Why shouldn’t the Greeks have their marbles back? We proved we lost ours years ago

‘Pilfered prey’: Visitors to the British Museum look at statues from the east pediment of the Parthenon as Greece renews its bid to have the sculptures repatriated. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

In The Curse of Minerva, his attack on Lord Elgin’s appropriation of the Parthenon marbles, Lord Byron imagined divine revenge by the goddess whose temple Elgin had raided – not only on the vandal himself but on Britain, the country that bought the peer’s “pilfered prey”.

Elgin would suffer and Britain would one day find herself – it probably sounded far-fetched in 1811 – isolated, starving and impotent, “hated and alone”, her politics declining into ignominy. “Then in the Senates of your sinking state / Show me the man whose counsels may have weight.”