THE PARTHENON
MARBLES
See Also: THE BRITISH MUSEUM; MENU
In 1687
Ottoman forces in Athens used the Parthenon as a gunpowder dump. Venetian gunfire caused this to explode. As a result, the building and its sculptures
were severely damaged.
The
Elgin Marbles are a collection of sculptures and architectural details that
were salvaged from the ruin. At the
start of the 19thC the 7th Earl of Elgin was the British government's Envoy
Extraordinary at Constantinople. In a
private capacity, he bought the Marbles from the Ottoman authorities. The peer returned to Britain and, after years
of bargaining, sold the stones to the British Museum in 1816.
Byron
witnessed the removal of the Marbles from the Parthenon. He disliked his fellow peer. He referred to him in his poem Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage (1812).
Let
Aberdeen and Elgin still pursue
The
shades of fame through regions of Virtu;
Waste
useless thousands on their Phidian freaks,
Mis-shapen
monuments, and maimed antiques;
And
make their grand saloons a general mart
For
all the mutilated blocks of art.1
The
Marbles have been the cause of a long-running dispute between the Museum and
the Greek government. The latter
believes that the Marbles belong in Greece, while the former states that, in international
law, it has full and clear legal ownership of them.
It is
commonplace to find people in Britain who would be happy to see the Marbles
returned to Athens. An uncommented
aspect of the matter is that through the relative mobility of people of Greek
cultural identity during the travails of the 20thC, a large
proportion of modern Athenians - if not the majority - are descended from
people who would have regarded Classical Athens as either their enemy or their
oppressor.
The
Classical Athenians were generous and inclusive towards one another. However, their culture was essentially
xenophobic with regard to anyone who was not of their number. A massive vein of silver-bearing ore was
discovered Laurium close to Athens in 484 B.C..2 The state's citizens voted to use the
resulting wealth to invest in their navy.3 This new military strength was used to
operate a ruthless de facto protection racket against non-Athenian
Greeks. This compounded the income from
the mines and enabled the Acropolis to be enhanced in a magnificent
manner. During the Parthenon s
construction many Athenians voiced their opposition to what they regarded as
being the excessive grandeur of the structure.
Historically, it had been a widely held view amongst the citizen body
that conspicuous consumption could have adverse social consequences. This opinion was reflected by the fact that
their state had a set of sumptuary laws on its statute book.
In the
early 19thC the southern portion of what is now Greece became an
independent state; this was achieved with the support of Britain, France, and
Russia. Many of those who fought for the
cause, such as Laskarina Bouboulina (1771-1825), were neither ethnically nor
culturally Greek. They were Arvanites
who spoke Arvanitika, their own distinct language. They were descended from Albanians who from
at least the 14thC had settled much of of the Greek mainland that
had become depopulated, e.g. Attica.4 In his book La Gr ce contemporaine
(1854) the French writer Edmond About (1828-1885) was to describe the Athens
that he had visited as being an Albanian village.
Prince
Otto of Bavaria became the new nation's first monarch; he Hellenised his name
to become King Otho. The German arrived
in the country in 1833. From the time of
Goethe onwards the German culturati gad been preoccupied with trying to
identify what had gone wrong. They
always bore Classical Greece in mind as an ideal time. The new monarch was accompanied by a group of
Bavarian advisers. Initially, it was
this circle that directed the state's affairs.
In large part, these men had been shaped by the Classical instruction
that they had received as children and youths.
Under their guidance, Greece set herself upon a course of trying to
recreate something of the glory of 5thC B.C. Athens. Therefore, the Parthenon became a symbol of
Greek identity in a way that it had not been before. This development was an instance of informal
colonialism deriving from the nature of education in Western Europe rather than
being a case of native cultural self-expression.
As
Otho's reign progressed, his subjects began to chafe at the Bavarians
domination of their political life. A
decade after the king had ascended to the throne, there was a coup d tat. The monarch continued as the nation s
sovereign but his counsellors were ousted from power. However, the idea of trying to recreate
something of the grandeur of the Periclean era was not jettisoned. The colonialist concept metamorphosed into
being a derivative nationalist one.
However, even at the time, to many ethnic Greeks this would have appeared
to have been profoundly anachronistic.
For examples of contemporary Greek cultural and commercial dynamism they
would have looked to the Levantine cities of Alexandria, Constantinople, and
Smyrna.
1. Canto ii, Stanza 15, Line 1.
2. In the early 20thC the mines were still being worked.
3. The Athenian state effective killed Socrates, prompting Plato to
leave the city. He travelled through the
Greek speaking world. During a stay in
Syracuse he had dealings with the tyrant Dionysius II that he did not
enjoy. Upon returning to Athens he opted
not to enter politics but rather to devote himself to philosophy. In The Gorgias Plato critiqued the way
in which individuals could use rhetoric to manipulate the demos to their
own ends rather than seeking to establish the truth.
4. Arvanites also established communities on some of the Aegean
islands, such as Hydra.
David
Backhouse 2024