Why shouldn’t the Greeks have their marbles back? We proved we lost ours years ago | Catherine Bennett

Antiquated excuses for keeping the sculptures are wearing thin after 12 years of Conservative cultural freezes

In The Curse of Minerva, his attack on Lord Elgin’s appropriation of the Parthenon marbles, Lord Byron imagined divine revenge by the goddess whose temple Elgin had raided – not only on the vandal himself but on Britain, the country that bought the peer’s “pilfered prey”.

Elgin would suffer and Britain would one day find herself – it probably sounded far-fetched in 1811 – isolated, starving and impotent, “hated and alone”, her politics declining into ignominy. “Then in the Senates of your sinking state / Show me the man whose counsels may have weight.”

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