Returning the Parthenon Marbles to Athens

8 December 2001, London

I come from Britain's largest colony in the antipodes. I thank you very much for inviting me from the New World to redress the balance of the Old. In this first year of the Third Millennium of the Christian Era I have to survey the last two and a half millennia of European civilisation.

In 480 BC the Persians under Xerxes I invaded Greece. The Greek army was commanded by King Leonidas of Sparta, the only Greek city state that had kings, and the Greek navy was commanded by the Athenian Themistocles. Leonidas and his finest troops were killed holding the pass of Thermopylae. The Persians moved on and burned Athens. The population of Athens had been evacuated by sea to Salamis. Their navy severely defeated the Persian navy, which retreated to Asia.

Two years later, under the leadership of Athens, most of the Aegean islands agreed to contribute ships or money to a Delian League against the Persians. In 454 the League transferred its treasury from Delos to Athens. Within five years the League had become an Athenian empire. Athens had a democratic leader, Pericles, who was in his late 40s. He used the Delian League's reserves to rebuild the temples destroyed by the Persians on the Acropolis.

The Parthenon, the temple of Athena the Virgin (Parthënos), designed by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates, was commenced in 447. The temple was completed and the 12-metre statue of Athena in gold and ivory by the Athenian sculptor Pheidias was dedicated in 438. The temple of Nike (Victory) and the Propylaea were commenced in 437. Pericles died in 429.

The Parthenon is the paragon of Doric temples. The first Doric temples were built in the sixth century BC at Olympia, Syracuse, Selinus, Paestum, Delphi and Agrigentum. In the fifth century more were built in Aegina, Syracuse, Olympia, Agrigentum, Paestum and Athens itself (the Theseion). Ictinus commenced the temple of Apollo Epikourios at Vassai before, and completed it after, the Parthenon. Pheidias's nine-metre bronze statue of Athena Promachos for the Acropolis was made about 456. His 13 metre ivory and gold statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders, was made about 430. Pheidias and his assistants were also responsible for the marble sculptures of the Parthenon.

Athens was occupied by the Spartans in 404, Philip II of Macedon in 338, Mithradates VI of Pontus in 87 and Sulla in 86 and by the Heruli in 267 AD, Alaric in 396 and the Slavs in 582. None of them stripped or damaged the Parthenon. (Alaric spared Athens after accepting a huge ransom but sacked Piraeus, the rest of Attica, Corinth and Sparta.) Before the end of the sixth century the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church dedicated to the Holy Wisdom. The statue of Athena Parthenos was taken to Constantinople. The church was the seat of a bishop. In the ninth century the bishop was raised to metropolitan status.

In 1203 the armies of the Fourth Crusade laid siege to Constantinople. The statue of Athena was destroyed in a riot in the city. When the Crusaders took over the city in 1204, they created a dukedom of Athens. The Parthenon became the Cathedral of Notre Dame d'Athènes, the Propylaea was converted into the ducal palace and the other buildings of the Acropolis were used as churches. The Florentine Acciaiuoli dukes reestablished the Orthodox Cathedral of Maria Vergine del Partenone in 1403. The city fell to the future Emperor Constantine XI in 1446 and to the Turks in 1456. The Parthenon was converted to a mosque.

The Turks twice besieged Vienna, in 1529 and 1683. After the second siege was raised by King Jan Sobieski of Poland, the Catholic powers attempted to drive the Turks out of Europe. The greatest Venetian general, Francesco Morosini (1618-94), overran the Peloponnesos with his army of mercenaries and besieged the Acropolis of Athens. His field commander, Count Königsmark, placed his artillery on the Hill of the Muses. There had been a Turkish powder magazine in the Propylaea before it exploded after being struck by lightning in 1645. A new powder magazine was placed in the Parthenon. On 26 September 1687 a mortar bomb landed in the Parthenon, which exploded. I quote Mr William St Clair's authoritative book, Lord Elgin and the Marbles, published in 1967:

When the garrison surrendered and Morosini took possession of the Acropolis he decided to take home to Venice as a trophy of his conquest the large group of sculptures from the west pediment which had survived the explosion. But when his engineers were lowering the massive statues their cables broke and the whole group was shattered. A head from one of the pedimental figures, now in Paris, was taken back to Venice by Morosini's secretary. Two heads from a metope, now in Copenhagen, were taken by another officer of his army. The following year Morosini was compelled to withdraw from Athens, leaving the Acropolis a heap of marble rubble. More damage was done to the Parthenon in one year than in all its previous history.

The Venetians gave Morosini the title Peloponnesiacò and elected him doge.

British readers became familiar with the features and sculptures of the Parthenon from the descriptions and illustrations in The Antiquities of Athens (1762) by James Stuart (1713-88) and Nicholas Revett (1720-1804). The first ambassador to seek sculptures from the Parthenon was a French nobleman, the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier. He had met the French antiquary Louis-François-Sébastien Fauvel on a tour of Greece in 1780. They carved their names on the Monument of Philopappos in Athens. The British ambassador protested at their activities. The Turkish authorities refused to let the French remove any sculpture from the building itself.

The next British ambassador was a Scottish nobleman, Thomas Bruce (1766-1841), seventh Earl of Elgin. He presented his credentials to Sultan Selim III in November 1799. He engaged Giovanni Battista Lusieri (Naples 1755-1821 Athens) to work for him in Athens as Fauvel had worked for Choiseul-Gouffier. Elgin's arrival was timely. Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian Expedition had invaded Turkey's most precious province in July 1798. Nelson had destroyed the French fleet during the Battle of the Nile on the night of 1-2 August. (The boy Casabianca stood on the burning deck of the flagship Orient before it exploded.) Bonaparte escaped to France between 22 August and 9 October. The French capitulated in Egypt in August 1801. The Turks turned a blind eye to Elgin's manipulation and corruption of their officials in Athens since he was the envoy of the British Empire that had saved the Ottoman Empire.

Elgin left Constantinople in January 1803. The first part of Elgin's collection arrived in England in January 1804 and the second part in May 1812. All the artists declared that the marbles which, though fragmentary, had come straight from the temple, were the finest works of art they had ever seen. In 1816 a Select Committee of the House of Commons judged £35 000 to be a reasonable and sufficient price for the Elgin Collection of Sculptured Marbles. Elgin died in Paris.

The first sculptures removed from a Greek temple to the British Museum did not come from the temple of Athena in Athens but from the temple of Apollo in Vassai. (The Select Committee called them the Phygalian Marbles.) In 1811 John Robert Cockerell (1788-1863), an architectural student, and Haller von Hallerstein, an agent of Ludwig, Prince Royal of Bavaria (Strasbourg 1786-1868 Nice), paid £40 to the leading men of Aigina for the marble pedimental sculptures on the temple of Aphaia. They then removed the 23 marble slabs of the cella frieze from the temple of Apollo Epikourios at Vassai. In 1812 the marbles from both Aigina and Vassai were auctioned in Zante, which had been included in the Illyrian Provinces of the Napoleonic Empire but had been occupied in 1809 by the British general Richard Church (Cork 1784-1873 Athens). The Aigina marbles were purchased for Prince Ludwig for £6 000. He had them renovated by Thorvaldsen in Rome and built the Glyptothek to house them in Munich. The Prince of Wales, newly installed as Prince Regent, provided £15 000 for the British Museum to acquire the Vassai marbles.

In 1827 Sir (1822) Richard Church was appointed commander in chief of the Greek forces. There is an obelisk to him in the Protestant corner of the First Cemetery of Athens. A window with an inscription by Gladstone is dedicated to him in St Paul's Anglican Church designed by Cockerell in 1840. In the wall of the same church there is a marble monument to Lusieri.

Greeks everywhere celebrate two anniversaries, 25 March and 28 October. On 25 March 1821, in the Julian calendar, Germanós (1771-1826), the Metropolitan of Patras, raised the standard of revolt, now the Greek national flag. On 28 October 1940, in the Gregorian calendar adopted by Greece in 1923, the dictator Ioannes Metaxas (1871-1941) replied "No" to an ultimatum by Mussolini to allow Italian troops in occupied Albania to pursue Albanian rebels into Greece. The Italians then invaded Greece. Having done ancient Greek at university, I followed the campaign in Sydney's katharëvousa newspaper. On 17 December Miss Thelma Cazalet, a Conservative MP, tabled a notice to ask the Prime Minister whether he will introduce legislation to enable the Elgin Marbles to be restored to Greece at the end of hostilities as some recognition of the Greeks' magnificent stand for civilisation. In January the Greeks drove the Italians back into Albania. On 23 January the Labour Leader, Clement Attlee, deputy to Churchill, replied:

His Majesty's Government are not prepared to introduce legislation for this purpose.

In 1942 Mr Ivor Thomas tabled a question asking the Prime Minister whether, in order to mark our gratitude for the continuing resistance of Greek guerilla forces, he would consider the transfer of the Elgin Marbles to the Greek Government for restoration to their original site after the war. On 13 October Churchill referred to the reply which had been given to Mrs Cazalet Keir.

Churchill himself arrived in Athens on Christmas Eve 1944 and arranged a temporary truce in the civil war between the monarchists and the communists. He was accompanied by an Australian classicist, Sir Reginald Wildig Allen Leeper (1888-1968), known as Rex, the British ambassador to the Greek Government-in-exile from 1943 to 1946. After the war Leeper made the remarkable suggestion that Greece should join the Commonwealth. During the war in Crete, where the Greek monarchy was never popular, another Australian classicist, Thomas James Dunbabin (1911-55), DSO, is still fondly remembered as the comrade-in-arms of the British resistance leader Patrick Leigh-Fermor DSO.

At school in Canberra and university in Sydney in the mid-1930s I was familiar with the poems of Byron. He excoriated Elgin in The Curse of Minerva, written at the Capuchin convent in Athens in March 1811; he admired the plunder but abhorred the thief. In 1812 in Canto the Second of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage he cursed Elgin as the modern Pict who rived what Goth, and Turk, and Time had spared. Later in the canto Byron inspired his contemporaries in England and Europe with his exhortation to the modern Greeks to throw off the Turkish yoke. In 1827 the 18-year old Alfred Tennyson wrote an 18-line Exhortation to the Greeks. Since these juvenilia have not been reprinted I quote some of the lines:

Remember the night, when, in shrieks of affright,
The fleets of the East in your ocean were sunk:
Remember each day, when, in battle array,
From the fountain of glory how largely ye drunk!

For 100 years after Byron's death Britain used to bask in the glory of his role in the liberation of Greece. One of the first actions of the first Hellenic Republic in 1924 was to issue two postage stamps inscribed 'Lord Byron' to commemorate the centenary of his death at Mesolongi. He is still the liberator most honoured at Mesolongi. Britain's reputation in Greece still depends above all on Byron. Shelley and our Victorian poets lauded Greece but none of them visited it.

It is reasonable to conjecture why Australians and this Australian should concern ourselves with the return of the Parthenon sculptures to Greece from Britain. There are more people in Australia than in Britain who can speak and read Modern Greek and, indeed, ancient or Christian Greek. There are more people in Australia than in Britain who know the politics and cultures of the Balkans, Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim. Australian schools, universities, galleries and museums developed along British lines and are still mostly influenced by British practice.

I was elected a member of the Australian House of Representatives in 1952 and deputy Leader of the Australian Labor Party in 1960. In 1961 the Macmillan Conservative Government in Britain applied to join the European Community and appointed Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, to conduct the negotiations. In his autobiography (1998) he recounts how, after visiting Cyprus to check the part which the British forces played in monitoring the activities of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, he visited Greece, which had just become an associate member of the Community. He asked Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis and the Foreign Minister what they thought Britain's chances of membership were. He was told that the British should promise three things if they wanted to be successful; adopt the metric system, which he thought possible, drive on the right-hand side of the road, which he also thought possible, and return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. 'That', he replied, 'is not only difficult, it is quite impossible.'

In 1962 the Menzies Coalition Government in Australia offered the Labor Party four ministerial style visits to Europe to assess the consequences of Britain joining the Community. I was sent as the forerunner and made my first visit to the Parthenon in Athens and the Elgin Marbles in London. I was briefed at the Foreign Office in Athens by the son of a former president and in London by Heath himself. In 1967 I was elected leader of the Australian Labor Party and on a visit to the British Museum I bought St Clair's book. In December 1972 and again in May 1974 I was elected Prime Minister of Australia. In August 1974 Australia became the 7th country to ratify Unesco's 1972 World Heritage Convention. In January 1975 I was the first Head of Government to be received by Karamanlis, the first Prime Minister of the second Hellenic Republic.

I became involved with the Parthenon Marbles in two contexts. Australia and Greece are the only two countries from which athletes have gone to every Olympic Games since 1896. Australia and Greece were among the 28 founding members of Unesco. In September 1990 the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1996 Games to Atlanta ahead of Athens, the sentimental favourite, Toronto, Melbourne, Manchester and Belgrade. In September 1993 the Committee awarded the 2000 Games to Sydney; my wife's and my contacts with the francophone African members of the International Olympic Committee and Unesco had secured the 2000 Games for Sydney ahead of Beijing, Manchester, Berlin and Istanbul. Australia helped to secure the 2004 Games for Athens and the 2008 Games for Beijing.

Meanwhile, in 1981, Melina Mercouri was appointed the Greek Minister of Culture and the World Heritage Convention was ratified by Greece. In 1983 the Oxford University Press published a second edition of St Clair's book and the Hawke Government appointed me the Australian Ambassador to Unesco. In the opening speeches at the General Conference in October Melina Mercouri, was followed by Senator Susan Ryan, the Australian Minister for Education, who announced that Australia proposed to become a party to two Unesco Conventions on Cultural Property, the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. In pursuit of the 1970 Convention I went to Athens in April 1985 as an observer at the fourth session of Unesco's Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation. Melina Mercouri chaired the Committee. We met in the renovated Zåppeion. I observed the United Kingdom's reluctance to discuss the return of the Parthenon Marbles. Australia was elected to the Committee at the next Unesco General Conference in October 1985.

In February 1986 the Australian Attorney-General, Lionel Bowen, who came to Greece with me in January 1975, wrote to a Greek organization in Australia:

The Government ... has taken a sympathetic position on the question whenever the issue has been raised with the Government as, for example, in discussions in 1984 between the Minister of Arts, Heritage and Environment, Mr Cohen, and the Greek Minister for Culture, Ms Melina Mercouri.

Legal advice available to the Government is that the return of the Marbles is essentially a political matter to be resolved between the British and Greek Governments rather than a legal one and that, so far as international law is concerned, the title of the British Museum could not be successfully challenged. The Government, nevertheless, acknowledges the salience of arguments on aesthetic, technical and moral grounds.

In 1987 the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles sent me the book by Christopher Hitchens, The Elgin Marbles - Should they be returned to Greece? (Chatto and Windus). Under the Thirty Year Rule the author was able to obtain Foreign Office documents which showed the frantic efforts taken to frustrate Miss Cazalet's initiative. In 1988 the book was translated into Greek with a Foreword by Melina Mercouri and Prologue by Manolis Andronikos.

As a member of the World Heritage Committee from 1983 to 1989 I supported the inscription of the first Greek sites on the World Heritage List:

The Temple of Apollo Epikourios at Vassai in 1986,
Delphi and the Acropolis of Athens in 1987,
Epidavros, Mt Athos, Meteora, the Paleochristian and Byzantine Monuments of Thessaloniki and the Medieval City of Rhodes in 1988 and
Mystras and Olympia in 1989.

Australia accepted the 1970 Convention in 1989.

In 1998 the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport assured the House of Commons that 'the Parthenon sculptures were legally and properly acquired. They have been kept in very good condition.' St Clair's book showed that the first contention was highly dubious. A few days later the latter contention was demolished in the preface to the third edition of St. Clair's book:

My researches have brought to light the facts of how, in 1937 and 1938, while in the stewardship of the British Museum, the Elgin Marbles were, over a period of at least eighteen months, and against the regulations then in force in the Museum, scraped with metal tools and smoothed with carborundum in an effort to make them appear more white. As a result, the historic surfaces of most of the sculptures were severely and irreparably damaged. With recourse to the official records to which access was repeatedly denied to me until 1996, I am here able to present the full account of the circumstances in which the disaster occurred, and of the extent of the damage, which the official inquiry of the time, hitherto suppressed, said "cannot be exaggerated". I also describe the measures subsequently taken by the British Museum authorities to cover up, quite literally, the effects of the mistreatment, and then, by unlawfully denying access to the relevant public documents, to prevent the full facts from becoming known until now.

In 1938 Lord Duveen of Millbank (Hull 1869-1939 London), the millionaire art dealer had undertaken to pay for the construction of a new gallery in the British Museum to accommodate the marbles and ordered workers to "spruce them up". During World War II they were stored in a disused underground station at Aldwych. They were not installed in the Duveen Gallery until 1962, when at last the British Museum acquired proper air filters. Lords Elgin and Duveen were shown to be worse barbarians than Alaric the Goth. In the International Journal of Cultural Property (1999, pages 397-521) St Clair published full documents on the acquisition and stewardship of the sculptures from Elgin to Duveen.

Four significant conferences arose from St Clair's revelations:

The 10th session of the Intergovernmental Committee in Paris in January 1999 adopted a recommendation for "further initiatives to promote bilateral negotiations" between the UK and Greece;
A seminar on "The Parthenon Sculptures: their History and Destiny" was held in February 1999 in Washington at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and a paper was delivered by Mr David Walden, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Committee;
An international conference was held at the British Museum in November 1999 concerning the present state of the surfaces, including the effects of the damage done in 1937/38, in which, among others, experts of the British Museum and the Greek Ministry of Culture participated. Despite promises to Parliament and Unesco, the Museum has not published the papers, perhaps in an attempt to avoid the further revelations in the paper by William St Clair. Incidentally he is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and Senior Research fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Until 1992 he was a senior official in Her Majesty's Treasury, professionally concerned with the matters of standards and accountability which arise in this affair.
The Greek Government and the Greek National Committee for Unesco organised a two-day international conference on the Parthenon Marbles in Athens in May 2000.

In October 1999 the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee announced its intention to conduct an inquiry into matters relating to cultural property, including measures to control the illicit trade in such property. The Committee held eight oral evidence sessions between late March and early June. Australians for the Return of the Parthenon Marbles sent a memorandum to the Committee. You may be intrigued to know that their patrons are Malcolm Fraser and I. You may remember that he was appointed Prime Minister of Australia in the coup d'état, the praxikopema, of November 1975. I can assure you that in recent years he and I have taken the same position on three great issues in Australian politics, transition to an Australian republic, reconciliation with Aboriginal Australians and acceptance of refugees. The Committee is bipartisan and professional. Honorary members of it are the Leaders of the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Democrats, State leaders, - Liberal and Labor, former and current, royalist and republican -, and the chairmen of the Australian Museum and the Sydney Opera House and the CEO of the Australian Council for the Arts; the CEO chairs the Australian Management Committee. The Commons Committee's report, ordered by the House to be printed in July 2000, was strictly neutral, setting out the arguments on each side.

Last June a delegation from the Hellenic Council of Australia and the World Council of Hellenes Abroad gave the Australian Prime Minister a petition signed by 30,000 Australians calling for the British Government to return the Parthenon sculptures to Athens. Our Prime Minister told the delegation that he would give the petition to the British Prime Minister in the margins of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting which was to meet in Brisbane in October. The Secretary of Australians for the Return of the Parthenon Marbles was a member of the delegation and sent each Prime Minister a letter with points to support the return. As you know, CHOGM was postponed. On 8 October, however, the following reply was received from Britain:

While the British Government have considered the issue over a number of years, they have decided that the return of the sculptures to Greece is not a feasible or sensible option. The British Museum, who hold these sculptures, is not permitted under its governing statute to dispose of any items within its collection (with minor exceptions). The institution is independent of Government, so any decision, for example on loans, would be a matter for the Museum's Trustees. The Trustees are of the view that they hold these items in a world class museum in trust for the British Nation and that 6.5 million visitors per annum from around the world see them in a multicultural context for free, and in conditions of excellent conservation and maintenance.

On 30 November the Assistant Secretary of the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet wrote to the Secretary of Australians for the Return of the Parthenon Marbles:

Mr Howard considers the Parthenon Marbles an irreplaceable part of Greek heritage and national identity and has publicly expressed some sympathy for their return.

The British Prime Minister appoints 15 of the 25 Trustees; six of the 15 have been appointed since September 1999. One should assume that the present Trustees are more responsible than the Trustees whom one of them, Edward Heath, hilariously ridiculed 40 years ago. The Australian letter to the Prime Ministers asserted that a recent survey showed only 1.5 million persons visit the Duveen Gallery each year, a figure comparable with the number of visitors to the Acropolis each year. I find it sad that in the second half of the 20th century British Governments, Labour and Conservative, have dissipated the affection and admiration that Britain enjoyed in Greece in the century after Byron.

The first and largest restitution of movable cultural property took place very soon after the Elgin collection arrived in England. As the commanding general of the first French republic in Egypt and Italy and then as First Consul and finally as Emperor, Napoleon assembled the greatest collection of movable cultural property in history. There will never again be as fabulous a repository as the Louvre during his reign. In August 1815 Canova, who had made many statues of Napoleon and his family, was sent by Pius VII to Paris to recover Napoleon's loot from Louis XVIII. He assisted the other occupying powers to recover their treasures.

Countries whose museums are still replete with treasures from old empires are not impressed by the British argument that, if Britain returns the Parthenon sculptures to Greece, they in turn will be pressured to return their treasures to the countries of origin. There are no signs of a domino effect. Turkey accepts that Prussia legally acquired the Hellenistic marbles from Pergamon for Berlin and that Austria legally acquired those from Ephesus for Vienna. After the Fourth Crusade Doge Enrico Dandolo took the four Bronze Horses from the Hippodrome in Constantinople to the façade of St Mark's in Venice. Napoleon appropriated them for the Arc du Carousel in Paris. After Waterloo, the Habsburgs gained Venice and the Bronze Horses were restored to St Mark's. Turkey does not seek their return to Istanbul. Nor, I understand, does Egypt seek the return of the Rosetta Stone to Alexandria.

Suggestions that the Parthenon sculptures should be sent temporarily or in perpetuity to Athens have been met by assertions that the British Museum is prohibited from lending any of its works. I well remember, however, that while I chaired the Council of the Australian National Gallery in Canberra in 1990, the last year of the Thatcher Government, the Director of the Gallery and Sir David Wilson, the Director of the British Museum, arranged an exhibition of 100 objects, massive and minute, called Ancient Treasures from the British Museum. In the preface to the catalogue Sir David wrote 'This exhibition is without precedent in the history of the British Museum.' Germany is commemorating Greece's hosting of the Olympic Games by returning architectural sections from the Philippeion, the circular building at Olympia begun by Philip II after Chaironeia and finished by Alexander the Great. In return, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin will create a permanent exhibition space to receive regular loans of significant Greek antiquities.

The adoption of conventions on cultural property continues. The Unidroit Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects was adopted in Rome on 24 June 1995. The Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict was adopted under the auspices of Unesco at The Hague on 26 March 1999. The Unesco Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage was adopted in Paris last month.

On cultural property the UK, Greece and Australia have variable records in ratification and accession but in Unesco they have opportunities to consult and co-operate. Greece was elected to the 21-member World Heritage Committee for a six-year term from 1997 and the UK for a six-year term from 1999. Greece was elected one of the 22 members of the Intergovernmental Committee for a four-year term from 1999. Greece was elected to the 58-member Executive Board for a four-year term from 1999 and the UK and Australia were elected for four-year terms from this year.

The Parthenon Marbles constitute an exceptional and special case for restitution. They are incomparably the finest examples of classical sculpture. The city of Pericles was also the city of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Athens became the city of Thucydides, Aristophanes, Socrates, Isocrates, Plato, Xenophon, Demosthenes and Aristotle. Athens was the centre of ancient Greek culture and civilisation. Western civilisation and democracy were born in Athens. Australians and others, who are among the inheritors of those assets, do what we can to have the most significant symbols returned to Athens.

On Easter Monday 6 April 1896 George I, King of the Hellenes and brother-in-law of our future King Edward VII, and Crown Prince Constantine, who was married to Queen Victoria's granddaughter, spoke at the opening of the first Olympic Games of the modern era in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens. Many in this audience will be in the Panathenaic Stadium when the President of the Hellenic Republic opens the Games of Athens celebrating the XXVIII Olympiad in 2004. Few will accept the view expressed by Byron in 1819:

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

Most will accept the view expressed by Shelley in 1822:

Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime