Not until the house was entirely destroyed did the one-time owner calmly stroll up to the ruins and announce that all the marbles had been ground down to make mortar for his dwelling. It seems incredible, yet it is literally true that the greatest works of art ever created by man were pulverized to make cement for a workman’s house. The incident was but one of a series of such acts of vandalism. On another occasion a Turk, getting at some of the statues, smilingly knocked the head off one of the figures and deliberately smashed it to bits because the people, whom he called Christian dogs, admired it.
The fragments of sculptures that remained were gathered up by loving hands and packed into cases. But there was much delay before they reached England. Lord Elgin, owing to our war with France, became a prisoner in Paris, and the cases containing the sculptures lay neglected in Malta and other places.
Some of the Elgin marbles which now grace the British Museum were for a period at the bottom of the sea. The Mentor, on which they were shipped, was wrecked at Cerigo in the Grecian Archipelago, and went down in 60 feet of water. For three years a fight was waged to rescue these treasures from the sea-bed, and only after considerable difficulty were all the cases eventually recovered by divers.
While the art world acclaimed Lord Elgin for having saved some of the most beautiful statues in the world, the Government looked upon him askance. He spent a fortune of about £80,000 in acquiring the wonderful collection, and it was questioned whether the sculptures were really his private property. Directly he gave the State the opportunity of acquiring them on behalf of the public, the Government began to haggle about the price as though the sculptures were an everyday article of commerce such as tea or sugar. A Commission was appointed to go into the matter and many people were examined, giving the impression that Lord Elgin, in expending his private fortune to rescue the priceless sculptures of Phidias from the destroying hands of the Turks, had committed some grave crime. Famous sculptors like John Flaxman, R.A., and Joseph Nollekins, R.A., went before the Commission and spoke enthusiastically about the beauty of the ancient marbles that had once graced the Parthenon; artists like Sir Thomas Lawrence sang their praises; the President of the Royal Academy said the marbles were incomparable.
All the time the question of value kept cropping up. “How much do you think they are worth?” the artists were asked. The artists did not know. How could they say? It was impossible for them to fix a price on beautiful things they considered priceless.
But it was not impossible for the Government. The value of the Elgin Marbles was set down at £35,000. The wonderful sculptures which many American millionaires to-day would pay anything to obtain were valued then at £35,000. The nation owes much to Lord Elgin for acquiring from the ruins of Athens these matchless relics of the time when Athens was the first city of the world and Greek art was blooming in all its beauty.
Lord Elgin rescued the glories of Greece that were still visible, but Schliemann nearly three quarters of a century later had the extraordinary insight and genius to delve into the dim past before Greece was, before Troy was a nation, back to the misty beginnings of that ancient race whose writings even now we are unable to read.
The puzzling characters inscribed on the pottery dug up by Schliemann gave him the clue where to look for the earliest traces of that race. With rare judgment, amounting to genius, he pointed to Knossos, in Crete, as the seat from which the Mediterranean civilization sprang.
By courtesy of the British School at Athens