The Elgin Marbles Argument Has No Clean Answer
Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, arrived as British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1799 and left, between 1801 and 1812, with approximately half the surviving sculptural decoration of the Parthenon. This is the basic fact around which everything else — the legal argument, the cultural argument, the moral argument, the counter-argument, and the occasional productive silence — has been organized for the better part of two centuries.
The sculptures he removed include 17 figures from the pediments, 15 of the 92 metope panels, and 75 meters of the 160-meter Ionic frieze that ran around the interior of the temple. They are now in the British Museum, where they have been since Elgin sold them to the British government in 1816 for £35,000 — less than he had paid for their removal, which had ruined him financially. They are displayed in the Duveen Gallery, purpose-built for them in 1939, in the kind of clinical neutrality that British museum culture has elevated to an aesthetic. They are extraordinary. The quality of the fifth-century BC carving — the drapery, the anatomy, the spatial organization of narrative reliefs — has barely been exceeded in the 2,400 years since.
The British Museum’s argument for retention has evolved over time but rests on several claims: that Elgin had legal permission from the Ottoman authorities who governed Athens at the time; that the sculptures are better preserved in London than they would have been had they remained; that a universal museum — a museum that belongs to all humanity rather than to any one nation — is the appropriate setting for works of this magnitude; and that returning the marbles would set a precedent that would require the return of enormous quantities of artifacts from collections worldwide.
The Greek argument is that the Ottoman permission, whatever its scope, did not amount to a legitimate transfer of ownership of cultural heritage; that the sculptures were removed from a functioning monument and cannot be meaningfully understood in isolation from the Parthenon and from Athens; that the New Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009 specifically to house the marbles if returned, offers conditions equal to or better than the Duveen Gallery; and that “precedent” arguments function as a general license for colonial-era acquisition to become permanent.
Both sets of arguments have internal logic. The precedent argument is genuinely serious — the Benin Bronzes, the Rosetta Stone, the Koh-i-Noor, and thousands of less famous objects involve comparable acquisition histories, and a ruling principle broad enough to require the Elgin Marbles’ return would have consequences that no museum, including the Acropolis Museum, has fully thought through. The Greek argument about the monument’s integrity is also genuinely serious — a frieze narrating the Panathenaic procession that circles the Parthenon cannot be fully read when half of it is in London and the other half, or what remains of it, is in Athens.
The Ottoman permission document — a firman — does not survive in its original form. The known version is an Italian translation of a Turkish document whose scope is disputed: it may have authorized removal of specific pieces or all pieces, for study or for permanent export. The British government in 1816 appointed a select committee to investigate the acquisition, which concluded the purchase was legitimate; the committee did not have access to a contemporary Greek voice, because Greece did not exist as an independent state in 1816. It declared independence in 1821.
The strongest argument for return is not legal but architectural. The Parthenon was built as a unified whole, and its sculptural program is a single composition organized around the temple’s geometry and its position on the Acropolis. The pieces in London are beautiful objects. In their original context — or in the Acropolis Museum, which is built on a sight line to the Parthenon itself — they are part of an argument about what human beings can produce when they decide to make something that is not only useful. That argument is harder to make when half the evidence is in a different country.
The British Museum has lent objects to foreign institutions; it has never returned them. The legislation governing the Museum actually prohibits deaccessioning most of its collection, meaning the decision would require an act of Parliament. No government has been willing to introduce the bill.
The marbles stay in London, for now. Greece maintains its claim. The Acropolis Museum has a gallery with windows facing the Parthenon and empty wall space where the returned sculptures would go, if they returned. The empty space is not subtle. It was not designed to be.