Good morning. When one of Lord Elgin’s hired hands wrote to him to describe his progress in removing some of the antiquities from the Acropolis that would come to be known as the Elgin marbles, he was blunt about the roughness of his work. In a letter dated September 1801, he asked for 12 saws to be provided so that he might hack the sculptures from the temple. In 1802, he announced that he had successfully removed one of the plaques. “The piece has caused much trouble in many ways,” he confessed, “and I was forced to be a little barbaric.”
More than 200 years later, there are many in Greece who see something similarly barbaric in Britain’s handling of the controversy over the Parthenon marbles – as they are properly known – today. This week, the question of whether they will finally be returned to Athens moved from a matter quietly being negotiated between the British Museum and the Greek government to a major diplomatic row.
