LONDON – A British Professor of Religion has chimed in on the debate over the stolen Parthenon Marbles to support the British Museum keeping them and said that they were saved from ruin by the Scottish diplomat, Lord Elgin, who plundered them.

Writing in the conservative magazine The Spectator, Nigel Biggar – who also teaches Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, mocked Greece’s argument that Elgin took them unlawfully.

“Elgin didn’t nick the Marbles; he rescued them. The argument that the Marbles should be returned to Greece because they represent ‘the essence of Greekness’ is nationalist nonsense,” he wrote.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-risk-of-loaning-the-elgin-marbles-to-greece/

He said that argument doesn’t align with the reality of Ancient Greece at the time the Parthenon was built atop the Acropolis from 447-432 B.C. during the Golden Age of Pericles, but Biggar said democracy wasn’t part of it.

The “essence” stance that was highlighted by former culture minister and late film star Melina Mercouri – who renamed them the Parthenon Marbles although the British call them The Elgin Marbles – is hypocritical, Biggar said.

“That essence is supposed to be democracy, and yet in the ‘democracy’ that Periclean Athens supported when the Parthenon was built, 30,000 citizens elected representatives to the legislative assembly, which ruled over 300,000 unenfranchised women and slaves. That was far more like England’s medieval Parliament than today’s democratic one,” he said.

He added that while Greeks today, including those espousing the return of the stolen treasures, “may project onto the Parthenon’s sculptures an embodiment of their own ideals, their original meaning to ancient Athenians was imperial triumph and to ancient Spartans and Corinthians, imperial oppression.”

He wrote in the midst of the British Museum continuing to offer Greece only a loan of the stolen marbles in return for Greece sending other artifacts to be held hostage until their return, on condition that Greece give up ownership.

Greece’s New Democracy government has steadfastly refused that and Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said there won’t be any negotiation about Greece’s ownership as they were created in Greece.

Elgin said he had the permission of the then-ruling Ottoman Turkish empire in a written firman but Turkey’s government said it can’t find any indication of that although the museum said it has one written in Italian, not Turkish.

Biggar belittled the Labor party’s former Europe Minister Dennis McShane who write in the Times – which has switched from opposing to supporting reunification of the marbles – who said, “It would be smart politics” to send them back.

Biggar smacked that McShane was “Waxing romantic in his love for the Greece of Lord Byron and Paddy Leigh Fermor,” and had “decried Elgin’s ‘crime’ and ‘vandalism’ in ‘hacking off the friezes that were the very origin of western sculpture’ and urged the return of the ‘plundered sculptures.’”
Elgin had them ripped off the Parthenon beginning in 1801 but Biggar said the structure then had already been severely damaged in invasions and when a gunpowder store there exploded when the Venetians ruled in 1687.

“The Marbles have no single, authentic meaning. They meant contrary things to ancient Greek peoples. They mean something different to contemporary Greeks. And they mean something different again to international visitors to the British Museum, where their juxtaposition to art from all over the world provokes fresh insight into human cultures,” he argued about why they shouldn’t go back to Greece.

He said they should remain there and that “returning them to Athens out of a misplaced sense of colonial guilt would serve to entrench the ‘decolonising’ left’s narrative more deeply in our institutions and public opinion.”