Emily Hauser considers the long debate of the Parthenon Marbles as she reviews A.E. Stallings Frieze Frame: How poets, painters, and their friends framed the debate around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon.  

Emily writes in the TLS: "Frieze Frameis lucidly brilliant, learned read that wears its learning lightly, inviting the reader into a coterie of artists and intellectuals, traced and  uncovered with a poet's touch. While the occasionally erratic leaps back and forth between different periods in the Marbles' history can take a while to grasp, Stallings is at her best when she is bringing together her incisive poetic criticism with attention to etymologies, intertexts and interactions in the history of ideas. Combining the vice of a poet and rigour of a scholar, she delivers a contribution to a keen and pointed debate and an extended  mediation on the emotion of language and poetry that responds to art. The web of allusions woven across the Marbles gives a tight cast of characters to the tale, where many of the players in the story - not only Elgin, Byron and Keats, but also Constantine P. Cavafy and Melina Mercouri, Greece's first female minister of culture and sports - are interlinked across centuries-old narrative that repeatedly turns back on itself. Particularly valuable is Stallings's attention (she is , after all, an acclaimed translator of Greek) to the Greek as well as the Ottoman evidence, beyond poets to letter and travel writers, once again unravelling the long history of the debate about the Marbles, and the many voices at stake."

Emily visits the British Museum after reading Frieze Frame and once in the Parthenon Galleries she writes that her eyes were drawn "not only to the sculptural reliefs of the Parthenon frieze and metopes, but also to the story of damage that they represent in the violent prising of these stones from the building to which they belonged."

Is it poetry, and not necessarily politics that may provide a strategy to effect change?

To read Emily Hauser's article in full, visit the TLS.

To order A.E. Stallings Frieze Frame: How poets, painters, and their friends framed the debate around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon, check most online book stores including Waterstones.  

We are also reminded of Stuart O'Hara, a BCRPM member's review of A.E. Stallings words in the Hudson Review, written in October 2023.

Stallings’ article is hefty – 110 very readable pages – and should be published as a standalone pamphlet. If that were to happen, it would surely be the best survey of the Marbles debate for the general reader since Christopher Hitchens’ The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification which came out in 1997, and the third edition published by Verso was launched at Chatham House by BCRPM in May 2008. To finish, here’s what CP Cavafy, probably the most famous Greek after Pericles to appear in this article and one who was raised in the UK, in Liverpool, wrote in the lengthy letters page debate started by Harrison’s Nineteenth Century polemic:

'It is not dignified in a great nation to reap profit from half-truths and half-rights; honesty is the best policy, and honesty in the case of the Elgin Marbles[sic] means restitution.'

The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) front page has the image of a pedimental sculpture in the British Musem's Room 18, which is sometimes refered to as Hermes, and the title: Whose marbles are they anyway? Mark Mazower on Elgin's legacy.

The Aropolis Museum has this on its site in reference to the pedimental sculpture that is featured on the TLS cover: Fragment from a man’s thigh usually identified with Hermes, although some researchers believe he is Kekrops, Theseus or Ares. It is adjusted to the plaster cast of the original remaining sculpture kept in the British Museum in London. Hermes strides to the viewer’s right next to Athena's chariot. He looks back as he stretches his right hand to the front perhaps pulling the reins of the chariot horses driven by Nike. On his back falls his chlamys the edge of which probably was wrapped around his left arm.

The fragment must have broken off from the sculpture and fell on the ground during the removal of the statue from the pediment by Thomas Bruce, lord of Elgin, who was in Greece between 1801-1804 when the country was under Ottoman rule, and forcibly detached most of the sculptures of the pediment still in their original position. It was found later on the Acropolis.

The TLS article by Mark Mazower is entitled 'Give them back!' and reviews William St Clair's 876 page book: Who Saved the Parthenon? A new history of the Acropolis before, during and after the Greek Revolution.

Read Frank Mazower's TLS review of Wlliam's book here.

Reference to William's first book 'Lord Elgin and the Marbles'  originally published in 1967, saw William edit and re-publish this over the years as he also investigated the cleaning of the Parthenon Marbles in 1938-9 at the request of Lord Duveen, the donor of the gallery that continues to house them. Mark Mazower writes: "It took St Clair over a decade to wrest the relevant documents from the grasp of the British Museum, and the explosive result was a third and entirely rewritten edition of his 1967 study that ended with the devastating judgement that " the British Museum's stewardship of the Elgin Marbles turns out to have been a cynical sham."

Fred Mazower goes on to praise Wiliam St Clair as a 'magnificent example of an independent scholar'.We'd agree with that as we also remember his input on the UCL debate.

William St Clair's last book is about who really saved the sculptures given the scale of destruction wrought during the Greek struggle for independence. St Clair explains that when the revolution broke out, the British Ambassador Lord Strangford, asked the grand vizier to issue an order to ensure the preservation of the ancient monuments in Athens. William suggestes that the Ottomans in the summer of 1826 saved the Parthenon because that would prove that they deserved to be treated as a European power and would bring them diplomatic leverage.

Mazower concludes: "William St Clair surely knew what he was doing when he wrote a book that bolsters the case for the marbles' restitution to Greece by attributing their survival to the Ottomans."

Also read Suzanne Marchand's review.