agent of Prince Ludwig of Bavaria for £6,000. Like the scramble for colonies in the later part of the century, western powers scrambled for Greek statuary to inspire their artists and bring prestige to their museums and their countries.

Archaeology and Hellenism in Independent Greece

Five years before the auction of the Aegina Marbles, the leading intellectual of the Enlightenment in Greece, Adamantios Koraïs, had called for the protection and preservation of Greek antiquities. The year after the auction, in 1813, a group of Greek intellectuals formed the Philomousos Eteria, or Society of Lovers of the Arts. Their aim was to discover antiquities and display them in a museum, originally intended to be the Erechtheum in Athens, for the benefit of the people of Greece in general and the country’s youth in particular. Under Ottoman rule little progress could be made, but a revolution in 1821 and the eventual independence of the southern part of Greece under a Bavarian monarch in 1832 changed the situation. Even in 1825 the temporary government had protested the looting of antiquities and proposed setting up a museum in every school to teach future generations the importance of their ancestors.

One of the earliest laws that the new government passed concerned the archaeological heritage of the Greek nation. This law, passed in May 1834, declared that all antiquities were “national heritage” and “state property” and could not therefore be exported. Excavations could be carried out only with a permit. The foundation of the Greek Archaeological Service the next year provided the personnel and infrastructure to carry out excavations in the new state and marked a major shift toward Greek-run projects.

The reason for the major emphasis on archaeology lay in the ideology of the new kingdom and its need to create a new and widely accepted identity. Previously the inhabitants of this relatively unimportant Ottoman province had called themselves Romei (“Romans”) and Orthodox Christians; they were ruled by Ottoman governors and by local chiefs and aristocrats who had attained some measure of autonomy—all of which hardly made them members of a modern European nation. Thanks to the European Enlightenment, however, they could appropriate their own classical past and identify themselves with “the Hellenes,” the originators of European civilization. To do so required knowledge and control of the classical past, discovery of the tangible monuments of that past, and appropriate education of the people now to be called Hellenes.

The most famous symbol of the Hellenic past was the Acropolis, but the four classical structures that can be seen there today—the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, the Propylaea, and the Temple of Athena Nike—had been converted, respectively, into a mosque, an armory, a fortress, and a bastion. Visually, they were dominated by a tall Frankish defensive tower beside what had been the Propylaea and were surrounded by a warren of small houses and alleys. The task of the new Archaeological Service was to purify this morass of different periods and peoples. Under the directorship of Kyriakos Pittakis, conservator of antiquities from 1836, the mosque and minaret within the Parthenon were demolished, the Venetian and Turkish defenses were removed, the various houses and streets were destroyed, the blocks of the Temple of Athena Nike were discovered and reconstructed, and the Erechtheum porches were restored. This work of cleaning and restoring continued into the 1860s when the Acropolis Museum was built, and finally, in 1874, the Archaeological Society of Athens, with financial help from the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, demolished the Frankish tower. The Acropolis was thus returned to its original “pure” classical form with all its barbarian accretions removed.

There were dissenting voices. Not everyone, including some Greek intellectuals, agreed with the removal of all traces of later periods. King Otto, the son of the same Ludwig of Bavaria who had so eagerly acquired the Aegina Marbles, was wholeheartedly in favor of Greek classicism, but he and his advisers also favored the Byzantine period, which was a better symbol of stable autocracy than the warring democracies and oligarchies of the classical city-states. In