NO RELIEF

The Greeks, who are always thinking up something important when not engaged in founding restaurants, have decided at last to restore the Parthenon. It's really a wonder they didn't do it earlier, before some of the pieces were lost. But what with the general wear and tear, the growth of grass and American tourist travel, many of the stones have become either missing or mutilated. Its been so long too--oh, almost three hundred and fifty years now--that things have just been drifting along in Greece. It may seem unsympathetic to make any strong statement of protest against the project, for the Greeks have the ambition and the cement, and they can probably do a pretty decent job of restoration, if they don't lose interest and start a war. But the main trouble is they haven't got the Elgin marbles, the Parthenon's most distinctive ornaments.

These famous reliefs were taken by a certain Elgin in a spirit of archaelogical camaraderie to the British Museum where they have remained ever since. Nobody can see them, of course, because it is too dark and dusty inside, but they are in a good safe place and everybody knows where to find them. The Greeks feel that properly to restore the Parthenon they should have the marbles, which is quite illogical from an English point of view and for that matter quite impractical from any point of view.

If the marbles were restored to the Parthenon and the Parthenon to Greece who knows how long they would stay together? Even a Greek will admit that things haven't been what they should be on the Balkan Peninsula during the past century. Evidently they have not thought of sending the remaining fragments of the Parthenon to England and setting them up beside the marbles in the British Museum.