Stealing Athena

  Turks in robes and turbans, holding prayer beads, were sitting with their backs against the ancient columns of the Great Gateway.

  “Why would they choose this location to say their prayers?” Elgin asked. Mary did not think that he expected an answer from her, but she nonetheless gave one.

  “With every bead they invoke another attribute of God,” Mary said brightly. “God most Holy, God of Mercy, God of Truth, God of Infinite Wisdom. I think it a lovely way to pray, no matter the location.”

  Elgin ignored her comments, staring at two turbaned fellows slouching against the grand columns, bleached to a bony yellow.

  “Disturbing, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “To see that Turks have commandeered the monuments of the Greeks.”

  “Would you prefer they were French?” Mary asked provocatively. What had he expected? They were in Ottoman territory.

  “Of course not. But we are more the spiritual descendants of the Age of Pericles, Mary. Not the Turks.”

  “Yes, but we are not in English territory.”

  She had hoped—prayed—that Elgin would be pleased with what he saw on the Acropolis. She did not think that his spirits would hold up against another disappointment such as those he had suffered with his own government.

  Lusieri met them outside the Parthenon, where he had set up a camp for the artists to work. Happily, Elgin’s mood improved once he saw the artists and workers rushing in and out of the white tents with their tools and supplies, and the scaffolds climbing the walls and columns of the Parthenon. Dozens of workers twined with a complex system of ropes were busily removing its pieces to send to the warehouse he had rented at the docks.

  Inside one of the tents, Lusieri had made a lovely display of the work he had done over the past two years. He and the other sketch artists and painters had made dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of drawings and paintings of the ancient temples, from magisterial representations of the whole of the Acropolis to individual pictures of the monuments, and fantastic drawings of every architectural detail.

  “When we met you, I said that your drawings were superior to anything I had seen in England, sir, but you have exceeded yourself,” Mary said. “Generations of artists and designers will cherish the work you have done here.”

  “I must tell you something important,” Lusieri said. “Louis Fauvel is out of prison and he is coming back to Athens, this time as a representative of Napoleon.”

  Louis-François-Sebastien Fauvel, a cutthroat antiquarian art collector and dealer, had been in Athens for years, trying to garner as much as he could for himself and Bonaparte. He was arrested by the Turks, along with the rest of the French, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, and was sent to Constantinople. The officials on the Acropolis happily gave Lusieri the use of all of Fauvel’s sophisticated excavation equipment, including a large cart and tackle without which the removal work could not have been done.

  “Dear God,” Elgin said. “Will we have to give back his equipment?”

  “If I lose the equipment, I can do nothing, Lord Elgin!”

  Lusieri looked on the verge of hysteria at the thought. “That French dog managed to sabotage our operation even from his prison cell,” Lusieri explained to Mary. “He had his agents in Athens cut off our water supply time and again, slowing the work down. Now he has the use of Bonaparte’s money! He has already tried to bribe our artists into giving him the drawings that we have done for you, Lord Elgin. The French are going to do anything they can to reap the benefits of your labor.”

  He leaned in close to Mary and Elgin. “I have used the gifts you sent me to gather information. Greeks and Turks alike enjoy a little cash or trinket now and then. The Greeks say that Napoleon is already sending spy ships, disguised as merchant vessels, to look for everything you have collected at the docks. Even now, they are trying to find where you stored the treasures.”

  Later that night, after she put the children to sleep in the makeshift nursery upstairs, fashioning a gate across the stairwell so that the adventurous Lord Bruce would not set out on an expedition in the middle of the night, Mary voiced her concerns to Elgin.

  “Is it safe here for the children?” she asked. “What with brewing revolts and Napoleon’s spies everywhere?”

  “Oh yes, rebellions are discussed for years and years before anyone lifts a finger. The Russians have been trying to get the Greeks to oust the Turks for forty years. I have my informants, Mary, and they are paid well. If there were imminent danger, I would send you and the children away at once.”

  “Would you not come with us?”

  “Not until my work here is complete,” he said. “As you have heard with your own ears now, we must move very quickly.”

  MARY STOOD IN THE hot sun under a parasol, gazing in wonder at the latest object of her husband’s grand ambitions. The temple called the Erechtheion, dedicated to Athena Polias, the ancient olive-wood icon; the snake-boy, Erechtheus; and his faithful governess, the obedient Pandrosos, had been damaged in the same explosion that had blown open the roof of the Parthenon. Mary had been keen to see the temple complex described in the books of antiquities she had been reading. Since she had been acquainted with the myth of Pandrosos, the king’s daughter who was honored forevermore for obeying Athena’s command, she often reflected on it. She too thought of herself as an obedient daughter. But she was also a curiosity seeker and a natural-born adventurer. Would she have obeyed the goddess and not looked inside the basket, or would she have disobeyed and found herself jumping over the side of the Acropolis with the more curious sisters?

  The Erechtheion was one of the four main buildings designed by Pheidias as part of Pericles’ master building plan. It too had lost its roof, and the interior, packed with rubble and huge blocks of marble, was impossible to negotiate. The structure was smaller than the Parthenon, and its primary feature was a south-facing porch that was supported by Caryatids—statues of solemn ladies in flowing robes—which served as columns. The Caryatids’ faces were elegant and noble, as if the women were bearing the burden of the heavy building from a sense of duty.

  The Caryatids—along with the ornamentation of the cornices and capitals, thought to be unsurpassed works of design by the world’s experts in architecture—were the most extraordinary things Mary had seen thus far in Greece. Originally, six Caryatids had held up the porch, but Elgin’s crew had removed one of the sisters, leaving a rather sad gape in the configuration, or so Mary thought. The symmetry of the structure had been destroyed, but it was more than that.

  “It appears as if a family member has been ripped from the clan,” Mary said, looking at the gap where the sixth sister had stood for two thousand years.

  “That is sentimental nonsense and not worthy of you,” Elgin replied.

  The lone statue in question was now at the dock at Piraeus awaiting means of transportation back to England. Elgin revered the Caryatids. He had just shooed away three servants lounging in their shade. He could not bear to see the elegant Greek ladies sullied by the attentions of such fellows.

  “The Erechtheion, holiest of holy temples on the Acropolis, was most recently used by the Turks as a harem,” Reverend Hunt said. “But that was long ago.”

  It looked to Mary as if ages had passed since it had been inhabited. “It looks more sacked than abandoned,” she offered. “According to Pausanias, the temple was just about the most lavish thing. It was jam-packed with statues and frescoes and gilded ornaments—all still there when he wrote about it, five hundred years after the days of Pericles, and now, all gone!”

  Elgin folded his arms.

  “I think we should take the entire temple,” Elgin said matter-of-factly.

  “Splendid idea,” said Reverend Hunt. “Why not remove it and rebuild it back in England?”

  “If we were supplied with a man-of-war, it would be possible, wouldn’t it?” Elgin said.

  “But the costs in labor and transportation would be prohibitive,” Mary said,
trying to imagine the letter she would have to compose to her father for his financial contribution to the project. He had been happy to help since his own trip to Athens, but the transporting of an entire Greek temple was sure to test the limits of any Scottish landowner.

  “We are having difficulty finding transport for the one Caryatid we’ve got!” Mary added. “I have already spoken to Mr. Lacy about it.”

  “If I may, Lord Elgin?” Thomas Lacy had been quiet the entire day. He was a captain in the Royal Engineers, whom Elgin had managed to steal from service in Egypt to come to Athens to supervise the transportation of the treasures. “Captain Dick of the Cynthia cannot be persuaded to transport the Caryatid. I thought I had him convinced, but he sent someone to the docks to estimate the weight of it and decided it was too heavy.”

  “What was he persuaded to take?” Elgin asked.

  “In fact, sir, he looked at all the marbles and declined to transport any aboard his ship. He said that he was under no direct order by either Admiral Lord Nelson or Admiral Lord Keith to perform these services. With pirate ships plaguing the seas, he thought it too dangerous to be weighted down by the statues.”

  “Is Nelson interfering with the transportation of these items?” Elgin asked.

  “Not to my knowledge, sir. But neither is he encouraging the captains to comply.”

  “What are we to do?” Mary asked.

  Nearby, headless, fallen statues that had appeared to have been of goddesses leaned against one another as if for support. Elgin pointed to them as an example. “Do you wish these great ladies to suffer the fates of those crumbling pediments? Bonaparte has got no such thing from all his thefts in Italy and Egypt. I shall write to Admiral Lord Keith immediately and ask him to send a ship of a size to accommodate the most valuable piece of architectural art at my disposal. Surely he will understand that I am doing a very essential service to the arts in England!”

  “If he is a man of vision like yourself, Lord Elgin,” said Reverend Hunt. “And if we succeed in procuring the proper ship, there is also a fetching little temple to Pandrosos on the Peloponnese that we might take.”

  As with Athena, Mary thought, soon there would be no sign of Pandrosos in Greece.

  “What is the mood outside of Athens?” Elgin asked. “I hear that the collector Edward Clarke ran into some difficulty in Eleusis.”

  “Yes, he was determined to procure the statue of Demeter that had stood in the field there for, oh, several millennia. It predated the Age of Pericles. He hired one hundred fifty men and chartered an enormous ship to carry it off. But the villagers protested that if the lady with her basket were removed, their crops would fail. Demeter was goddess of the corn, or some such nonsense that they still believe though they are supposedly of the Orthodox faith,” Mr. Hunt said. “The villagers said that the statue of Demeter was older than the world, and anyone who took it away would be punished by the goddess.”

  “All Greeks are peasants and do not deserve to possess these masterpieces,” Elgin said.

  Mary was afraid that some of the hired Greek workers might understand enough of the English language to overhear. “What did happen to Mr. Clarke?” she asked Reverend Hunt.

  “Ah, the superstitions of the Greeks were confirmed! As they were clearing away the soil to take the colossal statue, an ox broke loose from its yoke and went careening in the field, which sent the villagers into a panic. The priest declared that it was an omen, and that Clarke would pay the price of insulting a goddess. The ox went mad; nothing would stop it. It finally rammed itself into the statue.”

  “Imagine a rational man going on about a pagan goddess,” Elgin said in disgust.

  “Later, the ship Clarke had chartered was battered in storms and got stuck in the seabed, and it took weeks—and an awful lot of manpower and money—to get her to sail again. At that point, I believe, even Mr. Clarke was convinced that Demeter did not want to abandon her people.”

  “Pausanias claims that when Demeter is neglected, barrenness comes to the land,” Mary said, chiming in.

  “Why is it so easy for women, even the most intelligent among you, to lapse into superstitious nonsense?” Elgin said.

  “I did not invent the myth, my dear, I am simple relating it to you,” Mary replied, though her husband had read her thoughts correctly. Something deep inside her was beginning to question this wholesale acquisition of Greece’s treasures. Perhaps she had read too much mythology. She knew, for example, that Poseidon, the sea god, was lovesick over Demeter, who sometimes took the form of a mare. Poseidon had transformed himself into a stallion in order to seduce her. “But don’t you think it’s easy to see why the villagers would conclude that Poseidon had teamed up with Demeter to take his revenge on Mr. Clarke? After all, they had been lovers.”

  “We mustn’t allow the backward mentality of the Greeks to interfere with our mission, Mary,” Elgin admonished. “We must behave as the enlightened creatures we are and stay the course.”

  Mary knew that Elgin was correct. It would be a shame, perhaps a crime, to allow the treasures to remain here where they might be pummeled for ammunition or building materials, or shipped away to put coins in the Disdar’s pockets. What if there was another war in Greece? Another siege? Another explosion? They had ample evidence that much of Greece was ripe to join in a revolt against the Ottomans.

  “I shall write to Lord Keith immediately, making a case for him to put a man-of-war at my disposal,” Elgin said. “If he complies, I shall set about preparing to transport the Erechtheion—every last glorious Caryatid and cornice and column—to England.”

  MARY WALKED AWAY FROM the men and the rubble to collect her thoughts. She was sure that Lord Keith would have nothing to do with the transportation of Elgin’s treasures. In fact, it was becoming increasingly clear that no one wanted to participate in the endeavor. From all reports, every sea captain feared the cost to his ship and to his crew if burdened with the tons of marble that Elgin had been collecting and amassing at the port of Piraeus. In addition to all that had already been shipped on their private vessel, the Mentor, the collection was growing: six more slabs of the Frieze were removed, and another was found in excavation. Slabs of frieze from the Temple of Athena Nike, also on the Acropolis, were discovered built into the walls around the citadel. Massive examples of architectural detail that Elgin insisted were crucial to the elevation of art and design were collected—pillars, bases, cornices, capitals, and other details from all of the Acropolis’s temples and shrines—and waiting for shipment at the dock. The stacks of metopes piled up, sitting in the storeroom alongside the lone Caryatid, and all the casts that the artists had made of architectural details that could not be removed from the buildings. Coins, inscriptions, busts, heads, and a staggering number of vases—anything found that was considered of worth—were put into Elgin’s storehouse.

  When the grand prize from the Parthenon—the horse’s head from the chariot of Selene, the moon goddess—was lowered to the ground, Mary had been sure that Elgin’s ambition would be sated and they could return to Constantinople.

  But she soon learned that this was only the beginning.

  “We must make a tour of all of Greece,” he had announced. She wondered if he’d noticed that she was pregnant. “Mary, we shall cut quite the dash all over the country. We must do this now, while I am here in an official capacity. The opportunity will not come to us again. The French have been released from Turkish prisons and will soon be crawling all over Greece. They’ll sabotage me at every turn, don’t you know? We must see what antiquities are available to us in the other Grecian territories. Reverend Hunt says that Athens is just the tip of Greece’s treasures!”

  The excitement Elgin used to display during sex he now reserved for his Greek acquisitions. Not that his enthusiasm for sex was gone. Now that Mary was pregnant, she acquiesced whenever he desired her. Though he was no longer handsome, she still enjoyed being in bed with her husband, especially since she did not have the fine-
looking Sébastiani to compare him to. If there was no risk of pregnancy—already done!—she enjoyed it even more. Whereas her eyes used to remain open, they now enjoyed the rapture in the dark.

  She sat on a pedestal in the sun, disquieted by his words. The sun was high in the midday sky. Dr. Scott had warned her that though it was spring, the relentless Greek sun could pose a danger to a woman in her condition. She did not believe him. She had traveled half a month aboard a damp, stinking ship, and half a day on a donkey “in her condition,” and had survived. Still, the heat and the glare made her feel a sudden fatigue, and she looked for a patch of shade that was not taken by a crouching Turk.

  Through an opening in the wall, she saw a scraggly olive tree. She climbed over the mounds of concrete and peered inside the temple. Most of the roof had been blown off and light streamed inside, illuminating a flat chunk of marble. She climbed through the opening. The room was fairly empty but for weeds growing out of the old stones and a pile of rubbish in the corner. She heard a noise come from the trash, and fearing it was a nest of rats, moved away from it.

  The chunk of marble sat on a pedestal and was worn at the center. She had to resist the urge to give in to her fatigue and lie down upon it. She envisioned herself doing so and realized that she would look like a human sacrifice, whereupon the idea struck her that the thing had once been an altar. It was not ornate, not by the standards of the art that her husband was collecting. The pedestal was plain, and the altar itself was without adornment. There was something primitive about it, as if it did not belong in the ornate building that housed it. It was devoid of the kind of design that had gone into Pheidias’ creations. No, this was the sort of place she had read about where the mysteries must have been performed.

  She put her hand on the cold marble, where, she thought with a chill, blood had undoubtedly been spilt. She felt very dizzy, and so hot that she knew she had to find some shade and sit down. If she could return to Elgin and the others, the men would somehow see to her comfort. Maybe she would call for Dr. Scott after all. She turned around, but fell back against the slab. She steadied herself on it with her palms. She could fight the urge to rest no longer. She thought for a moment that she heard the distant sounds of drumbeats. Was that possible? It seemed to get louder as her head started to spin and spin. Was it part of the Mohammedan call to prayer? She turned and fell forward on the altar, and managed to lie on its cold surface before the world went black.