Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 27, 1989 by James Gardner

GIVEN THAT Christopher Hitchens does not seem especially inter- ested in the subject of his most recent book, it is natural to wonder why he wrote it in the first place. Imperial Spoils (Farrar, Straus) is a slightly oversized pamphlet advocating the restitution to Greece of those sculptures that Lord Elgin removed from the Athenian Acropolis and sold to the British nation early in the nineteenth century. Even to those of us who have enjoyed Hitchens's splenetic outbursts in The Nation, in which he attacks everyone to the political right of himself (which is to say, nearly everyone), it is not self-evident why he should now feel moved to agitate for the return of several tons of ancient stone to a small country on the Mediterranean.

Although it may be that Hitchens merely feels he is "lending his prestige" to a worthy cause, he would have us believe that he has been spurred into print by the beauty of the Elgin Marbles and by his outrage at their ongoing captivity in the bowels of the British Museum' And yet, when it comes to explaining why anyone should actually want the marbles, Hitchens has little to say. Aside from several ennobling. sentimentalities on the glories of nationalism, his aesthetic commentary is limited to such half-digested cribbings as the observation that the Parthenon "has eight columns at the end instead of the usual six," or that "Pericles . . . called upon that sense of balance and symmetry which Thucydides immortalized in his funeral oration."

Why, really, has Hitchens written this book at this time? For its publication certainly comes at an opportune time. No doubt Hitchens was influenced, at least in part, by a

movement that over the past year or two has advocated the return of ancient artifacts to the descendants of their original owners. The Smithsonian and other museums have agreed to surrender century-old Indian bones and burial paraphernalia to angry tribe members. In a celebrated case

this August, a federal judge ordered an art collector in Indianapolis to return a set of sixth-century Byzantine mosaics to the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus.

More to the point, perhaps, one cannot help but suspect that the middlebrow temptation to see the whole issue as polities through other means has simply proved too much for the author. For Hitchens, the Elgin Marbles epitomize the British Museum, and the British Museum, with its gleaming white columns and millions of priceless artifacts, epitomizes everything stuffy and reactionary and clubbable about the British character. Those British who might feel a custodial affection for the marbles are stigmatized at one point as "John Bull up on his hind legs," and in their words Hitchens "hears the tones and assumptions of those who wondered if the workers would

keep coal in their bath, or whether the Indians were ready for self-government." As for the British Museum, "one is tempted to say that it might be more apt if [it] called itself the Imperial Museum."

But if that goes some way to suggesting why Hitchens wants the British not to have the marbles, it does not in itself explain the author's interest in championing a specifically Greek cause. Surely this interest has much to do with the fact that, on the contemporary political map, Greece has been for years one of the most prominent socialist nations, and one of the most outspoken critics of the United States. Furthermore the Greek Cypriots have been engaged in conflict with the Turks for years now (about which Hitchens has even written a book), and the Arks, of course, are perhaps the staunchest members of the NATO Alliance.

Whatever one thinks of the proposed return of the marbles, it would be illiberal to deny that a better case could be made than will be found here. Hitchens is far better at attacking an enemy than at serving a friend. Written seemingly in careless haste, his book reads like a patchwork of ill-assorted and often irrelevant digressions.

He begins by recounting the oft-told story of Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin and 11th Earl of Kincardine, who, when serving as British consul in Constantinople, arranged to have roughly half the friezes and metopes and one of the pediments of the Parthenon, together with a pillar and caryatid of the neighboring Erechtheum, removed from their ancient site and sent back to the British Isles. According to Hitchens, the history of their acquisition is "a repressed and guilty secret." And yet, when put to it, he can find little support for this claim. Elgin can in no sense be said to have stolen the marbles, since to steal is to take that which one knows to belong to another; and, to all appearances, the Parthenon seemed to belong to an ancient people who no longer inhabited the earth, and to be in the possession of the Turks, from whom, at all events, Lord Elgin received permission to take the stones away. In addition to those vaporous effusions on truth and beauty cited above, Hitchens tries to impress us with a

list of famous people who condemned Elgin's act and advocated the sculptures' return to Athens. From a tactical point of view, however, Hitchens makes some rather large blunders, of which two are especially grave. The first is his quoting with thoughtless approval from Lord Byron's bigoted tirade against the Scottish people, of whom Elgin was one of the more prominent members. Though Hitchens would probably reject these sentiments if he considered them (or so we hope), it nevertheless suggests an almost acrobatic banality to quote them in support of his argument, simply because they were written by someone famous. Hitchens's second error is his enlisting the name of Harold Nicolson, when Nicolson advocated not that all the marbles be returned, but only the caryatid and pillar from the Erechtheum, and only on condition that they be replaced in situ ipso antiquo. Now, one would think that Hitchens would want to