 The Scottish Curse - Byron's Anger Η ιστορία των Γλυπτών του Παρθενώνα συνδέεται με τρεις Σκότους, τους Έλγιν, Μπάυρον & ΜακΓκρέγκορ, διευθυντή του Βρετανικού Μουσείου. Τhe Parthenon Marbles story is one linked to three Scotsmen - Elgin, Byron and Neil Macgregor, the director of the British Museum.
The Parthenon Marbles - A Story of three Scots, Byron, Elgin and Macgregor, the Director of the British Museum (Glaswegian Neil Macgregor's British Museum - copied Greek architecture, looted Greek exhibits)
When Lord Elgin, a Scotsman, was looting the Parthenon sculptures, another Scotsman, Lord Byron was staying at a hostel just below the Parthenon and was horrified when Elgin invited him to see what he was doing to the Parthenon. 
Byron wrote two angry poems denouncing the sacrilegious mutilation and theft of the ancient Greek masterpieces that adorned the Parthenon. Childe Harolde was the most famous of these poems, while extracts of another one "The Curse of Minerva", a difficult poem, are published below.
Byron did not want the poem published in his lifetime and as a result few know the work.
In the poem Byron speaks to Pallas Athena, the Ancient Greek goddess to whom the Parthenon temple was dedicated. Byron is damning in his description of the Scotsman Elgin and describes how Goddess Athena casts a curse on the Scots, a race the poem alludes to as coming from a barren land where no seed grows and no intellect flourishes - a race which did not respect what even the Goths and Turks had not dared to violate. Byron speaks with scorn of his fellow Scotsmen and makes a point of distinguishing them from the English. In defense of his countrymen Byron tells the vengeful Goddess Pallas Athena, whose temple the Parthenon has been desecrated, that there may be a handful of Scots who are decent men of letters and whose positive acts may save the honour of a damned race. Strong words indeed for his fellow countrymen but words from the heart, words of outrage at the barbaric behaviour of Elgin.
 (Glasgow-raised Neil Macgregor, Director of the British Museum, smiling)
Today another Scot comes into the story - Neil Macgregor, director of the British Museum. A man whose arrogant behaviour and disrespectful behaviour towards the representatives of the Greek people, their culture ministers, and his ill-advised posting of a notice in the British Museum saying that visitors now have the opportunity to see the sculptures at "eye level" (!) and not "high on a building" (!) do not make him a welcome candidate to attend the new Acropolis Museum opening on June 20th 2009.
(Looted and mutilated Parthenon masterpiece. Present Location - The British Museum) Mr Macgregor's qualifications as a custodian of the Parthenon Marbles are worth noting. He has no early connection with Greece (except perhaps for the occasional visit to Stakis the Greek- Cypriot owned coffee shop chain) since he grew up within reach of a predominantly industrial Glasgow at a time when it was attempting to emerge from its past as a drab cultural and architectural wasteland, a grey city almost all owned by the Orwellian-like Corporation of Glasgow, a city of formerly vast tenement estates like Barlinnie and the Gorbals with its Hutchie E blocks to show for architecture (Iktinos move over!), a city in fact making desparate efforts to emerge from the hangover of the social influence of its Gorbals culture, fist fights, booze-ups, seven o'clock pub closings, walk up flats with coal cupboards, a city where the most important cultural/social event had been until recently the quasi-religious Rangers-Celtic footbal meeting, a city where one had feared to walk at night in fear of drunken cosh- and bicycle chain-carrying youths, a city whose only recognisable to most foreigners international claim to fame was the exhibit of one (1) painting by Salvador Dali (for this work of art at least there is credible evidence that it was legally purchased), and for entertainment there were espressos and hot dogs at the Stakis coffee houses, dancing which had been standard entertainment on Saturday evenings at the Pally, and for some better healed Glaswegians acceptable nosh had only been available until the seventies at the Malmaison restaurant (the sole French eatery in the vast city) located in the unimaginatively named Central Hotel. This then was the heritage of the cultural environment which had existed only a stone's throw from where the man who hangs so tenaciously onto the Parthenon Marbles grew up as the son of two doctors.
Can Neil Macgregor ever feel for the Greek marbles what the natives of Athens who see the splendour of the Parthenon and its exquisitely sculpted form each time they lift up their eyes? Can Mr Macgregor really be expected to know what the looted Marbles mean to those from whose city his fellow countryman Elgin removed a sizable part of Europe's most important monument?
What do Greeks think of Mr Macgregor?
If Mr Macgregor does misjudge the mood of the people in Athens and decides to attend the June opening of the New Acropolis Museum in the shadow of the mutilated Parthenon, an event to which he was misadvisedly invited by mandarins at the Greek Ministry of Culture, then he and the British Ambassador to Athens, Dr Landsman, will have the chance to come face to face at the entrance of the venue on opening night with outraged members of a 70,000 strong Parthenon Marbles protest group and to see for themselves just how Greeks feel about the refusal of Britain and the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles to Athens. Interestingly Mr Macgregor is described as Saint Neil (!) owing to his religious convictions. He also has legal training which brings his refusal to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece into direct conflict with basic legal principles. It is a fact that the Parthenon Marbles were stolen, in other words they were removed without the consent of the owners who are of course the Greeks. Let us look at the legal interpretation of the removal and custodianship of the Parthenon Marbles -
1) God's law - The Commandement says - THOU SHALT NOT STEAL
2) British and Greek law - To take for oneself the possessions of a third party, without their consent, is defined as "theft" and is a crime punishable by law
3) To receive and hold items which you know are stolen is receiving of stolen property, a crime punishable by law
4) To remove, sell, purchase or hold for oneself items which are the defining symbols of a nations
culture, history and identity is a crime so abominable that it needs neither God nor Man to define it.
It is the ultimate act of cultural barbarity and it is this of which Elgin and the British Museum stand accused of until today.
If indeed Mr Macgregor is a man of God and a lawyer how can he reconcile his position and the actions of the British Museum with the law of God and of Man?
Perhaps the answer lies in Lord Byron's poem below. Let us see what the poet had to say two hundred years ago, and then only let us try and understand Mr Macregor's behaviour towards Greece, towards Greek history and towards the very root of European civilisation as expressed in the magnificence of the injured monument that is the Parthenon of Athens. As for his scholarly publications we do not know much but will refer to Wikipedia's reference to Neil Macgregor. The online encyclopedia says - "Rather unusually for a Director of the National Gallery, his only scholarly book is the brief reprint of a lecture A Victim Of Anonymity: The Master Of The Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece of 1993" (!)
see also: http://www.electroasylum.com/elgin
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THE CURSE OF MINERVA by Lord BYRON (extracts)
ATHENS: CAPUCHIN CONVENT,
"Mortal!" -- 'twas thus she spake -- "that blush of shame
Proclaims thee Briton, once a noble name;
First of the mighty, foremost of the free,
Now honour'd less by all, and least by me;
Chief of thy foes shall Pallas still be found.
Seek'st thou the cause of loathing? --look around.
Lo! here, despite of war and wasting fire,
I saw successive tyrannies expire.
'Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,
Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.
Survey this vacant, violated fane;
Recount the relics torn that yet remain:
These Cecrops placed, this Pericles adorn'd,
That Adrian rear'd when drooping Science mourn'd.
What more I owe let gratitude attest--
Know, Alaric and Elgin did the rest.
That all may learn from whence the plunderer came,
The insulted wall sustains his hated name:
For Elgin's fame thus grateful Pallas pleads,
Below, his name--above, behold his deeds!
Be ever hailed with equal honour here
The Gothic monarch and the Pictish peer:
arms gave the first his right, the last had none,
But basely stole what less barbarians won.
****
See here what Elgin won, and what he lost!
****
She ceased awhile, and thus I dared reply,
To soothe the vengeance kindling in her eye:
"Daughter of Jove! in Britain's injured name,
A true-born Briton may the deed disclaim.
Frown not on England; England owns him not:
Athena, no! thy plunderer was a Scot.
Ask'st thou the difference? From fair Phyles' towers
Survey B?otia;--Caledonia's ours.
And well I know within that bastard land
Hath Wisdom's goddess never held command;
A barren soil, where Nature's germs, confined
To stern sterility, can stint the mind;
Whose thistle well betrays the niggard earth,
Emblem of all to whom the land gives birth;
Each genial influence nurtured to resist;
A land of meanness, sophistry, and mist.
***
Then thousand schemes of petulance and pride
Despatch her scheming children far and wide:
Some east, some west, some everywhere but north,
In quest of lawless gain, they issue forth.
And thus--accursed be the day and year!
Yet Caledonia claims some native worth,
As dull B?otia gave a Pindar birth;
So may her few, the letter'd and the brave,
Bound to no clime, and victors of the grave,
Shake off the sordid dust of such a land,
And shine like children of a happier strand;
As once, of yore, in some obnoxious place,
Ten names (if found) had saved a wretched race."
"Mortal!" the blue-eyed maid resumed, "once more
Bear back my mandate to thy native shore.
Though fallen, alas! this vengeance yet is mine,
to turn my counsels far from lands like thine.
Hear then in silence Pallas' stern behest;
Hear and believe, for time will tell the rest.
"First on the head of him who did this deed
My curse shall light, --on him and all his seed:
Without one spark of intellectual fire,
Be all the sons as senseless as the sire:
If one with wit the parent brood disgrace,
Believe him bastard of a brighter race;
***
And last of all, amidst the gaping crew,
Some calm spectator, as he takes his view,
In silent indignation mix'd with grief,
Admires the plunder, but abhors the thief.
Oh, loath'd in life, nor pardon'd in the dust,
May hate pursue his sacrilegious lust!
Shall vengeance follow far beyond the tomb
***
"So let him stand, through, ages yet unborn,
Fix'd statue on the pedestal of Scorn'
Though not for him alone revenge shall wait,
But fits thy country for her coming fate:
Hers were the deeds that taught her lawless son
To do what oft Britannia's self had done.
***
A fatal gift that turn'd your friends to stone,
And left lost Albion hated and alone.
"Look to the East, where Ganges' swarthy race
Shall shake your tyrant empire to its base;
Lo! There Rebellion rears her ghastly head
And glares the Nemesis of native dead;
Till Indus rolls a deep purpureal flood
And claims his long arrear of northern blood.
So may ye perish! Pallas, when she gave
Your free-born rights, forbade ye to enslave.
***
How view the column of ascending flames
Shake his red shadow o'er the startled Thames?
Nay, frown not, Albion! for the torch was thine
That lit such pyres from Tagus to the Rhine:
Now should they burst on thy devoted coast… |
