National Review’s art critic Brian Allen brings up the embarrassing attempt by Hartwig Fischer, the former director of the British Museum, to keep quiet when he learned in 2021 that several items from its inventory had been stolen. The suspected burglar, the inside man, was his curator of Greek antiquities. It so happens that Fischer had, a couple of years earlier, given an interview to Greek media defending the British Museum’s ownership of a collection of sculptures that Lord Elgin’s team of artists and artisans had taken from the Athenian Acropolis in the early 1800s.
Greek commentators — all of whom seem convinced, like my Greek-spirited fellow Cypriots and like Anglophone progressives, that the Greek government ought to be given the marbles — reliably jolted out of their seats. A Labourite member of the British parliament joined them:
One of the most insulting reasons that they [the British Museum] have given [for keeping their collections] is that the other countries that these items belong to would either not be able to take care of them or they are likely to be stolen. But you’ve got people in this country putting them on eBay.
The MP’s right, narrowly. For repatriationists, the British Museum’s stewardship chops are irrelevant to their accusations of thievery and their claims about cultural property rights. The notion that museums hesitate to hand over historical rarities to their supposed countries of origin because of a concern about curatorial incompetence or hypothetical wars that could endanger them is fatuous. No one buys it.
Here’s the real reason: The Parthenon sculptures — or Elgin Marbles, lest the careful reader impute meaning in how one refers to them — are artifacts of Western civilization, and their inheritors include me and you, the Greeks and the Brits, and others besides. The modern Athenian has about as much in common culturally with the classical Athenian, and about as good a claim over the legacy of antiquity, as does the modern Londoner or Milwaukeean (in whose art museum some years ago I saw, for the first time, a beauteous Corinthian helmet). And this was just as true when the Sublime Porte allowed the associates of Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin, whose mission at the Acropolis was to draw and make casts of its contents, to help themselves.
How the Parthenon sculptures ended up at the British Museum isn’t secret — those who insist that the English be honest about the means of their acquisition are late to a party that never started — and it hardly matters. Really, I’m not convinced it matters at all. Had the sculptures been discovered to have been seized by Athenian hoplites during some war against, say, Miletus, or bought in the fifth century b.c. from that city-state’s tyrant Aristagoras, would anyone be arguing that the British Museum must “repatriate” them to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ministry of culture and tourism?
Archaeologists distinguish between an item’s provenance, or its post-discovery sequence of ownership — which can involve all manner of procurement and dispossession — and its provenience, the place where it was found — which might be unknown or unknowable and indeed, given more information, simply an early part of its provenance. There’s no good reason why any of these various origins should take moral priority.
None of this is to argue that the British Museum must keep its piece of the Parthenon: Should it decide to transfer — to no acclamation and without shame — the artifacts to Greece, they’ll be comfortably at home in the recently renovated, eminent Acropolis Museum, and they’ll be cared for by heirs and trustees equally rightful. But none of the oily, slippery reasons the British Museum is now contemplating for handing them over has any purchase. Brothers and sisters in Europe and in the New World and beyond: The culture of classical antiquity is yours too.