Forbidden History - The Secrets of the Parthenon | Part 3

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

In this final episode of our three-part series, we explore the modern battle over the Parthenon sculptures as a clash between the idea of shared global heritage and the pull of national identity, as Britain and Greece stake competing claims to history itself. Cast List: Dominic Selwood: Journalist Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. We're an independent podcast, and advertisements help keep us going. Ads are automatically placed and not specifically chosen or endorsed by us, unless read by me the host. Thanks for supporting the show. In part two of this special, we saw the focus shift to the removal of the Parthenon fragments by this story's most controversial figure, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, also known as Lord Elgin. The arrival of the fragments in westernized civilization and modern Europe meant these pieces of art had entered a new life. But one thing was still unknown. Where would the most

controversial art in history ultimately end up? The question of where ultimately the sculptures should go is a very naughty one. We live in a world now of contested heritage and calls for restitution. In part three, we'll wrap up the series and discover the importance and cultural significance of these sculptures to the wider world. And what went wrong in the eyes of those who were deemed the protectors? This is a reality of museums. Museums hold objects from other countries. To guide us through the final chapter of the story is Dominic Selwood, historian, author and barrister, who has written extensively on how art moves through history, both politically and culturally.

Hi, I'm Dominic Selwood and I'm a historian and barrister, and I love looking at some of the weirder sides of history. The transportation of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens to London would not have been a small expense. After all, these precious works of art needed to be handled with a high standard of care. So just how did Elgin afford to transport these precious works of art across Europe? He didn't have the sort of wealth that was necessary for this kind of work. So he took out a large number of loans and he was very, very heavily indebted.

There had been a lot of unexpected expenses along the way. For example, his ship, it was a brig called the Mentor, at one stage sank, and the sculptures on it went to the bottom of the ocean. So Elgin had to pay for divers to go down and collect every case of marble and bring them to the surface and reship them, which he did. The divers who recovered the cargo of the Mentor were traditional Greek sponge divers, using techniques that had changed little since antiquity. They did not have modern diving suits, oxygen tanks, or mechanical assistance.

Instead, each dive was a breath-hold descent. Divers prepared by hyperventilating to maximize lung capacity, then plunged feet first, often weighted with a stone, with a stone to speed the descent. Reaching depths of around 20 to 25 meters, they had only a minute or two to work. On the seabed, they located crates or fragments of marble buried in sand and seaweed, attaching ropes or nets

so they could be hauled up by crews waiting on the surface. Once signaled, the diver ascended rapidly, pulled up by the rope or swimming under extreme physical strain. Many suffered from decompression-related illnesses, lung injuries, and long-term health damage, risks that were poorly understood at the time, and accepted as part of the job. This process was repeated hundreds of times over many months. The work was slow and dangerous, but remarkably effective. Not a single piece was lost, but his costs ended up being over 75,000 pounds,

which in those days was a vast amount of money. So he was bankrupted by this experience. It didn't profit him financially. So once all the sculptures had finally made the tumultuous journey to London, what did Elgin decide to do with them? He was bankrupted, it ruined him. So his only option was to try to sell the sculpture. And he decided not to sell it to Napoleon or to sell it to some private individual that could have made him more money, but to sell them to the British nation, in a way to create that school of art that he'd that he'd originally thought about.

And the way to do that was to get Parliament to buy them. Parliament therefore held a select committee on the sculptures in 1816, and it asked itself a number of questions. The first one was, did Elgin have legal title to these sculptures? And the answer they concluded, having seen the paperwork, Hunt's translation of the Furman, was that yes he did. The second question was, had he been acting in a personal capacity or an official capacity? because that again would impact how the nation could acquire these.

And they concluded he'd been acting personally. This wasn't part of his official job as ambassador. This is something he'd done as a private individual. The third question was, are these sculptures any good? And they brought in experts from Britain and Europe who all said these sculptures are not only good, they are truly exceptional. And the final question was, what should they pay Elgin? And Parliament's never been generous with money,

So they didn't look at his expense bill of over 75,000 pounds. They looked at what they thought the market value was, and they put that at 35,000 pounds. So they paid Elgin 35,000. That officially bankrupted him, but it meant the nation got the sculptures. And that was the stage at which Elgin retired into France, and it took his family three or four generations to become solvent again.

But now that Parliament owned the sculptures, Parliament did what it always does with works of art that it owns, it gave them to the nation by putting them in trust with the British Museum. With the sculptures now firmly in the hands of the British Museum, the story now enters its most contested phase. What had once been a question of transport, fermens, and preservation, gradually transformed into something more charged. Over time, arguments hardened,

and the Parthenon sculptures became more than works of art. And it was in the museum gallery, rather than on the Acropolis, that the great discourse we recognize today first began to take shape. One of the results of the deep controversy about the sculptures today is that people look back and try and find examples of saying that Britain did something wrong. And one of the cases that is commonly cited is that in the 1930s, the British Museum damaged the sculptures badly by cleaning them overzealously, with very hard tools. That's not what actually happened. The British Museum cleaned the sculptures

with copper chisels and copper, very importantly, is softer than marble. This was a very common practice at the time and in fact in Greece, 20 years later in the 1950s they were cleaning a temple the Hephaestion in Athens with steel chisels and steel is harder than marble than marble and does do damage. But there was a big international conference and all of this was looked at and raked over. And the conclusion is that there was no damage done to the sculptures

by the cleaning. There are fashions in how sculpture is cleaned in different times. There was a time when sculptures like the David in Florence was cleaned with hydrochloric acid. So we might be a bit horrified now that people are scraping sculptures with copper chisels, but it was something that was done. If you look round the sculptures today, it's impossible to say which of them was cleaned in the 1930s and which wasn't, which is demonstration that no huge damage was done. But most importantly, recently, very small microscopic paint flecks have been found on the sculptures because we know that ancient Greek sculpture was painted and it was always wondered whether the Parthenon was an exception to that.

For centuries, historians believed that ancient sculpture was meant to be pure, white marble. That belief wasn't based on ancient evidence, but on Renaissance and Enlightenment taste, which equated whiteness with intellectual and moral superiority. So when microscopic traces of pigment began to appear on ancient statues, it was deeply unsettling. It meant the classical world had been colourful and expressive, even theatrical, and closer to modern popular art, it meant the classical world had been colourful and expressive, even theatrical, and closer to modern popular art than the austere ideal Europeans had projected onto it.

But now they found the paintflex, they know that the Parthenon 2 was also painted. But that is definitive proof that the Parthenon sculptures in the museum were. not damaged by the cleaning. Also it's a very modern idea to talk about that damage. Melina Mukuri, who in Greece really started the calls for the Parthenon sculptures to be returned when she was Minister of Culture. She said in her opening discussion of all of this in the 1980s that our British friends have looked after the sculptures well. The biggest myth that people repeat about the Parthenon marbles is that Elgin and Britain destroyed a pristine building and have subsequently wrecked the marbles.

Not only was the building a wreck when Elgin turned up, but Britain has looked after the marbles very well, regardless of where you feel they should be today. One very, very visible example is that in the British Museum there is a horse's head. It's from the chariot of the goddess Seleney, which was on the pediment of the Parthenon, and it shows a horse absolutely exhausted.

been pulling the chariot for hours and hours and is quite clearly straining. Its veins are bulging, its eyes are popping. This is an absolutely fatigued animal and the detail is extraordinary. You see crowds around it all the time. It's one of the most engaging pieces of art in the Parthenon sculptures. If you go to the Acropolis Museum in Athens, you'll see two more of those horses from that exact same block of sculpture. And they are unintelligible as objects. They look like fluffy boxes or pillows. They have no detail on them at all.

There are no eyes, there are no teeth, there are no ears. It is impossible to know their horses. And those were left on the Parthenon throughout the 20th century when there was acid rain, car pollution, pollution from the nearby oil refinery at Illusis. and it rubbed all the details off those horses and many, many other pieces of sculpture. So when you look around the New Acropolis Museum, the quality of the sculpture is massively inferior to what is in London. The point about that is that whatever you think about Elgin, and he wasn't the Victorian moustache twirling villain that people claim he was.

He was a well-intentioned, enlightenment person who was trying to save sculpture. The reality is that he did save sculpture. If you look at the quality of the sculpture in London and the quality in Athens, they are night and day. So although the collection is spread across the two cities, if you really want to experience the closest we can get to the original Parthenon sculptures, you have to go and see the ones in London. And for that reason, Elgin is one of the most misunderstood and actually abused characters in history, because he's endlessly spoken of as a villain, as self-serving, as a wrecker, as a despoiler, as an imperialist, as a thief, somebody who should be in prison.

The reality is he was a conservator. He saved sculpture and the empirical evidence is to go and look at the quality of the two collections. By the late 20th century, the argument had shifted. The question was no longer whether the sculptures had been damaged or neglected. but whether they belonged in Britain at all. Preservation gave way to politics and conservation to conscience. The Parthenon sculptures moved into the center of a global argument about who has the right to decide where the past should live.

We'll be right back after a short ad break. The most common argument is that the sculptures are not stand-alone artworks, but integral parts of a single architectural home. Supporters of returning the sculptures argue that the Parthenon was designed as a unified structure. The building and the sculpture must be together, and that separating them permanently fractures its meaning. From this perspective, displaying them in Athens restores the integrity. Author and historian Dominic Selwood tells us more. For a long time, Athens didn't have a museum that could hold.

that could hold the Elgin marbles. But they now absolutely do. The Acropolis Museum in Athens is an absolutely stunning, beautiful, modern state-of-the-art museum. It's a real joy. But one thing that should be mentioned about it is that it's not really a museum of the Parthenon. It's a museum of the Parthenon when it was built.

In other words, they've tried to show what the Parthenon looked like. what the Parthenon looked like the moment that it was unveiled in the 5th century BC. So there's no evidence of the turning it into a church in the 500s or turning it into a mosque or the subsequent damage. So if you visit the Parthenon Museum, you don't get a sense of the building throughout history, you get a sense of what the original building would have looked like. The Acropolis Museum has set the sculpture out with a layout exactly as it would have been on the ancient Parthenon. So a visitor experiences the scale and perspective and layout of the original sculpture scheme on the building. It's been beautifully and very cleverly done. But what a visitor

also hears 50 times in the morning is that the gaps are where some sculptures are held hostage in London. And that is not correct. Because of all of the casts that Elgin's artists took, the The British Museum has copies of everything that was in existence at the time of Elgin. So has provided the Acropolis Museum with copies of everything that is in the British Museum. So the gaps are not what's hostage in London. The gaps are what was lost before Elgin's artists arrived, what was lost just to the ravages of history. So those gaps are simply not known to anyone.

It's not that they're in London. The Parthenon today dominates Athens by day and by night when it's spectacularly illuminated. And you look up and you see what you expect to see. A proper Greek temple with columns, with a roof, with the triangular pediments gleaming in white. When people talk about bringing the Parthenon sculptures back to Athens, they talk about putting them back on the Parthenon, where they can bask under the blue attic sky. There are two problems with that. Firstly, the building that you see in Athens now is not the original Parthenon. It was so hugely damaged over time that when Elgin turned up, for example, there was no roof, most of the sides were missing, lots of it had fallen in, vast amounts were on the ground.

What happened after Elgin in the later 1800s and in the early 1900s and ongoing is a project to rebuild and reconstruct the Parthens. So a lot of the work that was done in the late 1800s is now being redone because things were put slightly in the wrong place. They were also held together with particular metal clamps that are now rusting and damaging the marble, so those need to be removed. But what you see today is a modern reconstruction. That is not the building that Elgin's men would have seen. And secondly, the sculptures can never go back onto the Parthenon. These are world heritage, incredibly old, very fragile, very fragile. The only place they can ever be in London, Athens or anywhere else is inside

and cared for in a museum environment. Some also argue that Elgin's removal of the sculptures occurred under conditions of imperial imbalance, even if it was technically legal at the time. Greece was under Ottoman rule, and the argument follows that the Ottomans had no moral right to authorize the removal of Greek cultural heritage. In this framing, the legality is seen as insufficient. They believe that what matters is whether consent was meaningful in a context where the local population had no sovereignty over its own past. The people who now demand that the sculptures are returned to Athens

point to the British Museum and say the British Museum is being obstructive in not giving these back to Athens and is behaving in a colonial or imperialist way. Of course it's not colonial or imperialist because Elgin didn't take these through warfare or any act of empire. Britain never ruled Athens. But the main point is that Parliament put the sculptures into the British Museum Trust, which governs everything the British Museum holds. And the trustees of the British Museum have no power to give anything away from their collection, unless it's a duplicate or it's damaged or it's unfit to be displayed. And that is not the case with any of the Elgin marbles.

So even if the British Museum wanted to, they have no legal power. They would be breaking the law if they gave the sculptures back to Greece. The only thing that could be done if one day Britain decides that the sculptures should go back to Athens is that Parliament would have to pass a special act of Parliament. So actually this is a matter for politics. politicians not for the British Museum.

The museum and heritage sector around the world thrives on loans. For every big exhibition in one of the world's great museums, a huge number of pieces are borrowed from other countries. There's this constant highway of exchange going on around the world between museums. So the British Museum will lend the Parthenon sculptures. The difficulty has always been that Greece will not accept any of the Parthenon sculptures. as a loan, because they say the sculptures were stolen, they don't belong to Britain, therefore they won't sign any loan document, that has been the perennial stumbling block.

The question of where ultimately the sculptures should go is a very naughty one. We live in a world now of contested heritage and calls for restitution. At the heart of this debate is a deeper philosophical clash. Cultural nationalism argues that objects belong where they were created, that heritage is rooted in place, or identity, and that removing artefacts severs them from their meaning. Universal museums, by contrast, are built on the idea that culture transcends borders, the idea that displaying objects from across the world, side by side, helps tell a shared human story rather than a national one.

Now, people might say to me, Dominic, you're British. It's easy for you to say because the British museums in London and you can go and see it. If you weren't British, you might have a very different view. What if part of Stonehenge was in Azerbaijan? And the answer to that is Britain, like every other country, has its heritage all over the world. The most important Bible, arguably in the history of medieval Bibles, the first complete Latin Bible, was made in Anglo-Saxon England. But it's been in Florence for the last thousand years and I'm happy for it to be there. It's an ambassador for Anglo-Saxon England. It tells people about the culture in England at the time. Greece itself in Athens

has a museum called the Banaki Museum, which is filled with what it says is one of the world's premier collections of Islamic art. And it is. It comes from over 15 different countries. This is a reality of museums. Museums hold objects from other countries and I think that's a very good and a positive thing. And we get rid of that and ask museums to send away everything not from that country at our peril, because the experience of going into a museum then simply becomes one of looking at a reflection in a mirror of your own culture. Other famous British items that are abroad, for example, Shakespeare's first folio is the Holy Grail of Shakespeare books, the first one that contained all of his plays. There aren't many copies in Britain. In America, there are over 50.

America has the Churchill Museum, which again has tens of thousands of objects and memorabilia associated with Churchill, but they're in America, they're not in Britain. America has a Christopher Wren church from the city of England, which was moved brick by brick. Again, not in Britain, in America. And this is a positive thing. This helps cultures learn about other cultures. The argument over the Parthenon sculptures endures, because both sides are in different ways right. Those who call for their return argue that the sculptures are inseparable from the monument they were made for,

that they carry a cultural and emotional weight, which can only be fully understood in Athens, beneath the shadow of the Parthenon itself. For them, return is not about punishment or blame, but about repair and restoring something. something broken by history. On the other side is the case for preservation, legality, and the idea of shared heritage. The sculptures were acquired within the laws of their time, paid for at an enormous personal cost,

and safeguarded for more than two centuries. In institutions like the British Museum, they became part of a global story, viewed not as national property, but as human achievement, accessible to the world. to the world. Critics argue that removing them now would risk weakening the very idea of universal museums. At its core, this is not just a dispute about marble. It is a question about how

we treat the past. Whether history should be corrected, preserved as it unfolded, or negotiated anew by each generation. It asks whether cultural objects belong to the places that created them, people who protected them or to humanity as a whole. Museums have been around since the 1750s. The British Museum opened in 1753 and the idea was to collect things from around the world and help people understand the human story. And museums are places that bring us as a world closer together. So while I'm sympathetic to people who feel that a particular piece of art should be in a particular

country, I don't think it's helpful to give art a passport, whereas actually heritage is global. That now concludes our three-part series on the Parthenon. So what do you think? Should Britain return the sculptures to Greece? Or does their story, like history itself, belong to more than one place? Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below

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