Elgin Affair

The Elgin Affair: The Abduction of Antiquity's Greatest Treasures and the Passions It Aroused by Theodore Vrettos, 220 pages

In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Lord Elgin, acquired permission from the Ottoman Turks to conduct excavations on the Athenian Acropolis and to take various antiquities back to Britain.  In perhaps the most extensive act of vandalism in history, Lord Elgin used this permission as a blank check to strip the Parthenon of every piece of decoration his team could pry from the structure, including much of the sculpture from the pediments and roughly half of the internal frieze, as well as a column capital and a caryatid from the Erechtheum, both of which were literally sawn off in order to remove them.  Elgin answered protests with the claim that modern Greeks were unworthy of their heritage.

In Vrettos' account, all this is secondary to the Elgins' domestic woes, culminating in a high profile divorce and a lawsuit by the aggrieved husband against Lady Elgin's lover.  Aside from the identity of the actors and the suggestion that Lord Elgin's preoccupation with the marbles may have contributed to his wife's estrangement, there is no connection between the archaeological and the personal dramas.  Exasperatingly, Vrettos includes a 13 page excerpt from a letter by Lady Elgin and a 24 page trial transcript, both of which merely repeat information which is present elsewhere in the narrative.  The incorporation of this filler is sadly consistent with the superficiality of the work as a whole, which reduces "the abduction of antiquity's greatest treasures" to a subplot in favor of a not particularly passionate tale of adultery.