This is part of a series of posts I began last year centered on the connections between the British Museum and the literature I teach and study. Other entries can be found under the “British Museum” tag.

The Duveen Gallery at the British Museum containing the Elgin Marbles, photo by Andrew Dunn via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve yet to visit the Acropolis. I’ve seen photographs of course, and I’ve read descriptions, but I’ve not climbed the hill to the Parthenon. Still, I can imagine the ruin’s splendor, and I can imagine the frustration I would feel standing in the temple’s shell and seeing it stripped of so many of its iconic pieces of sculpture.

But I have seen many of those sculptures, the bulk of which form the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, elsewhere. When I lived in London I spent many hours wandering the Museum’s halls including the beautiful Duveen Gallery (pictured below.) The marbles take their name from Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin who completed the excavation and shipping the sculptures to Britain in 1812. The legality of Elgin’s acquisition is still in dispute for a number of reasons. Allegedly Elgin received a firman, an Islamic legal document utilized by the Ottoman Empire, from the Sultan Selim III, though the authenticity of this decree as well as its larger legality of such a decree (as the Ottoman Empire were an occupying force) have been questioned. The Greek Government has requested the return of the marbles, however Britain has stood firmly behind the Museum.

The Elgin Marbles illuminate the multiple tensions inherent in British Imperialism. Their placement in the British Museum is part of the larger process that seeks to bring the world to London, and by corollary create London as the center of the world. In this manner it functions in a way similar to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the number of Victorian spectacles that sought to create a vision of the world as an Imperial cosmos with London as its nexus.

The holding of these antiquities also seeks to locate British imperial identity in relation to its precursors. Having the bulk of the Parthenon Frieze in Britain can be seen as a way of identifying Britain as the true inheritor of the flame of Western Civilization.

The Duveen Gallery is a wonderful setting for the sculptures, and there is something perhaps to say about viewing the marbles in relation to the other artifacts of world cultures held in the Museum. Still it is hard to look at these works and not desire they be returned to the descendants of the people who created them.

Lord Byron despaired of this as well, writing in the second canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

But most the modern Pict’s ignoble boast,

To rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared:

Cold as the crags upon his native coast,

His mind as barren and his heart as hard,

Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared,

Aught to displace Athena’s poor remains:

Her sons too weak the sacred shrine to guard,

Yet felt some portion of their mother’s pains,

And never knew, till then, the weight of Despot’s chains. (XII)

*   *   *

Cold is the heart, fair Greece, that looks on thee,

   Nor feels as lovers o’er the dust they loved;

   Dull is the eye that will not weep to see

   Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed

   By British hands, which it had best behoved

   To guard those relics ne’er to be restored.

   Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,

     And once again thy hapless bosom gored,

And snatched thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred! (XV)

This is a complex piece of poetry that seems to encapsulate at least some of the tensions at the heart of the Elgin Marbles controversy. Byron characterizes the removal of the sculptures as a defacement, a point that is hard to argue. Yet, the same line points to the decay that centuries of neglect have wrought on the ancient marbles. One of the arguments defenders of Elgin make is that their removal actually preserved them, first from the ravages of war and then from the ravages of pollution. Still Byron is of course ultimately critical of the removal as is attested by his other long (and unsubtle) attack on Elgin in the first portion, referencing him as “the modern Pict” (like the Pictish tribes, Elgin was Scottish).

There is something fascinating about the last lines of the selection of Childe Harold pointing to the alien environment in which these Mediterranean deities find themselves. The much touted “quality of Greek light” familiar to writers and artists for centuries does not fall in Britain. The environment is so different; even if the British Museum is a neo-classical building the weather that envelops it is famous for its chill. It is romantic to say that England is a land of fogs, mists, and marshes, but these things do help to distinguish it from Greece and have provided important symbolic touchstones.

Byron’s brief moment there reminds me of Walter Pater’s waxing like Heinrich Heine:

“Consecutive upon Apollo in all his solar fervour and effulgence,” says a writer of Teutonic proclivities, “we may discern even among the Greeks themselves, elusively, as would be natural with such a being, almost like a mock sun amid the mists, the northern or ultra-northern sun-god. In hints and fragments the lexicographers and others have told us something of this Hyperborean Apollo, fancies about him which evidence some knowledge of the Land of the Midnight Sun, of the sun’s ways among the Laplanders, of a hoary summer breathing very softly on the violet beds, or say, the London-pride and crab-apples, provided for those meagre people, somewhere amid the remoteness of their icy seas. In such wise Apollo had already anticipated his sad fortunes in the Middle Age as a god definitely in exile, driven north of the Alps, and even here ever in flight before the summer. Summer indeed he leaves now to the management of others, finding his way from France and Germany to still paler countries, yet making or taking with him always a certain seductive summer-in-winter, though also with a divine or titanic regret, a titanic revolt in his heart, and consequent inversion at times of his old beneficent and properly solar doings. For his favours, his fallacious good-humour, which has in truth a touch of malign magic about it, he makes men pay sometimes a terrible price, and is in fact a devil!” (“Apollo in Picardy”)

Byron’s respect for the monument, by the way, did not stop him from carving his own epigram on the Acropolis, one which echoes his “Curse of Minerva.” A grafitto attributed to Byron at the site reads Quod non fecerunt Goti, fecerunt Scoti, “What the Goths didn’t steal, the Scots stole.”