Parthenon - c.pedia
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The Parthenon seen from the hill of the Pnyx to the west.


First of all I would like to thank very much Mr Katsourides and the Apocalypse Historical Research Society and their sponsors for inviting me. It is a great privilege and a deep delight to be in Cyprus. Thank you. What I thought would be most useful tonight would be to outline some of the main points of the history of the Parthenon Marbles, mentioning a few general questions as I go along, some of which are highly topical. We can then discuss any that you want to pick up or any others that you wish to raise in the question time afterwards.

So, I first begin with a few reminders about the Parthenon in Athens. The temple was built in the middle of the 5th century B.C. after the defeat of the invading Persians. The city-states which have been invaded, including Athens, left their holy places desolate for a generation. When the time came to rebuild, the Athenian authorities under the leadership of Pericles decided to rebuild the whole sacred area afresh, including the Acropolis as a whole. And sculptor Phidias was in charge of the overall programme and we are also confident of the overall design.

The Parthenon, therefore, at the time when it was rebuilt, was specifically an Athenian building, asserting the civic and cultural identity of Athens against other Hellenic cities as well as against the foreigners beyond whom they called the barbarians. Indeed the building cost of the Parthenon was largely financed by enforced contributions from other Hellenic cities. So it was not originally a celebration of Hellenic civilisation as a whole. Indeed to some contemporary Hellenes from other cities looking up the Parthenon may perhaps have been a humiliating reminder of the hegemony of Athens at that time.

Many German neo-Hellenic architects and artists present an imagined picture. Many believed that when built it was plain and white. But in fact as it has been discovered in the 18th century that some features, such as the wreaths and the horses bridles, were made from metal, some of which were guilded and others were added in paint. The whole composition underneath much of the building was probably painted in bright colours.

Another picture, this time by an English artist shows Phidias, the sculptor, showing Pericles round the work in progress and it can be seen that part of the freeze is in colour.

Later a succession of non Athenian Greeks, such as Alexander of Macedon, tried to draw on the prestige of the monument to help legitimise their own claims as the successors of the 5th century Athenians, who had already by that time attained classic status. Each group which took possession of Athens from the 5th century onwards, the Romans, the Goths, the Byzantines, the Christians, the Frankish Catholics and then the Ottoman Turks, tried to appropriate the Parthenon and its prestige to their own ideological purposes.

Let me now skip rapidly over the centuries and turn to Lord Elgin. In 1799, he was appointed British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople. His Embassy he realised presented a rare opportunity for improving western European knowledge of the monuments of Athens. His aim was to improve modern western art by attaining exact detailed knowledge on how the classical sculptors and architects of the 5th century had achieved their effect. Athens was then a small town, scarcely changed since it had been captured by the Ottoman invaders in 1456. The Parthenon was a ruin within the walls of an Ottoman military fortress. Few people ever saw it close up. Certainly very few Greeks. There was no suggestion in Elgin's original plan that any original pieces should be removed.

I have in mind the picture of the Parthenon as it stood in Elgin's days, which is thought to have been painted by his artist Lucieri. Let me mention it was built throughout of local marble from the ancient quarries of Pentelikon, which you can still visit. I have a piece here, not by the way taken from the Parthenon, but from the quarry. As material it has very special characteristics which distinguish it from other Greek marbles and from marbles from elsewhere. When it's first cut, its bright like snow, but over time the surface changes colour to become a warm brown or golden colour. Personally, I am inclined to believe that the ancient artists were well aware of this quality of their material. The patination of the marbles was another feature which made the Parthenon a specially Athenian monument.

With the opening up of Greece to the West in the late 18th century, the rate of destruction of their monuments accelerated sharply. Traveler after traveler came from Western Europe in larger numbers than ever before, especially from England which was cut off from the continent. Naval ships of many countries anchored at Piraeus, sending their crews on trips ashore. Many of these visitors wanted to buy original antiquities. They had money in their pockets, which opened the doors of the fortress and hammers in their knapsack. The monuments of Athens were eroded at an accelerating rate.

In the long history of the Parthenon this form of destruction was quite recent. The building had stood largely intact until the gunpowder explosion in 1687 rendered it a ruin, but from then on and to the latter part of the 18th century, it survived without much further acts of damage. Neglect and the days before air pollution being quite a good preservative.

But in the generation before Elgin we can see big changes. In 1749 for example the travelers Daulton drew 12 figures in the west pediment. But by the time Elgin's agents arrived in 1800 there were only four. By 1800 five slabs of the freeze, which were drawn by Steward in the 1750's, had completely disappeared and the two figures in the left corner of the pediment, still had their heads in place as recently as 1765. After that date both heads had gone and none of the pieces that were lost during this period has since been found. The erosion was largely uncontrolled, the market in classical antiquities was lively. There was no reason at the time to believe that it could soon be halted.

In 1801, Elgin obtained what was called a "firman", a letter from the central government in Constantinople addressed to the Governor of Athens and also to the Chief Justice, asking them to grant certain requests, mainly concerned with the making of drawings and excavations. Although the firman gave no explicit authority to permit removals from the buildings, by a mixture of threats and bribes, Elgin agents persuaded the Ottoman officials in Athens to stretch the terms and let them take away most of the best surviving sculptures from the Parthenon.

The reason I printed for the first time extracts from the financial accounts which were kept by Elgin's agents is that, as a former official of Her Majesty's treasury, I like accounts because they show more clearly than many other documents, what actually is going on. They record for example the expenditure on roads, gangs of labourers, hiring of draft animals and the hiring of gangs of men to dig. But they also show what were called presents amounting to 25% of the total costs of the removals, which in the money of the day came to the equivalent of many millions. The Voivod, that is the civil governor, received a payment in the form of a cheque, which he could lodge with a foreign banker. The military governor was paid in cash piece by piece as the sculptures were taken. During the first year and a half alone, the military governor received bribes equivalent to 35 times his annual salary.

In subsequent years, aided by more political pressures and more presents, Elgin and later Ambassadors, obtained a number of other firmans from the Ottoman government. The effect of these latter firmans was to give an amnesty to the officials who had allowed the removals and to authorise the export of Elgin's collection from Ottoman jurisdiction.

So although all Elgin's operations were conducted as a private enterprise, with Elgin claiming private ownership of everything taken, he would not have obtained these permissions if he had not been a British Ambassador. So the firman of July 1801, although in form it is a favour given by the Sultan to a political ally interested in the arts, was in practice operated as an official commercial concession to mine for antiquities on the Acropolis of Athens.

I think the question for us today which these new historical details raise, is what constitutes legality or legitimacy? In Elgin's view firmans, political pressures and bribes were not relevant considerations. In his view he has taken advantage of a unique moment of good fortune to perform an act of rescue and historically in the circumstances of Ottoman Athens he was probably right. For the casual piecemeal, destruction of the Parthenon continued for another 30 years or so after Elgin until it was finally brought to an end by the independent Greek state.

So Elgin's activities were different from those of Cesnola's in Cyprus, about which Anna Marangos has written so persuasively. But can the British Government be content with an argument for legitimacy which is at best legalistic and when the circumstances are very different when Greece has a sophisticated and scientific archaeological service with access to international advice and funds if they are needed? Who today would want to rely on Ottoman justice for legitimacy? Here I think we have another clear link with the problems of our own day. The same issues involving high level political influence and bribery at the centre and locally are relevant today when new international efforts are being made to discourage the breaking off of pieces from monuments, the digging up and looting of archaeological sites and damage to artifacts and irreplaceable destruction of potential knowledge about the past.

Today we have a world crisis in archaeology. In Europe, the Far East, Central America and many other places and I am sure also in Cyprus, pieces are still being broken from ancient monuments to be sold. Sites are being dug with the help of metal detectors. Influence is being brought to bear and after passing through the hands of intermediaries, the antiquities are sold to wealthy collectors often in the West, including Museums.

Unprovenanced antiquities, that is antiquities for which no record exists of where they were found, do not add to our knowledge about the past. On the contrary they are parasitical on genuine archaeology because it is only because of genuine archaeology that we can identify say, the date, the style and sometimes the context. "Unprovenanced antiquities" is really a polite word for looted antiquities and those museums which buy them, such as the Boston Museum of Art and the Getty in California, are encouraging this digging and so do great damage. The only consolation as far as Getty is concerned, is that many of their millions have been spent on fakes!!.

Let me now turn to what happened to the Parthenon sculptures taken by Elgin's agents. There were ships from Athens, a variety of ships, all of them spent years in store in various seaports, some of the most important pieces laid at the bottom of the sea for 18 months in the Bay of Severa, when one of the transport ships sank. But all were recovered and all eventually reached London. Elgin, who spent some years as the prisoner of Napoleon, was broken in health and financially ruined. The Elgin marbles, as they were now called, were bought by the British Government after an inquiry in 1860 and entrusted to the Trustees of the British Museum to be preserved and displayed on behalf of the nation.

It is very difficult, I think, from having such few records to know what the Greeks at the time thought, let alone what the Turks thought. They had very little access to writing, or to print.

As far as the people in the West were concerned, I think many, perhaps most, accepted the rescue narrative. But there was one man who spoke up on behalf of the Greeks and that was the poet Lord Byron who offered another view. During his time in Greece, Byron had seen what had happened to the Parthenon and actually traveled on a ship carrying some of the Marbles. In one of his poems as he contemplated the ruins of the Parthenon, his melancholy gave way to anger.

I quote one of his stanzas:

"Cold is the heart fair Greece that looks on thee, north fields as lovers
Or this dust they loved
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see thy walls defaced by moldering shrines removed,
by British hands which had at best behoved to guard those relics near to be restored".

Byron was a writer of influence all over the Western world. With the advent of Byron the controversy over the Marbles moved to a new ground, one which still reverberates today. The Elgin Marbles have become a symbol of Greece's subjection; the taking of the Marbles from a defenceless Athens seen as an act of imperial plunder.

In some of Byron's other poems there are calls for the Greeks of his day to assert their latent nationalism and rise up in a violent revolution.

"Shrine of the mighty, can it be that this is all that remains of thee?
Approach thou craven, crouching slave
Say is this is not Thermopylae ?
These waters blue that round you lave (love)
Servile offspring of the free
Pronounce what sea, what shore is this,
The gulf, the rock of Salamis"

No need for Byron to remind the classically educated readers of his time of these names which were as familiar to them as those is their own history.

Byron offered his readers a powerful romantic fantasy. You only have but to refer to some painting of the time to see the fantasy of classical ruins, turbaned pastures, black-eyed girls. And this mixture of classicism and orientalism made a strong appeal to the peoples of Northern Europe and North America who at that time could visit the Mediterranean only in their imagination. The world "lave" by the way which is obsolete in English exists in romantic verse only to provide a rhyme for slave.

Lord Byron gave expression to another cultural idea, which at least until recently was central to the constructed national identity of modern Greece. I mean the view that the modern Greeks are the descendants of the ancient Greeks, the notion of cultural identity, or cultural continuity. The late Melina Mercouri for example formulated the claim for the return of the Marbles in straightforward nationalist terms. The Marbles, she would say, are ours. They are the soul of Greece.

Incidentally I can say here that if I occasionally use the phrase Elgin's Marbles it's not because I am unaware of the appropriating connotations of these words. As Melina Mercury said : "There are no Elgin Marbles." I use the phrase for convenience to avoid having to repeat the following mouthful: Those parts of the Parthenon sculptures and architecture taken from the building or excavated from the Acropolis of Athens by agents of Lord Elgin at the beginning of the 19th century, with a few pieces donated, purchased before or later which are presently held in the British Museum, in a legal trust on behalf of the British people and the wider world.

There is of course no contradiction between accepting, as a matter of history, that what was done in the years after 1801 may have saved the Marbles from further damage at that time and asking for a change in their status in the year 2000.

Let me now turn to the Marbles in London. When they arrived they changed at once western appreciation of ancient art. In modern terms we can say it was the turn of the British to appropriate them, not only physically, but culturally. And there were other changes too, the Marbles redefined as works of art, indeed the most perfect works of art ever attained, set up to be admired and copied like pictures in a secular gallery far from their original cultural context.

This change of location illuminates another more general point, which became more clear as that century receded. For it was the British, the French and the Germans and others later who sent expeditions to study, record and excavate the ruins of ancient Greece, who published the results and wrote theoretical and practical histories of ancient art and who drew the lessons both aesthetic and archeological and tried to take their lessons into their own public art as we can see from the classical buildings all over Western Europe and North America.

The sculptures of the Parthenon came from Greece, but it was the countries of Western Europe which gave them their fame, the iconic status and their constantly changing meaning as well as their new name. They were physically constructed in Athens, but until the time of Greek Independence they were culturally constructed and raised in London, Paris, Rome and Weimar. It was there that they provided a cultural site for another version of authenticity, an emerging romanticism. The fact that the Marbles were fragmentary to the men and women of their time, seem to make them more real.

As the poet Keats wrote: "They mingled, Greece and grandeur with the rude wasting of old time." One aspect of this authenticity was the fact that they carried their history visibly on their surface. The mixture of colours and the contrast between the ancient brown and the sparkle of newly chipped white, proclaiming their extreme age.

As Visconte, the director of the Vatican and first cataloguer of the Marbles, declared: "They bore the mark of a cross which time alone can give."
And by Victorian times we see other cultural shifts. The influential British writer Ruskin for example was keen to promote the Marbles as icons of motherhood, very much a Victorian value.

As he noted: "The Greek Venus is conspicuous for her broad and full breasts, a sign that her essential function is child-bearing. This is fully illustrated by the female figures of the Elgin Marbles, all of which are remarkable for their ample bosoms."

And then Walter Pater, who was another influential critic in late Victorian times, whose adoration for the Marbles knew no limits said : "They represent the supreme example of the separation of art from life. They were absolute beauty."

This notion of absolute beauty required that the sculptures should be if not white, then at least colourless. For if the Parthenon sculptures had been painted in realistic colours, was it not the duty of modern artists also to use colour in contemporary sculptures? And if works of art had effects on the mental state and the morality and eventually on the behaviour of viewers what would the effects of realistic colour be? To many Victorians coloured statues of naked figures would have been almost pornographic.

The notions of whiteness were also linked to notions of race. Dr Robert Locks for example, who has the unenviable distinction of being the father of European scientific racism or anthropological racism, was a warm admirer of the Elgin Marbles. And he was one of those who helped to promote the notion that the ancient Greeks had been an ideal Northern European race, closely akin racially, with blue eyes to the modern Northern European nations.

So to many of the Victorians who were encumbered with the psycho - sexual and racial fears of the time, the presumed original whiteness of the Elgin Marbles, although it originated with an archaeological error made by archaeologist Winkleman in the 18th century, was invested with high cultural and ideological significance. Some come to their misconception long after it was known and confirmed many times to be an archaeological error. But others were content to say that the ancient Greeks had simply been wrong and had shown bad taste in painting their statues and that the Marbles were somehow more authentic in modern London with the colour gone.

Let me now say a few words about the damage, which was done to the sculptures, to some of the Marbles in 1937 and 1938. In my book, drawing on a range of sources, including some official documents, which had previously been illegally withheld, I described how in 1937 and 1938, the British Museum stonemason and his team of unskilled labourers scraped some of the surfaces with metal tools and harsh abrasives. These crude interventions were intended to meet the wishes of Lord Devin who was a millionaire art dealer who had given money to build a new gallery.

Devin's motive was to use his wealth to associate his name with the artistic masterpieces of classical Athens, an aim which he achieved as every visitor to the gallery can see from the inscription on the wall. He too wanted to appropriate the prestige of the Parthenon and his money enabled him to do so. Devin's fortune had been built by buying old pictures in Europe in the period after World War 1, when many aristocrats wanted money and selling them in the United States.

It was known at the time that he shamelessly modified the pictures he bought to make them more attractive to his customers. Old masters were stripped, repainted and coated with varnish and Devin would deny that there had been any intervention. He knew the power of money; he was an unscrupulous man. When the Nazis came to power in Germany for example, he set up a front company to help them sell pictures taken from German galleries. He was essentially what I call a consumerist, a man who believed in giving consumers of art what they wanted to see and were willing to pay for, even if that meant changing the appearance of the art. He insisted to successive Trustees, Directors and staff over a period of seven years that the Elgin Marbles should be thoroughly cleaned and by cleaned - cleansed was the word he preferred - he meant made more white.

The approved cleaning method involved washing the Marbles carefully in distilled water under supervision. But the workman responding to Devin's known wishes and encouraged by bribes paid by his agents used hammers and chisels, wire brushes and other metal scrapers to help change those parts of the sculptures which were not sufficiently whitened by washing.

They were also found to be using carborundum, silicon carbide, which was an artificial abrasive, at that time next to diamond the hardest substance known to science. One of the carborundum blocks was found "clogged with marble, dust particles". And all this was done without the Director of the Museum or the Curators knowing what was happening over a period of a year and a half.

By any measure I think the damage is substantial both archaeologically and aesthetically. Parts of at least four pedimental pieces have been scraped white in places as well as parts of at least ten, perhaps as many as 20 slabs of the freeze and I believe all of the metal pieces. And it was some of the best surviving pieces, which the workman attacked. There are ample examples of such change, i.e. the neck of Helios, the Sun god, which is to be found in the very corner of the pediment and it was because it was protected there that you can see on the right where it is black the surfaces highly polished. This is one of the few places where the polish of the original Phidian artists survived. This was one of the pieces which was undergoing cleaning when it was discovered what was going on, so you can see the before and the after.

There is the slab of the freeze before these events of 1937 - 1938, all monochrome photographs emphasised the red in the spectrum and are therefore a good indicator of the extent which the patina had survived at that time.

We have a continuous record from the watercolor paintings through the photographs to the present day.

Finally the horse of Selene, the moon goddess, at the other corner of the pediment, which is described as having been cleansed. If you visit the British Museum you can see that it is very different from the adjoining pieces, which were not attacked at this time. It has become no longer an original piece, but rather like a Greco-Roman copy of itself.

What happened is that the British Museum simply lost control over the Marbles or rather they abdicated control to Devin. And here again I think are the potential lessons for today, when public institutions are under great pressure in some countries - I know in my country - to adopt a consumerist ethic, a consumerist ethos to see themselves primarily as ways of enticing tourists rather than centres of original pieces, which are resources for research.

You may have read of the themed dinners which you can have in the Devin Gallery of the British Museum if you are rich enough, with the waiters dressed up in fake ancient Greek costumes. I don't think the British Museum has yet introduced themed orgies in the Roman Galleries.

In my book and article I outline the long pursuit and until recently pretty successful efforts by the British Museum authorities to prevent the main facts about this episode and the extent of the damage from becoming known. They did this by making no statement, no substantive statement of any kind for 60 years, censoring all scholarly work and illegally denying access to the public records. The gap between what actually happened and what was publicly admitted has been wide from the beginning.

In 1938 for example the report of the secret inquiry which was held into the damage included the sentence "the damage is obvious and cannot be exaggerated". But when the Minister of the day answered a question in the British House of Commons, he replied: "If there has been any damage, it is quite imperceptible". In the summer of 1998 by chance just a few days before my book came out, Mr Chris Smith, the present British Secretary for Culture, assured the House of Commons, again acting on advice from the British Museum "the Parthenon sculptures were legally and properly acquired, they have been kept in very good condition, very great care has been taken of them ever since".

So besides the artistic and archaeological questions about how we should now read the sculptures in their damaged state, the revelations raise issues for the public and Parliament in my country about scholarly standards, the duties of trusteeship and public accountability. The episode, I believe, illustrates vividly questions of what we should regard as genuine stewardship and genuine trusteeship, concepts incidentally which were first attempted in 5th century Athens.

Recently I believe there has been a change. Today the Greek claim for the return of the Marbles is no longer expressed in nationalist terms. The Greeks, as I read their memorandum, do not claim to be the descendants of Pericles any more than the British or the Cypriots are. The claim for return is based on the need to restore the integrity of the monument and on the generally accepted view that the Parthenon is a monument of importance to the whole world.

What is at stake today, they say, is not ownership which has a 19th century ring about it, but stewardship, conservation and the best way of making the Marbles available and understood for what they originally were, that is part of the decoration of a special building on a special site. The Greek Government has offered to discuss new forms of trusteeship, which would be tailor-made for that purpose with the British Government, which might well have an international element.

The Government of Greece has also decided to build a new Museum under the Acropolis at Makriyiannis. It's not yet finalised, but I have seen the designs, one feature of which is very striking. The sculptures it is intended, both those which are present in Athens and those which they wish to see come back from London will be displayed in a large open gallery. On the one end there will be two windows, in the shape of human eyes. So wherever you are in the gallery you will be drawn to look out at these windows and what you will see is the Parthenon or the Acropolis in all its changing lights. This seems to me to be very ingenious. An excellent way of reconciling the need for conservation, which requires that the sculptures should be insight with the need to remind viewers at all times that they are parts of a building.

So let me conclude. The Parthenon, which is a building originally erected to celebrate the religious and civic identity of the free citizens of the city of Athens, was successively assigned new meanings. First of all as an affirmation of Panhellenic cultural supremacy, of the benevolence of the Roman Empire, of the triumph of Christianity, Greek Orthodox and then Roman Catholic, and of the triumph of Islam. In the 19th century it became the cultural focus of the emerging Modern Greek nation and of the romantic ideal of perfection, of the turn of Western Civilisation to its ancient teachers. In the 20th century it is being increasingly perceived and proclaimed as a monument to liberal democracy and to the shared values of European civilization in its wider sense.

So the Parthenon's long history over 2500 years vividly illustrates such questions as the assertion of pedigrees of legitimization, the construction of group identities, the difference between heritage and history, changing notions of the purpose of art, the changing perceptions of the sacred and of the authentic. The Parthenon and its sculptures, have been frequently reinvented, refashioned and reinterpreted and the changing meanings conferred on them have led to actual physical changes in the stones themselves.

The Parthenon and its sculptures continue therefore to be a central case not only for cultural property, but also for some of the most difficult and also most important questions in the study of the humanities. That is their fascination and ultimately their value and let us hope that the 21st century can do better than our predecessors.

Thank you.

P.S. The lecture, as printed hereabove, was transcribed at the time it was delivered by Mr. William St Clair at the Forum Intercontinental Hotel, Nicosia, Cyprus on 5th December 2000. We therefore apologise in advance to Mr. St Clair for any unintentional mistakes, as well as for minor but necessary changes to the text whenever slides or pictures of the Parthenon (which were shown during his lecture) are unavailable.