Row over Parthenon Marbles a pure distillation of culture wars that wrack British psyche

The Parthenon Marbles used to adorn the periphery of the Parthenon temple, looming over Athens from the peak of the Acropolis. Now, they sit in a dingy side room of the British Museum in central London. This – more than any other conceivable reason – is why Britain must return them to Greece.

It is not a question of propriety, law, nationalism or decolonisation – though all four of those ideas have clouded this debate for too long. Instead, it is a question of aesthetics. It is a question of appreciating beauty. And, in spite of what those who continue to hoard the sculptures in the British Museum say, it is about respecting our shared history.

George Osborne, the Chair of the British Museum, is in the midst of brokering a deal that could see the marbles loaned to the Parthenon Museum – a paragon of the modern museum to which all others should aspire, designed by Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, nestled at the southern base of the Acropolis, with perfect views of the mountain and its ruins.

Once we might have said that the marbles are better off in London because Greece lacked any adequate place to store and display them – now that argument cannot hold.

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Since the Greek government made a formal request for the return of the sculptures in 1983, the row has come to be a pure distillation of the culture wars that wrack the British psyche, a means to signify political affiliation. In a grand sense, those who argue they should remain in London are demonstrating their refusal to succumb to the woolly and the woke; instead maintaining pride in Britain and its national museum.

Though the nation’s history is complex, it is no point of shame.

In a practical sense the arguments go something like this: the marbles were acquired legally; the fight for their return is a project of petty Greek nationalism; the Greeks could not be trusted to look after them anyway; the British Museum has a greater footfall than the Acropolis; this is an act of preservation and nuanced thinking; it is not just right for Britain but for humanity that the marbles sit in a poorly lit ground-floor room in Bloomsbury.

[ Greece says Parthenon marbles return not linked to Brexit talks ]

But no part of this case is underpinned by a reverence for history. Instead it is espoused by cultural iconoclasts who moonlight as concerned guardians. For all the appeals to propriety and conservation it seems we have lost a foundational, guiding principle: Beauty matters, and respecting our history means respecting the beautiful things people made before us.

If we accept these things as more important than foot traffic and quibbles over legality, then we cannot avoid the conclusion that Britain is currently doing a great disservice to the marbles and to all those who visit them.

We have been told that they were sustaining too much damage in smoggy Athens. But in 1938 museum workmen in Britain cleaned the marbles, scrubbing away their patina and leaving them unnaturally white, their true nature irrevocably changed.

Crucially they are also separated from their source. Meant to be soaked in the Athenian sun, they instead absorb the artificial light of the British museum.

Meant to face outwards from the Parthenon, in London they are displayed the wrong way round, inward towards the viewer.

And the frieze is meant to tell the story of the Lapiths and the Centaurs, the West pediment the fight for Athens between Athena and Poseidon, the East pediment the birth of Athena. How could that have any more resonance in London? What greater benefit can be gleaned from them divorced entirely from context? Why is it better to see the famous oxen lowing not at the Mediterranean sky but instead at a British ceiling?

The location of the marbles is intrinsic to how we understand them, to how we understand the foundational myths of classical Athens. It is hard to overstate the influence of these stories on the Western imagination.

Respecting that history then becomes a process of psychological excavation – a means to understand ourselves as we live now. The aesthetic case for repatriating the marbles is more than just that, it is the moral one too. And keeping them in place? To maintain the British Museum’s engorged collection? Tell me that is not an act borne out of so-called petty nationalism. Or for the still disputed propriety of Lord Elgin’s acquisition of them in 1816? As though it is not a tawdry bickering match designed to obfuscate the overwhelmingly obvious case for their restitution.

[ Elgin Marbles highlight Ireland’s complicated role in British empire ]

But if we start here, where do we stop? Until all the museums of the world are gutted and we embark on a tedious and brutal process of repatriation? Yes, that would be a failure to respect the purpose of museums and the importance of cultural exchange. But the “slippery slope” argument does a great disservice to the intellectual capacity of everyone involved in the conversation – to assume they lack the ability to distinguish on a case-by-case basis. The return of the Parthenon Marbles would not see every artefact world-over relitigated. But it would remind us that respecting their beauty is the ultimate act of historical reverence.