On May 22, 2025, the government of the United Kingdom signed the much-discussed treaty transferring sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, which included a lease agreement for the strategically vital Diego Garcia military base, at a price of £101 million per year for 99 years (to be adjusted for inflation). The handover — described variously in the British press as a “lousy deal” that “essentially amounts to a massive gift from British taxpayers to the Mauritian government,” and a “shameful surrender” that “will go down as this nation’s foreign policy nadir,” representing the “perfect example of Britain ceasing to be a country that can be taken seriously” — was nevertheless inevitable, given the extent to which Keir Starmer’s Labour government is consumed with post-colonial guilt. After all, it was no less a figure than David Lammy, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of the United Kingdom, who five years ago raised the prospects of reparations to come: “The starting point is truth and reconciliation … We’re no longer in a society where we question notions like white privilege. And then we get to a point where we have to discuss power and reckoning and repairing – and that to some extent is obviously financial.”
It should hardly be surprising, then, to hear that another humiliating handover is in the offing. On June 6, 2025, The Critic reported that George Osborne, Chairman of the British Museum, has agreed in principle to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, not permanently, we can assume, as the British Museum Act 1963 forbids the deaccession of collection items, but in the form of a permanent loan. The British Museum would not admit that its policy had changed, only that discussions with Greece concerning a so-called Parthenon Partnership are “on-going and constructive,” and that “We believe that this kind of long term partnership would strike the right balance between sharing our greatest objects with audiences around the world, and maintaining the integrity of the incredible collection we hold at the museum.”
The debate over the rightful ownership of the Parthenon Marbles, which were excavated and removed from Athens by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, in the early years of the 19th century, and sold to the British government in 1816, has been raging for more than two centuries now. Lord Byron, in his narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, famously complained that
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved
To guard those relics ne’er to be restored:—
Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,
And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
And snatched thy shrinking Gods to Northern climes abhorred!
Yet Lord Elgin himself initially had no intention of removing the marbles from the Athenian Acropolis, only wishing to document them; it was only after seeing that “Every traveller coming added to the general defacement of the statuary in his reach” that the Scottish diplomat and art collector decided to preserve the sculptures for posterity by taking them back to Britain, with the permission of the Ottoman authorities who held sway in Greece at the time. Contrary to Byron’s lament, it was not Lord Elgin doing the defacing. And there were cultural figures lining up with Elgin against Byron, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who delighted in the acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles, destined to inspire “a new age of great art,” while the poet Felicia Hemans wondered:
And who may grieve that, rescued from their hands,
Spoilers of excellence and foes of art,
Thy relics, Athens! borne to other lands
Claim homage still to thee from every heart?
Thus did two camps form, the Restitutionists and the Retentionists, which exist to this day, their rhetoric less stirring, perhaps, but their fundamental arguments otherwise unchanged.
We may begin with the premise that Greece, despite claims by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis that the marbles were “essentially stolen,” has no legal basis to contest British ownership of the Elgin Marbles. An 1816 parliamentary inquiry concluded that Elgin had purchased the sculptures fair and square, and although the Greek government has attempted to list the dispute with UNESCO, even that flawed agency has concluded that the issue must be addressed at the intergovernmental level. Greek attempts to contest the firman (an official Ottoman decree) allowing Elgin’s acquisition of the artworks, on the grounds that it is not really a firman but a buyuruldi (an official order from the Grand Vizier) or a mektub (official letter), are decidedly unconvincing, given that, as the British archaeologist and curator Dyfri Williams has rightly stated, “[w]hatever the exact form of the document was, it clearly had to be obeyed, and it was.” In the words of Daniel Hannan, “[f]ree contract and private property trump the superstitious idea that being descended from someone, or at least living in the same part of the world, establishes some kind of ownership right.”
Most arguments for the return of the Elgin Marbles, of the sort found in Christopher Hitchens’ The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (1997), present a moral or aesthetic case. Greeks will maintain that Athens was under Ottoman occupation at the time, and thus the transaction was illegitimate, while a Turkish spokesman bizarrely argued in 2024 that the Ottomans had clean hands, since the excavations were actually carried out by “UK colonialists.” For the late Graham Binns, former chairman of the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles, it was more a matter of making the Acropolis whole again:
The advantages of having every surviving part of the monument in one place are obvious. The concept is that of a unity — a spacious, well-conditioned and well-arranged museum from which the visitor will leave by one of the old processional routes, to the rock itself. It is a concept that satisfies the requirements of research and scholarship, and it will make a visit to the Acropolis the vision that it should be, rather than the scattered jigsaw it has become. We have the missing pieces in London. Have we got the spirit to give them back?
The same argument, of course, could be made of any number of artifacts in museum collections. Would there be advantages to having the Pergamon Altar, the centerpiece of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, shipped back to Pergamon? Would there be advantages to having the Rosetta Stone back in Sais? As Lord Strabolgi asked during a 1997 exchange on the subject in the House of Lords, “My Lords, is my noble friend aware that such a move would be an unwelcome precedent? If we started to return works of art to other countries, there would not be much left in our museums and galleries.”
The Greek response to such a slippery slope argument is that the Parthenon Marbles represent a special case, and that the survival of the Parthenon — badly damaged during the 1687 Siege of the Acropolis, but still standing and therefore able to showcase the various friezes, metopes, pediments, and other sculptures in British possession — alone necessitates restitution. I will be the first to admit that the Elgin Marbles are extraordinary works of art. How many times have I visited them, just to see the marble head of one of the horses drawing the chariot of the moon goddess Selene, once located east pediment of the Parthenon, and now on display in Room 18 of the British Museum, its eyes bulging, its jaw gaping, its nostrils flaring, its mane stiff, its veins bulging, its skin taut. Yet in that same museum, one can find equally masterful works in a similar vein, like the marble forepart of a horse that belonged to another colossal chariot group, this time at the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, a sculpture of equivalent if not superior sensitivity and vitality. Even the marble forepart of a horse from the Lanuvium Rider Group, an object that is not at present even on display, rivals the Elgin Marbles’ Selene Horse. The case for the restitution of these works of art, to Turkey and Italy, respectively, is not much weaker than the Greek case, and should likewise be rejected.
Tiffany Jenkins, a trustee of the British Museum and author of Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended up in Museums and Why They Should Keep Them (2016), has maintained that the “mission of museums should be to acquire, conserve, research, and display their collections to all. That is all and that is enough.” The time has come “to stop revelling in the wrongs of the past, to stop the recriminations. Political grievances cannot be overcome through the manipulation of objects.” One defender of the British claim to the Elgin Marbles, Bijan Omrani, has attempted a sort of moral jujitsu, noting that the Parthenon was constructed by an imperial power, Athens, that extorted money from islands like Naxos and Thasos, and since “Athens’ amorality abroad paid for its cultural efflorescence at home,” then
let the Marbles be loaded into some giant amphibious craft to roll from town to town around the Aegean, thus making reparation to the Delian cities for Athenian colonialism; or perhaps they should even be divided Solomon-like into an 150-odd pieces, one for each city: a reclining Dionysus for Naxos, Zeus on his couch for Thasos, perhaps a centaur grappling with a lapith for unfortunate Melos.
It is a cute argument, and a welcome thumb in the eye of the blustering Athenians, but we needn’t overthink the matter. The British Museum has amassed its collection, one that has made it the most popular museum in the world, spreading knowledge of humanity’s shared cultural heritage more effectively than any other institution on earth. “That is all and that is enough.”
The ancient Greek rhetorician Isocrates, in his oration Panegyricus, declared that “So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene a badge of education rather than of common descent.” Any member of Western civilization has a claim on the Hellenic inheritance. In the words of Felicia Hemans,
And who can tell how pure, how bright, a flame
Caught from these models, may illumine the West?
What British Angelo may rise to fame,
On the free isle what beams of art may rest?
The confidence to create and exhibit encyclopedic museum collections is a sort of barometer of civilizational self-confidence. If the British government does indeed needlessly surrender the Elgin Marbles, we may regard it as yet another “example of Britain ceasing to be a country that can be taken seriously,” and becoming a self-flagellating country so subsumed with post-colonial guilt that it must invent it even in cases where none exists.
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Confronting the Shadows: Shūsaku Endō’s Rediscovered Masterpieces