Lord Elgin: "I am not a thief" (#211, Topic H)

A story in last week's papers stated that the Getty Museum in LA and other leading museums had decided to return artifacts taken from the Parthenon in Athens back to Greece. The story then mentioned that the most famous piece of artifacts taken from the Parthenon, commonly known as the Elgin Marble, in honor of its perpetrator, Britain's Lord Elgin VII, now in display at the British Museum, was/is still awaiting return -- this is not surprising, since the British government has refused to entertain this idea for centuries. What is surprising is an account, I read yesterday, on the ransaking of the Summer Palace in Beijing at the end of the second Opium War (1856-1860) by Anglo-French troops -- the ring leader was no less than Lord Elgin VIII, the son of the Lord Elgin of the Parthenon marble fame! The account reads as follows: "Growing up the son of a bankrupt peer widely considered the vandal, not conservator, of the Parthenon, Elgin had an aesthetic inferiority complex. Watching the precious stones and sculptures, etc., ripped from their settings must have seemed like deja vu all over again from the son of the pillager of the Parthenon. [He wrote a] plaintive entry in his diary: 'I am not a thief.'" (Hanes and Sanello, The Opium Wars [2002], p 277) Of course not. A thief is usually prefaced with the adjective petty; this was big time -- a pearl necklace given to the Empress Eugenie of France was valued at 72,000 pounds (or 1,440,000 pounds in terms of 2001 valuation); a diamond necklace, 90,000 pounds (or 1,800,000 pounds in 2001 valuation).