Books, Arts & Manners: On Losing One’s Marbles

Given that Christopher Hitchens does not seem especially interested in the subject of his most recent book, it is natural to wonder why he wrote it in the first place. Imperial Spoils (Farrar, Straus) is a slightly oversized pamphlet advocating the restitution to Greece of those sculptures that Lord Elgin removed from the Athenian Acropolis and sold to the British nation early in the nineteenth century. Even to those of us who have enjoyed Hitchens’s splenetic outbursts in The Nation, in which he attacks everyone to the political right of himself (which is to say, nearly everyone), it is not self-evident why he should now feel moved to agitate for the return of several tons of ancient stone to a small country on the Mediterranean.

Although it may be that Hitchens merely feels he is “lending his prestige” to a worthy cause, he would have us believe that he has been spurred into print by the beauty of the Elgin Marbles and by his outrage at their ongoing captivity in the bowels of the British Museum. And yet, when it comes to explaining why anyone should actually want the marbles, Hitchens has little to say. Aside from several ennobling sentimentalities on the glories of nationalism, his aesthetic commentary is limited to such half-digested cribbings as the observation that the Parthenon “has eight columns at the end instead of the usual six,” or that “Pericles . . . called upon that sense of balance and symmetry which Thucydides immortalized in his funeral oration.”

JG

About the Author

James Gardner

Featured Tags

Given that Christopher Hitchens does not seem especially interested in the subject of his most recent book, it is natural to wonder why he wrote it in the first place. Imperial Spoils (Farrar, Straus) is a slightly oversized pamphlet advocating the restitution to Greece of those sculptures that Lord Elgin removed from the Athenian Acropolis and sold to the British nation early in the nineteenth century. Even to those of us who have enjoyed Hitchens’s splenetic outbursts in The Nation, in which he attacks everyone to the political right of himself (which is to say, nearly everyone), it is not self-evident why he should now feel moved to agitate for the return of several tons of ancient stone to a small country on the Mediterranean.

Although it may be that Hitchens merely feels he is “lending his prestige” to a worthy cause, he would have us believe that he has been spurred into print by the beauty of the Elgin Marbles and by his outrage at their ongoing captivity in the bowels of the British Museum. And yet, when it comes to explaining why anyone should actually want the marbles, Hitchens has little to say. Aside from several ennobling sentimentalities on the glories of nationalism, his aesthetic commentary is limited to such half-digested cribbings as the observation that the Parthenon “has eight columns at the end instead of the usual six,” or that “Pericles . . . called upon that sense of balance and symmetry which Thucydides immortalized in his funeral oration.”