They fill a long, lovely room in the British Museum. Horses, centaurs, and heroes burst from the stone, frozen in mid-battle. For more than twenty centuries, though, they were high above the Acropolis, filling the spaces between the carefully cut columns on the frieze of the Parthenon. Their distance from viewers would have been partly compensated for by their colorful paint job, very different from the milky marble white we associate with classical sculpture.
They are called the Elgin Marbles, of course, because of the (in)famous Earl of Elgin, who removed them from Greece to England in the early 1800s, taking advantage of some combination of permission and indifference on the part of Greece’s Ottoman rulers. A controversy rages to this day over whether they should be repatriated to Greece—a controversy visible on the ever-informative Wikipedia, and especially its “discussion” page. In fact, Wikipedia’s entry devotes most of its 5,000 words to the aftermath of Elgin’s expedition.
Carved in stone though they are, the Elgin Marbles are a palimpsest, a manuscript that has been written, erased, and written again countless times, with layers of meaning still visible to the careful eye. Indeed, so many layers have clung to these carvings that it is easy to miss their central theme: the battle between the Lapiths, representing an emergent civilized culture, and the Centaurs, representing the ever-present human tendency to retrogress to untamed anarchy. How do the Elgin Marbles, with and without their tortured history, shape the way we see the world?
Start from the name—they assume that the rights of naming belong to the victors (or, I suppose, the owners)—hence they’re by far best known as The Elgin Marbles, and not The Parthenon Marbles, or Phidias’ Centaur Battle Series. They’re even the Elgin Marbles, more or less, in Greek: ???????? ???????.
—Nate BarksdaleThat, to quote Indiana Jones, “This belongs in a museum!”—that great works of art from all cultures, should be protected, studied by experts, and made available for viewing and appreciation by the general public. (And, shifting towards the murkiest ethical depths of the Elgin story—that the ideal museum for such preservation and disply will be in a major city of a first-world country.) Right now one of the strongest arguments for bringing the Marbles back to Athens is that they’ve now got a place ready for them in a first-rate international-standard museum).
—Nate BarksdaleAlso that authenticity now means being left untouched, rather than restored to the original state—at least where antiquities are concerned. I’d love to see at least an artist’s rendition of what the Parthenon would have looked like in all its painted, garish glory…
—Doug RandInsightful and helpful discussion by non-experts!! (Hint-hint).
When I suggested this topic for the fivequestions treatment, Andy worried it might be a bit highbrow compared to, say, bbq. But the point of these discussions is less to solicit additional bits of knowledge or even personal anecdote, but rather to point out, and in our own collective clumsy way embody, that these sorts of cultural questions allow us to ponder a given artifact a bit more deeply, even if it’s something we don’t know much about—or, for that matter, just learned of at the top of this page—and even if you, like me, still couldn’t pick a lapith out of a police lineup.
—Nate BarksdaleInsightful and helpful discussion by non-experts!! (Hint-hint).
When I suggested this topic for the fivequestions treatment, Andy worried it might be a bit highbrow compared to, say, bbq. But the point of these discussions is less to solicit additional bits of knowledge or even personal anecdote, but rather to point out, and in our own collective clumsy way embody, that these sorts of cultural questions allow us to ponder a given artifact a bit more deeply, even if it’s something we don’t know much about—or, for that matter, just learned of at the top of this page—and even if you, like me, still couldn’t pick a lapith out of a police lineup.
—Nate BarksdaleAre these sculptures one possible source of inspiration for Mary Renault’s novel “The King Must Die”? In creating a plausible historical world for the otherwise strictly-mythical Theseus, the book presents centaurs as a tribe of regular humans who have a habit of riding horses bareback. They have less advanced technology than the Athenians, and a very low alcohol tolerance, which leads to some unfortunate goings-on at a certain banquet…
—Doug Rand