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It’s a wonder that the Parthenon remains standing at all

From a temple to Athena, it became a Byzantine, then Latin, church, a mosque, a powder magazine and finally a ruin. Lord Elgin’s vandalism was hardly anything new

10 May 2025

9:00 AM

10 May 2025

9:00 AM

Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon A.E. Stallings

Paul Dry Books, pp.235, 14.99

We all have our own vision of the Parthenon. Lord Elgin, for one, seems to have treated it like Harrods. Hoping to decorate his Scottish stately home with the Marbles, he wrote long instructions to his agent: ‘The first on the list are the metopes, the bas-reliefs and the remains of the statues… Would it be permissible to speak of a Caryatid?’ The Greek gods must have thought not, because Elgin’s fortunes rapidly took a turn for the worse.

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