[In the following excerpt, Beard offers a negative assessment of the reissue of The Elgin Marbles.]

In April 1811, Lord Byron was in Athens looking for a lift back to England. Ostentatious philhellene and vicious satirist of Lord Elgin (“Noseless himself he brings here noseless blocks / To show what time has done and what the pox” ran one famous jibe, probably invented by Byron, likening Elgin's syphilitic nose to the mangled marbles), he eventually found a cabin on a boat bound for Malta. His travelling companions were a very mixed bunch: C. R. Cockerell joined him for a few hours of farewell drinking as they crossed the Saronic Gulf (Cockerell was on his way to strip the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina of its sculptures); sharing the whole voyage was Byron's new fifteen-year-old boyfriend, chaperoned by his brother-in-law, G. B. Lusieri, Lord Elgin's draughtsman and agent. But the most precious passengers were in the hold: the final consignment of the Elgin Marbles on their way, eventually, to London, “the last poor plunder from a bleeding land,” as Byron was to call them in Childe Harold. It's a party which neatly symbolizes that distinctive mixture of sheer coincidence, telling irony and gross opportunism that underlies the whole story of the Elgin Marbles and the long campaign for their return to Greece. …

Christopher Hitchens's book, however, The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (also a reissue) is concerned entirely with the strength of arguments for restitution, and the weakness of those against. It is a terrible warning of what can happen when even an excellent journalist like Hitchens blows up a usefully provocative magazine article (from the Spectator) into a book. The result here is a philhellenic tract of the least reflective and most nationalistic kind: Greek “nationhood” stretches back to at least 1400 BC (which apparently qualifies the Greeks, unlike the modern Assyrians, to have their treasures back); the Parthenon was not a monument to slave labour (who does Hitchens think quarried the stone, carried the blocks and—for the most part—built it?); Byron was a hardworking and “practical” patriot, who understood “Greek emotion.”

All this is backed up with a series of unhistorical and opportunistic “arguments,” which do the cause of restitution no service. Elgin's rival E. D. Clarke is quoted with approval, when he criticizes Elgin's actions on the Acropolis; but there is no mention of the fact that Clarke himself removed what he thought was the cult statue of Demeter from Eleusis, in the face of a riot of protest from the local population. More recent academics are cited inaccurately and outrageously selectively, when it looks as if they can be useful to whatever point is at hand; a paragraph which Hitchens claims is written by A. M. Snodgrass is enlisted in support of the continuity of “Greekness” (in fact, this paragraph comes from an editorial introduction to an article by Snodgrass in a collective volume and was written, presumably, by its editor, Robert Browning, himself a leading campaigner for the Marbles' return; Snodgrass's own position is much more nuanced); and a letter from the Slide Librarian of the Courtauld Institute is so excerpted that she appears to support restitution, when the full text (amazingly quoted by Vrettos) shows that she was arguing exactly the reverse. Such wilful selectivity marks almost every page.

It is no surprise to discover that for all his philhellenism, Hitchens has a decidedly shaky grasp of (ancient) Greek culture and the Greek language. When fantasizing, in his new foreword, about that blissful day when the Marbles eventually do go back home, he wistfully recalls the spirit of “phylloxenia” that you find “all over Greece and in Greek tavernas all over the world.” What he means is “hospitality” or “philoxenia”; his bizarre coinage is hard to translate, but “fetish for leaves” probably comes closest. Of course, knowledge has never been important in the disputes about the Elgin Marbles; but Hitchens's carelessness reminds you that, after nearly 200 years, no one has put the case against Elgin better than Byron.