I decided to read this pre-publication review copy of Moving The Moon by Andrea Marcolongo because it was relatively short. I was sure I could read it in the month of August even though my reading speed has slowed so much. I watch too much television. The news viewing is necessary, but the watching of drama shows is entertainment. I could be reading instead.
I hadn't realized that the content of this non-fiction book would be a shocking revelation. Even though well known people who were in positions of authority have sometimes been revealed to have engaged in criminal acts, these thefts were so brazen and so tragic for a monument that is central to Western culture. I am a student of history, but I had never heard about these thefts.
I had thought that the Parthenon was a ruin due to war or conquest. It would never have occurred to me that British visitors and one prominent British official had actually stolen marble fragments that were pieces of the temple, and statues that were inside the Parthenon in order to ship them back to Britain.
Why had they stolen from the Parthenon? Because they were arrogant, and because they could.
The Greeks could have made a diplomatic protest and demanded that Parthenon art and masonry be returned. I suppose that Greece didn't feel that they were in a position to demand anything of the British. They didn't really have any power and they hoped that British visitors would benefit their economy. They probably didn't imagine that the British would be so disrespectful as to steal from a sacred place.
When I saw classical era sculptures in the New York Metropolitan Museum as a child, I imagined that they belonged there. Shouldn't great works of art be displayed in a museum? It never occurred to me that these were originally objects of devotion in the ancient Greek and Roman religions that had probably come from temples.
Author Andrea Marcolongo spent a night in the Acropolis Museum. She had written a book about the ancient Greek language. This is probably why Marcolongo was invited to spend the night in the museum alone. She was forbidden to vandalize marble sculptures by Phidias, or to steal them for sale. She could do anything else there.
Marcolongo had brought one book with her. It was a biography of the British Lord Elgin who had actually been the thief in chief. The title of the book that Marcolongo brought to the Acropolis Museum was Lord Elgin and the Marbles by William St. Clair. I suppose it would be like bringing a biography of Alexander the Great to a place he had conquered and pillaged. Yet Alexander would never have done what Lord Elgin had done to the Parthenon. He would have had reverence for a Greek temple.
Marcolongo comments that Classical Greece had become "an imagined paradise" for Western Europeans. I don't forget about slavery or how the Athenians treated women. So I don't romanticize Classical Greece.
Marcolongo tells us that there is an image on the south side of the Parthenon of a Centaur attacking a woman with her "peplos flapping in the wind". This image is called "beautiful". Who would consider it beautiful? I strongly suspected that this was an image of rape. A survivor of rape would find that image traumatizing, not beautiful. Even a woman who hadn't been a rape survivor wouldn't see it as beautiful, and a little girl who is a virgin could also be traumatized if she had never previously seen such an image. That leaves men as the only people who would find the image of a Centaur attacking a woman "beautiful".
Andrea Marcolongo, an Italian woman, is so upset about the thefts of pieces of the Parthenon, that she wanted to "glue the pieces of the Parthenon together with my own two hands". She identified with the Parthenon. If the Parthenon wasn't whole, then she wasn't whole.
In Judaism believers identify with Torah scrolls. The Torah is a compilation of the books of the Bible in Hebrew. There is a Sabbath prayer about the Torah which begins "she is a tree of life for those who hold on to her". This isn't just a metaphor. People who study Torah are thought to live longer because of their study.
It wasn't just the Parthenon that suffered from thefts, the statue of Demeter was stolen from Eleusis. Demeter might have had a strong objection to this because the ship carrying Demeter's statue to England sank within view of the white cliffs of Dover. It took many years to retrieve that statue from the bottom of the sea. The people of Eleusis believe that the thieves were cursed. I don't know about that, but it may be that the statue took some time to withdraw its objections to being displayed in a museum. Today it stands in a corner of a museum in Cambridge.
At one point, Marcolongo seems to feel sorry for thieving Lord Elgin. I've been a huge fan of Robin Hood, but when it's British aristocrats stealing from the Greeks, whose only wealth was their archaeological artifacts, that's completely the reverse of what the legendary outlaw did. On the other hand, the Greek Embassy in France, seemed to have sufficient funds to underwrite Marcolongo's book.
I've read one five star book this year, yet I'm still hoping there will be another that I'd give a grade of A on this blog. We'll see. There's still a few months left to go.
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