January 16, 2006

Dorothy King’s book

Posted at 1:15 pm in Elgin Marbles

Two more reviews of Dorothy King’s book on the Elgin Marbles that has just been published. Neither seems particularly positive about either the content, or the general way in which it is presented.

From:
The Independent

HUTCHINSON £18.99 (340pp) £17.99 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897
The Elgin Marbles, by Dorothy King
Ruins, rhetoric and restitution
By Paul Cartledge
Published: 13 January 2006

This sorry book gets off to a very bad start. Actually, it is about the Parthenon marbles as a whole, not merely those marbles currently in the British Museum which may properly be called “the Elgin Marbles”. Lord Elgin (Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl) does not enter the story – or rather, Dorothy King’s version – until two-thirds of the way through. The question of whether, as it claims, the Elgin Marbles constitute “archaeology’s greatest controversy” is both ambiguous (greatest ever? Or greatest current?) and substantively moot.

After that bad start, it gets almost unbelievably worse. There are so many elementary errors of fact, transcription and description in the opening historical chapters that it is hard to credit that the author really did get both an undergraduate and a graduate degree in classical archaeology from a reputable university. For small instance: there was no democracy at Athens before 508/7 BC. Hope was precisely what did not emerge from Pandora’s box – in fact pithos or jar. “Erechthonios” should be “Erichthonios”, “epastatei” is not ancient Greek, “yolk” for “yoke” would be funny were it not painful. And so on…

Her publishers, moreover, have let her down rather badly. It is becoming a cliché to lament the absence of modern equivalents of editors such as the legendary Maxwell Perkins. But Dr King seems to have had no editorial guidance whatsoever.

Apart from faults of fact and style, there is a fundamental flaw in the book’s conception. It is a very bad idea to write what purports to be history in the form of all-too undisguised propaganda. Nor is it a good idea to seek to counter what she takes to be the defamation of Lord Elgin by an equal and opposite defamation of his adversary Edward Clarke – or of anyone else whose common crime is not to agree that the Elgin Marbles should be where they now are.

The heart of the author’s case resides in its final chapter, “The Debate over the Elgin Marbles: who owns them, and where do they belong?” Unfortunately for King, as is the way with matters of urgent political concern, events have moved on since she submitted her final draft. The British Committee which she crudely lumps with the despised “restitutionists” is now the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles. There’s a huge difference.

“Restitution” implies a legal and moral status quo that has been impaired and can and should be rectified. Restitution must be to someone or some body, the state of Greece or “the Greek people”. But when the sculptures were removed by Elgin’s team in the 1800s, what was then left of the Parthenon after the 1687 explosion found itself in Ottoman Greece. Though there was a Greek people, it was a very different Greek people from that of 2006, who are constituent members of an independent sovereign state within the EU and subscribe to the articles of Unesco under which the overall programme of conservation on the Acropolis of Athens has been conducted since 1977.

It is that state which is responsible for constructing a dedicated museum near the Acropolis to house the reunited Parthenon marbles. Easily the largest single collection of the diaspora marbles is in the British Museum, but there are significant pieces elsewhere. To avoid the obfuscatory issue of “ownership”, and the overdetermined issue of how can one pay restitution to a state or people that no longer exists, it is more fruitful to speak now of “reunification”, not “restitution”. Though even that is unsatisfactory, since all that can be reunited is what’s left – and, so far as the sculpture goes, not on the Parthenon itself.

Besides, what we mean when we say “the Parthenon” is itself an issue, not a given. Even a non-philosopher like me can see that it can hardly be the same building as erected almost 2500 years ago. The moral-political issue of reunification must turn ultimately not on emotion, but on the scholarly issues of the study, conservation and communication of understanding of the available remains of this extraordinary building.

The Parthenon is “as much a modern icon as an ancient ruin” (to quote Mary Beard, author of the best short book on the subject); it is or contains “the most important ancient sculpture to survive from classical antiquity” (Ian Jenkins, writing then as the assistant keeper with responsibility for the Elgin Marbles); and it may even be “the Western world’s biggest cultural cliché” (Peter Green’s pugnacious formulation). At any rate, it’s famous for being famous, but its fame is in no way helpfully explicated by a defective work such as that under review here.

Paul Cartledge is a Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and a member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles

This sorry book gets off to a very bad start. Actually, it is about the Parthenon marbles as a whole, not merely those marbles currently in the British Museum which may properly be called “the Elgin Marbles”. Lord Elgin (Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl) does not enter the story – or rather, Dorothy King’s version – until two-thirds of the way through. The question of whether, as it claims, the Elgin Marbles constitute “archaeology’s greatest controversy” is both ambiguous (greatest ever? Or greatest current?) and substantively moot.

After that bad start, it gets almost unbelievably worse. There are so many elementary errors of fact, transcription and description in the opening historical chapters that it is hard to credit that the author really did get both an undergraduate and a graduate degree in classical archaeology from a reputable university. For small instance: there was no democracy at Athens before 508/7 BC. Hope was precisely what did not emerge from Pandora’s box – in fact pithos or jar. “Erechthonios” should be “Erichthonios”, “epastatei” is not ancient Greek, “yolk” for “yoke” would be funny were it not painful. And so on…

Her publishers, moreover, have let her down rather badly. It is becoming a cliché to lament the absence of modern equivalents of editors such as the legendary Maxwell Perkins. But Dr King seems to have had no editorial guidance whatsoever.

Apart from faults of fact and style, there is a fundamental flaw in the book’s conception. It is a very bad idea to write what purports to be history in the form of all-too undisguised propaganda. Nor is it a good idea to seek to counter what she takes to be the defamation of Lord Elgin by an equal and opposite defamation of his adversary Edward Clarke – or of anyone else whose common crime is not to agree that the Elgin Marbles should be where they now are.

The heart of the author’s case resides in its final chapter, “The Debate over the Elgin Marbles: who owns them, and where do they belong?” Unfortunately for King, as is the way with matters of urgent political concern, events have moved on since she submitted her final draft. The British Committee which she crudely lumps with the despised “restitutionists” is now the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles. There’s a huge difference.

“Restitution” implies a legal and moral status quo that has been impaired and can and should be rectified. Restitution must be to someone or some body, the state of Greece or “the Greek people”. But when the sculptures were removed by Elgin’s team in the 1800s, what was then left of the Parthenon after the 1687 explosion found itself in Ottoman Greece. Though there was a Greek people, it was a very different Greek people from that of 2006, who are constituent members of an independent sovereign state within the EU and subscribe to the articles of Unesco under which the overall programme of conservation on the Acropolis of Athens has been conducted since 1977.

It is that state which is responsible for constructing a dedicated museum near the Acropolis to house the reunited Parthenon marbles. Easily the largest single collection of the diaspora marbles is in the British Museum, but there are significant pieces elsewhere. To avoid the obfuscatory issue of “ownership”, and the overdetermined issue of how can one pay restitution to a state or people that no longer exists, it is more fruitful to speak now of “reunification”, not “restitution”. Though even that is unsatisfactory, since all that can be reunited is what’s left – and, so far as the sculpture goes, not on the Parthenon itself.

Besides, what we mean when we say “the Parthenon” is itself an issue, not a given. Even a non-philosopher like me can see that it can hardly be the same building as erected almost 2500 years ago. The moral-political issue of reunification must turn ultimately not on emotion, but on the scholarly issues of the study, conservation and communication of understanding of the available remains of this extraordinary building.

The Parthenon is “as much a modern icon as an ancient ruin” (to quote Mary Beard, author of the best short book on the subject); it is or contains “the most important ancient sculpture to survive from classical antiquity” (Ian Jenkins, writing then as the assistant keeper with responsibility for the Elgin Marbles); and it may even be “the Western world’s biggest cultural cliché” (Peter Green’s pugnacious formulation). At any rate, it’s famous for being famous, but its fame is in no way helpfully explicated by a defective work such as that under review here.

Paul Cartledge is a Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and a member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles

From:
The Independent on Sunday

HUTCHINSON £18.99/£16.99 (P&P FREE) 08700 798 897
The Elgin Marbles, by Dorothy King
What’s Colin Firth doing with the marbles?
By Vera Rule
Published: 15 January 2006

What an exasperating volume: 295 pages pass before its main point, which is its short final polemic in harrumphing prose insisting that the Parthenon sculptures should remain in the custodianship of the British Museum. All the rest, including the belated arrival on page 220 of Lord Elgin, is but preface to King’s disparagement of Greek management of antiquities. I’m not among those fervently convinced that the return of the marbles to Athens so they can be seen again under blue Attic skies is the only course: they are likely to swap immuration in a big, free museum for ditto on smaller, pricier premises, and anyway Athenian skies are too hazed with exhalations to be that blue.

But I won’t be addressed as a public meeting, especially after I’ve read with curiosity all the preceding chapters of background, from the Parthenon’s completion in 434BC, and been left not merely irritated by rambling and repetition, but unsatisfied. Not for want of hard facts: King amasses professional archaeological detail, referring to figures by their scholarly identification alphanumerics without even a key; the book really needs a pullout strip-cartoon of where all the bits fitted, instead of a scramble of snaps of marmorial tits and fragments of tantalising sketches inked before the 1687 explosion. (A groundplan would help.) And not for want of frivolity: King has clearly decided that Lord Elgin is a Colin Firth role, what with the two monied wives, the loss of his nose, his fierce rivalries with failed fellow-collectors, and she never misses an excuse for just-relevant gossip – the first Lady Elgin on Emma Hamilton (“She is indeed a Whapper! And I think her manner very vulgar”), or Melina Mercouri kissing the floor of a BM gallery and declaiming its exhibits to be “our history, our soul” before being helped up by a curator who explained that the sculptures were indeed beautiful, “but the Elgin Marbles are in the next room.”

But then, it may not be King’s fault. Dissatisfaction seems intrinsic to the Parthenon. It wasn’t ever what subsequent ages presumed it to be. King certainly is brilliant on its original construction and purposes. It wasn’t a temple, although it was erected to house a giant statue of Athena Parthenos, goddess of the city-state and its brief empire, and to commemorate that state’s victory over the Persians at Marathon. The statue’s flesh was ivory over wood, and her robes were cast from a ton of the Athenian treasury’s gold reserves; the Parthenon was somewhere between the Lincoln Memorial and Fort Knox. They seem to have kept the moulds of sculptor Pheidias so Athens could melt its assets in an emergency, and cast the drapes again when flush, until dwindling prosperity forced a trade-down to gilded bronze. Moreover, the Parthenon wasn’t a dominating edifice, despite the prime location: by the time of its founder-funder Pericles (he signed the cheques), the building had to be overlaid on an Acropolis already cluttered with heritage, jammed in like a monumental clock among the ornaments on a Victorian mantelpiece. It would have been impossible to get a clear sightline of those carvings whose battered remains we have come to admire in extreme close-up. Nor was the Parthenon considered that impressive in antiquity. The statue was – gold always awes guidebook compilers – if you could access it, which few could even in Athens, but its carved box didn’t rate worth-the-detour status. Hardly a wonder of the world. More city hall. Alexander the Great, passing through, knew it was the appropriate venue to dedicate suits of captured Persian armour and stick up shields under the frieze, where their pegholes remain.

Indeed, the subsequent history of the Parthenon as its adornments were shed or shaken, stripped and smashed by blast and greed, is melancholy and venal. When Athens was a late classical Oxbridge, it did at last become a proper temple, only to be evicted by Byzantine Christianity. It was converted to a Catholic church, a mosque, dwindled into a store. King hates Byron and his malicious slights on Elgin in Childe Harold, but I feel Lord B was on to something in “Cold is the heart, fair Greece! That looks on thee/ Nor feels as lovers o’er the dust they lov’d”: the Franco-British scramble to own the just-about-portable artworks of ancient empires was personally selfish as well as nationalistically vaunting. Byron did understand selfishness. Mine, mine, all mine! That, despite a narrative of captures, counter-captures, bribes, sunken ships and desolation in dank country gardens, anybody anywhere ended up in safe custody of a single Centaur or charioteer, is almost accidental. And a blessing, wherever they go.

What an exasperating volume: 295 pages pass before its main point, which is its short final polemic in harrumphing prose insisting that the Parthenon sculptures should remain in the custodianship of the British Museum. All the rest, including the belated arrival on page 220 of Lord Elgin, is but preface to King’s disparagement of Greek management of antiquities. I’m not among those fervently convinced that the return of the marbles to Athens so they can be seen again under blue Attic skies is the only course: they are likely to swap immuration in a big, free museum for ditto on smaller, pricier premises, and anyway Athenian skies are too hazed with exhalations to be that blue.

But I won’t be addressed as a public meeting, especially after I’ve read with curiosity all the preceding chapters of background, from the Parthenon’s completion in 434BC, and been left not merely irritated by rambling and repetition, but unsatisfied. Not for want of hard facts: King amasses professional archaeological detail, referring to figures by their scholarly identification alphanumerics without even a key; the book really needs a pullout strip-cartoon of where all the bits fitted, instead of a scramble of snaps of marmorial tits and fragments of tantalising sketches inked before the 1687 explosion. (A groundplan would help.) And not for want of frivolity: King has clearly decided that Lord Elgin is a Colin Firth role, what with the two monied wives, the loss of his nose, his fierce rivalries with failed fellow-collectors, and she never misses an excuse for just-relevant gossip – the first Lady Elgin on Emma Hamilton (“She is indeed a Whapper! And I think her manner very vulgar”), or Melina Mercouri kissing the floor of a BM gallery and declaiming its exhibits to be “our history, our soul” before being helped up by a curator who explained that the sculptures were indeed beautiful, “but the Elgin Marbles are in the next room.”

But then, it may not be King’s fault. Dissatisfaction seems intrinsic to the Parthenon. It wasn’t ever what subsequent ages presumed it to be. King certainly is brilliant on its original construction and purposes. It wasn’t a temple, although it was erected to house a giant statue of Athena Parthenos, goddess of the city-state and its brief empire, and to commemorate that state’s victory over the Persians at Marathon. The statue’s flesh was ivory over wood, and her robes were cast from a ton of the Athenian treasury’s gold reserves; the Parthenon was somewhere between the Lincoln Memorial and Fort Knox. They seem to have kept the moulds of sculptor Pheidias so Athens could melt its assets in an emergency, and cast the drapes again when flush, until dwindling prosperity forced a trade-down to gilded bronze. Moreover, the Parthenon wasn’t a dominating edifice, despite the prime location: by the time of its founder-funder Pericles (he signed the cheques), the building had to be overlaid on an Acropolis already cluttered with heritage, jammed in like a monumental clock among the ornaments on a Victorian mantelpiece. It would have been impossible to get a clear sightline of those carvings whose battered remains we have come to admire in extreme close-up. Nor was the Parthenon considered that impressive in antiquity. The statue was – gold always awes guidebook compilers – if you could access it, which few could even in Athens, but its carved box didn’t rate worth-the-detour status. Hardly a wonder of the world. More city hall. Alexander the Great, passing through, knew it was the appropriate venue to dedicate suits of captured Persian armour and stick up shields under the frieze, where their pegholes remain.

Indeed, the subsequent history of the Parthenon as its adornments were shed or shaken, stripped and smashed by blast and greed, is melancholy and venal. When Athens was a late classical Oxbridge, it did at last become a proper temple, only to be evicted by Byzantine Christianity. It was converted to a Catholic church, a mosque, dwindled into a store. King hates Byron and his malicious slights on Elgin in Childe Harold, but I feel Lord B was on to something in “Cold is the heart, fair Greece! That looks on thee/ Nor feels as lovers o’er the dust they lov’d”: the Franco-British scramble to own the just-about-portable artworks of ancient empires was personally selfish as well as nationalistically vaunting. Byron did understand selfishness. Mine, mine, all mine! That, despite a narrative of captures, counter-captures, bribes, sunken ships and desolation in dank country gardens, anybody anywhere ended up in safe custody of a single Centaur or charioteer, is almost accidental. And a blessing, wherever they go.

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1 Comment »

  1. Christopher Gordon said,

    12.30.07 at 11:32 am

    At the end of the year when newspapers fill themselves up with easy copy about favoutite books of the year, I decided to recheck my impressions of the worst book I read in 2007. I was right. Dorothy King’s self-indulgent and sloppy tirade is as awful as I remembered (and just ludicrously wrong at certain points) and the editing possibly even worse. The only significant point of positive interest to me was the section of the original and varied subsequent uses of the building, which does have some value. For the rest, better to draw a veil over it (but maybe the publishers would prefer that to be spelled ‘vale’…)

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