SOURCE: Griffin, Jasper. “Precious Stones.” New York Review of Books (20 July 1989): 14–15.

In the following review, Griffin discusses the history of the Elgin Marbles and offers a positive assessment of Imperial Spoils.

High on the educated tourist's list of sights to see in Europe stands the British Museum. Its colossal treasure includes everything from Egyptian mummies to Renaissance clocks, Roman silver and Magna Carta, and harps from Ur of the Chaldees and King George V's stamp collection. But pride of place, perhaps, and the most costly galleries, go to a large collection of more or less broken marble carvings from Athens: the celebrated and controversial Elgin Marbles. Their history raises a number of moral and political questions.

In the years immediately after 450 BC the people of Athens were persuaded by Pericles, the great aristocratic leader of the democracy, to embark on a spectacular program of public building. They spent...