Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, the production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is part two of our two part podcast on Lord Elgin and the Parthenon Marbles. I really recommend listening to part one. That's the whole story of of how he got these marbles in the first place. Very briefly, in that episode, we talked about how he became the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, how he decided to document classical Greek ark and architecture while he was there, and how that project morphed to include removing the artwork rather than just drawing it and making casts and molds of it. These are often called the Parthenon Marbles, although the pieces that are involved were not just from the Parthenon, they were also from other parts of the Acropolis and Athens and elsewhere in Greece. So today we're going to talk about how all of that played out, and how these sculptures became part of the collection of the British Museum, and why there's still controversy about this that has continued until today. Just a quick recap on sort of the cast of characters people involved. At this point we have Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and eleven of Kincarten. He was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and was stationed in Constantinople. Giovanni Batista Lucieri was a landscape painter from Naples who was recruited to oversee a team of architects, artists, mold makers and others in a project that was originally meant to document classical Greek art and architecture. The Reverend Philip Hunt was an Anglican priest and the chaplain to the British embassy in Constantinople. He was appointed as Lord Elgin's temporary secretary to act on his behalf in Athens. And then in Athens, the team mostly interacted with people who occupied two different government positions. The exact people in those positions varied over time. They included the Voivode, who was the governor of Athens, and the Dizdar, who was the military governor with authority over the acropolis itself. Elgin asked for permission to return to England in late eighteen o two. He had taken this position in part because he thought that the climate and warm sea bathing available in Constantinople would be good for his health, and instead I had the opposite effect. In addition to not bringing about any improvement in the chronic illnesses that had motivated him to go, he had developed some kind of wasting condition that eventually caused him to lose the lower half of his nose. He was also just tired of a Constantinople and he wanted to go home, and he was given permission to depart in January of eighteen oh three. He seems to have understood that future Ottoman administrations might not look kindly on the removal of so much material from the Parthenon and elsewhere at the Acropolis, and he also worried about what that might mean for the Ottoman officials he had worked with while he was an Athens. So before he left, Elgin got ds from Ottoman officials saying that they had approved of the actions made by the Voivode and the dISTAR, and he left those letters with those two men as protection in case politics shifted. Later on, as Elian was preparing to leave Constantinople, France was also withdrawing from Egypt, and it seemed likely that peace would soon be negotiated between France and the Ottoman Empire. This meant that the Ottoman Empire had way less need of the British as allies, which gave Ottoman authorities less incentive to cooperate with Britain's plans. It also meant that the British Navy ships that Elgin had counted on to take all of this marble back to England were now occupied with the withdrawal of British troops from Egypt. Even though Elgin's project wasn't an official government effort, everyone had taken for granted that the British Navy would help get all of this material back to England. Yeah. This this shift in relationships among Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire went so far as the fact that, like the British Embassy was being shut down and in Stantinople, when it was established in Constantinople, it was in a former French embassy. Like there was a lot of of international back and forth with this, on top of the lack of availability of British Navy ships moving a whole bunch of marble statues, reliefs, architectural elements, and other work by sea is just an inherently difficult task. I mean it would be difficult overland also, But most of the captains that Elgin and his team talked to trying to get all this stuff to England were not at all eager to weigh their ships down with such heavy cargo, which would make the ship a lot more likely to wreck in bad weather. So Elgin used his own ship, the Mentor, for a lot of this transport. The Mentor successfully made a round trip from Athens in late eighteen o one. Then in September of eighteen o two, two days after setting sail from Athens, it sank in a storm off the coast of Cithera. And when it sank, the Mentor was carrying seventeen cases of classical Greek sculpture, including fourteen pieces of the parts non freeze and four pieces of the freeze from the Temple of Athena Nike. Various other pieces were on board as well, although the largest heaviest pieces were still in Athens. With the help of passing ships and sponge divers who had been recruited from islands in the agency. Four of the seventeen cases were salvaged from the shipwreck pretty quickly. Then, in November of eighteen o two, plans were made to try to raise the Mentor from the sea floor. Two ships were supposed to work together to do this, but due to a miscommunication, one of them didn't arrive, so the HMS Lave Victorious tried to do it alone. The cable that they were using to do this snapped, The mentor sank back down to the sea floor, and soon afterwards salvage operations had to be suspended for the winter. It turned out that the crew of the other ship had incorrectly heard that the Mentor was in pieces and was impossible to raise, so they thought that they weren't needed after all. Although that wasn't true in November of eighteen o two, it was true by this ring of eighteen o three, after it had sat there underwater in months of winter storms. By that point, Elgin was on his way home, having left Constantinople on January sixteenth of eighteen o three. When he left, England and France were not at war, peace had been established. He decided to make part of the journey home over land through Italy and France. Part of his motivation here was to try to avoid the seasickness that had really just plagued his wife on their first journey to get to Constantinople in the first place. But he also wanted to talk to artisans in Rome about restoring the statues that he was removing from Athens. At the time, it was really common for restorers to replace broken and missing parts of things like classical statues, so like if the arm had broken off, they would make a new arm for it, right. And you will still see in some museums some pieces where they will point out, yeah, hey, that's not the same stone, that's a repaired piece. Right. We wouldn't do that if we had recovered this piece today. Um. But then England declared war on France again on eighteen o three, which is often marked as the start of the Napoleonic Wars. Elgin and his wife were in French territory and they became prisoners of war. Their children were allowed to continue home to Britain and they had some degree of freedom, but Elgin and his wife were not permitted to leave France. Meanwhile, the salvage operations at the wreck of the mentor were ongoing, with five cases brought up in eighteen o three. These cases were partially buried on the beach and covered with things like seaweed and stones to try to protect them from the wind and the water until a ship could be dispatched to pick them up. Divers brought up the remaining cases in eighteen o four, and finally Admiral Nelson ordered a ship to the area to retrieve them all. Elgin later estimated that the salvage effort cost him about five thousand pounds, but it didn't recover everything from the ship. He was really focused on those seven team cases of sculptures. Divers have continued to bring up other items in the century since then, with dives in and Steen bringing up things like ancient amphora, coins, jewelry, and statues. In August and September of archaeologists from Greece's effort for underwater antiquities brought up other items, including jewelry, cookware, and even a prosthetic leg. Also still ongoing was lucy Aries work around the Parthenon. He continued to work for years after this, Long after Elgin had gone back home, he kept collecting and documenting various antiquities. In eighteen o four, France convinced the Ottoman Empire to rescind their earlier firmans, and in October of eighteen o five, the Empire implemented a total ban on removing antiquities from Greece, and from that point Lucy Area had to confine his work to Elgin too, drawing and painting and guarding the statues that Elgin had already collected that had not been taken to Britain yet. While Elgin was being detained in France, the British captured a French ship that had been carrying Greek sculptures and other pieces that had been collected by Schwizoi Guffier, who we mentioned in Part one. British authorities didn't think the cargo was important enough to worry about, so it remained in a British customs house until Elgin eventually found it there years later. At various points between eighteen o three and eighteen o six, elgin situation went beyond just not being able to leave France. He was actually imprisoned. His wife was allowed to leave in eighteen o five after the death of one of their sons. Basically let her go home for humanitarian reasons. Elgin finally arrived home in June of eighteen o six, after signing a par role that promised the French government that he would go back to France at any time they demanded. That parole was in place until Napoleon abdicated in eighteen fourteen. We will get to what happened after Elgin finally got home after we first paused for a little sponsor break. Elgin's life changed dramatically after his return to England. As we noted in part one earlier in his career, he was thought of as a pretty promising young man, but after being detained in France, he could not get any kind of appointment that would be typical for a man of his station. The idea that he might be called back to France at any moment and would have no choice other than to go was just too big of a risk for anyone to take on him. He also went through a really embarrassing divorce when he returned from France. His wife said that she had been so traumatized and injured by the birth of their fifth child that she could not risk becoming pregnant again, and she ended their physical relationship. However, she was also having an affair, and when Elgin learned about this, he filed a civil action against her in England, and he filed for divorce in Scotland, where it was easier to get a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Elgin was worded ten thousand pounds in the civil suit, but his divorce trial lad to just a lengthy and scandalous public testimony about his wife's infidelity, including statements she had made about how her attraction to him had started to wane after the loss of his nose. There's also been a lot of speculation about exactly what caused Elgin's illnesses and his disfigurement, and various people have concluded that it was syphilis, which of course would have carried even more stigma than than it does today. Yeah, basically, he had all of his personal business just spilled out into the public. Elgin's divorce also meant that he would no longer be coming into his wife's fortune, and that was something that he had been counting on and had been a factor in his financial decision making up to that point. He also lost his seat in Parliament, and his health made it impossible for him to return to active duty with the military. Elgin's massive debts and lack of income trickled down to people who had been working for him, who then lost their incomes as well. To add insult to injury, many of Elgin's peers didn't think that he was actually broke. They assumed that he had gotten rich off bribes while working in Constantinople and that he was just being coy about it. At this point, all those antiquities that Elgin had removed from sites in Athens and elsewhere in Greece were scattered around various places, some of it still in Greece waiting transport to England. In terms of what was in England, a lot of it was being stored in various friends homes, and many of them were deeply annoyed that there were these giant cases of marbles taking up space in their houses. So Elgin rented a large home with a garden, and he had a shed built to house all of this artwork. He collected all the marbles that had arrived from Greece and arranged them in a way that he thought was aesthetically pleasing rather than one that had a historical or architectural meaning to it. He did not wind up having the sculptures restored in Italy because he just did not have the money to do it. He finished us in eighteen o seven and he opened his little shed for viewings by artists and architects, and he immediately got a ton of requests from artists that wanted to study and draw what he had brought back to Britain. He had to appoint a curator and ration access to the shed, and people also praised the idea that he had saved all this artwork from destruction. But he did also have some detractors, especially after classical scholar pay Night went on a campaign to tell people that the sculptures weren't from the Greek Golden Age at all, but were in fact much later and far inferior Roman works. That was not true, but it fueled various controversies. The Anglo Turkish War started in eighteen o seven and that started a huge scramble for Elegant to try to get the last of those sculptures that were waiting for him in Athens out of Athens. That effort to remove the last sculptures to Britain lasted beyond the end of the Anglo Turkish War in eighteen o nine, the last shipments from Athens to England and did not happen until eighteen twelve. Meanwhile, in eighteen ten, Elgin remarried and it became clear to him that he needed to do something to try to get himself out of debt. His income from his family property wasn't anywhere near enough to pay it off. He also had four surviving children from his first marriage, and he expected to have more kids with his second wife, and he needed a way to support them all and ideally not leave them all in debt after his death. So he decided to sell the sculptures that he had brought back from Greece, advocating for the Nation of Britain to buy them. To that end, he anonymously published a memorandum on the subject of the Earl of Elgin's pursuits in Greece. He published several editions of that over the next few years. The British government heard his proposition, they made him an offer of thirty thousand pounds. This was significantly less money than he had spent getting the marbles and salvaging them from the wreck of the Mentor and so he turned it down. Then, in eighteen eleven, George Gordon, Lord Byron, visited the Acropolis in Athens. Lucieri, who was still working for Elgin, gave Lord Byron a tour, and later when Byron sailed to Malta, it was on Elgin's ship. Byron seems to have warned Elgin that he wasn't happy with what he saw and experienced regarding Elgin's work in Athens, but Elgan either did not take him seriously or just didn't know what to do about it. Byron also was not nearly as famous at this point as he was about to be, so Elgin may not have thought any of this was a big deal. Simultaneously, Elgin was advocating for Britain to buy the sculptures and other marbles. He was also looking for somewhere else to house them, because with all of his debts he could not afford to keep renting a separate home for that purpose. With the shed to display all the marbles in the Duke of Devonshire offered to store them at his home, which was Burlington House. There wasn't really enough room for all the sculptures indoors there, though, so some of them were left out in the yard, and that included the last shipments that arrived from Athens in twelve. In March of that year, Byron published a long poem called Child Harold's Pilgrimage, and with this poem his career suddenly took off. The first printing of Child Harold sold out in just a few days. Byron had previously written several critiques of various antiquarians, including Elgin specifically, and Child Harold included this passage along with prose notes that specifically named Elgin. Here's what this passage said, among others in the work, dull is the eye that will not weep to see thy walls defaced, thy moldering shrines removed by British hands, which it had best behooved to guard those relics near to be restored. Cursed be the hour when from their aisle they roved and once again thy hapless bosom gourd and snatched thy shrinking gods to northern climbs of hoard. Lord Byron is one of those people that I would not have ever wanted to be on his bad side and have him rite nasty verse about me, because he could be vicious uh. In addition to launching Byron to fame, this poem brought Elgin's actions in Athens, as well as the plight of the Greek people under Ottoman rule, into the public spotlight, and it stoked a lot of debate. At one point, Edward Daniel Clark told Byron about his experience seeing the marbles cut down and people weeping, which Byron worked into the notes of future editions of this poem. Clark had also published his own thoughts on this in his travels in various countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This was a massive, multi volume work that heavily criticized the removal of the sculptures from the Parthenon, and it included some selections from Child Harold in later additions. I should also be noted that Clark came home with some antiquities from his travel in Greece as well, just not nearly to the extent of what Elgin had done. Of course, this controversy folded into the question of whether Britain might buy the sculptures, which Elgin was still trying to pursue after turning down that initial offer of thirty thousand pounds, but on May eleventh of eighteen twelve, John Bellingham assassinated British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval over a personal grievance with the government. That assassination took place in the lobby of the House of Commons, and of course the question of what to do with the Parthenon Marbles was tabled in the aftermath, along with a whole lot of other issues. The War of eighteen twelve also started in June of that year. Yeah, there was there was a lot going on, and as all of that was happening in Britain, attitudes were shifting in Greece. A sense of Greek nationalism and Greek national identity was starting to grow there, including a renewal of the Greek language and a movement for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. In eighteen fifteen, Napoleon returned from exile and the Duke of Devonshire sold Burlington House. Its new owners plan to totally rebuild the estate, which made Elgan's need to sell the sculptures even more urgent. The Brite Museum arranged for a committee to evaluate the issue, although that committee included pay Night and other people who either did not care for Elgin or thought the sculptures he'd acquired were overrated. Elgin started to fear that he might be offered even less than what he had turned down initially. On June fifteenth of eighteen fifteen, Elgin presented a petition to the House of Commons, which the House of Commons debated but didn't take any action on. Then just days later, on June eighteenth, Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. At that point, many of the nations that France had previously invaded demanded their artwork and artifacts and other national treasures back from the Louver. Although Elgin's acquisitions from Athens weren't part of this, they were part of this conversation, especially as at least five thousand pieces of artwork were returned from France to their nations of origin. And then came yet another source of public allegations against Elgin, this time from the Reverend R. Twiddel to a l published a book about his late brother John, including an appendix detailing all kinds of allegations against both Elgin and Philip Hunt. It is kind of a convoluted story, but the Reverend Twitter was apparently incensed over what he saw as Elgin's mishandling of his late brother's papers, something that John Spencer Smith, who we mentioned in Part one, was connected to and egged him on about. So Elgin denied any wrongdoing in all this, but it turned into kind of a scandal like we would describe it today as a flame war. There was a lot of back and forth publishing of letters, and various people pointed out how Elgin's relationships with pretty much everyone he had ever worked with, aside from Lucieri he was still employing in Athens, those relationships had all totally deteriorated. When some of John Twiddel's drawings were found at the home of Elgin's ex father in law, people took it as evidence that, on top of everything else, Elgin had lied about this whole situation. In February of eighteen sixteen, Elgin put forth another petition before the House of Commons, once again proposing that the British government by the marbles. It also requested that they investigate how he had gotten them in the first place, to try to put an end to all of the suspicion. This petition was debated on February hearings before a select committee began on February nine. When they were questioned, Elgin, Hunt and a lot of the other people who were involved talked about a lot of the points that we've already gone over. We read from some of their stuff in part one. They talked about how Elgin wanted to document the masterpieces of ancient Greece for the edification of artists and architects in Britain, and that he had asked for the government to fund this but had ultimately paid for it himself, and that when he saw the damaged the Acropolis that had already happened, he wanted to save as much artwork there as he could. He estimated his total expenses, including expenses after the marbles had been removed to Britain, as just shy of seventy five thousand pounds. There was also a lot of discussion about the ferments that we talked about earlier, and about the persuasion that had been part of how Ottoman authorities interpreted them. Artists were also questioned about the value of these marbles, both artistic value and monetary value. As part of that pain Night suggested that they were worth thousand pounds. These hearings went on for two weeks. When the committee delivered its report, it suggested that Elgin had done what he did legally, that he did not abuse his power to do so, that he hadn't damaged the monuments needlessly, and that he hadn't done what he did for personal gain. The report also spoke to the benefit that the marbles could bring to the arts in Britain, and the words of the report quote, no country can be better adapted than our own to afford an honorable asylum to these monuments of the School of Phidias and the Administration of Pericles. The recommended offer price for the sculptures was thirty five thousand pounds. This was much less than Elgin had said that he spent on this whole endeavor, but it was also five thousand pounds more than the previous offer, so he kind of felt like he had no other choice at this point and he accepted. Then Parliament had to vote on all this to make an official in which they did after debating on June seventh of eighteen sixteen. They voted to purchase the marbles from Elgin for thirty five thousand pounds, with eight two votes four and eighty against. An Act of Parliament then gave the nation ownership of the marbles, which were formerly known as the Elgin Marbles, and it also made Elgin and his heirs trustees of the British Museum. That payment of thirty five thousand pounds immediately went to Elgin's creditors, still leaving him in debt. In spite of that, he kept employing Lucieri for as long as he could, saying that he felt sorry for him. For his part, Lucieri believed he could have become a really famous artist if he hadn't started working for Elgin. He died in eighteen one. All Elgin did eventually returned to Parliament as a representative peer for Scotland. His career never really recovered from all of this. He kept trying to get a British peerage, hoping that it would help him get out of debt, but that never happened and he died on November fourteenth of eighteen forty one. But the story of the marbles continues, and we'll get back to them and how the controversy around them has also continued after we have one more sponsor break. By January of eighteen seventeen, the collection of sculptures, which were by then officially known as the Elgin Marbles, was on public view in a temporary space in the British Museum. They immediately became a huge draw. Although there were people still in Britain, Greece and elsewhere who vocally protested that they should not have been removed from Greece in the first place, these sculptures and architectural elements were credited with doing exactly what Elgin had hoped they would, contributing to the edge of cation of British artists and architects and bringing a renewed focus on art and architecture in Britain. The marbles themselves became part of the British national identity. They also inspired other works of art, including poetry by John Keats, and contributed to an ongoing trend of Greek Revival architecture, including the main entrance of the British Museum. The British Museum also started providing molds and casts of the marbles for other museums and other facilities to use. Over time, a lot of these casts were made, and eventually the museum made a set of casts like a master set, specifically for the purpose of making molds out of them, but they were making so many molds that eventually those casts had become too worn down to make good molds anymore. They would need to make the cast over again. In eighteen twenty one, the Greek War of Independence began. It's also called the Greek Revolution, and this, combined with the rising sense of Greek national identity that we mentioned earlier, led to increasing calls for Britain to return the parson on Nobles. These calls continued after Greece was formally declared an independent nation under the protection of Britain, France, and Russia in eighteen thirty three. Immediately this newly independent nation of Greece started focusing on the return of its cultural, artistic, and architectural heritage from other countries. To be clear, Greece at this point was culturally and ethnically diverse. It's not really clear how many people living there could have traced their lineage all the way back to Greek antiquity. And there's really a whole other discussion that could be had about the rise of this Greek national identity and what that meant for racial and ethnic minorities who were living there. Nevertheless, this Nation of Greece, right from its founding, saw classical Greece in general, and the Acropolis and the Parthenon specifically as a really important part of its identity. In March of eighteen thirty five, the Acropolis was declared a national monument and the Nation of Greece put an end to its use as a military facility for the first time in probably centuries. Greece also banned the export of its antiquities, although it's still had trouble stopping vandalism and looting, most of which was done by foreign visitors. Dad there's there was an article that came out um right before the end of the year that was basically about how there was more damage done to these monuments that were still in Greece in the nineteenth century then there has been in the centuries since then through things like air pollution. There's is a lot of vandalism and looting and theft. Also in eighteen thirty five, the British Museum offered Greece a set of casts of the Parthenon marbles. Greece asked for the originals and also embarked on a project to restore the Parthenon that year, as well as repairing and re erecting elements that had been knocked down in that sixteen eighty seven explosion, along with other damage. In eighteen thirty two, the Elgin Room, now called Room seventeen, opened on the British Museum's west side as a home for the Elgin Marbles. Another gallery, named for its financier art dealers Shore Joseph Duvine, was built for that purpose in the nineteen thirties, and while that gallery was being built, Duvine employed people to clean the Parthenon marbles and make them look whiter, under the incorrect idea that he was restoring them to their proper appearance without the oversight of museum staff and without following the museum's established cleaning procedures. Yeah, we're kind of fast forwarding roughly a hundred years here, but during that whole time, people in Greece were still advocating for the return of the marbles. That didn't stop in the interim. So the museum had used various cleaning techniques over the years, and by the early twentieth century, the basic process was to periodically dust the pieces off, to occasionally wash them with distilled water and a neutral soap very gently. But the people that Duvine and ployd we're using metal tools and carborundum, which is an abrasive to scrub and scrape away the exterior of these pieces, which at that point was kind of a brownish or a honey color. Of course, initially we know that these sculptures were painted, like the paint is not visible to the naked eye at this point, but like after there's there, you know, two thousand years of existence, they had taken on this this different coloring. And when this cleaning in quotation marks was discovered, it happened because a member of the museum staff walked into a room and saw that in the works on three pieces. In the investigation that followed this discovery, the museum learned that this whole incorrect cleaning procedure had been going on for at least a year and a half in nineteen thirty seven and ninety eight. This was a massive oversight, and it is not entirely clear still exactly how it happened, but at least some of the people that Duvine had hired had been given keys to the museum. That was not a good security procedure. So the museum's investigation was finished in December of night, and this new exhibit was supposed to open the following May. And the words of Frederick Price, who was then the keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities at the museum, from this report quote the surface of the sculptures, showing the evidences of two thousand years of exposure to the climate of Greece, was a document of the utmost importance. There being no possible doubt about the history of the Parthenon sculptures, they came to the museum as authentic masterpieces of Greek work of the fifth century BC, and for purposes of study in comparison, they are of inestimable value. The damage which has been caused is obvious and cannot be exaggerated. The exact steps that the museum took next were not recorded, but the Standing Committee's minutes record some kind of remedial solution. Apparently coding the marbles was something that was meant to replicate their earlier color in terms of the ramifications. For the museum staff, multiple people who were involved with all of this oversight were given early retirement. One man, assistant keeper, Roger Hanks, became something of a scapegoat over it. He was essentially to be demoted, but he was also told that it quote would not be to his disadvantage if he resigned, so he did. Although the museum tried to handle all of this quietly, rumors quickly spread that something had happened to the marbles, and this bloomed into a massive media scandal. The museum's public statements from the nineteen thirties generally tried to downplay things, explaining what the authorized cleaning methods were without really acknowledging the widespread damaging and unauthorized cleaning that had also gone on. But not long after the Divine Gallery opened, World War Two started in Europe and people became more focused on making sure the sculptures weren't damaged in air raids. The gallery itself was badly damaged by bombs during the war, but the sculptures were not affected. There is a lot more about all of the story in Lord Elgin and the Marbles, which is a book by WILLIAMS. St Clair published by Oxford University Press, specifically the third edition, which came up in St Clair was the first person to go through and document in print what happened in nineteen seven and ninety eight, and how the museum presented it to the public. St Clair is extremely critical of the museum's actions, interpreting their response as an ongoing cover up. The British Museum has framed it more as a mistake, acknowledging that the work was an overcleaning and characterizing the response to the public at the time as a serious misstep, but denying that there was any sort of long term cover up involved since then. In recent years, when Greece has renewed its calls for the return of the Marble's, Brittain has refused, but in other points in history Britain has made overtures that they might actually give them back. During World War Two, Britain started drafting a plan to return the Marbles to Greece, hoping it would inspire Greek resistance against an invasion by Germany or Italy. In the nineteen fifties, during the Cyprus Emergency, Britain suggested that it might return the Marbles if Greece would end its support of a guerrilla campaign against Cyprus's British colonial government. In more recent years, Neil Kennock, who was then the leader of Britain's Labor Party promised that the Marbles would be returned to Greece in nineteen ninety six, but when the Labor government actually took power the following year, they were not. At various points, legislation has been introduced in Parliament to return the Marbles to Greece, but it has never really gone anywhere. As Britain was nodding to the idea of returning the Marbles in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, some of the reinforcement work that had gone on at the Parthenon in the years after Greek independence started to deteriorate. Iron had been used in some of the supports, which had shifted and rested over time. Greece also industrialized very quickly into the nineteen sixties, leading to issues with air pollution and acid rain. A major earthquake also struck Athens in n one, and all of this became arguments in part for why Britain should not return the Marbles. But at the same time there were ongoing calls that Britain should return them, especially after the passage of UNESCO's Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property that was past in ninety Those calls have cited all the questions about Elgin's actions and the scope and the legitimacy of the firm in that we have talked about throughout this episode, along with whether that nineteen thirties overcleaning incident undermines the idea that the British Museum has been protecting the sculptures. One of the things that's been cited is the reason why the marbles shouldn't be returned to Greece is the idea that Greece didn't have a facility like the British Museum where those marbles could be housed, conserved, and displayed. In part because of that criticism, Greece built the new Acropolis Museum of Athens, which opened in two thousand eight. All the statues and other artworks that can be removed from the Parthenon are now indoors there so that they can be protected from the elements and from intentional theft or vandalism. So the gallery that's dedicated to the Parthenon at this new museum has large glass windows that overlook the Parthenon itself and then the size and the shape of the room replicates the perimeter of that inner cello where the freezes are, and the friezes are displayed there as they were on the original building. The pieces of the freeze that are in the British Museum or in other museums, because there are some pieces in other museums as well, those have been replaced with molds, and in some cases molds and casts replace individual pieces that were broken off and are in the British Museum collection, not so much in like the old style of restoring pieces, but more to show like we have this piece of the freeze, but the foot that should be on here is in the British Museum. In the Andonis Samaras administration in Greece called on UNESCO to mediate between Britain and Greece over the issue of the marbles. That August, UNESCO's Assistant Director General for Culture wrote a letter to the director of the British Museum, the UK Foreign Secretary, and the Minister for Culture, Media and Support. UNESCO offered to act as the mediator that Greece had requested. In the UK government and the trustees of the British Museum each responded with a decline. The museum's response read, in part quote, the British Museum is not a government body and the collections do not belong to the British Government. The trustees of the British Museum hold them not only for the British people, but for the benefit of the world public, present and future. The trustees have a legal and moral responsibility to preserve and maintain all the collections in their care, to treat them as inalienable, and to make them accessible to world audiences. The passage of brexit in also raised questions about whether Britain should return the Marbles after leaving the EU. There are several arguments at work with that idea. One is that returning artwork to other nations might help Britain rebuild relationships with other countries once it is not part of the EU anymore. And another is that if citizens of the European Union can no longer freely visit England to visit the British Museum, then Britain isn't really holding those works for the good of humanity only for the British. Obviously, citizens of the European Union are just a fraction of the totality of humanity. But that is the argument that's being made in this case. As of when we are recording this, the bregsit deadline is January. It's a few weeks down the road from today, so this all remains to be seen. Yeah, I think it's like a week after this episode will probably come out. However, throughout this controversy, Britain has said fastly maintained that it will not return the marbles in January are British Museum director Heartwig Fisher again reiterated that the marbles would not be returned, calling their initial removal a creative act. He said this in an interview with Greek daily newspaper Tanya Today. Britain's argument for keeping the parthen On Marbles is basically that they were acquired legally and that they are freely available for anyone to see because the museum does not charge admission. They have also stressed the museum's placement of the marbles in the context of world history and art, alongside other masterpieces from other parts of the world. Britain has also cited concerns relating to things like economic issues in Greece, including a debt crisis and austerity measures. Previous points about Greek air quality in the lack of an appropriate museum are no longer really relevant thanks to the construction of the new Acropolis Museum. Greece's argument for having the Marble's return includes that Britain's acquisition was not legal, that the firm and was not that broad to allow such a huge removal of material, or that it may not have existed or may not have been an actual firm in at all. Additionally, Britain's negotiations were not with Greek authorities. They were with the Ottoman Empire, which modern Greece views as an occupying nation. It's also been noted that Elgin's initial plan with all of this was not at all to safeguard the pieces in a museum for the benefit of all of humanity. It was to keep them on his personal property for access by people he chose to allow to see it. From the Greek perspective, these sculptures are a critical part of Greek national identity, Greek history, and Greek culture, and they should be returned to Greece and reunited with the rest of the sculptures that are still there. But it's also been noted that At this point, Britain's argument for keeping the Marbles isn't really motivated by all of the points that we have just outlined. There's more of a slippery slope argument in play, and a fear across the world of museums as a whole that if Britain returns the parthon on Marble's, every museum everywhere will be forced to return artwork, artifacts, or other pieces of historical or cultural heritage that they obtained in some way that would be considered questionable today. Yeah, and ways that we're probably considered questionable at best by the people they were removed from at the time. So some other commonly cited examples of this are the Rosetta Stone, which Britain obtained in a treaty with Egypt, the Benin Bronzes, which British soldiers took from what's now Nigeria in the late nineteenth century, and the bust of Nefertiti, which has been in Germany since a German team founded in nineteen twelve and is now in the Noius Museum in Berlin. We've talked about calls to return the Rosetta Stone in a past Unearthed episode and Britain has announced that at least some of the Benien Bronzes will be returned to Nigeria and overall, in the last few years there has been a growing trend of returning and repatriating items from museum collections, especially human remains, as part of an overall trend towards decolonizing museums. But people are still fearful of what a greater move toward repatriation might mean. And it is something that would affect the world's most prominent art museums, including the met, the Louver and many others, lots and lots of them. And so it's a huge, huge issue and like a massive conversation that's going on throughout the world of art and art history and museums and all of that. Uh. Well, probably talk some more about those ideas in our behind the Scenes many so uh which will be out on Friday. It's a safe bet. Yeah. Um. I have a listener mail, so who takes out before we get to that sweet This is from Stephanie. Stephanie says, Hello, Tracy and Holly. I'm a longtime listener and absolutely love your show. I was particularly excited to hear your show about Alfred Wegner, because although I don't know much about his working continental drift, I am familiar with his final expedition. You mentioned in the know that the researchers who made it out to ice Mended were able to do some work before Vegnar arrived, but I wanted to note just how important that work was. While waiting out the winter, Earnst Sworge Hand dug a sixteen meter deep pit into the ice and developed a new method for measuring the seasonal accumulation of ice on the glacier using its density that could be used even if the layers were not visible. Later, this technique would be critical in the discovery of man made climate change. What I love about the story is that it further proves how important scientific research is, even if the importance isn't clear for years and years. Thank you so much for all the work you do. Happy podcasting, Stephanie. Thank you Stephanie for this email. UM. I had read a little about the ice cores that they took during that expedition, but I did not know that detail about them, so thank you so much for sending that. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast where History podcast at my heart radio dot com. And then we're all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also subscribe to our show on Apple podcast, the I heart radio app, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts, for my heart radio visits, i heeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, the production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is part two of our two part podcast on Lord Elgin and the Parthenon Marbles. I really recommend listening to part one. That's the whole story of of how he got these marbles in the first place. Very briefly, in that episode, we talked about how he became the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, how he decided to document classical Greek ark and architecture while he was there, and how that project morphed to include removing the artwork rather than just drawing it and making casts and molds of it. These are often called the Parthenon Marbles, although the pieces that are involved were not just from the Parthenon, they were also from other parts of the Acropolis and Athens and elsewhere in Greece. So today we're going to talk about how all of that played out, and how these sculptures became part of the collection of the British Museum, and why there's still controversy about this that has continued until today. Just a quick recap on sort of the cast of characters people involved. At this point we have Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and eleven of Kincarten. He was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and was stationed in Constantinople. Giovanni Batista Lucieri was a landscape painter from Naples who was recruited to oversee a team of architects, artists, mold makers and others in a project that was originally meant to document classical Greek art and architecture. The Reverend Philip Hunt was an Anglican priest and the chaplain to the British embassy in Constantinople. He was appointed as Lord Elgin's temporary secretary to act on his behalf in Athens. And then in Athens, the team mostly interacted with people who occupied two different government positions. The exact people in those positions varied over time. They included the Voivode, who was the governor of Athens, and the Dizdar, who was the military governor with authority over the acropolis itself. Elgin asked for permission to return to England in late eighteen o two. He had taken this position in part because he thought that the climate and warm sea bathing available in Constantinople would be good for his health, and instead I had the opposite effect. In addition to not bringing about any improvement in the chronic illnesses that had motivated him to go, he had developed some kind of wasting condition that eventually caused him to lose the lower half of his nose. He was also just tired of a Constantinople and he wanted to go home, and he was given permission to depart in January of eighteen oh three. He seems to have understood that future Ottoman administrations might not look kindly on the removal of so much material from the Parthenon and elsewhere at the Acropolis, and he also worried about what that might mean for the Ottoman officials he had worked with while he was an Athens. So before he left, Elgin got ds from Ottoman officials saying that they had approved of the actions made by the Voivode and the dISTAR, and he left those letters with those two men as protection in case politics shifted. Later on, as Elian was preparing to leave Constantinople, France was also withdrawing from Egypt, and it seemed likely that peace would soon be negotiated between France and the Ottoman Empire. This meant that the Ottoman Empire had way less need of the British as allies, which gave Ottoman authorities less incentive to cooperate with Britain's plans. It also meant that the British Navy ships that Elgin had counted on to take all of this marble back to England were now occupied with the withdrawal of British troops from Egypt. Even though Elgin's project wasn't an official government effort, everyone had taken for granted that the British Navy would help get all of this material back to England. Yeah. This this shift in relationships among Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire went so far as the fact that, like the British Embassy was being shut down and in Stantinople, when it was established in Constantinople, it was in a former French embassy. Like there was a lot of of international back and forth with this, on top of the lack of availability of British Navy ships moving a whole bunch of marble statues, reliefs, architectural elements, and other work by sea is just an inherently difficult task. I mean it would be difficult overland also, But most of the captains that Elgin and his team talked to trying to get all this stuff to England were not at all eager to weigh their ships down with such heavy cargo, which would make the ship a lot more likely to wreck in bad weather. So Elgin used his own ship, the Mentor, for a lot of this transport. The Mentor successfully made a round trip from Athens in late eighteen o one. Then in September of eighteen o two, two days after setting sail from Athens, it sank in a storm off the coast of Cithera. And when it sank, the Mentor was carrying seventeen cases of classical Greek sculpture, including fourteen pieces of the parts non freeze and four pieces of the freeze from the Temple of Athena Nike. Various other pieces were on board as well, although the largest heaviest pieces were still in Athens. With the help of passing ships and sponge divers who had been recruited from islands in the agency. Four of the seventeen cases were salvaged from the shipwreck pretty quickly. Then, in November of eighteen o two, plans were made to try to raise the Mentor from the sea floor. Two ships were supposed to work together to do this, but due to a miscommunication, one of them didn't arrive, so the HMS Lave Victorious tried to do it alone. The cable that they were using to do this snapped, The mentor sank back down to the sea floor, and soon afterwards salvage operations had to be suspended for the winter. It turned out that the crew of the other ship had incorrectly heard that the Mentor was in pieces and was impossible to raise, so they thought that they weren't needed after all. Although that wasn't true in November of eighteen o two, it was true by this ring of eighteen o three, after it had sat there underwater in months of winter storms. By that point, Elgin was on his way home, having left Constantinople on January sixteenth of eighteen o three. When he left, England and France were not at war, peace had been established. He decided to make part of the journey home over land through Italy and France. Part of his motivation here was to try to avoid the seasickness that had really just plagued his wife on their first journey to get to Constantinople in the first place. But he also wanted to talk to artisans in Rome about restoring the statues that he was removing from Athens. At the time, it was really common for restorers to replace broken and missing parts of things like classical statues, so like if the arm had broken off, they would make a new arm for it, right. And you will still see in some museums some pieces where they will point out, yeah, hey, that's not the same stone, that's a repaired piece. Right. We wouldn't do that if we had recovered this piece today. Um. But then England declared war on France again on eighteen o three, which is often marked as the start of the Napoleonic Wars. Elgin and his wife were in French territory and they became prisoners of war. Their children were allowed to continue home to Britain and they had some degree of freedom, but Elgin and his wife were not permitted to leave France. Meanwhile, the salvage operations at the wreck of the mentor were ongoing, with five cases brought up in eighteen o three. These cases were partially buried on the beach and covered with things like seaweed and stones to try to protect them from the wind and the water until a ship could be dispatched to pick them up. Divers brought up the remaining cases in eighteen o four, and finally Admiral Nelson ordered a ship to the area to retrieve them all. Elgin later estimated that the salvage effort cost him about five thousand pounds, but it didn't recover everything from the ship. He was really focused on those seven team cases of sculptures. Divers have continued to bring up other items in the century since then, with dives in and Steen bringing up things like ancient amphora, coins, jewelry, and statues. In August and September of archaeologists from Greece's effort for underwater antiquities brought up other items, including jewelry, cookware, and even a prosthetic leg. Also still ongoing was lucy Aries work around the Parthenon. He continued to work for years after this, Long after Elgin had gone back home, he kept collecting and documenting various antiquities. In eighteen o four, France convinced the Ottoman Empire to rescind their earlier firmans, and in October of eighteen o five, the Empire implemented a total ban on removing antiquities from Greece, and from that point Lucy Area had to confine his work to Elgin too, drawing and painting and guarding the statues that Elgin had already collected that had not been taken to Britain yet. While Elgin was being detained in France, the British captured a French ship that had been carrying Greek sculptures and other pieces that had been collected by Schwizoi Guffier, who we mentioned in Part one. British authorities didn't think the cargo was important enough to worry about, so it remained in a British customs house until Elgin eventually found it there years later. At various points between eighteen o three and eighteen o six, elgin situation went beyond just not being able to leave France. He was actually imprisoned. His wife was allowed to leave in eighteen o five after the death of one of their sons. Basically let her go home for humanitarian reasons. Elgin finally arrived home in June of eighteen o six, after signing a par role that promised the French government that he would go back to France at any time they demanded. That parole was in place until Napoleon abdicated in eighteen fourteen. We will get to what happened after Elgin finally got home after we first paused for a little sponsor break. Elgin's life changed dramatically after his return to England. As we noted in part one earlier in his career, he was thought of as a pretty promising young man, but after being detained in France, he could not get any kind of appointment that would be typical for a man of his station. The idea that he might be called back to France at any moment and would have no choice other than to go was just too big of a risk for anyone to take on him. He also went through a really embarrassing divorce when he returned from France. His wife said that she had been so traumatized and injured by the birth of their fifth child that she could not risk becoming pregnant again, and she ended their physical relationship. However, she was also having an affair, and when Elgin learned about this, he filed a civil action against her in England, and he filed for divorce in Scotland, where it was easier to get a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Elgin was worded ten thousand pounds in the civil suit, but his divorce trial lad to just a lengthy and scandalous public testimony about his wife's infidelity, including statements she had made about how her attraction to him had started to wane after the loss of his nose. There's also been a lot of speculation about exactly what caused Elgin's illnesses and his disfigurement, and various people have concluded that it was syphilis, which of course would have carried even more stigma than than it does today. Yeah, basically, he had all of his personal business just spilled out into the public. Elgin's divorce also meant that he would no longer be coming into his wife's fortune, and that was something that he had been counting on and had been a factor in his financial decision making up to that point. He also lost his seat in Parliament, and his health made it impossible for him to return to active duty with the military. Elgin's massive debts and lack of income trickled down to people who had been working for him, who then lost their incomes as well. To add insult to injury, many of Elgin's peers didn't think that he was actually broke. They assumed that he had gotten rich off bribes while working in Constantinople and that he was just being coy about it. At this point, all those antiquities that Elgin had removed from sites in Athens and elsewhere in Greece were scattered around various places, some of it still in Greece waiting transport to England. In terms of what was in England, a lot of it was being stored in various friends homes, and many of them were deeply annoyed that there were these giant cases of marbles taking up space in their houses. So Elgin rented a large home with a garden, and he had a shed built to house all of this artwork. He collected all the marbles that had arrived from Greece and arranged them in a way that he thought was aesthetically pleasing rather than one that had a historical or architectural meaning to it. He did not wind up having the sculptures restored in Italy because he just did not have the money to do it. He finished us in eighteen o seven and he opened his little shed for viewings by artists and architects, and he immediately got a ton of requests from artists that wanted to study and draw what he had brought back to Britain. He had to appoint a curator and ration access to the shed, and people also praised the idea that he had saved all this artwork from destruction. But he did also have some detractors, especially after classical scholar pay Night went on a campaign to tell people that the sculptures weren't from the Greek Golden Age at all, but were in fact much later and far inferior Roman works. That was not true, but it fueled various controversies. The Anglo Turkish War started in eighteen o seven and that started a huge scramble for Elegant to try to get the last of those sculptures that were waiting for him in Athens out of Athens. That effort to remove the last sculptures to Britain lasted beyond the end of the Anglo Turkish War in eighteen o nine, the last shipments from Athens to England and did not happen until eighteen twelve. Meanwhile, in eighteen ten, Elgin remarried and it became clear to him that he needed to do something to try to get himself out of debt. His income from his family property wasn't anywhere near enough to pay it off. He also had four surviving children from his first marriage, and he expected to have more kids with his second wife, and he needed a way to support them all and ideally not leave them all in debt after his death. So he decided to sell the sculptures that he had brought back from Greece, advocating for the Nation of Britain to buy them. To that end, he anonymously published a memorandum on the subject of the Earl of Elgin's pursuits in Greece. He published several editions of that over the next few years. The British government heard his proposition, they made him an offer of thirty thousand pounds. This was significantly less money than he had spent getting the marbles and salvaging them from the wreck of the Mentor and so he turned it down. Then, in eighteen eleven, George Gordon, Lord Byron, visited the Acropolis in Athens. Lucieri, who was still working for Elgin, gave Lord Byron a tour, and later when Byron sailed to Malta, it was on Elgin's ship. Byron seems to have warned Elgin that he wasn't happy with what he saw and experienced regarding Elgin's work in Athens, but Elgan either did not take him seriously or just didn't know what to do about it. Byron also was not nearly as famous at this point as he was about to be, so Elgin may not have thought any of this was a big deal. Simultaneously, Elgin was advocating for Britain to buy the sculptures and other marbles. He was also looking for somewhere else to house them, because with all of his debts he could not afford to keep renting a separate home for that purpose. With the shed to display all the marbles in the Duke of Devonshire offered to store them at his home, which was Burlington House. There wasn't really enough room for all the sculptures indoors there, though, so some of them were left out in the yard, and that included the last shipments that arrived from Athens in twelve. In March of that year, Byron published a long poem called Child Harold's Pilgrimage, and with this poem his career suddenly took off. The first printing of Child Harold sold out in just a few days. Byron had previously written several critiques of various antiquarians, including Elgin specifically, and Child Harold included this passage along with prose notes that specifically named Elgin. Here's what this passage said, among others in the work, dull is the eye that will not weep to see thy walls defaced, thy moldering shrines removed by British hands, which it had best behooved to guard those relics near to be restored. Cursed be the hour when from their aisle they roved and once again thy hapless bosom gourd and snatched thy shrinking gods to northern climbs of hoard. Lord Byron is one of those people that I would not have ever wanted to be on his bad side and have him rite nasty verse about me, because he could be vicious uh. In addition to launching Byron to fame, this poem brought Elgin's actions in Athens, as well as the plight of the Greek people under Ottoman rule, into the public spotlight, and it stoked a lot of debate. At one point, Edward Daniel Clark told Byron about his experience seeing the marbles cut down and people weeping, which Byron worked into the notes of future editions of this poem. Clark had also published his own thoughts on this in his travels in various countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This was a massive, multi volume work that heavily criticized the removal of the sculptures from the Parthenon, and it included some selections from Child Harold in later additions. I should also be noted that Clark came home with some antiquities from his travel in Greece as well, just not nearly to the extent of what Elgin had done. Of course, this controversy folded into the question of whether Britain might buy the sculptures, which Elgin was still trying to pursue after turning down that initial offer of thirty thousand pounds, but on May eleventh of eighteen twelve, John Bellingham assassinated British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval over a personal grievance with the government. That assassination took place in the lobby of the House of Commons, and of course the question of what to do with the Parthenon Marbles was tabled in the aftermath, along with a whole lot of other issues. The War of eighteen twelve also started in June of that year. Yeah, there was there was a lot going on, and as all of that was happening in Britain, attitudes were shifting in Greece. A sense of Greek nationalism and Greek national identity was starting to grow there, including a renewal of the Greek language and a movement for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. In eighteen fifteen, Napoleon returned from exile and the Duke of Devonshire sold Burlington House. Its new owners plan to totally rebuild the estate, which made Elgan's need to sell the sculptures even more urgent. The Brite Museum arranged for a committee to evaluate the issue, although that committee included pay Night and other people who either did not care for Elgin or thought the sculptures he'd acquired were overrated. Elgin started to fear that he might be offered even less than what he had turned down initially. On June fifteenth of eighteen fifteen, Elgin presented a petition to the House of Commons, which the House of Commons debated but didn't take any action on. Then just days later, on June eighteenth, Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. At that point, many of the nations that France had previously invaded demanded their artwork and artifacts and other national treasures back from the Louver. Although Elgin's acquisitions from Athens weren't part of this, they were part of this conversation, especially as at least five thousand pieces of artwork were returned from France to their nations of origin. And then came yet another source of public allegations against Elgin, this time from the Reverend R. Twiddel to a l published a book about his late brother John, including an appendix detailing all kinds of allegations against both Elgin and Philip Hunt. It is kind of a convoluted story, but the Reverend Twitter was apparently incensed over what he saw as Elgin's mishandling of his late brother's papers, something that John Spencer Smith, who we mentioned in Part one, was connected to and egged him on about. So Elgin denied any wrongdoing in all this, but it turned into kind of a scandal like we would describe it today as a flame war. There was a lot of back and forth publishing of letters, and various people pointed out how Elgin's relationships with pretty much everyone he had ever worked with, aside from Lucieri he was still employing in Athens, those relationships had all totally deteriorated. When some of John Twiddel's drawings were found at the home of Elgin's ex father in law, people took it as evidence that, on top of everything else, Elgin had lied about this whole situation. In February of eighteen sixteen, Elgin put forth another petition before the House of Commons, once again proposing that the British government by the marbles. It also requested that they investigate how he had gotten them in the first place, to try to put an end to all of the suspicion. This petition was debated on February hearings before a select committee began on February nine. When they were questioned, Elgin, Hunt and a lot of the other people who were involved talked about a lot of the points that we've already gone over. We read from some of their stuff in part one. They talked about how Elgin wanted to document the masterpieces of ancient Greece for the edification of artists and architects in Britain, and that he had asked for the government to fund this but had ultimately paid for it himself, and that when he saw the damaged the Acropolis that had already happened, he wanted to save as much artwork there as he could. He estimated his total expenses, including expenses after the marbles had been removed to Britain, as just shy of seventy five thousand pounds. There was also a lot of discussion about the ferments that we talked about earlier, and about the persuasion that had been part of how Ottoman authorities interpreted them. Artists were also questioned about the value of these marbles, both artistic value and monetary value. As part of that pain Night suggested that they were worth thousand pounds. These hearings went on for two weeks. When the committee delivered its report, it suggested that Elgin had done what he did legally, that he did not abuse his power to do so, that he hadn't damaged the monuments needlessly, and that he hadn't done what he did for personal gain. The report also spoke to the benefit that the marbles could bring to the arts in Britain, and the words of the report quote, no country can be better adapted than our own to afford an honorable asylum to these monuments of the School of Phidias and the Administration of Pericles. The recommended offer price for the sculptures was thirty five thousand pounds. This was much less than Elgin had said that he spent on this whole endeavor, but it was also five thousand pounds more than the previous offer, so he kind of felt like he had no other choice at this point and he accepted. Then Parliament had to vote on all this to make an official in which they did after debating on June seventh of eighteen sixteen. They voted to purchase the marbles from Elgin for thirty five thousand pounds, with eight two votes four and eighty against. An Act of Parliament then gave the nation ownership of the marbles, which were formerly known as the Elgin Marbles, and it also made Elgin and his heirs trustees of the British Museum. That payment of thirty five thousand pounds immediately went to Elgin's creditors, still leaving him in debt. In spite of that, he kept employing Lucieri for as long as he could, saying that he felt sorry for him. For his part, Lucieri believed he could have become a really famous artist if he hadn't started working for Elgin. He died in eighteen one. All Elgin did eventually returned to Parliament as a representative peer for Scotland. His career never really recovered from all of this. He kept trying to get a British peerage, hoping that it would help him get out of debt, but that never happened and he died on November fourteenth of eighteen forty one. But the story of the marbles continues, and we'll get back to them and how the controversy around them has also continued after we have one more sponsor break. By January of eighteen seventeen, the collection of sculptures, which were by then officially known as the Elgin Marbles, was on public view in a temporary space in the British Museum. They immediately became a huge draw. Although there were people still in Britain, Greece and elsewhere who vocally protested that they should not have been removed from Greece in the first place, these sculptures and architectural elements were credited with doing exactly what Elgin had hoped they would, contributing to the edge of cation of British artists and architects and bringing a renewed focus on art and architecture in Britain. The marbles themselves became part of the British national identity. They also inspired other works of art, including poetry by John Keats, and contributed to an ongoing trend of Greek Revival architecture, including the main entrance of the British Museum. The British Museum also started providing molds and casts of the marbles for other museums and other facilities to use. Over time, a lot of these casts were made, and eventually the museum made a set of casts like a master set, specifically for the purpose of making molds out of them, but they were making so many molds that eventually those casts had become too worn down to make good molds anymore. They would need to make the cast over again. In eighteen twenty one, the Greek War of Independence began. It's also called the Greek Revolution, and this, combined with the rising sense of Greek national identity that we mentioned earlier, led to increasing calls for Britain to return the parson on Nobles. These calls continued after Greece was formally declared an independent nation under the protection of Britain, France, and Russia in eighteen thirty three. Immediately this newly independent nation of Greece started focusing on the return of its cultural, artistic, and architectural heritage from other countries. To be clear, Greece at this point was culturally and ethnically diverse. It's not really clear how many people living there could have traced their lineage all the way back to Greek antiquity. And there's really a whole other discussion that could be had about the rise of this Greek national identity and what that meant for racial and ethnic minorities who were living there. Nevertheless, this Nation of Greece, right from its founding, saw classical Greece in general, and the Acropolis and the Parthenon specifically as a really important part of its identity. In March of eighteen thirty five, the Acropolis was declared a national monument and the Nation of Greece put an end to its use as a military facility for the first time in probably centuries. Greece also banned the export of its antiquities, although it's still had trouble stopping vandalism and looting, most of which was done by foreign visitors. Dad there's there was an article that came out um right before the end of the year that was basically about how there was more damage done to these monuments that were still in Greece in the nineteenth century then there has been in the centuries since then through things like air pollution. There's is a lot of vandalism and looting and theft. Also in eighteen thirty five, the British Museum offered Greece a set of casts of the Parthenon marbles. Greece asked for the originals and also embarked on a project to restore the Parthenon that year, as well as repairing and re erecting elements that had been knocked down in that sixteen eighty seven explosion, along with other damage. In eighteen thirty two, the Elgin Room, now called Room seventeen, opened on the British Museum's west side as a home for the Elgin Marbles. Another gallery, named for its financier art dealers Shore Joseph Duvine, was built for that purpose in the nineteen thirties, and while that gallery was being built, Duvine employed people to clean the Parthenon marbles and make them look whiter, under the incorrect idea that he was restoring them to their proper appearance without the oversight of museum staff and without following the museum's established cleaning procedures. Yeah, we're kind of fast forwarding roughly a hundred years here, but during that whole time, people in Greece were still advocating for the return of the marbles. That didn't stop in the interim. So the museum had used various cleaning techniques over the years, and by the early twentieth century, the basic process was to periodically dust the pieces off, to occasionally wash them with distilled water and a neutral soap very gently. But the people that Duvine and ployd we're using metal tools and carborundum, which is an abrasive to scrub and scrape away the exterior of these pieces, which at that point was kind of a brownish or a honey color. Of course, initially we know that these sculptures were painted, like the paint is not visible to the naked eye at this point, but like after there's there, you know, two thousand years of existence, they had taken on this this different coloring. And when this cleaning in quotation marks was discovered, it happened because a member of the museum staff walked into a room and saw that in the works on three pieces. In the investigation that followed this discovery, the museum learned that this whole incorrect cleaning procedure had been going on for at least a year and a half in nineteen thirty seven and ninety eight. This was a massive oversight, and it is not entirely clear still exactly how it happened, but at least some of the people that Duvine had hired had been given keys to the museum. That was not a good security procedure. So the museum's investigation was finished in December of night, and this new exhibit was supposed to open the following May. And the words of Frederick Price, who was then the keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities at the museum, from this report quote the surface of the sculptures, showing the evidences of two thousand years of exposure to the climate of Greece, was a document of the utmost importance. There being no possible doubt about the history of the Parthenon sculptures, they came to the museum as authentic masterpieces of Greek work of the fifth century BC, and for purposes of study in comparison, they are of inestimable value. The damage which has been caused is obvious and cannot be exaggerated. The exact steps that the museum took next were not recorded, but the Standing Committee's minutes record some kind of remedial solution. Apparently coding the marbles was something that was meant to replicate their earlier color in terms of the ramifications. For the museum staff, multiple people who were involved with all of this oversight were given early retirement. One man, assistant keeper, Roger Hanks, became something of a scapegoat over it. He was essentially to be demoted, but he was also told that it quote would not be to his disadvantage if he resigned, so he did. Although the museum tried to handle all of this quietly, rumors quickly spread that something had happened to the marbles, and this bloomed into a massive media scandal. The museum's public statements from the nineteen thirties generally tried to downplay things, explaining what the authorized cleaning methods were without really acknowledging the widespread damaging and unauthorized cleaning that had also gone on. But not long after the Divine Gallery opened, World War Two started in Europe and people became more focused on making sure the sculptures weren't damaged in air raids. The gallery itself was badly damaged by bombs during the war, but the sculptures were not affected. There is a lot more about all of the story in Lord Elgin and the Marbles, which is a book by WILLIAMS. St Clair published by Oxford University Press, specifically the third edition, which came up in St Clair was the first person to go through and document in print what happened in nineteen seven and ninety eight, and how the museum presented it to the public. St Clair is extremely critical of the museum's actions, interpreting their response as an ongoing cover up. The British Museum has framed it more as a mistake, acknowledging that the work was an overcleaning and characterizing the response to the public at the time as a serious misstep, but denying that there was any sort of long term cover up involved since then. In recent years, when Greece has renewed its calls for the return of the Marble's, Brittain has refused, but in other points in history Britain has made overtures that they might actually give them back. During World War Two, Britain started drafting a plan to return the Marbles to Greece, hoping it would inspire Greek resistance against an invasion by Germany or Italy. In the nineteen fifties, during the Cyprus Emergency, Britain suggested that it might return the Marbles if Greece would end its support of a guerrilla campaign against Cyprus's British colonial government. In more recent years, Neil Kennock, who was then the leader of Britain's Labor Party promised that the Marbles would be returned to Greece in nineteen ninety six, but when the Labor government actually took power the following year, they were not. At various points, legislation has been introduced in Parliament to return the Marbles to Greece, but it has never really gone anywhere. As Britain was nodding to the idea of returning the Marbles in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, some of the reinforcement work that had gone on at the Parthenon in the years after Greek independence started to deteriorate. Iron had been used in some of the supports, which had shifted and rested over time. Greece also industrialized very quickly into the nineteen sixties, leading to issues with air pollution and acid rain. A major earthquake also struck Athens in n one, and all of this became arguments in part for why Britain should not return the Marbles. But at the same time there were ongoing calls that Britain should return them, especially after the passage of UNESCO's Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property that was past in ninety Those calls have cited all the questions about Elgin's actions and the scope and the legitimacy of the firm in that we have talked about throughout this episode, along with whether that nineteen thirties overcleaning incident undermines the idea that the British Museum has been protecting the sculptures. One of the things that's been cited is the reason why the marbles shouldn't be returned to Greece is the idea that Greece didn't have a facility like the British Museum where those marbles could be housed, conserved, and displayed. In part because of that criticism, Greece built the new Acropolis Museum of Athens, which opened in two thousand eight. All the statues and other artworks that can be removed from the Parthenon are now indoors there so that they can be protected from the elements and from intentional theft or vandalism. So the gallery that's dedicated to the Parthenon at this new museum has large glass windows that overlook the Parthenon itself and then the size and the shape of the room replicates the perimeter of that inner cello where the freezes are, and the friezes are displayed there as they were on the original building. The pieces of the freeze that are in the British Museum or in other museums, because there are some pieces in other museums as well, those have been replaced with molds, and in some cases molds and casts replace individual pieces that were broken off and are in the British Museum collection, not so much in like the old style of restoring pieces, but more to show like we have this piece of the freeze, but the foot that should be on here is in the British Museum. In the Andonis Samaras administration in Greece called on UNESCO to mediate between Britain and Greece over the issue of the marbles. That August, UNESCO's Assistant Director General for Culture wrote a letter to the director of the British Museum, the UK Foreign Secretary, and the Minister for Culture, Media and Support. UNESCO offered to act as the mediator that Greece had requested. In the UK government and the trustees of the British Museum each responded with a decline. The museum's response read, in part quote, the British Museum is not a government body and the collections do not belong to the British Government. The trustees of the British Museum hold them not only for the British people, but for the benefit of the world public, present and future. The trustees have a legal and moral responsibility to preserve and maintain all the collections in their care, to treat them as inalienable, and to make them accessible to world audiences. The passage of brexit in also raised questions about whether Britain should return the Marbles after leaving the EU. There are several arguments at work with that idea. One is that returning artwork to other nations might help Britain rebuild relationships with other countries once it is not part of the EU anymore. And another is that if citizens of the European Union can no longer freely visit England to visit the British Museum, then Britain isn't really holding those works for the good of humanity only for the British. Obviously, citizens of the European Union are just a fraction of the totality of humanity. But that is the argument that's being made in this case. As of when we are recording this, the bregsit deadline is January. It's a few weeks down the road from today, so this all remains to be seen. Yeah, I think it's like a week after this episode will probably come out. However, throughout this controversy, Britain has said fastly maintained that it will not return the marbles in January are British Museum director Heartwig Fisher again reiterated that the marbles would not be returned, calling their initial removal a creative act. He said this in an interview with Greek daily newspaper Tanya Today. Britain's argument for keeping the parthen On Marbles is basically that they were acquired legally and that they are freely available for anyone to see because the museum does not charge admission. They have also stressed the museum's placement of the marbles in the context of world history and art, alongside other masterpieces from other parts of the world. Britain has also cited concerns relating to things like economic issues in Greece, including a debt crisis and austerity measures. Previous points about Greek air quality in the lack of an appropriate museum are no longer really relevant thanks to the construction of the new Acropolis Museum. Greece's argument for having the Marble's return includes that Britain's acquisition was not legal, that the firm and was not that broad to allow such a huge removal of material, or that it may not have existed or may not have been an actual firm in at all. Additionally, Britain's negotiations were not with Greek authorities. They were with the Ottoman Empire, which modern Greece views as an occupying nation. It's also been noted that Elgin's initial plan with all of this was not at all to safeguard the pieces in a museum for the benefit of all of humanity. It was to keep them on his personal property for access by people he chose to allow to see it. From the Greek perspective, these sculptures are a critical part of Greek national identity, Greek history, and Greek culture, and they should be returned to Greece and reunited with the rest of the sculptures that are still there. But it's also been noted that At this point, Britain's argument for keeping the Marbles isn't really motivated by all of the points that we have just outlined. There's more of a slippery slope argument in play, and a fear across the world of museums as a whole that if Britain returns the parthon on Marble's, every museum everywhere will be forced to return artwork, artifacts, or other pieces of historical or cultural heritage that they obtained in some way that would be considered questionable today. Yeah, and ways that we're probably considered questionable at best by the people they were removed from at the time. So some other commonly cited examples of this are the Rosetta Stone, which Britain obtained in a treaty with Egypt, the Benin Bronzes, which British soldiers took from what's now Nigeria in the late nineteenth century, and the bust of Nefertiti, which has been in Germany since a German team founded in nineteen twelve and is now in the Noius Museum in Berlin. We've talked about calls to return the Rosetta Stone in a past Unearthed episode and Britain has announced that at least some of the Benien Bronzes will be returned to Nigeria and overall, in the last few years there has been a growing trend of returning and repatriating items from museum collections, especially human remains, as part of an overall trend towards decolonizing museums. But people are still fearful of what a greater move toward repatriation might mean. And it is something that would affect the world's most prominent art museums, including the met, the Louver and many others, lots and lots of them. And so it's a huge, huge issue and like a massive conversation that's going on throughout the world of art and art history and museums and all of that. Uh. Well, probably talk some more about those ideas in our behind the Scenes many so uh which will be out on Friday. It's a safe bet. Yeah. Um. I have a listener mail, so who takes out before we get to that sweet This is from Stephanie. Stephanie says, Hello, Tracy and Holly. I'm a longtime listener and absolutely love your show. I was particularly excited to hear your show about Alfred Wegner, because although I don't know much about his working continental drift, I am familiar with his final expedition. You mentioned in the know that the researchers who made it out to ice Mended were able to do some work before Vegnar arrived, but I wanted to note just how important that work was. While waiting out the winter, Earnst Sworge Hand dug a sixteen meter deep pit into the ice and developed a new method for measuring the seasonal accumulation of ice on the glacier using its density that could be used even if the layers were not visible. Later, this technique would be critical in the discovery of man made climate change. What I love about the story is that it further proves how important scientific research is, even if the importance isn't clear for years and years. Thank you so much for all the work you do. Happy podcasting, Stephanie. Thank you Stephanie for this email. UM. I had read a little about the ice cores that they took during that expedition, but I did not know that detail about them, so thank you so much for sending that. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast where History podcast at my heart radio dot com. And then we're all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also subscribe to our show on Apple podcast, the I heart radio app, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts, for my heart radio visits, i heeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.