Boris Johnson and his entourage are frequently accused of wishing to turn Britain into an insular, backward-looking place, obsessed with reliving past imperial glories. Their romantic counterclaim is that opting out of the European Union is a means of allowing Britain to regain control of its destiny. Pride restored, the country will be free to engage generously with the rest of the world. So what stance should this open, friendly and “global” Britain take towards renewed Greek demands for the restitution of the Parthenon marbles?
Greece, with Italy’s backing, has inserted a pointed clause in the EU’s draft negotiating mandate for a trade deal with Britain. It calls for the return of “unlawfully removed cultural objects” to their place of origin. It does not mention the marbles by name, and the move is explicitly directed at illegal trade in antiquities in London auction houses. But assuming it remains in the formal mandate to be unveiled this week, it would clearly provide a platform for renewed pressure to be exerted on London.
Whenever the fate and future of the marbles are debated, those in favour of sending them back tend to turn to Lord Byron. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poet laments the recent removal of the treasures from their Athenian home with moving melancholy: “Dull is the eye that will not weep to see / Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed / By British hands.”
Like other Romantics of his age, Byron was preoccupied with themes of time, place and history. He was particularly fascinated by the ruins of cities and ancient empires. By contrast, the peer responsible for bringing the marbles to Britain, Lord Elgin, eagerly profited from the vanity of imperial Britain. Having secured permission from Greece’s Ottoman occupiers to remove roughly half the sculpture collection from the Parthenon, he sold the marbles to parliament for £35,000 in 1816. The self-regarding notion of imperial London as the “new Athens” was in vogue; Elgin successfully convinced the government – still basking in the triumph over Napoleon at Waterloo – that owning them would further enhance Britain’s international reputation and prestige.
That vaunting hubris seems to have made a comeback since Brexit, judging by some of the hostile responses to the Greek intervention. For its part, the government’s response has been witheringly dismissive: “This is just not going to happen,” said a spokesman. Mark Francois, ostentatious patriot (and former member of the arch-Brexiter group of MPs who called themselves the Spartans), treated himself to a typically leaden joke:“Anybody who thinks this will be a high priority has lost their marbles.”
The most common justification for keeping the sculptures in the British Museum relies on its status as a global institution which displays the treasures of the world to the world. But for a government so suspicious of “cosmopolitan” values, this would seem a strange stance to take. Brexiters relentlessly stress the importance of sovereignty, national self-esteem and dignity, and pride in past achievement. What holds for Britain should surely hold for Greece as well. Restoring the Parthenon marbles to Athens would recognise the legitimacy of a fellow European country’s emotional attachments and sense of itself, after the economic battering it has taken for over a decade. It would also belie the notion that Britain has become so mesmerised by its own lost empire that it is incapable of restoring a past injustice. As a piece of post-Brexit messaging, it deserves more than a juvenile joke from Mr Francois.
