But it was only by means of renewed efforts at Constantinople, and after a long delay, that the artists and their assistant labourers were enabled to act with freedom and to make thorough explorations. So long as the French remained masters of Egypt Lord Elgin had to win every little concession piecemeal, and obtained it grudgingly. As soon as it became apparent that the British Expedition would be finally successful, the tone of the Turkish government was entirely altered. They were now eager to satisfy the Ambassador, and to lay him under obligation. |Influence of the British Victories in Egypt.| Firmauns were given, which empowered him, not only to make models, but ‘to take away any pieces of stone from the temples of the idols with old inscriptions or figures thereon,’ at his pleasure. Instructions were sent to Athens which had the effect of making the Acropolis itself a scene of busy and well-rewarded labour. Theretofore a heavy admission fee had been exacted at each visit of the draughtsmen or modellers. Before the close of 1802, more than three hundred labourers were at work under the direction of Lusieri—with results which are familiar to the world.

It is less widely known that, had Napoleon’s plans in Egypt been carried to a prosperous issue, the ‘Elgin Marbles’ would, beyond all doubt, have become French marbles. When Lord Elgin’s operations began, French agents were actually resident in Athens, awaiting the turn of events and prepared to profit by it, in the way of resuming the operations which M. de Choiseul Gouffier had long previously begun.[[63]]

Instances of Turkish Devastation.

1674.

The efforts of the British Ambassador became the more timely and imperative from the fact that no amount of experience or warning was sufficient to deter the Turks from their favourite practice of converting the finest of the Greek Temples into powder magazines. Twenty of the metopes of the northern side of the Parthenon had been, in consequence of this practice, destroyed by an explosion during the Venetian siege of Athens in the seventeenth century. |1800.| The Temple of Neptune was found by Lord Elgin devoted to the same use, at the beginning of the nineteenth.

No methods of extending his researches, so as to make them as nearly exhaustive as the circumstances would admit, were overlooked by the ambassador. Through the friendship of the Capitan Pasha, Lord Elgin had already, whilst yet at the Dardanelles, obtained the famous Boustrophedon inscription from Cape Sigæum. Through the friendship of the Archbishop of Athens, he now procured leave to search the churches and convents of Attica, and the search led to his possession of many of the minor but very interesting works of sculpture and architecture which came eventually to England along with the marbles of the Parthenon.

Of the curious range and variety of the dangers to which the remains of ancient art were exposed under Turkish rule, the Boustrophedon inscription just mentioned affords an instance worth noting. |Memoranda on the Earl of Elgin’s Pursuits in Greece, &c., p. 35.| Lord Elgin found it in use as a seat, or couch, at the door of a Greek chapel, to which persons afflicted with ague or rheumatism were in the habit of resorting, in order to recline on this marble, which, in their eyes, possessed a mysterious and curative virtue. The seat was so placed as to lift the patient into a much purer air than that which he had been wont to breathe below, and it commanded a most cheerful sea-view; but it was the ill fate of the inscription to have a magical fame, instead of the atmosphere. Constant rubbing had already half obliterated its contents. But for Lord Elgin, the whole would soon have disappeared. At Athens itself, the loftier of the sculptures in the Acropolis enjoyed equal favour in the eyes of Turkish marksmen, as affording excellent targets.

In the course of various excavations made, not only at Athens, but at Æginæ, Argos, and Corinth, a large collection of vases was also formed. It was the first collection which sufficed, incontestibly, to vindicate the claim of the Greeks to the invention of that beautiful ware, to which the name of ‘Etruscan’ was so long and so inaccurately given.

Ibid., 31.

One of the most interesting of the many minor discoveries made in the course of Lord Elgin’s researches comprised a large marble vase, five feet in circumference, which enclosed a bronze vase of thirteen inches diameter. In this were found a lachrymatory of alabaster and a deposit of burnt bones, with a myrtle-wreath finely wrought in gold. This discovery was made in a tumulus on the road leading from Port Piræus to the Salaminian Ferry and Eleusis.