On or about 11 June 2012, Intelligence Squared hosted a debate about the return of the Elgin Marbles. Partnering with Vanity Fair, the group televised and later posted to the Internet this rich debate, nicely summarizing opposing views and arguments mustered in favor of and against the proposed action. Visitors can follow the English-language debate on the website of Intelligence Squared at http://www.intelligencesquared.com/?s=Parthenon+marbles .

Following the Internet airing of the debate, Videoman.gr ostensibly picked up the clip and provided Greek subtitles for Greek audiences, after which it was posted to You Tube to reach an even larger Greek-speaking viewing audience globablly.Thus far, more than 25,000 visitors have accessed and viewed the brief video. Most of the comments have been solidly positive, expressing appreciation to the eloquent efforts of Stephen Fry to sway British officials.

HCS Transcription of Fry Remarks:

(Introduction by moderator) Stephen Fry, writer, actor, broadcaster, you-name-it he’s done it all, he’s going to argue for the motion. (Applause)

I’m very disappointed—he’s a marvelous MP and a splendid man and a very fine historian—yet he used the phrase “slippery slope.” And the very fact that we want to return the friezes and the metopes of what now everyone is far too embarrassed, only recently, to call the Elgin marbles, the very fact that we want to return them to the place where they were born, does not mean that the Rosetta Stone is going to go back to Egypt.

As has already been said, the idea that a museum is some whole, perfect, finished Victorian idea of a kind of pantechnicon of all world knowledge is non-sensical. Like all things, it changes.

My proposal to you is very simple. How classy would it be if you went into the British Museum, and in the place where now you see the friezes that Elgin took, you saw a film of how they were cast—because they can be cast, unlike a painting which you can only photograph—so what you would see when you went to the British Museum, you would see a period of two hundred years in which we curated them beautifully, and then you will see the journey of these extraordinary pieces of Pentelic marble being returned to within five miles of Mt. Pentelika where the marble was quarried and where that extraordinary temple, the Parthenon, was erected to Pallas Athene, the goddess of Athens.

The reason it’s important in Athens, is because it’s all about Athens. There are 192 soldiers on the friezes because 192 soldiers died in the Battle of Marathon. And it was between the Battle of Marathon and their own defeat at the hands of the Spartans, between that period, Periclean Athens, that saw the rise of everything that our culture now depends on: philosophy, logic, Euclidean mathematics, empiricism, a refusal to take on trust anything that is told to you—Socrates died by that principle, history, algebra, astronomy, justice—the Areios Pagos, the hill up to which they went to dispense their justice, every citizen available to do it.

By no means was it a perfect society; women did not have equal rights; pederasty was rife. But, hey, I was in a public school—there’s nothing new there. (Laughter) So, the fact is, everything our enlightenment is predicated upon, Athens and around that time the enlightenment, it so happens the Ottoman Empire had completely overtaken Greece. Now the idea that it was a legitimate purchase by John Bruce, the Lord of Elgin, is like saying the American ambassador to the Netherlands went to Amsterdam when the Nazis had invaded, and did a deal with the Nazi ruler of Holland to buy Rembrandt’s “Night Watch.” And it was all signed, yes?

“Und ve are de Germans und ve own Hollands und de are under our occupation, und you can have it, it’s yours.”

And then Congress said, Yup, it’s perfectly legal. We now own the ‘Night Watch.’”

Greece was under occupation. Nine years after Elgin took those, raped those beautiful, but extraordinary pieces of history, Byron died to that cause. There are more statues of Byron in Greece than there are in Britain. And the Greeks started their War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire which they eventually won in the 1830s—in 1832 I think it was. So, we’re not talking about some simple business of an English ambassador doing a deal with a legitimate government who gave him the right to take away the stones on the temple that absolutely characterized and personified the greatest civilization the world has yet seen, the one on which ours is predicated.