Words: Ethan McGrory (he/him)
These modern constructions do nothing in erasing the sores of subjugation or repairing what (in the Stones and in much else) has already been lost to the Turks, to the Scots, and to time.
The Periclean Age’s foremost benison was the Athenian Acropolis. Socrates may have been among those employed for its construction. The period’s contribution to philosophy and to democracy is well known – the Parthenon’s facade is the symbol used by UNESCO. A museum dedicated to the antiquities originating in the Acropolis opened in 2009 and includes five of the six caryatids – pillars sculpted into the female form – which were designed for the Erechtheion, an Ionic temple dedicated to Athena. The other caryatid is housed in the British Museum.
The Erechtheion is a temple of a now vanished religion. After the Christianisation of Greece, it was reconsecrated into a basilica. Later still, during Ottoman suzerainty of Greece, it was used as the local dizdar’s harem. It suffered fire damage during the reign of the Emperor Augustus. The Acropolis was besieged twice during the 1821 Greek War of Independence; the story goes that when the Greeks discovered that the Ottomans were improvising bullets from the molten lead clamps used on the Parthenon, they offered bullets to their enemies under the provision that the desecration come to an end. The Acropolis has been repurposed, reconsecrated, and rebuilt.
Enter Lord Elgin. Twenty years before the 1821 Revolution, during the later Ottoman period, Greece was a miserable, abject country. British Foreign Office papers concerning Ottoman revenues describe Athens as ‘the forty-third city of European Turkey.’ Elgin received an incredibly elastic firman from the Sultan’s ministers to perform ‘excavatory work’ in and around the Parthenon, certainly overextending his authority in the removal from the pediment much of the narrative frieze as well as the caryatid. Lord Elgin did not pirate from sovereign Greece, but rather extracted value from an imperial province disinterested in the local culture. Elgin wrote to Lord Keith, then British naval commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean, that ‘Bonaparte has not got such a thing from all his thefts in Italy.’ This was a keepsake, a fragment of antiquity intended as part of an identity project for the British Empire to establish itself as the natural inheritor of the classical, civilisational tradition; Elgin’s first intention was to ship the marbles to his Fife estate.
I quote Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
‘But who, of all the plunderers of yon fame
On high, where Pallas linger’d, loth to flee
The latest relic of her ancient reign;
The last, the worst, who was he?
Blush, Caledonia! such thy son could be!’
Byron is indissolubly linked to Romantic Philhellenism. Still, this instance was not pursuit of his fancy – he dedicated much long, unrewarding service to the Grecian revolutionary cause. This was not aesthesis or theatre: he died for it. Indeed, Byron’s asking of Caledonia to blush is shared by Athenians: inscribed on the inside walls of the Erechtheion, is the following: ‘Quod non fecerunt Goti, hoc fecerunt Scoti’, which means ‘What the Goths did not do, the Scots did.’
Britain’s relationship to Greece has not typically been predatory. There exists admiration of Greece as the originator of a democracy that has formed the British moral identity. At a point during the Second World War, the nations found themselves the two remaining democracies resisting the imposition of Nazi Germany. Praise of Greek valour among Brits in the aftermath of their shared defence of Crete in 1941 was commonplace. Though harems, Christian desecration, and careless archaeology have affected the Acropolis, certainly the most turgid filth to have been imposed upon it was the Swastika during the occupation.
Considering Scotland (Elgin’s, Byron’s, and the author’s own nation), we might turn to the Stone of Scone. Used for coronations dating back to the mythic-historical period, it had been kept under Longshanks’ chair in Westminster Abbey for five centuries. On Christmas Day in 1950, four of Glasgow University’s best made away with the Stone and brought it north. Scotland, as a political entity, ceased to exist after the Act of Union, becoming a mere constituent part of a larger whole. Ethnic Scottishness as related to Gaeldom has always been rocky: much of ‘indigenous’ Scotland is of Anglo-Saxon extraction. And yet, the Scottish sense of self persisted, leading to the foundation of the Scottish Parliament, agitation for independence, and, indeed, the permanent return of the Stone of Scone to Scotland. This consciousness is not ancient inheritance, but modern invention. Even if one were to ignore the artistic value of seeing the caryatids and the other Marbles reunited to be part of the intended original whole, there is another principle of sovereignty and cultural continuity triumphing over cosmopolitanism.
These modern constructions do nothing in erasing the sores of subjugation or repairing what (in the Stones and in much else) has already been lost to the Turks, to the Scots, and to time. Which project are we to pursue? Readers who have made it this far will recognise square one.
