Translating the Elgin Marbles: Byron, Hemans, Keats

Abstract

Every day, visitors come to the British Museum and contemplate a remarkable collection of sculptures created in Greece some twenty-four centuries ago. The events that translated these ancient artworks into an English context took place at the beginning of the 19 th century, when Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, had the sculptures detached from the Parthenon in Athens, shipped in several boatloads to England, and sold to the British government, which installed them in the British Museum as the Elgin Marbles. If the Marbles are implicated in a globalized debate over the treatment of cultural patrimony, in Romantic Europe they were surrounded by an even more animated controversy that manifested itself in politics, periodicals, and poetry. Taking into account the responses of John Keats and Felicia Hemans, I would like to re-examine the treatment of the Elgin affair by Lord Byron, focussing on its significance for the rhetorical form of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the social-cultural processes that were at work among Byron's 19th century audience. Byron asks his readers to compare the seizure of treasures from occupied Mediterranean countries to the ancient Roman practice of seizing trophies and celebrating their arrival in the imperial capital with public triumphs. Invoking this paradigm repeatedly in Childe. Harold's Pilgrimage and in his annotations to the poem, Byron characterizes Elgin's activities as a debased version of it. Modern trophies, epitomized by the Elgin Marbles, are obtained by negotiation and bribery, commodified as souvenirs or museum pieces, and publicized through modern media practices. While opposing the removal of antique ruins and seeking to offer an alternative aesthetic experience by way of his own poetry, Byron also intuits his own complicity in the structures of desire and commodification that characterize modern economic empires. Capitalizing on his position as British ambassador to Constantinople, Lord Elgin began removing large fragments of statuary, friezes, and bas-reliefs from the Acropolis and shipping them to London in 1801. The debate over Elgin's motives and justification--whether he had rescued the sculptures from certain destruction in Ottoman-occupied Greece, or whether he had himself destroyed the temple of Athena Parthenos by his crude removal of the marbles--was further complicated by the contemporaneous activities of Napoleon in plundering occupied Italy. Beginning in 1796, French agents transported paintings and classical sculptures from Rome, and elsewhere in the growing French empire, to Paris for display in the Louvre. In the case of France, the plunder of art-works was a much more deliberate imitation of ancient history, consistent with the self-representation of revolutionary France as a new Roman republic and Napoleon's self-construction as the new Augustus. The arrival of the largest shipment of artworks in Paris in July, 1798. was accordingly celebrated by a public triumphal procession in the style of ancient Rome. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, these artworks were restored to Italy. The widespread public debate over their restoration thus coincided exactly with the debate over the British Parliament's purchase of the Elgin Marbles, which was concluded in 1816. Britain, opposing France on the battlefields of Europe for almost twenty years while consolidating its own empire, more frequently located its cultural origins in Greece, and public discourse drew heavily on the trope of London as the New Athens. The significance of ancient Rome for the British Empire was mediated, moreover, by a more direct parallel between Britain and Venice, two island-republic-empires that derived their wealth from eastern trade and naval strength. Nevertheless, even if these elective affinities insulated Britain somewhat from manifesting the explicit imperial aspirations of Napoleonic France, the ambitions of Britain and France did clash directly over the acquisition of ancient ruins from the Eastern Mediterranean. …