig who had bought the Aegina marbles. Otto was proclaimed king in 1832 and, soon after he arrived in Greece the following year, invited the great Schinkel to prepare designs for a palace on the Acropolis — Neo-Classical in style, of course. In the event it was the King of Bavaria's architect, Leo von Klenze, who helped plan the new city and Friedrich von Gartner, another Neo-Classicist from Munich, who designed the Royal Palace built below the Acropolis, while the Danes, Hans Christian Hansen and Theophilus Hansen, who were responsible for the magnificent group of University, Academy of Science and Library as well as other Greek Revival buildings in Athens. Had the marble friezes, metopes and pediment sculpture still been on the Par- thenon in the 1830s, it is most unlikely that they would ever have been removed and ex- ported. However, had not Elgin taken them away, during the period 1801-04, it is very likely that they would have been damaged, like much else, during the Turkish siege of insurgent Athens in 1826-27, or fallen vic- tim to arbitrary vandalism, the result either of Islamic fanaticism or Greek indifference, of which there is a mass of contemporary evidence. Sculptures were sometimes burn- ed to make lime, or destroyed by fanatical Turks because they gave pleasure to in- fidels. It is against this background that Elgin's activities must be judged. His pur- chase of the Marbles was permitted by a fir- man from Constantinople and the removal of the sculptures was affected in a perfectly legal and careful manner.

The objection to Elgin's purchase that the Turks, as invaders, had no authority to dispose of the Marbles is typical 9f naive and sentimental English liberalism which ig- nores the realities of power and of Euro- pean history. The Turks, I suppose, had as much right to be in Greece as the Romans in Britain, but both, while there, provided the only framework of law and order. And Greece, after all, had been part of the Turkish Empire for three and a half cen- turies when Elgin was British Ambassador at the Sublime Porte — a longer period than that enjoyed by the British Raj in In- dia. And just as Britain left a positive legacy in India, so the Turks had a profound in- fluence in Greece. Not only much of the language but many Greek customs are Turkish in origin and visitors to Istanbul will know that Greek coffee and food are merely provincial expressions of Turkish originals.

The Turkish Empire has had an unfair press. Though I thank God for the results of the Battle of Lepanto and the Siege of Vienna, I do feel that whether the issue is Turkey in the 19th century or Cyprus to- day, the British have a quite unjustified bias against Turkey and in favour of Greece, a country which has often been conspicuous- ly unfriendly to us. In its later years, the Turkish Empire was capable of vicious- ness and cruelty such as is typical of any dying frightened empire, but Turkey would not have been able to hold its posses- sions on the Balkans and the Levant for so, long and to leave such a marked influence if

the Empire had not been intelligently and tolerantly governed. Although Islam was always encouraged and protected, the Turkish Imperial rule was maintained by a mixture of decentralised and religious tolerance. Certainly the Turkish Empire was infinitely more tolerant and less ruthless than the Spanish Empire in America.

In Greece, the Orthodox Church was not suppressed but allowed to survive and thus

maintain independent Greek culture. The Turks did not find it necessary to deface and destroy Greek churches and the surviv- ing monuments of antiquity were only remcived for military reasons, as on the Acropolis which was a military garrison un- til 1833. It was certainly bad of the Turks to use the Parthenon as a powder magazine, but equally reprehensible for the Venetians to shell it in 1687. The resulting explosion half-demolished the building while the vic- torious commander, Francesco Morosini, then did further damage in his inept at- tempts to remove the pediment sculpture. The record of the Turks in Greece is cer- tainly no, worse than our own, remember- ing, for instance, how in 1885 the 15th-century Mohammedan glories of Herat were destroyed on British orders. because of a suspected Russian invasion.

Nor is the record of the Greeks since 1829 — when the Treaty of Adrianople recognis- ed their independence — particularly im- pressive. Not only have three and a half centuries of visible Turkish influence been expunged but archaeologists were allowed to pick the Acropolis clean, removing not only Turkish mosques and buildings but also mediaeval fortifications in an attempt to restore it to Classical purity. Today the Acropolis is no longer a rich and complex historical monument exhibiting over two thousand years of change, but a clinical, academic museum. Meanwhile, in the last few decades, Neo-Classical Athens — more a part of modern Greek history than Classical Athens — has been ruthlessly spoiled. Athens is now one of the most unpleasant cities in the world, polluted and ugly. Nineteenth-century elegant stucco has been ripped down and replaced by 20th-century crude brick and concrete.

Athens is not a suitable home for the Marbles, for the Marbles today do not only belong to Greece, they belong to Europe, if not to the world. The culture, architecture and sculpture of Ancient Greece have had such a profound influence on Europe and the West that, in truth, they mean more to a Scotsman, a German or an American than they do a Greek. They happen to be in Lon- don, a most accessible place for any visitor to see them, and a much more convenient city than Athens. We, the British, have been their guardians for almost two cen- turies, a duty which we have performed conscientiously. There is only one other city, other than Athens, where they would be equally at home: Edinburgh, 'Athens of the North', and today a much finer Greek city than its sad, spoiled, jealous namesake at the end of the Balkans.