Unlike George Clooney, who also wants to see the Elgin Marbles back at the Pantheon, his colleague Stephen Fry correctly identifies their original site as the Parthenon, not the Pantheon.
That’s what expensive British education provides. Go through a good public school followed by Cambridge, and you’ll never confuse Parthenon with Pantheon, nor either of them with the Pink Panther.
Yet Stephen echoes George in insisting that the Marbles should be repatriated. “It would be a classy thing,” he says, “and Britain hasn’t done a classy thing internationally for some time.”
And there I was, singing the praises of British private education. “Classy” isn’t classy, Stephen. Like ‘posh’, ‘toilet’ and ‘serviette’, it’s not a word that ever crosses the lips of cultured Britons.
Still, I’m glad that after all those nervous breakdowns, bouts of manic depression (so self-described) and suicide attempts, Stephen is still lucid enough to offer a solution to the problem that really doesn’t exist.
The Elgin Marbles should return to Athens, “where they belong”. That much is clear, at least to Stephen and George.
But the six million visitors who enjoy the sculptures at the British Museum every year needn’t be deprived. They could be treated to a computer-generated virtual reality show featuring the Marbles.
That, to Stephen, would be a more than sufficient substitute. Athenians, meanwhile, will be enjoying the sight of those sculptures in situ.
Stephen has a warm spot for Greece in general. In fact, it’s because of his “fundamentally Hellenic outlook” that he is an atheist who “can’t believe in God”. One detects a gap in his education there.
For the “Hellenic outlook” certainly wasn’t atheistic. I shan’t detain either you or Stephen by providing a treatise on the religiosity of, say, Plato and Aristotle, other than saying that it was profound, devout and even proto-monotheistic.
Perhaps what formed Stephen’s outlook is the more frivolous, if oft-exaggerated, aspect of the Hellenic civilisation. Be that as it may, the Marbles belong in Athens, not London, as far as he is concerned. But don’t fret: London will be treated to a virtual “Parthenon experience”.
Stephen graciously acknowledges that “we’ve looked after” the Marbles, but that’s a misleading understatement. But for Lord Elgin, they wouldn’t exist.
That British envoy to the Ottoman Empire, to which Greece then belonged, noticed some of the sculptures were missing. The Turks, who didn’t share Stephen Fry’s Hellenic outlook, were burning them to obtain lime for construction purposes.
Lord Elgin immediately bought the Marbles and, between 1801 and 1812, had them moved to London. That cost him £70,000, a huge sum at a time when £500 a year was a solid upper-middle-class income. That outlay was only partly offset when Elgin sold the Marbles to the British Museum, having refused, for patriotic reasons, to sell them to Napoleon for a larger amount.
Hence our ownership of the Marbles is indisputable on any grounds, legal, moral and historical. The Greeks’ desire to get them back is understandable, but then so is my desire to go out with every Bond girl of recent vintage or, in the case of Halle Berry, not so recent.
However, my futile yearnings aren’t encouraged, but the Greeks’ craving for that particular baklava in the sky is. It so happens that most encouragers tend to fall on the left of the political divide, where Britain is seen as an historical villain and Greece as a victim.
The gesture that Stephen Fry demands Britain make would be not so much “classy” as culturally self-destructive. And Britain is expected to be more self-abnegating than any other country.
Many of them own works of art to which their title is a great deal less ironclad than Britain’s to the Elgin Marbles. Russia, for example, plundered 2.5 million art objects from Germany at the end of the Second World War.
Only a small part of them have ever been returned. The rest are either on display or in the reserve collections of Russia’s top museums. And, unlike Lord Elgin, they never paid for them. Nor, incidentally, do they take an equally good care of those masterpieces, but that’s a subject for another day.
Napoleon too looted art on an epic scale. As a result, many museums in Europe display art whose provenance wouldn’t pass muster in any court of law. The Royal Museum in Brussels, for example, would be almost stripped bare if the likes of George and Stephen demanded restitution with the same thunderous vigour.
Also, many great museums of Europe and America have large collections of African art. How many of those works were actually bought, as opposed to looted? In round numbers, not a hell of a lot.
Historical, especially cultural, revisionism is an entertaining game to play, but it shouldn’t be played with the Elgin Marbles. We paid for them, we saved them – they are ours. Repatriating them would be insane.
Fry would certainly like Mykonos, but I’m picking the low hanging fruit there.. Oops, did it again!
Careful. Puns can land you in pokey these days.
Yes , incredible that, but he’s such a pompous poser I couldn’t resist . Ditto Clooney with the silent C and his Muslim beard . Where to start on their hypocrisy ? The Buddhist carvings blown up by the Taliban ? the Catholic Churches razed ?
Since the marbles were the work of Phidias, a slave-owner, I’m surprised that they haven’t been spray-painted and thrown into the Thames by our moral superiors. Or perhaps they ought to be blown up as blasphemous depictions of false gods by our other moral superiors. The way things are going in the UK, these odious symbols of White Patriarchal Islamophobic oppression might be safer in Greece.
I agree. Let’s get rid of everything slave-owning civilisations produced. And you are right: before long that simple idea will be put into practice in the UK.