perfection to revive western European art, and a convenient location to house a military garrison. To understand the history of archaeology in Greece, we need to investigate a wide range of participants and place them within their social and political contexts.

Art, Enlightenment, and Statue Smuggling

During the eighteenth century, the aristocrats of western Europe were educated in the classics, and part of a young man’s education was to go on “the grand tour” of classical sites. They first went mainly to Italy, the home of western Christianity and the Renaissance and thus more relevant to European culture. Gradually their destination changed, as the Enlightenment encouraged reason, logic, and a belief in human progress as opposed to an unquestioning acceptance of a universal order imposed by God. The relics of Christianity became irrelevant, and the search for the origins of Europe led to the art and architecture of ancient Greece.

As the new values became prevalent, painters and architects were dispatched to Greece to record this first flowering of European civilization and thereby rejuvenate the art of their own more decadent times. In 1751, for example, a prestigious London dining club called the society of dilettanti sent the painter James Stuart and the architect Nicholas Revett to Athens to paint and record the ruins there. Their meticulous work was marred only by minor inaccuracies in recording the higher parts of the temples, owing mainly to a chronic shortage of ladders. The four volumes of The Antiquities of Athens published between 1762 and 1816 were intended entirely for a British audience and provided models for the then-current craze for Greek architecture and ornament. The Ottoman governors of Greece, when it suited them, were happy to gain credibility with the European powers by allowing their painters and architects to record apparently valueless ruins. As for the local inhabitants, they only appeared as small and stereotypical figures in the paintings to provide local color and a scale for the architecture of their ancestors.

By 1800 the shift in European intellectual fashion from Italy and Christian origins to Greece and European origins was complete and was further heightened by the Napoleonic Wars, which prevented easy travel to Italy. There was yet another intellectual change. Eighteenth-century art historians, particularly the Prussian johann joachim winckelmann, had used ancient texts to elucidate the Greek spirit that lay at the origins of European civilization. Thanks partly to the efforts of Stuart and Revett and their successors, there was, by the early nineteenth century, a firm interest in the monuments and masterpieces themselves.

When lord elgin was appointed British ambassador to Constantinople in 1799, he originally intended only to make casts of the Parthenon sculptures for the inspiration of British artists. Ottoman gratitude for British help in removing the French from their province of Egypt gave him the opportunity to go further, however, and between 1801 and 1804 he was able to remove and export the actual pieces. The removal was not without criticism. The British architect Robert Smirke, watching Elgin’s men extracting the sculptures, commented on his feelings: “a strong regret” as they were being taken “as a sort of signal of the annihilation of such interesting monuments.”

Smirke’s reservations were amply confirmed by the activities of European architects and agents in Greece during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Not content with painting and measuring, they competed with each other in finding and removing statuary and even whole buildings for their various collections and national museums. If they could not gain permission, then perhaps the local governor could be bribed; if not, they could smuggle the statues out of the country by night. In 1811, for example, the English architect Charles Cockerell managed to send his newly discovered statues from the Temple of Aphaea on the island of Aegina to Athens with the help of a bribe to the pasha of the islands. From there they were smuggled out from a small fishing village to the island of Zante (now Zákinthos or Zacynthos), which was then under British occupation. At an international auction for the pieces the next year, the british museum representative was misdirected to Malta, and the statues were snapped up by the