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Article: Letter: the opening in June of the Acropolis Museum in Athens has rekindled the quarrel over the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. Guy Weill Goudchaux--who is neither British nor Greek--invites us to consider some points.
- Article from:
- Apollo
- Article date:
- September 1, 2009
- Author:
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It is possible to imagine circumstances in which the Greek demand that the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum should be returned to Athens might have greater force. If modern Greeks still worshipped Athena and intended to rebuild the Parthenon to use it again as a temple, their claim would be comparable with those that have led museums to hand ancestral bones to Australian Aborigines for religious reasons. But modern Greeks are Orthodox or agnostic and the Parthenon lost its original identity, more than a millennium and an half ago.
When, in the early 19th century, Lord Elgin, then ambassador to Constantinople, visited a small town lost in Attica called ...