Money for marbles
Sir: The recent history of the title to the Marbles has been well explored in your columns. I wonder that your correspondents did not look further back. They would then have found that they were originally paid for with stolen money.
Pericles fraudulently converted defence funds that had been subscribed by the Allies for the purpose of keeping an earlier Ayatollah on the further side of the Taurus Mountains. When taxed with his theft he is recorded to have retorted, with an impudence worthy of Ms Mercouri herself, that the Athenians were not obliged to give the Allies any account of how their money was spent. On such a basis it is a little hard to see why we should now account to the Greeks for either how we spent money that was undoubtedly ours, or how we dispose of our own possessions.
The virago of the Piraeus is now on record as claiming the Marbles to be ...a symbol of our Greekness ... they rep- resent... our soul.' If they are a symbol of anything it is of Periclean Athens, whose soul was conveniently summarised in the Funeral Oration. I see from my copy of Livingstone's translation of Thucydides that he has Pericles as ruling: ' . on the powers and duties of women, . . . Great will be your glory if you do not lower the nature that is within you — hers is greatest of all whose praise or blame is least bruited on the lips of men.'
Cecil B. Willcock
Captain, Royal Navy, The Stables, Charlcombe Lane, Bath
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