Word: elgin
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...usurper of those jewels, Lord Elgin, was not content with many masterpieces alone, but tore away and transported to England one of the six caryatids and one of the six columns of the eastern portico of the Erechtheum." The writer bitterly asks the British Government to restore these two pieces, adding that he knows it would be useless to claim the heart of the collection...
History. In 1800, the Earl of Elgin set forth to make drawings, models, paintings of the Athenian ruins which testify to the immortality of Periclean Greece and the work of Phidias. Greece then was under Ottoman dominion. Being a Christian, Lord Elgin found himself obstructed at every turn. His artist companions were forbidden approach to the ruins, let alone entrance. Later Great Britain's arms prevailed over France, and Egypt (hitherto under French dominion) was dealt to Turkey. So enthusiastic waxed the Ottomans over this token of good will, that Lord Elgin was told to go ahead and make...
...Lord Elgin made the most of his good luck. Putting a broad interpretation upon his carte blanche, he proceeded to divest the Parthenon of its rarest ornaments-pediment, friezes, metopes, statuary. He proceeded as a private individual, without authority of parliament, with only private encouragement of public men. Hundreds of natives were employed in excavating, removing. The people of Greece showed no resentment. Indeed the interest attaching to the work brought tourists. The tourists, then as always, spent money. As for the Turks, they had little use for Greek relics, other than as objects upon which to inflict spiteful blows...
...engaged in the practice of law in Chicago. . . . Mr. Morgan was interested in the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway, known as the Outer Belt Line of Chicago. . . . Having information which was not in possession of Mr. Morgan or his legal staff, I saw instantly that his plan would not work. 'You can't do that under the law,' I explained. 'I don't hire lawyers to tell me what I can't do,' was Mr. Morgan's [famed] report. 'I hire them to tell me how to do what I want them...
Thus was Keats inspired to sing when for the first time he saw the Elgin marbles. What must have been their glory when, not as now battered and broken by time and fortune, they adorned the Parthenon, that great temple of the Acropolis which enshrined the gold and ivory statue of Athena...