Readers of Neos Kosmos won’t need to be told that one of the world’s most aggravated and thorny cultural-political issues has been and is that of ‘the Marbles’: the marble sculptures, that is, that originally adorned Athens’s truly magnificent marble temple, known for short as the Parthenon. Formally dedicated to Athena in one of her many capacities (as a Virgin, a sort of Jeanne d’Arc patriotic warrior), this was a temple to democracy and aesthetics as well as to religion. It was built during the third quarter of the 5th century BC, as a key element of the astonishing programme of building works paid for out of both internal and external public funds that produced – besides the Parthenon – the Erechtheum, the Temple of Athena Nike (Victory), and a Stoa (Colonnade, Portico) dedicated to Zeus the Liberator, among many others.

In all sorts of respects, the Parthenon was unique, both functionally, in being more of a National Memorial Monument and the city’s National Bank than a temple for worshippers, and aesthetically – the sophistication of its architecture, and the richness and beauty of its sculptural adornment, all are unexampled in the ancient Greek world at any time or place. Which is why its fate matters as much today as it mattered then, if in different ways. And why the fact that a good proportion of its extant sculptural ornament is now imprisoned in London’s British Museum, far away from where it should be displayed in glory in its native Athens, is so painful and so desperately in need of rectification. Or reunification.

Here I must declare an interest as Vice-Chair of BCRPM – the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, one of about a score of such national committees. This campaign was launched in 1981 in Greece itself, thanks to then Culture Minister Melina Mercouri, and outside Greece it started soon after in – where else?  Australia, thanks to now 90-year-old Emanuel Comino, originally from the island of Kythera.

My main point here is that the campaign is very far from static but rather a moving target, in which nothing stands still ever. A recent flurry suggested that negotiations for the reunification of the British Museum’s holdings were closer to conclusion than sadly they actually were. This is an inevitable consequence of the issue’s essential politicisation, of which more later. But with time and research come enlightenment, and hot off the press are two, very different but complementary and mutually reinforcing, publications, one from North America the other from Europe, both highlighting anew the legal fiction and moral deliction that underpin the ‘Elgin crime’.

The seventh earl of Elgin was the UK’s Ambassador to the Sublime Porte (Constantinople) a.k.a. the Ottoman empire. Using his own (or rather his wife’s) as well as public money, for illegal as well as legitimate purposes, he and his team of workmen succeeded in extracting from the Acropolis of Athens significant amounts of beautifully worked Pentelic marble sculptures, collectively known, when they were bought by the UK government in 1816 and entrusted to the care of the British Museum, as the ‘Elgin Marbles’. Of these, far and away the most significant were those taken – stolen, hacked away in situ as well as retrieved – from the Parthenon. And it is for the repatriation of those – and those alone – that successive Greek governments have made formal, courteous diplomatic requests ever since the birth of the modern Greek independent state, in the 1830s. Not, repeat not, for, most notoriously, the Caryatid removed from the Erechtheum. Only the Parthenon marbles/sculptures.

There are numerous, still highly controversial aspects to the ‘Elgin affair’: what really were Elgin’s motivations, or why really did MPs vote to buy his (putatively) Marbles? But the two hot-press, hot-button items I’m highlighting here focus respectively on the legality and on the morality of his acquisition. Possession, the adage goes, is nine points of the law – but what of the other points: did Elgin have a specific written permission or warrant from the Sultan or his deputy, and, if so, what exactly did it permit? Unfortunately, no such complete and explicit legal document has ever been produced.

Professor Catharine Titi, a Thessaloniki native now based as a professor of International Human Rights Law in Paris (home of UNESCO), has burrowed very deeply into such archival evidence as exists, both British and Turkish. Here is part of what I have written to be used as back-cover copy for her excellent book, The Parthenon Marbles and International Law (Springer, 2023): ‘Cutting through the swathes of ideological obfuscation, she patiently and incontrovertibly demonstrates just how shaky in international law is the UK’s case not alone for retention but even for the original possession let alone ownership of the Sculptures held in the British Museum’.

But whatever the legal rights and wrongs of the case, under international or domestic UK law, then or now, there remains the burning ethical issue: by what moral right do the UK Government and the Trustees of the BM cling on to objects obtained under immeasurably different, neo-colonial and neo-imperial conditions, and – arguably – under false, pseudo-legal pretences? It is this issue among others that distinguished American poet and Athens-resident Alicia Stallings addresses so skilfully and movingly in a remarkable and timely essay published in the 75th anniversary issue of The Hudson Review. Some essay! Over 120 pages long with a suitably hefty title: ‘Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters (and Actors and Architects) Framed The Ongoing Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles Of The Athenian Acropolis’. ‘What better way’, she writes, ‘for a post-Brexit Britain to display large-mindedness, its good faith, generosity, its participation in the brotherhood of nations’ than to make the ‘magnificent gesture’ of reunification? Hear, hear. Lord Byron, author of ‘The Curse of Minerva’, would undoubtedly approve.

Paul Cartledge is the AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, emeritus, University of Cambridge, UK is the foremost authority on Ancient Sparta and has written books, such as the best selling ‘The Spartans: An Epic History’, ‘Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice’, ‘Democracy: A Life’ and his most recent ‘Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece.’