More coverage of the fact that the Intelligence Squared debate on the Parthenon Marbles, will be relayed live to the Acropolis Museum in Athens.

Note also, that the final lineup for the debate has now been announced. Andrew George MP (Chair of the Marbles Reunited campaign) is to replace Anna Diamantopoulou, who is no longer able to attend because of the new elections that have been called in Greece for June 17th.

The chair for the debate has also been announced as BBC News presenter Zeinab Badawi.

From:
Kathimerini (English Edition)

Live from London: Debating on the Parthenon Marbles
Thursday June 7, 2012 (17:53)

Greece has found a number of prominent allies in the ongoing 200-year-old discussion on whether the Parthenon Marbles should leave the premises of the British Museum in London and return to Athens.

“What greater gesture could be made to Greece in its appalling finance distress? An act of friendship, atonement and an expression of faith in the future of the cradle of democracy would be so, well just so damned classy,” British comedian and author Stephen Fry wrote on the subject of their possible return in an essay published in December last year.
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Intelligence Squared are organising a debate about whether the Parthenon Sculptures should be returned to Greece.

Speakers include Stephen Fry, who has recently written at length about why he supports the campaign for their return.

According to the website, the debate will also be later screened on BBC World News.

From:
Intelligence Squared

Send them back: The Parthenon Marbles should be returned to Athens
June 11th, 2012, Cadogan Hall
Doors open at 6pm. The debate will begin at 6.45pm and finish at 8.30pm

What’s all this nonsense about sending the Parthenon Marbles back to Greece? If Lord Elgin hadn’t rescued them from the Parthenon in Athens and presented them to the British Museum almost 200 years ago, these exquisite sculptures – the finest embodiment of the classical ideal of beauty and harmony – would have been lost to the ravages of pollution and time. So we have every right to keep them: indeed, returning them would set a dangerous precedent, setting off a clamour for every Egyptian mummy and Grecian urn to be wrenched from the world’s museums and sent back to its country of origin. It is great institutions like the British Museum that have established such artefacts as items of world significance: more people see the Marbles in the BM than visit Athens every year. Why send them back to relative obscurity?

But aren’t such arguments a little too imperialistic? All this talk of visitor numbers and dangerous precedents – doesn’t it just sound like an excuse for Britain to hold on to dubiously acquired treasures that were removed without the consent of the Greek people to whom they culturally and historically belong? That’s what Lord Byron thought, and now Stephen Fry is taking up the cause. We should return the Marbles as a gesture of solidarity with Greece in its financial distress, says Fry, and as a mark of respect for the cradle of democracy and the birthplace of rational thought.
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