The Elgin Affair by Theodore Vrettos Secker & Warburg, 238pp, £17.99 in UK
It is one of history's uncountable ironies that the sculptures and reliefsthe Parthenon in Athens should have been known, for close on two centuries, as the Elgin Marbles: A visit to the British Museum to view them may be disappointing, at least on first sight; can these hacked, disjointed, fragmentary figures and horses really be the supreme masterworks of Greek art and a thing of awe in Greco-Roman antiquity?
The truth is that we are seeing them as they were never meant to be seen. Originally they formed part of a grand processional ensemble which celebrated the Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon, exalted the Athenian dead and Athenian democracy, and above all honoured Athene, the goddess who gave the city her name and her protection.
The entire complex on the Acropolis, which was the initiative of the great statesman/orator Pericles, was a wonder to the classical world and even to the tough, phlegmatic Romans who recorded their impressions and admit-ted that their own city, the capital of the world in their eyes, could offer nothing like it. Whether it was mainly the work of Pheidias (as was long accepted, but now doubted), or of Kallikrates and Iktinos, or (which seems most likely) of a team of collaborators, can scarcely be determined. Perhaps Pheidias did only the huge chryselephantine (gold-and- ivory) statue of Pallas Athene which was the umbilical centre of it all, though it vanished long ago.
What is certain is that for centuries conquerors spared the site, including the Spartan commander Lysander in the Peloponnesian War which ended Athenian greatness, the various Roman overlords from Sulla to Hadrian, and finally the Turks. The early Christians turned it into a church and seem also to have hacked some of the sculptures. The Turks insisted on building a small mosque there and they also hacked the Parthenon about a little in turning it into a magazine fort, but it was left to the Venetian general Morosini, in the 7th century, to turn his artillery on it and inflict major damage.
Nevertheless, the basic shell of the Parthenon with the core of its sculptures survived, and so did the little Erechteum with its caryatids. Greece over centuries became semi-barbarous and backward and knew or cared little about its classical past, while the local Turkish governors were mostly either career soldiers or semi-corrupt officials. Occasional tourists thought nothing of knocking pieces off the statues (including their noses) to take home as souvenirs, and fragments were also sold covertly or openly to those prepared to buy. Several of the great friezes lay about shattered or half-buried, the result of earthquakes, wars and weathering or natural decay. At this stage, enter Thomas Bruce, the seventh Lord Elgin. He was a Scottish peer and landowner, of no great wealth but a good deal of ambition, who made his mark as a gentleman-diplomatist until he was offered the key post of Britain's Ambassador to the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople. Elgin had cultural ambitions besides diplomatic ones, and he set about acquiring a team of artists, experts, scholars and skilled workmen who would help him to amass classical works of art as well as recording and measuring the ruins of antiquity. He did not offer enough money to tempt Turner, Girtin or the other leading English artists bang had to hire as supervisor of his artistic team a respected Neapolitan painter, Giovanni Battista Lusieri.
After enjoying in Naples the hospitality of Sir Edward Hamilton and Lady Hamilton and meeting her lover, Lord Nelson, Elgin and his wife, Mary nee Nisbet, the beautiful daughter of a rich landowner and twelve years younger than him, arrived in Constantinople at an awkward, even crucial time. Britain was at war with France, and Egypt, thanks largely to Napoleon's invasion, was an important theatre of war, nominally under Turkish sovereignty though in fact controlled by the military caste of the Mamelukes. Elgin worked hard for his country's interests and was officially thanked when the French were finally driven out, though his application for an English peerage was rebuffed. Neither was the money he had spent from his private fortune ever reimbursed to him.
France and England, as the two leading nations in Europe, were also clashing in the search for antiquities: Napoleon wanted them for the Louvre, England for its great public and private collections. So when Elgin set his team working on the Acropolis, he could argue that he was only pre-empting the local French agent who did his best to thwart him, and he could (and did) also argue that both the Turks and the Greeks were semi-barbarous and cared little about such things.
Not only the Parthenon was almost cleaned out; Elgin and his agents scoured whole regions for classical statuary and inscriptions, including a huge half-buried statue of Demeter which was the object of a local fertility cult by farmers (now at the Fitzwilliam Museum). Political influence and discreet "gifts" opened many doors, though at a certain stage of the despoliation of the Parthenon, even the local military commander called a halt.
Elgin, to be fair to him, does not appear to have been self-seeking in all this; he honestly believed that he was acting in his country's interests and was building up a great national treasure. In spite of his native stinginess, he spent hugely on his art activities and could only carry on through raising bank loans at a high rate of interest. At this stage, too, he suffered physical and psychological misery when his nose literally rotted away - which may have been a symptom of tertiary syphilis, though he lived on for more than thirty years. Lady Elgin, who had been a loyal and capable wife, seems to have been partly estranged by his new deformity, though she had borne him several children and was to bear him two more. He was, in any case, a difficult and charmless man who al-ways behaved as though much older than his years, while she was lively and sociable and fond of card-playing.
With most of the Parthenon marbles either shipped safely to England or awaiting shipment, Elgin closed down his embassy in 1803 and left for home with his wife and children. She always suffered miserably from seasickness, so when they reached Naples, Elgin sent the children on by sea while he, his wife and a few staff and servants set out to cross Italy and France by coach.
It was a disastrous decision; the Treaty of Amiens had lapsed, and France and England were once again at war. The Elgins, as an ambassador and his wife, had been promised a safe-conduct by Talleyrand, but Napoleon personally overruled this and ordered the arrest and round-up of British residents in France. The couple were at first held under easy house detention, then Elgin - as a riposte to the alleged ill-treatment of a French general in London - was imprisoned at Napoleon's orders, - in Lourdes. Napoleon, in any case, was rumoured to have hated him for his part in forcing the French out of Egypt and for shipping home antiquities which he himself coveted for Paris.
Lady Elgin lobbied hard for his release, but finally was forced to lone to England; she was also in mourning for her little son William, who had been born in France and died of fever. With her on the voyage home went a handsome and personable young Scottish geologist, Robert Fergusson, whom she had met before in Paris and greatly liked. By the time they reached England they were lovers, and in London, instead of living with her parents, she took a house of her own where he often visited her. She still, however, campaigned actively for her husband's freedom, even writing letters on his behalf to the King of Prussia and the Emperor Alexander of Russia.
Elgin's friends and dependants kept him informed of the affair, even intercepting letters between the lovers, and when he finally returned from France he sued Fergusson for adultery and won. It was a typical Regency scandal, acted out against the background - or foreground - of furious and sometimes .venomous public controversy about the Parthenon marbles, which were now housed in London in a temporary museum, in effect little more than a shed. A leading pugilist paraded there publicly to show his physique against the statues and reliefs, and riding masters sometimes brought along their pupils to show them the right way to sit on horseback.
Elgin wanted the nation to buy them at a reasonable price, but people of all sorts denounced the methods by which they had been acquired, while many politicians considered them merely a waste of money; certain scholars complicated the issue by declaring that the marbles were not Greek at all, but inferior Greco-Roman works from the age of Hadrian. Byron, who had been to Greece and was now famous for Child Harold attacked his fellow-Scot in verse as a vandal and robber. Virtually the only sector of opinion which was strongly behind Lord Elgin was that of the artists Lawrence. Flaxman, Benjamin West, Haydon. all of whom declared that the marbles were an incomparable national legacy and would raise the standards of English art. A public inquiry was held, and in the end they were bought by the State for £35,000 - far less than Elgin had hoped or asked for. The huge expenses he had incurred were not reimbursed, so that many of his old staff remained unpaid. His creditors seized on the money, and he was forced to leave the country and take refuge in France, where he died poor and apparently forgotten in 1841.
All in all rather a depressing but also an absorbing story, which Mr Vrettos tells with novelistic skill and, so far as I can tell, with due care for his sources. As everyone knows, the Marbles are again a red-hot issue internationally, though handing them back to Greece might set a precedent by which countries all over the globe could sue museums and collections for the return of national treasures. And as has been pointed out several times, Athens has a level of pollution which would prove disastrous for these already battered and weathered survivals from classical Greece's golden age.
What is particularly striking about the whole business is the high level of mortality and misery it involved, so that few of its dramatis personae emerged safe and well. The Elgins, though their lives were ruined, at least lived on for many years, but Fergusson died young; Lusieri - living alone in Athens in fear of his life - was found dead in his house there after bursting a blood vessel; Joseph Dacre Carlyle, a classical scholar in Elgin's entourage, died suddenly after returning to Lon-don; another young scholar, John Tweddell, died of fever in Athens; and several figures prominent in the controversy, including Byron, also died young. The contagion extended to artists. The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, magnetised by the marbles standing or lying in their crude London shed, spent long hours studying and drawing them and even brought along a young poet-friend, John Keats, who used also to sit there spellbound. Haydon committed suicide and Keats's early death from TB is too well known to rehearse here.
In two heartfelt but rather halting sonnets, Keats recorded the huge impression the Marbles made upon him: "a shadow of a magnitude". The shadow, alas, was a deathly one for him. Those who talk about Tutankhamen's Curse (with little factual justification, it seems) might consider instead the Vengeance of Pallas Athene, protectress 9f Athens and of the olive tree. As Elgin and his classically educated friends should have known from reading their Homer, the helmeted, grey-eyed virgin goddess (the Parthenon derives its name from parthenos, a virgin) is a loyal friend to her worshippers but an implacable foe to those who offend her.
Brian Fallon is Chief Critic of The Irish Times