Stephen Fry offers Britain graceful solution for return of the Parthenon Marbles during the Intelligence Squared conference debate “The Parthenon Marbles Should be Returned to Athens” on Monday June 11, 2012 at Cadogan Hall.
He concludes by saying “We will never ever be able to repay the debt we owe Greece.”
A must watch 46 minutes video:
You can also watch the debate here: Intelligence Squared debate at Cadogan Hall.
Stephen’s analogy to the argument below was “If your house is on fire and you as a neighbor store the neighbor’s paintings in your garage for some time does it make them yours? Will you return them when the neighbor asks you for them?
Speakers against the motion: “What’s all this nonsense about sending the Parthenon Marbles back to Greece? If Lord Elgin hadn’t rescued them from the Parthenon in Athens and presented them to the British Museum almost 200 years ago, these exquisite sculptures – the finest embodiment of the classical ideal of beauty and harmony – would have been lost to the ravages of pollution and time. So we have every right to keep them: indeed, returning them would set a dangerous precedent, setting off a clamour for every Egyptian mummy and Grecian urn to be wrenched from the world’s museums and sent back to its country of origin. It is great institutions like the British Museum that have established such artefacts as items of world significance: more people see the Marbles in the BM than visit Athens every year. Why send them back to relative obscurity?”
“But aren’t such arguments a little too imperialistic? All this talk of visitor numbers and dangerous precedents – doesn’t it just sound like an excuse for Britain to hold on to dubiously acquired treasures that were removed without the consent of the Greek people to whom they culturally and historically belong? That’s what Lord Byron thought, and now Stephen Fry is taking up the cause. We should return the Marbles as a gesture of solidarity with Greece in its financial distress, says Fry, and as a mark of respect for the cradle of democracy and the birthplace of rational thought.”
BBC WORLD NEWS
Chair: Zeinab Badawi BBC World News presenter
Speakers for the motion: Andrew George Chair of Marbles Reunite, Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives
Stephen Fry Actor, writer, comedian, and broadcaster
Speakers against the motion: Felipe Fernández-Armesto William P Reynolds Professor of History, the University of Notre Dame
Tristram Hunt Broadcaster, historian and newspaper columnist; Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central
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