HISTORY

P ETER J ONES MARBALLS

T HE E LGIN M ARBLES : T HE S TORYOF A RCHAEOLOGY ’ S G REATEST C ONTROVERSY

★By Dorothy King (Hutchinson 288pp £16.99)

T HISISTHE worst book I have ever reviewed. It reads as if it has been cut and pasted from a website by a semiliterate schoolgirl (in my proof copy, King talks of Greek cities ‘still under the [Persian] yolk’) struggling with her GCSE coursework. Doubtless a great deal of labour has gone into it, but to little purpose when the author’s ignorance on many topics is encyclopedic, her ability to clarify and marshal arguments based on evidence that demands careful handling almost non-existent, and her English style execrable (her favourite conjunction is ‘and so’). Here, for example, King is struggling to say something about (i) the Athenian claim that their first king was born from the earth, and (ii) the absence of mothers from the Parthenon marbles (‘and so one can read the Parthenon as a statement of Athenian misogyny’, she concludes, absurdly): The Athenians also thought of themselves as superior to all other Greeks, for they claimed that they had always inhabited Attica, and had not arrived as migrants, and so their race was the oldest. Athenian mythology is confusing, for it emphasises this notion of autochthony, and the lack of a human mother also of course emphasises how little the Athenians thought of women, and so we have not one king who sprang from the earth, but a whole series of them, so that a king almost didn’t need a queen, or to bother himself with such trivial matters as procreation. Autochthony meant that Athenians could claim they were purer, allowing themselves to see other Greeks as pseudo-foreigners. Don’t ask. I haven’t the remotest, either. Not only is the book unreadable, its title is also misleading. King begins her story millions of years ago with the formation of the Mediterranean basin, spends a hundred pages mangling Athenian history and trying to describe the original Parthenon, and another hundred pages labouring through Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman times, before finally arriving at the subject of the title, Elgin, two-thirds of the way through. The subject of the title is then treated to a royal fifty pages before we turn to the controversy over the marbles’ subsequent treatment and ownership (forty-six pages). The word ‘history’ would have been

helpful somewhere. King’s views on this controversy continue to exemplify the seamless fit between prose style and logic evident from the rest of the book: she is against returning them, but then again, she isn’t. The following points pop out like ping-pong balls from a lottery machine. Greeks: The marbles can be appreciated only in Athens. King: This is cultural nationalism. British Museum: We acquired them legally and have cared for them well. K: The Greeks have made requests to get the marbles returned, which have been rejected by various political and cultural bodies. Christopher Hitchens says that the Greeks want only the marbles back, but we cannot know that. Greeks: We now want you to loan the marbles to us. K: They would never give them back. Their demand is cultural nationalism. BM: The marbles are better seen in the BM, in the context of other cultures. K: They have inspired poets and painters, and millions see them every year here. They are part of our culture. They have inspired philhellenism and led to the recognition of Greece as a country. They are part of our heritage. The city state of Athens no longer exists, but the marbles have been here for 200 years. Henry Moore and Selfridges have been influenced by them. Had Elgin not brought them back, they would not exist. BM: The trustees are not allowed to make permanent loans. Only an Act of Parliament will allow their return. K: States cannot return everything. Should we return things in chronological order? The marbles belong to the whole of humanity. To the Greeks they are a symbol of their imperial past. Should we destroy, for example, Venetian palazzi which contain bits of the marbles? The Greek and BM holdings could not be displayed next to each other because their quality is so different. The BM gets more visitors than Athens would. When I was studying Greek art, the Greek authorities would not let me see material. The BM is open and free to all. The Parthenon was famous only to Athenians, not all Greeks. Greeks have not looked after their own material well, so ours and theirs could not be displayed next to each other. And so the little balls continue popping out, some reappearing two or three times, until she unveils a conclusion which she has already explained is constitutionally excluded, quite apart from contradicting everything she has said: ‘When the Greeks can demonstrate that they too have done an admirable job of caring for the marbles in Athens then, perhaps, we can discuss a loan.’ I love that ‘we’. To order this book at £13.59, see order form on page 78

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 HISTORY

E S T URNER

ENGLAND AND ALL THAT

O UR I SLAND S TORY

★By H E Marshall (Galore Park 494pp £19.99)

T HEREISSUEOF Our Island Story, first published in 1905, has brought a dreamy look to many a seasoned face. The book is affectionately remembered for its bracing stories, its sturdy simplicities, its fearless assessments of the mighty as wise or wicked. On the jacket Antonia Fraser and Andrew Roberts testify to the inspiration it gave them as historians and the pleasure it afforded their own offspring. The Daily Telegraph’sEducation Editor, John Clare, says the book chimes with the Prince of Wales’s campaign to restore narrative and chronology to school history lessons, instead of ‘fractured incoherence’. If the authors of 1066 and All That, Sellar and Yeatman, had been available for a jacket quote, they would surely have blushingly acknowledged their debt to H E Marshall’s best-loved bestseller. All that seems to be known about Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall is that she used initials to conceal her gender and that she lived in Melbourne, Australia. There is a rumour that she was a homesick governess. Whatever she was, she hit on a good idea, and when Our Island Storyprospered she wrote similar books about Scotland and the Empire. She never claimed to be writing serious history, and justified the peddling of fables on the grounds that these were what people believed. They’re all here, the familiar whoppers: Neptune handing over his cherished island to his son Albion; Merlin ‘magicking’ Stonehenge from Ireland; Arthur pulling the sword Excalibur from the stone; Raleigh, the smoker, drenched by a housemaid who thought he was on fire… Take away the stories, and the book becomes a fairly unremitting recital of monarchs, battles and beheadings. The standard of kingship revealed is pretty low, but Marshall, for

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chronology’s sake, stays close to the throne. Towards the end there is only passing mention of railways and steamships. Newspapers and the electric telegraph are ignored. Martyrs abound, but not the Tolpuddle kind. Marshall has an eye for boy kings, some of whom were wise and good, but not Ethelred, who was slow, foolish and worse. She also has an eye for young, handsome, merry-making favourites and pretenders, who were up to no good. At school we sometimes wondered about those favourites; they seemed not to be in the same harmless class as teachers’ pets. How were they able to sow so much mischief at court? Merry-making meant getting drunk, but that word never appears. It was upper-class merry-makers who brought disaster to the White Ship, in which Prince William was lost, after which Henry I never smiled again. The book is full of clever people. The Romans were clever but greedy (Vortigern’s nobles were not clever enough). The first Duke of Marlborough was clever but dishonest. Queen Bess was clever but ‘had no right’ to behead Mary Queen of Scots. She was wrong to think she was beautiful; ‘her people loved her so much that very likely they really thought she was beautiful’. Let that stand for the ‘nuanced’ treatment so much admired by today’s reviewers. In a slightly squirm-making address to her young readers Marshall tells them that when they are older they must not be cross at finding how much she has left out, things they would not have understood at the time (about favourites, perhaps). Encouraging them to emulate, with paper and scissors, a famous cutting-out trick by Hengist, she says that if they are not allowed to use scissors they should find some kind person to help. This is a touch governessy; one almost expects to hear a Grenfellish ‘George – don’t do that.’ But Marshall, the storyteller, well knows how to capture the young imagination. She also knows the appeal of rousing patriotic verse, many swatches of which adorn her pages. There has been some tweaking of the text. It is odd to read in a book steeped in the attitudes of a hundred years ago that Christ was born in a land called Israel. To order this book at £15.99, see order form on page 78

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