SOURCE: Beard, Mary. “Plunder Blunder.” Times Literary Supplement (12 June 1998): 5–6.

In the following excerpt, Beard offers a negative assessment of the reissue of The Elgin Marbles.

In April 1811, Lord Byron was in Athens looking for a lift back to England. Ostentatious philhellene and vicious satirist of Lord Elgin (“Noseless himself he brings here noseless blocks / To show what time has done and what the pox” ran one famous jibe, probably invented by Byron, likening Elgin's syphilitic nose to the mangled marbles), he eventually found a cabin on a boat bound for Malta. His travelling companions were a very mixed bunch: C. R. Cockerell joined him for a few hours of farewell drinking as they crossed the Saronic Gulf (Cockerell was on his way to strip the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina of its sculptures); sharing the whole voyage was Byron's new fifteen-year-old boyfriend, chaperoned by his brother-in-law, G. B...