Letters to the Sunday Times post Lord Sumption's article.

Supporting the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, and the return of the pieces in the British Museum to the Acropolis Museum:

Greece was under Ottoman-Turkish occupation

Lord Sumption says the Parthenon’s marbles were lawfully given to Lord Elgin by the legitimate government of Greece between 1802 and 1804 (Comment, last week). Not so. Greece was under Ottoman-Turkish occupation, and in 1826 Britain assisted the Greeks in their war of independence. This indicates that Britain also considered the Ottomans to have been unlawful usurpers.
Nemo dat quod non habet is a legal principle which says that no one can sell something which they do not legally own. If, during the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, Hitler had sold the Eiffel Tower to the Americans, would it be OK for the US still to keep it?
Kyriacos Kyriacou, London W8

Shaky reasoning
I hesitate to disagree with a former justice of the Supreme Court, but Sumption’s arguments for keeping the Elgin Marbles in London don’t stack up. It’s true the Ottoman authorities gave them to Elgin: the question is whether they were entitled to do so. It’s also true that cultural artefacts have been plundered for millenniums and often been dispersed in the process. That doesn’t mean this is OK. And to wail about the “gross cultural vandalism” of breaking up the British Museum’s collection seems hypocritical. Why is it acceptable to break up the marbles but not the British Museum’s collection?
Robert Wright, Cheltenham

Bribes paid
Sumption disregards the fact that Elgin did not buy the marbles, and so never acquired legal title to pass them to the British Museum. Elgin’s acquisition costs include “commission and agency … in Turkey” (that is, bribes) but no purchase price. As the museum never acquired title, the marbles do not form “part of the collections” and the British Museum Act 1963 would not preclude the trustees from returning them.
OM Lewis, Richmond, southwest London

Send them back
Sumption makes an intelligent case but he does acknowledge that the Greeks see the Parthenon frieze as “an emblem of their nationhood”. Spot on. What the Greeks feel about the Marbles, we do about Stonehenge. We should look at the issue a different way. The Parthenon Marbles have been on loan to Britain for more than a century. The time has come to return them to their country of origin.
Angus Neill, London SW1

Home truth
It is wrong to argue that something should remain where it is because it allows us to compare it to similarly important items. Yes, historical and cultural comparison has value but this should not detract from the greater value of reintegrating a work in the original place where it belongs.
Anastasia Demetriou, Southgate, north London

Missing argument
It is a bit rich for Sumption to accuse the Greeks of being nationalistic. The Parthenon sculptures are only here because of the chauvinism at the heart of the British Empire. As for the argument traditionally put forward for keeping them in the British Museum — that only we can look after them properly — recent news about hundreds of artefacts going missing from the museum, and previous revelations about damage caused in cleaning, surely put paid to that.
Ronnie Landau, London N12

Letters supporting Lord Sumptions argument for the UK and the British Museum retaining their half of the sculptures removed by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon, and in a fire sale becoming part of the British Museum collection since 1816:

Imperialist Athens
The Greeks do themselves no favours when they complain the Parthenon marbles were stolen. Sumption is right to say that their removal by Elgin was fully authorised. Perhaps we should remind modern-day Greeks that the Parthenon and its marbles were financed by Athens’s own theft of funds from the Delian league of city states, over which it exercised a cruel and greedy imperialism.
Charles Forgan, Great Broughton, North Yorkshire

Museum’s hands tied

The Greeks have no legal claim and the matter keeps going only because people such as George Osborne allow them to claim they are “in negotiations” — even though the proposed transaction is illegal. The British Museum’s trustees do not have a free hand; it’s time they and the board accepted the legal constraints and got on with the boring job of conserving the collection.
David Edwards, Eastbourne, East Sussex

To read Lord Sumption's article visit the Sunday Times. To read Dame Janet Suzman's reply, visit the link here. 

From Janet Suzman
Chair: British Committee for the Reunification
of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM)
1st January 2024

It really is very dispiriting that eminences like Lord Sumption (Sunday Times Dec 31st 2023) still make so many wrong assumptions. (Sorry). Here are some of them:

He fails to find a difference between a bas relief (the frieze, running round the perimeter of the building) and the 3D sculptures (metopes and pedimental figures). He can’t see why those pedimental figures make a stunning triangular pedimental shape when placed together, quite lost by enforced separation. The half of the extant frieze not in Bloomsbury is in Athens.

He avers that Lord Elgin obtained a ‘decree from the sultan authorising him to remove the sculptures.’ No such document has ever been found, only a permit (a ‘firman’) from a high official in Constantinople allowing him to retrieve ‘qualche pezzi di pietra’ already fallen down (it is an Italian copy) and to make drawings of pieces out of reach. Elgin, who kept a careful record of his expenses, bribed functionaries at every level to turn a blind eye to his crude attack on an already fragile building. Tourists reported shocking falls of precious metopes and such smashing to pieces, and a disdar – a guard at the time – was described as weeping at the mayhem inflicted on the building.

Elgin commandeered a ship of the line to transport his booty to Britain – so, taxpayers’ money – and had every intention of displaying the pieces at Broomhill, his Scottish seat, and none of sharing them with the public. Only when bankrupted after his rich wife left him did he turn to the British Government for a hasty sale.

Yet what’s done cannot be undone, and what matters now is a solution to a modern moral maze and not an old blame-game. And yet, Lord Sumption widens his argument to justify how artifacts have always voyaged to distant lands for our enlightenment. But this avoids the point; these Parthenon Marbles are sui generis. Elgin took far more than those cut off the Parthenon, but Greece is not asking for the caryatid he stole from the Erechtheum, nor is it asking for the Winged Victory of Samothrace from the Louvre.

In 2019 at a conference in Athens, I was invited into the then President’s rooms in his official residence where he took care to explain to me that Greece is proud that Hellenic pieces are in the Louvre (apart from Parthenon pieces…) and proud that around the world Greece’s treasures are displayed. “Let me be clear: we want only those pieces that Elgin took off the Parthenon itself”, he told me. The Greeks first claimed those Marbles when it was freed of Ottoman rule and became the Hellenic Republic in the 1830s. Melina Mercouri cast a spotlight on that claim in the 1980’s. Boris Johnson, when he was still an honest scholar, wrote a spirited article for the Oxford Union paper pleading for their return to the land of Achilles. The world is today more aware of cultural plunder than during colonial times. The British Museum is the only major museum in the world staying silent about its often ill-gotten contents. All of UNESCO is aware of this silence and is finding it embarrassing.

Sumption seems unmoved that panels from Duccio’s altarpiece are divided between nine museums, as if it might be diminished in some way were the whole to be displayed as Duccio intended. That altarpiece is a separate inspiration, whereas the Parthenon marbles are part of the very fabric of the building; it is one thing, conceived and carved as one thing. Alexander Herman (‘The Parthenon Marbles Dispute; Heritage, Law, Politics’ – Hart, Bloomsbury, 2023) makes this point: ‘Because we live in democratic times, we tend to have a predilection for remnants that connect us to the Athenian prototype. For this reason the Parthenon as a symbol continues to dominate’.

After two hundred years in London and badly displayed in a grey gallery in Bloomsbury since the 1960s, the Marbles have done their work of enlightening Europe to the glories of the ancient world. The United Kingdom is second to none in classical scholarship; the British Museum has millions of other ancient artifacts in its collections, and wonderful objects are promised for exhibition by the Greeks themselves to compensate for the (inevitable) return. George Osborne, Chairman of the BM Trustees, is embarking on an important act of international co-operation.

As to numbers, only one sixth of the 6 million annual visitors that enter its portals visit the Duveen Galleries. Approximately that same number passes through the Acropolis Museum in Athens, and why, one wonders, should not a Greek child be as astounded as a British one at the god-like figures caught in a high wind off Mount Olympus, and be as proud as Punch that his distant ancestors were so utterly brilliant with white stone? Why should the Greek people not thrill to such visions? They might be as far down the line as the Druids are to the English, but just listen to the fuss if half of Stonehenge had been nicked and plonked in Potsdamerplatz.

To read Lord Sumption's article, 'The Elgin Marbles weren’t stolen — Greece is just exploiting our weakness' follow the link to The Times.