That old chestnut is back in the fire, as always happens when a Greek government finds itself up the creek (when was a Greek government last not up the creek?). Let’s find something to rouse our sense of national unity, re-animate that spirit of dogged courage and resistance to the hostile world that always surrounds us, the ingrates, ever eager to destroy our brave and noble little country that gave the world art, science, literature, philosophy: in short, the whole of civilization.
And rather as the Arab countries have that oh-so-convenient running sore of Israel’s existence in “Palestinian” territory to distract attention from their own numerous failings, so Greeks can always turn on the unspeakable Germans (war reparations – though not too politic to make too much of that at the moment when we might need a pile of their tax-payers’ euros), the Americans (the 1940s defeat of the Left; the Colonels’ regime; the Turkish grab of northern Cyprus) or the wicked imperialist British and – horror of horrors – that arrogant, bullying milord Elgin who stole our greatest national treasure, the Parthenon sculptures, and gave them to the British Museum.
Enter the Clooneys or rather the Haven’t-a-Clooneys. For what do they know about the hornets’ nest they are stirring up? But what a wonderful windfall: a glamorous Hollywood star and his beautiful lawyer wife take up the cause. A human rights lawyer, en plus. Justice and human rights: an undreamed of piece of luck for a beleaguered and incompetent government and its died-in-the-wool old lefty minister of culture.
Greek claims based on narrow nationalism
But is Greece’s claim to the Elgin Marbles any stronger than that of any other modern state to objects or artefacts once found on what is now its territory and housed, for whatever reasons, in a museum on the territory of some other state. Are we to unravel the great international museum collections for this sort of petty cultural chauvinism? For that is what it is.
Greece does not NEED the Parthenon marbles, rather fewer than half of which survive anywhere in any form. It is absolutely stuffed with glorious monuments of the classical age. You would think they might be able to find it in themselves to leave these wonderful sculptures, which have arguably been far more influential in the subsequent intellectual and artistic development of countries other than their own, where they are: in one of the world’s great international collections. For the BM’s collection is INTER-national; that is half the point of it – it is not a matter of narrow nationalist pride. And one thing is very clear: if Elgin had not removed the marbles when he did, modern Greek administrative incompetence and corruption would have seen to it that none of them would have been around today, at least in anything like a recognizable condition, because of the appalling air pollution in Athens throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.
And why a fuss just about the Elgin marbles? Why not the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre in Paris or the sculptures from the temple of Aphaia on Aegina in Munich? Or indeed countless other Greek artefacts in various museum collections around the world? Or, come to that and closer to Mr Hasn’t-A-Clooney’s own home, the “iconic” Cycladic Harp-player in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, famously identified by my now dead friend, the artist John Craxton, as a fake. John had met its maker, a shepherd and self-taught sculptor, on the Greek island of Ios in the 1940s.
Would any of Greece’s classical monuments have survived without the money, dedication and expertise, indeed sacrifice, of other Europeans?
How often have Greek builders, finding something suspiciously “archaeological” in the foundations of a new house, simply poured concrete as quickly as possible in order to avoid the nosey, time-c0nsuming interest of the archaeological services? I don’t know. I simply ask the question.
Here is a list of major sites largely excavated by foreigners: Delphi and Delos, by the French; Aegina and Olympia, by the Germans; Knossos, by the English; Mycenae, by the Germans and the English; the Athens Agora and Corinth, by the Americans; Phaistos, by the Italians.
Any payments forthcoming from the Greek government? Or any thanks?
And what about all those scholarly works, editions of texts, histories, commentaries, all of which have contributed to bringing billions of tourist dollars to the Greek economy over the years?
Who deciphered Linear B, the oldest version of the Greek language?
And what about John Pendlebury, the archaeologist at Knossos and organizer of Cretan wartime resistance, captured and executed by the Germans, happy to die for the country that he loved? Like many other Englishmen, many of them classicists.
And while we are talking about what might count as claims for reparation of a sort or at least sympathetic acknowledgement: has the Greek government ever considered what it might owe the English, French and Russians for defeating the Turkish navy at Navarino in 1827, in a battle which largely secured the establishment of the infant modern Greek state?
By way of an aside: Codrington, the British admiral of that fleet, is a hero in Greece, with many streets named in his honour. In Britain his family’s name is dragged in the mud because its wealth came from slave-worked plantations in the West Indies which it used to endow the beautiful All Souls College Library in Oxford, now the target of students with similarly arse-over-tip, let’s-rewrite-history views as the Haven’t-a-Clooneys.
Some further ideas for Clooney intervention
Now that gives me an idea. Hey, Mrs Clooney, you could track down Achilles’ descendants and have them up before the beak on a war crimes charge for dragging the body of Hector round the walls of Troy? Or maybe arraign the Athenians for their wholesale destruction of brave little Milos?
But that would not please the Greeks. How about going for the restitution of Constantinople, capital of Orthodox Christianity, so wrongfully stolen by the Muslim Turks in 1453? Or the whole of modern Turkey, come to that, which had been Greek for a couple of millennia before the first Turkish boot ever trod its soil? Now that would be a good use of your celebrity and expertise. And we are coming up to May 29th, the 563rd anniversary of the Fall of that great city.
Greek whingeing and celebrity virtue-signalling
My heart is basically with the Greeks. But sympathy for their plight would be a lot easier if they could occasionally resist the temptation to play the victim and not blame someone else, especially when sporting such spectacular beams in their own eyes. Unfortunately for their own moral good, they can count on a large residue of sentimental sympathy in the western world’s many categories of haven’t-a-clue-nies; the celebrity ones, the politicians and economists like our own Goves and Masons with their own anti-EU or anti-austerity axes to grind and the general public, who knowing no history either ancient or modern naturally tell the pollsters yes when asked if they think the BM should return the “stolen” marbles.
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