Eyewitnesses to the taking of the Parthenon marbles

  Urban, Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, Wikipedia CC by SA 2.5

Bonaparte has not got such a thing from all his thefts in Italy.

                                    --Lord Elgin, writing in 1801 from Constantinople

It is Greece’s special sorrow that her War of Independence didn’t begin two decades earlier, before the fad for antiquities swept Western Europe – a fad that became an inter­national art race when the triumphant Napoleon pillaged Italy and Egypt to fill his newly created Louvre museum.

But Thomas Bruce, the seventh Lord Elgin, ambassador to the Sublime Porte, trumped Boney to something even the Romans never thought of taking home: the sculptures of the world’s most famous building. Admittedly Morosini was the first to try, in 1687 – after he bombed the then-intact temple (even though he knew the Turks were using it as a powder store), he added insult to injury by removing the great pediment showing the contest between Athena and Poseidon as a prize to take home to Venice. The ropes broke as it was lowered, and the statues ­shattered into bits. 

  

 

Elgin got his turn in 1801 when the Turkish military governor in Athens refused to let his artist, Lusieri, erect scaffolding to sketch the Parthenon frieze. Elgin went to the Sultan to get a firman, or authority, and the Sultan, pleased that the British had just rid Egypt of the French, readily provided one, not only allowing Elgin’s agents into the ‘temple of idols’ but to ‘take away any sculptures or inscriptions which do not interfere with the works or walls of the Citadel.’

Elgin interpreted this as a carte blanche, and sent Lusieri a long list of ‘samples’ to ship to London, all in the name of improving British arts by offering students back home a first-hand look at the greatest sculpture ever made. Besides, he wrote the Greeks ‘have looked upon the superb works of Pheidias with ingratitude and indifference. They do not deserve them!’ 

Considerable damage occurred to the marbles and to the temple’s structure during the removal; some panels were even sawn in two. In the meantime Naploeon’s agents were sniffing around Athens for any leftovers they could lay hands on. 

Lord Byron was there when the last of the 120 crates were being loaded: 

At this moment [3 Jan 1810], besides what h­as already been deposited in London, an Hydriot vessel is now in Piraeus to receive any portable relic. Thus as I heard a young Greek observe in common with many of his countrymen – for lost as they are, they yet feel on this occasion – thus may Lord Elgin boast of having ruined Athens. 

An Italian painter of the first eminence, named Lusieri, is the agent of devastation. Between this artist and the French Consul Fauvel, who wishes to rescue the remains for his own government, there is now a violent dispute concerning a car employed in their conveyance, the wheel of which – I wish they were both broken upon it – has been locked up by the Consul, and Lusieri has laid his complaint before the Waywode. 

Lord Elgin has been extremely happy in his choice of Lusieri. His works, as far as they go, are most beautiful. But when they carry away three or four shiploads of the most valuable and massy relics that time and barbarism have left to the most injured and most celebrated of cities; when they destroy, in vain attempt to tear down, those works which have been the admiration of ages, I know of no motive which can excuse, no name which can designate, the perpetrators of this dastardly devastation.

The most unblushing impudence could hardly go further than to affix the name of its plunderer to the walls of the Acropolis; while the wanton and useless defacement of the whole range of basso-rilievos, in one compartment of the temple, will never permit that name to be pronounced by an observer without execration. 

Another eye-witness, Edward Clark, wrote in his Travel to European Countries (1811):

The lowering of the sculptures has frustrated Pheidias’ intentions. Also, the shape of the Temple suffered a damage greater than the one suffered by Morosini's artillery. How could such an iniquity be committed by a nation that wants to boast of its discretional skill in arts? And they dare tell us, in a serious mien, that the damage was done in order to rescue the sculptures from ruin... 

 Just as the Hydra sailed off to Britain with its cargo of marbles, another vessel arrived in Athens, carrying architect Charles Robert Cockerell, who, inspired by Elgin, was on his way to Aegina to strip the frieze off the Temple of Aphaia (which went to Munich instead). 

 Relief of Achilles and Pentheselia from Bassae,  in the British Museum, CC by 2.0

Even so, Cockerell managed to bag the marbles from the Temple of Apollo at Bassae; by then, Greek outrage at the plundering permitted by bribe-greedy Turkish officialdom had reached such a pitch that an armed band tried to hijack Cockerell’s caravan, only to be thwarted by a forewarned Turkish army. 

 Nemesis, however, is a Greek goddess, and she saw to it that Elgin got no joy from his deed. One of his ships sank near Kythera (although the marbles were expensively rescued by divers over the next two years). He faced constant ridicule from the British public, many of whom agreed with Byron on the issue; syphilis caused his nose to fall off, and he was divorced from his bubbly young countess. 

 

The Elgin Marbles, by George Cruikshank, Wikipedia, CC0 license
 

On his way home to Britain he was taken prisoner in France for three years, on Napoleon’s orders. His marble-moving expenses totalled £63,000 (over £10 million today), a quarter of which was bribes to Turkish officials (this was at a time when the contents of the entire British Museum were valued at £3,000), but he managed to get only £35,000 from Parliament when it finally agreed to the purchase, in spite of members who condemned him as a dishonest looter, and he died in poverty. 

The issue of returning the Parthenon frieze to Athens comes up periodically, for instance in 1941, when several MPs proposed it as a reward for Greece’s heroic resistance to the Nazis. Doubt, too, has been cast on old claims that Elgin ‘saved’ the fragile Pentelic marbles, by moving them into the London damp and smog (even Elgin noticed they were deteriorating, as he dickered with Parliament over the price). The current Greek campaign for the return of the marbles, begun by the late Melina Mercouri when she served as Minister of Culture, received a morale-boost in 1998, when William St Clair revealed in his Lord Elgin and the Marbles that the British Museum had ‘skinned’ away fine details and the patina of the marbles in 1937–8, when they used metal scrapers to whiten them. 

Polls say that a majority of the British public want to return the marbles to Athens. The Greeks hope the  beautiful viewing gallery on top of the  Acropolis Museum  with its windows overlooing the Parthenon itself will encourage the British Museum to send them back to where they belong. 

The King of the Wood

Moving on from food for the stomach to food for thought...I keep finding juicy little nuggets that have gone out of print from our guidebooks so thought I'd just post them here because I like them. I hope you do, too. This is from our Cadogan guide to Rome and Central Italy.

 

                                                                      The Golden Bough, by J.M.W. Turner (1836)

 In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. 

                                                                                               James Frazer, The Golden Bough
 

Sir James Frazer was the son of a pharmacist from Glasgow who got a law degree because his strait-laced parents wanted him to, and instead of practising law then went off to become a classics fellow at Cambridge. 

 

In 1871 he happened to read about the singular customs of the sacred grove at Lake Nemi, ‘Diana’s Mirror’ in the Alban Hills, where her priest, an escaped slave known as the ‘King of the Wood’, ruled over the grove and its famous temple, until another would come to take his place. The challenge, for the intruder, took the form of chopping the mistletoe from an oak in Diana’s grove; an invitation to a fight that could only be to the death. 

 
 Frazer wondered why, but not in the innocent way that a less scholarly soul might wonder. Possessing some extreme strain of Scottish doggedness, he devoted the next twenty years of his life to finding out, and finally gave the world his answer in the thirteen volumes of The Golden Bough (1890), the foundation of modern anthropology. 

If the cult of Diana goes back to the remotest antiquity, it did not necessarily do so in Italy. As ancient writers attested, it was one of many Latin religious imports from the East. According to legends, Diana’s worship was brought to Italy by the hero Orestes from the Crimea, along with an image of the goddess hidden in a bundle of sticks. 

 
The Crimea, or the Chersonese, as it was known in classical times, was famous for outlandish religious practices, which usually involved blood, knives and horses. But the Latins, by way of the Greeks, would also have known other local variants of this most peculiar and dangerous of all goddesses – from Asia Minor, for example, where as the Ephesian Artemis she was worshipped in the form of an icon sprouting hundreds of breasts; her priests castrated themselves in her honour. 

Diana’s shrine at Nemi may have been the partial superimposition of foreign practices on a cult that already existed among the Latins. For Diana was not alone in her grove. As a classic ancient triple-goddess, she shared it with the crone Hecate and the mysterious nymph Egeria, who may have been the original goddess of the sanctuary. 

 
She was the lover of Rome’s legendary second king, Numa Pompilius, and taught him the laws and religious rituals that the Romans were to follow for centuries; it is entirely possible that Rome’s earliest kings were more sacred rulers than political leaders and, if he did not have to face death at the hands of a usurper, sacrifices of others may have been made in his place – Roman legends and the archaeological records are full of dark hints of human sacrifice, something the Romans suppressed all memory of in more civilized times. 

 
As Rome gained ascendency over the other Latin cities, the Romans took care to bring their gods and sacred places a little closer to home. A spring near the Appian Way was said to be the real home of Egeria, while Diana herself received a new sanctuary in a temple within the city walls.

 

                                                                      

 Lake Nemi  by John Robert Cozens, c. 1777

But perhaps Diana preferred to remain around her beautiful lake, for her worship, along with the strange custom of the grove, survived for centuries more. They were still at it in the enlightened reign of Hadrian, and how long after that no one knows. By this time, everything connected with Diana’s cult had become associated with the lower classes; Diana’s Roman temple was built on the Aventine hill, the working man’s district, and classical writers report that the grove at Nemi was constantly full of beggars, many of them from Rome’s large population of impoverished Jews. 

 
Even so, some of the more louche emperors took a special interest in Nemi, notably Caligula, who built luxurious pleasure barges on the lake, the famous ships that were later raised and displayed in the nearby Museum of Roman Ships before they were destroyed in World War II. It is said that when Caligula tired of one King of the Wood he purposely set a slave to kill him. 

 
Archaeologists entertain the grisly thought that in these later days the murder of the King had been brought out from the woods, and provided a bloody imperial entertainment in the theatre attached to the temple complex. It was not the sensationalism of this ancient rite, however, that set Frazer off on his twenty years of intellectual exploration. 

 

 One thing led to another: taboos, the ‘external soul’ (as the mistletoe, engendered by thunder, was the ‘soul’ of the oak), the ‘corn spirit’, and magical charms and rituals for the good of the crops, the cycle of the year, and its turning-points at the summer and winter solstices.  

 

Why must the King die? 

 

 

                           The Golden Bough, by Wenceslaus Hollar (17th century)

 

The main question was, why must the King die? Frazer tracked down innumerable ill-fated sacred Kings in cultures around the world, from ancient Sweden to the Zulu to the ‘King of Calicut’ on the Malabar coast to the Dinka and Shilluk tribes of the upper Nile. And he made the connection to the myriad gods of the Mediterranean and beyond who died too: Adonis, Attis, Osiris were the most famous, not to mention Jesus Christ, but ancient Greeks also showed visitors the ‘tombs’ of Dionysos and even Zeus, local relics of the days before gods became immortal.

Another question: why mistletoe? Ancient authorities linked the mistletoe to the golden bough plucked by Aeneas before his descent into the underworld; it was sacred to the Celtic Druids, and it formed the weapon that killed the Scandinavian god Balder. That led Frazer into a consideration of sacred trees around the world, which filled a volume or two of his great work.

 

The sacred king, this universal figure who hides at the magical roots of all religion, was in fact the spirit of the year, and he dies with it for the ‘good of the crops’, dies so that the eternal recurrence of death and rebirth in nature might be induced to continue.

This mighty theme, and the fascinating trip through the world’s antiquities and curiosities that illustrates it, made The Golden Bough one of the most popular and influential books of the 19th century; cast in Frazer’s flowing, silvery prose it is also a masterpiece of literature. 

 

The single-volume summation has been in print for over a century. In its wake, people began to look at the epics and myths of the past in a new way, and find the thread of Frazer’s idea running through everything from the Arthurian cycle to the story of Gilgamesh; it had a profound effect on many of the greatest 20th-century poets too, notably Eliot and Yeats.

Lake Nemi and the grove are still there, still beautiful and a bit uncanny, somehow magically preserved from the modern world and the noise of motor traffic (plenty of oaks, no mistletoe, but patches of pale, pretty violets everywhere; voices of women screaming far away, a crumpled pack of ‘Diana’ cigarettes by the roadside). 

 

Something still lives here. As we enter  a new millennium, obsessed with technics and parroting the fashionable rationalism of the day, desperately trying to convince ourselves it’s true, an old ghost waits quietly to tell us something different about our world and ourselves, something deep and strange, something that won’t go away.