A Long-Playing Greek Tragedy Is Unfolding in Stages

There was no explicit equivalent of the curse of King Tut, the disasters that befell early excavators of Tutankhamen’s tomb, for the sculptural treasures of Greek antiquity. Lord Elgin, who pried up much of the Parthenon’s frieze, and a great deal else, and shipped it all back to London in 1806, might have welcomed a Tut’s curse. It couldn’t have been worse than Lord Byron’s.

Cold, mean and arrogant, Elgin was nevertheless inflamed by a Great Idea: to rescue for what he regarded as civilization, the art of classical Greece, then under the slipshod care of an enfeebled Ottoman Empire. Imperial power had traditionally meant art-stripping, whether it was Napoleon’s loot-as-you-go enrichment of the Louvre, or the Dutch and Flemish paintings that arrived in Madrid during Spain’s 17th-century ascendancy in the Lowlands.

But it was misery all the way for the Englishman. Parliament repaid only half of his vast expenditures, leaving him deeply in debt and forcing him eventually to flee his creditors and die bankrupt. On his way back from Greece, unaware that hostilities had resumed with Britain, he was interned with his family in France for two years. Part of the time, he spent in a dungeon, owing to Napoleon’s particular anger that Elgin had, as he saw it, filched the precious marbles from under his nose.

Elgin’s nose was another affliction. “The strange illness that has devoured most of Elgin’s nose shows no signs of abating,” wrote his wife, Mary, fearing leprosy. His enemies suggested syphilis. Byron, leader of a literary onslaught against imperial pillaging, wrote a cruel couplet linking Elgin’s partly damaged spoils and his entirely spoiled face:

Noseless himself, he brings here noseless blocks

To show what time has done, and what the pox.

Theodore Vrettos’ “The Elgin Affair” takes a decidedly lurching look at Lord Elgin’s life and exploits and the controversy they aroused. It is not really a new look, more of a new old one. With a few exceptions, his primary sources are earlier books published in English.

Vrettos organizes erratically. He leaves gaping holes not just unfilled but unremarked. He also does a good deal of flamboyant breathing. Of Lord and Lady Elgin’s arrival in Naples, en route to the embassy in Constantinople, he writes:

“The Sicilian sky was on fire when HMS Phaeton dropped anchor off Palermo at noon. Inside the stifling bowels of the frigate’s only stateroom, the young bride trickled more vinegar into her silk handkerchief and dabbed it weakly over her face and wrists.”

Fortunately, Mary Nesbit, the newly wed Lady Elgin, was no weak dabber, but a strong-minded woman with a keen eye and a witty pen. Vrettos’ use of her correspondence, published 70 years ago, provides much of his book’s liveliness. Because, despite its flaws, “The Elgin Affair” is lively. That is, where it does not infuriate, it pleases.

If Elgin was something other than a sympathetic character, he was a remarkable one. As ambassador to the Sublime Porte, he won over the Ottoman court by helping organize the British assault (and personally paying for part of it) that finally drove Napoleon from Turkish-held Egypt.

This earned a series of decrees from the sultan that allowed him to bully and bribe the Turkish authorities in Athens to turn a reluctantly blind eye to the depredations of the Elgin team. The disdar (local official) in charge of the Acropolis was obliged to revoke his prohibition against the use of scaffolds, which, he complained, would be used to spy on his harem. And he had to stand by, weeping, when a panel lowered from the Parthenon frieze slipped its ropes and shattered.

Elgin enlisted several diligent classicists, notably the Rev. Philip Hunt. He tried to hire an English artist to supervise the project, but the wages he offered were ludicrously stingy; J.M.W. Turner, among others, turned him down. A team of architects, surveyors and cast-makers was assembled under Giovanni Battista Lusieri, the Italian painter. His stipend was relatively generous, an academic point because Elgin never paid him. Neither did he pay the loyal and industrious Hunt, who had been confident of making his fortune.

The controversy over the Elgin marbles, fierce at the time, died down for a while but has flared periodically. Over the last 20 years, there has been growing sentiment for their return, culminating in a formal request from Greece. It remains to be seen what the response will be from the new Labor government; last year 33 Labor Members of Parliament sponsored a resolution backing the Greek claim.

Vrettos, who shows understanding for Elgin’s achievements and the outrage they produced, ends with the current Lord Elgin’s complaint that even now he must use an assumed name when he visits Greece:

“Indeed he was sorry his great-great-grandfather [had] ever [seen] the bloody stones.”