Greece is losing its marbles

Ialways thought the Elgin Marbles would be round. Well, to be honest, I barely thought about the Elgin Marbles at all. I knew they were antiquities – spheres of stone, presumably – taken to England from Athens by some colonial hoorah in the year dot and sold to the British Museum. Now, Greece want them back.

Yet this was an idealistic, impossible demand, surely, for if we started taking everything out of western museums and sending it back to whence it came, the great cultural institutions of the world would collapse. No more Louvre, no more Metropolitan, no more Smithsonian …

And then last week I stood atop the Acropolis in Athens beside its monuments and ruins, greatest of them all the Parthenon, and visited the new Acropolis Museum – and finally I understood.

I haven’t stopped thinking about the marbles since, particularly Lord Elgin’s pillaging in the early 1800s, for his team hacked off over half of the marble statuary and panels – hence “marbles” – that adorned the temple, a massive act of vandalism widely condemned, even at the time. This included 80m of the original 160m continuous Parthenon frieze.

Elgin intended using these to decorate his (presumably enormous) house, but he got divorced and ran out of cash, so sold them.

One of the old arguments for keeping these marbles in Britain was that Greece did not have a facility that could offer protection and preservation. However, since 2009 that is no longer true.

The Acropolis Museum is state of the art, with an entire floor dedicated to the sculptures of the Parthenon – the originals brought inside for preservation – arranged as they were on the temple itself.

Except for Elgin’s. These are replaced with plaster casts, white and stark, which the Greeks had to copy from the British Museum, even paying for the privilege.

These white casts sometimes feature an original marble insert – a fragment, a finger, a horse’s hoof – forgotten by Elgin’s gungho crew.

It is certainly time these jigsaw pieces were put back together, revealing the whole picture created by Greek craftsmen 2 500 years ago, and displayed in the shadow of the Parthenon on the hill beyond.

And no, Greece doesn’t want all of its antiquities back: it just wants the rest of the Parthenon Marbles, the full story told again right here at the birthplace of western civilisation – as it should be.