The Elgin Marbles, otherwise known as the Parthenon Marbles, are the collection of sculptures, friezes, and busts built during the height of the Greek Empire (mid-400s BCE) brought back to Britain from Greece by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Lord Elgin. John Keats, one of England’s most famous poets, describes viewing them for the first time in his ekphrastic poem, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles:
“So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.”
The Parthenon Marbles, however, are currently giving a quite different kind of “dizzy pain,” namely, a headache, as Greece struggles to recover the Marbles from Britain during Brexit negotiations. A draft of the negotiations has the European Union (EU) demand, at Greece’s request, the “return or restitution of unlawfully removed cultural objects to their countries of origin.” Although this clause does not specifically refer to the Parthenon Marbles, it is clearly targeting them. Since its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832, Greece has continually demanded repatriation of all the statues and art, which they claim were stolen unlawfully by Bruce.
During his term as ambassador to the Ottoman sultanate in the 1800s, Bruce selected several artifacts to carry back to Britain by ship. He brought with him around half of what constituted the Parthenon. He claimed that he had received his permission in the form of a firman from the Sultanate in 1801 when he sold it to the British for £35,000, but no such document remains in the substantial archives of the period, so the truth of his statement is questionable. The British government maintains that the Marbles were acquired legally. They also claim that the cultural significance of the Marbles is just as great to Britain as it is to Greece, since they have had them for centuries. An entire wing of the British Museum is dedicated to them and they draw millions of visitors. The museum believes that they give the Marbles greater exposure than Greece’s Acropolis Museum would. But after Brexit, the Marbles are in a country outside of the EU, so now they are less accessible to Europeans. After separation, the museum loses one of its biggest justifications for keeping the Marbles. This is no guarantee of repatriation, but it is a clear shift in direction and power.
Because the Parthenon Marbles constitute about half of what the Parthenon originally had, the Acropolis Museum in Athens has displayed the remaining artifacts in orientation of the Parthenon with clear marked gaps for the missing elements in case they should return. Britain is not eager to relinquish them, but they may have no choice. More than two millennia after they were built—and two hundred years after they were taken—Greece may finally get its marbles back.