Is the British Museum Losing Its Elgin Marbles, by Choice?

Murmurs grow loud over surrendering its Parthenon sculptures to the Greeks.

I’ m in Seal Harbor on Mount Desert Island in Maine for vacation now. I call it the Land of the Blue-Eyed Blonds. There are few redoubts of old WASP America left, but this is one of them. I love seeing our friends, and the sea air is infinitely therapeutic. I’ll write a couple of pieces about the arts in Maine before returning to Nashville topics and writing about my visit to museums in Huntsville and Birmingham.

I had so nice a visit to the Parthenon in Nashville that I’ll add a coda to my piece from Thursday. Originally conceived for the 1897 Centennial Exposition saluting Tennessee’s statehood and rebuilt in the late ’20s, it’s a 1:1 replica of the Parthenon in Athens. It’s not a denuded ruin, though. It looks, scholars think, like the Parthenon circa 400 b.c., except Nashville’s is on terra plana, not a hill, and it’s made from aesthetic concrete, not marble.

It’s a unique experience.

A timely coincidence: In the news last week were the British Museum’s warm and fuzzy cluckings signaling that it will indeed return the Elgin Marbles to the Greeks. It had said it would never return them, not for all the souvlaki in Sparta. When I was in political life I learned that when people in that line of work say “absolutely no,” they really mean, “Absolutely yes, but not until we find a way to do it.”

The British Museum belongs to the British nation, which is in extremis now given Boris’s exit, strikes, inflation, a modest, short, but, to the Brits and climate loons, catastrophic heat wave, and a looming recession. The collective mind isn’t on Apollo, Athena, or Aphrodite, unless their taxes can be raised or their doings regulated by the Nanny State. Boris, of all people, with a First in Greek classics from Oxford, would tell the Greeks to go pound grape musks, in Greek.

George Osborne, the chairman of the British Museum board, is one of those Tories who by reflex cater to trendy opinion. Trendy opinion is anti-imperialist now. Britain hasn’t had an empire in my lifetime, but the chattering classes in London, New York, and Washington are often noisily against things that no longer exist. They make a moral point, strident and sonorous at the same time, of insisting they will fight these things that no longer exist, fight to the death if it comes to that, which, of course, it won’t.

Masters of the universe such as Osborne, now publisher of the Evening Standard, a newspaper I read in London, enjoy going where none hath gone before, doing what others thought impossible. He wants to be a hero. As chancellor of the exchequer in the David Cameron government and the PM’s best bud, he championed five years of austerity. No fun, to his credit. Running a government isn’t always fun.

Osborne also shares the blame for what the chatterers see as the Brexit debacle, the thought of which turns them into teeth-gnashers and -grinders, even spitting on their canapés like cranky camels. Right now, “Boris let the Brexit vote happen” comes first to mind, austerity second, and his silly 2015 VAT on Cornish pasties, but only if heated. He also left his wife of 20 years in 2019 and plans to marry a woman who used to be his assistant. They already have a baby. Transgression is his calling card.

Yet he knows he needs rehabilitation, wants an obituary with passages of fond praise, and probably doesn’t give a drachma about the sculptures, most of which were mauled by British conservators and curators in a botched 1938 cleaning. He says, “There’s a deal to be done.” Our masters can never leave well enough alone. There’s always “a deal to be done” when there’s a public to be fleeced.

The British Museum’s principal government regulator is the Ministry of Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. This is the most diffuse agency imaginable. It regulates tourism, gambling, and charity, too. It has had eleven ministers since 2010. Tories use it for a parking space for people who go elsewhere. Nadine Dorries is the ministry’s current secretary of state.

Dorries has feuded with Osborne for years, calling him arrogant, pernicious, out of his depth, stupid, and a liar. She described him and Cameron as “a couple of posh boys who don’t know the price of milk.” Dorries might very well become the force standing between Zeus and a one-way ticket to Piraeus. The king of the gods, a serial rake and adulterer, might wish he’d treated his women better.

Dorries grew up in a council estate, though — the British equivalent of low-income housing. She has known worse than big-ego ex-gods with fizzled lightning bolts in their holsters. Her big issue is the BBC’s bias. She’s likely to believe that what belongs to England stays in England. Will she have the focus and staff support to keep the British Museum from emptying the place of its plum treasure? Or, when a new prime minister takes over in September, will he get another minister to replace her?

That the British own the Marbles seems irrelevant. I’ve written about this before. It’s impossible to prove they don’t. And more people will see them in London. Classicism is the default English aesthetic and has been since the Renaissance. In Greece, it’s Byzantine revival and has been for 1,500 years. Greek love for the country’s classical past is entirely a 19th-century phenomenon developing from the war for independence in the 1820s. And Greece isn’t a stable country.

All irrelevant, since restitution fever is in the air. The British Museum owns so much art seized by actual, illegal force, such as the Benin Bronzes. Once the givebacks start, they’ll be hard to stop. The director and trustees will spend all their time dealing with them.

To be open-minded and fair, as I always am, the Greek state has a new, fantastic museum at the foot of the Hill of the Muses dedicated to the Acropolis. On the one hand, the failed restoration of the pediment sculptures by the British Museum was and still is an abomination. On the other, the museum actually moved some of the Parthenon sculptures, so its exhibition about Rodin and Greek sculpture could include them. That took initiative and a new commitment to exploring how important they’ve been to modern art.

Last week, the British Museum sent its associate director to muse to the press that “a new cultural exchange” and “a positive partnership” will involve a long-term loan of the Elgin Marbles to Athens. This might start with the pediment sculptures. These are the icons. The museum also owns the metopes depicting the Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs and most of the 420 feet remaining of the processional Frieze. They’ll be razzle-dazzle reciprocal loans. I’m sure there will be lots of back-and-forth, but things have hotted up, and it didn’t take Prometheus to do it.

After a bit, the Brits will forget they were ever in London. Parliament must approve a transfer of ownership of art belonging to the British Museum but not loans. “Time is the healer of all necessary evils,” the Greek dramatist Menander wrote around 300 b.c.

Late last year, UNESCO issued a report demanding that the Parthenon sculptures be returned to Greece. This in itself is a good reason to keep them in London. It’s safe to say that if the United Nations says something absolutely must be done, then it absolutely must not be done. Boris was asked a few months ago, before he was tossed from the Olympus of Downing Street, what he thought about sending the Parthenon sculptures back to Greece. He said it was up to the British Museum, which isn’t technically true.

I don’t see rush orders for “No abidin’ givin’ back our Poseidon” signs. Even today’s Brits devalue history and heritage. Melina Mercouri started the push to recover the Elgin Marbles 40 years ago when she was Greece’s culture minister. A citizens’ committee in the U.K. is now leading the charge. In February, the Times, the London one, endorsed sending them back. A Times readers’ poll conducted last week had 78 percent backing bye-bye Hera, nice knowin’ ya, Aphrodite.

No doubt the Parthenon in Nashville will take all of this in stride. It’s a confident, serious place nicely fixed in the city’s culture. And it’s the closest to the real thing. It doesn’t have to worry about Venetian ships blowing it up, either. When — I don’t think “if” — the Elgin Marbles return to Athens, new scholarship will happen. The juxtapositions alone will stimulate new ideas.

It’s happening all the time. At the center of the Nashville Parthenon is a 42-foot-tall reproduction of Athena Parthenos based on the best conjecture since the original disappeared 2,000 years ago. A respected scholar now insists that one of Athena’s accoutrements — a large sacred snake — was originally by her right side, not her left. In the world of Greek sculpture studies, this is big. The scholarly revolution over how Greek sculpture was brightly painted will probably deepen.

Who knows? The Parthenon is leading the charge in promoting classical education among Nashville’s young people. Will story hour’s drag queens in the Athens of the South be reading The Iliad to kindergartners instead of “Priapus Plays Peek-a-Boo”? We can only beseech the gods.