What we get wrong about Lord Elgin

I have long said that the rights and wrongs of the Elgin Marbles debate are more complicated than we often make them seem, and that the argument would be much more productive if we managed to see some of the complexity.

Now that Amal Clooney has taken up the case, all the old over-simplifications are crawling out again. Personally I hold no brief for Lord Elgin (I have remained uncomfortably "on the fence" on the whole issue for many a year). And it is important to admit that there is an awful lot we dont know about him and his motives (to be honest, it is completely uncertain whether he was looking to save a precious antiquity or looking for some nice decoration for his stately pile, or some combination of the two).

But there are some aspects to the story as it is now told that are simply WRONG.

For a start, the idea that Elgin went up to something like the "pristine" Acropolis we now see and gave orders for the finest sculptures from the finest temple to be removed and parcelled off to Britain is far from the truth. In the early years of the nineteenth century the Acropolis was an Ottoman garrison base with a rather squalid village attached. The antiquities were all encroached upon by shacks, houses, offices and stores, and there is no doubt that some of the ancient marble was being reused for various garrison purposes. How endangered the sculptures were is hard to say, but Elgin was not taking anything from what we would think of as an archaeological site (with or without permission -- the extent of his "firman" is not entirely clear, and anyway we dont have the Ottoman original, only an Italian translation, accurate or not).

Second, it is not the case that the British government -- avid plunderers to a man --  eagerly snapped them up when Elgin offered to flog them (by 1816 being close to bankrupt thanks to his Marbles). There was a long discussion and inquiry by a Select Committe of the House of Commons, which went through many of the issues we now discuss, including Elgin's title to the sculpture. Of course, they may have reached the wrong conclusion, but there is no doubt that they discussed the whole issue in minute detail (you can read the verbatim proceedings here).

Third, the Marbles were not a symbol of "Greek nationhood" when Elgin took them. Whether we think what he did was right or wrong, he was not doing the equivalent of walking into the Tower of London and pinching the Crown Jewels. The Marbles became a national symbol in a sense in their loss, and with some help from the later, classically focussed, monarchy of Greece. That is not to say that everyone approved of what Elgin did at the time. Byron famously penned verses attacking Elgin (though he still was happy enough to hitch a lift on one of the boats carrying the Marbles away from Athens). And Edward Daniel Clarke is supposed to have wept when he saw the Parthenon sculptures being taken down (though his finer feelings did not prevent him removing a famous sculpture from Eleusis and taking it back to Cambridge, to the howls of protest of the local Eleusis residents).

None of these factors are clinching either way (they don't push me off the fence). But we do have to understand the early nineteenth-century background properly if we are to judge Elgin's actions properly or fairly.