Mistress of the Elgin Marbles Read online

  Despite rumors spread by Elgin’s enemies, his reason for taking mercury had nothing to do with having contracted syphilis. He lived a long and very sane life, and his wife, Mary, showed no signs of ever having contracted syphilis from her husband. She continued to maintain sexual relations with him, and, in fact, in early 1802 she was pregnant again.

  Not feeling very well herself in the early stages of her third pregnancy, Mary wrote to her mother-in-law the dreaded news that her son had suffered “one violent cold after another [and] not-withstanding every precaution has been used an inflamation has settled in his nose.” The mercury had begun to eat away at it. Mary wrote to her mother-in-law, “He is amazingly reduced by the constant blistering and bleeding at this moment he has got on his throat two blisters that are to be kept open; he lives entirely upon Milk.” Elgin wrote to his mother that “my health inevitably gone for-Ever—I speak after a hard fight of five months during which I have not been out above a few times, and latterly very ill.” He confided to his mother again that he was anxious to leave Constantinople. He thought that travel to a warmer climate might help him recuperate. In fact, Dr. Wittman accompanied a group to the temperate island of Scio (Chios), where

  we paid our respects to the Turkish commandant, and to the British consul, Signor Giovanni Giudiuchi, who was so obliging to procure us an excellent house belonging to the Franciscan convent, which had been selected for the residence of Lord Elgin, his Lordship being shortly expected at this island for the recovery of his health.

  On March 11, 1802—their third wedding anniversary—Mary wrote to her parents that the handsome young Elgin had become permanently disfigured. To cure his blistering nose, the doctors cut off the tip. “I am very miserable about Elgin I dread his nose will be marked, as yet the Doctors do not think the bone is touched, and they hope to prevent but they do not say they positively can save it. The idea alone of such a thing makes one wretched.”

  On March 25, she wrote the Dowager Lady Elgin, “The under part of his nose is cut, I think a small mask must always remain.”

  Again, proving false the rumors that Elgin’s nose had fallen off as a result of a venereal disease, Mary’s letters documented that Elgin’s unfortunate deformity was caused by what we would today denounce as medical barbarism: first, the prescription of mercury, which caused the blistering, and then, the amputation of the tip of his nose as a preventive.

  Tragically, Elgin continued to follow his doctors’ advice and drink mercury, “and they think it agrees with him,” Mary wrote her parents. She insisted that everyone thought that the best medicine would be leaving for that warmer climate, “but I dread his catching cold going on board.” On March 31, they packed up the children for this long-desired excursion and sailed through the Straits of the Dardanelles, leaving Constantinople. The whole family was on board—Lord and Lady Elgin and their two small children, Lord Bruce—who was just about to turn two—and little Mary, barely six months old. Little Mary was, as Mary liked to write, fat and robust. Little Lord Bruce, on the other hand, often suffered from colds and asthma like both his parents. He was treated with “sweet mercury.”

  Chapter 12

  AWASH IN ANTIQUITIES

  Mary was devastated by her husband’s disfigurement. She wrote to her mother that she was “perfectly unhappy about Elgin…. My only comfort is my Bratts.” As they traveled to Athens, Mary longed to be her parents’ shadow, to feel their comforting presence and be where they had been the year before. She wrote to her mother that they had sailed with a small flotilla, as pirates were everywhere. The Maltese slaves, soon to veer off on their way home, were on one boat. She, Elgin, the children, their paramannas, her maid, Masterman, and Dr. Scott went in another vessel, and Mr. Hunt, Colonel Murray, and others went in an English brig. When she could stand no more of the rocking, Mary got off her ship for one night, leaving the children on board with their paramannas and the doctor. Elgin would not leave her side, and they pitched a tent, lit a fire, and slept in a cave, which she confided was “very romantic.” On land, they journeyed by ass—quite difficult for a pregnant woman—and apparently impossibly uncomfortable for little Mary’s paramanna, whom Mary, in her letter, named “Fatty.” Fatty, Elgin, and Dr. Scott walked, and somehow six hours later they all converged in a village where they spent another adventurous night assailed by fleas.

  Finally, on Saturday, April 3, they arrived in Athens at eight o’clock in the evening and stayed at the English consulate. The English consul had been given the title Logotheti, which allowed him to collect revenue for the church. His real name was Ioannis Stamou Khondrodimas, but the Elgins called him “Logotheti” and his wife “Madame Logotheti.” Mr. and Mrs. “Logotheti” offered the consulate to his excellency the ambassador extraordinaire, and the ambassador’s family and staff while they looked for temporary quarters elsewhere. That gesture was one not only of tribute but also of strict protocol; and one year earlier, out of respect for Lady Elgin, the Logothetis had extended the same hospitality to the Nisbets, and that visit was commemorated with portraits. Mary was thrilled to arrive at a house where she felt her parents’ presence. “Do you remember the pictures in the room next to your bedroom here? Bruce always shews us Grand-Papa and Grand-Mama; he never fails drinking your health every day.” She wrote, “I am now writing in the very room my own dear Mother used to write to me from.” On April 8, she hosted a Grecian Ball and, once again, was instantaneously popular. “We had a ball here the other night like those you used to have; how I like to hear them talk of you and my Father, they are really fond of you; Madame Logotheti wears your locket constantly, it is such an old friend of mine; I think I feel rather jealous when I see it on her neck.” She reported on how she had arranged them all comfortably into the house:

  I have made Hammerton’s room the nursery; did you ever go up the outside flight of stairs? We have repaired the long room and put my piano forte into it, and we breakfast and sit reading, writing, or arranging medals in the gallery; I have put a gate upon the top of the stairs, so there is a fine airy run for Bruce … tonight we drove to the Monastery of Daphne where you rode, and went all over it; I feel to know everything you thought and did here.

  Mary tried to trace the Nisbets’ footsteps and visited the Bath as they had done. Afterward, she inquired, “Had you dancers, singers, and tambourine players … the dancing was too indecent, beyond anything—Mary shall not go to a Turkish Bath!” She met with their artists working in Athens on Elgin’s behalf, and they, too, reported on where the Nisbets had gone, so that Mary could continue in their shadow. Lusieri told Mary that Mrs. Nisbet liked to “go almost every day to the Pnyx,” a hill to the southwest of Athens. On her twenty-fourth birthday, she wrote that she would see everything she could, go everywhere she could, and get all the work done that her husband required as “I feel no inclination to pay a second visit to Greece.” She wanted to go home and return to the comfort of her own family back in England.

  Once again, she observed everything on her tour in order to provide her family with the requisite entertaining travelogue. She went to Corinth, Argos, Delphi, the Cave of Trophonius in Lebadea, and stopped at the plain of Marathon. She enjoyed visiting the “wonders,” the Island of Salamis and Mount Aegaleus where Xerxes’ throne was placed, Eleusis, and the ruins of the Temple of Ceres; “the Statue of Ceres,” she wrote, “which was in the town, was sent to England last year by Mr. Clarke.” She rode “round the walls of Megara from whence we had a very good view of Parnassus covered with snow.” They dined at Crommyon where Theseus killed “the Sow,” and then stayed at the palace of the governor of Corinth, where they viewed the

  commencement of the wall which crosses the Isthmus, separating Greece from the Peloponnesus … we then went to the Amphitheatre, and entered the Caverns under the seats where the wild beasts used in the combats, used to be kept … we saw seven columns of the Doric Order, some say they belonged to the Temple of Venus, and others call it the Sisypheum.

  He
r reputation had preceded her. When they arrived at the bey’s palace, women of two harems, Bekyr Bey and Nouri Bey, had assembled in

  kind of covered boxes, two of which are slung across a mule like Gypsies panniers, with a lady in each; over them are curtains of scarlet cloth to prevent the people seeing them…. The women got hold of Masterman, took her into the Harem and begged of her to persuade me to go to them…. I went and was most graciously received by them. I was deluged with rose-water, then perfumed, and afterwards presented by a woman upon her knees with sweetmeats, water and coffee.

  On the sixth of May, they left Corinth and reached the Temple of the Nemean Jupiter, where she observed that “we antiquarians” believed that entire blocks of stone that had fallen to the floor must have done so during an earthquake. As she had made notations in her childhood diary of the natural world around her, Mary now reacted to the impact of time and weather on the ancient sites. In fact, she was a natural archaeologist.

  She was some five months pregnant as she traveled over mountains and very rugged terrain in very hot weather to see some sites (whose fame had varying stories at best). After visiting the plains of Argos, she traveled to “a stupendous vault, which is supposed by some to be the Tomb of Agamemnon, and by others, the Treasury of the Kings of Mycenae.” In her condition, she crawled through the hole to enter and reported that they actually measured “the architrave of the door … twenty four feet long, seventeen feet thick and near five feet high.” In contrast to her daring, Logotheti’s son, who was charged with accompanying her Ladyship and her maid into the wilds of Greece, “refused to follow me into the second vault—I saw the bristles on his skull were erect at crawling into the first vault.”

  Accompanied by “very numerous Turkish and Greek Escort, as well as an Albanian guard in the dress of the ancient Macedonians,” Lady Elgin arrived at Aklatho-Cambo, a picturesque, “exquisitely beautiful” place, replete with nightingale-filled groves and lovely “lassies.” These lovely young ladies, however, “possess none of the native simplicity you would have expected to have met with in such an out of the way place; they are declared to be the most dissipated ladies in the Peloponnesus.” On the ninth of May, a covered litter arrived to carry Mary; a gift from the pasha, it was the kind of transport only used by the pasha’s sultanas. Mary, Countess of Elgin, reacted to all of this reverence with her typical irreverence. Her van

  was carried between two mules and guided by six men in the manner of a Sedan Chair; in some of the very bad places the men actually took the mules up in their arms and lifted them over. I was in it once at this manoeuvre which I did not at all admire, and begged to be let out the next time.

  Masterman and I lay in it our full length, vis-à-vis to one another (like a sofa with fine embroidered scarlet cushions in it, covered all over with scarlet cloth trimmed with gold fringe, and ornamented with large gold tassels)—with two large lattice windows which I took the liberty of opening.

  A Black, who was the principal manager of this tarta-a-van, seeing Elgin coming up to speak to me, beckoned to him not to come up on that side because it was opened but to go to the other where the lattice was closed. Blacky took great care of me and did not allow the foxes to peep.

  The method of getting into the tarta-a-van is, a man lays down and one steps on his back—would you like that? In Turkish they call him “The Step”!

  As they forged on to Mycenae and the ancient theater of Epidaurus, Elgin received permission from the pasha of Nauplia to remove antiquities from Mycenae, Corinth, and Olympia. At Elis, they were given parade horses, sable and ermine pelisses, and other luxurious offerings. She acknowledged, “I can assure you such a journey is an amazing undertaking for a woman … one day we were 11 hours over roads you would think it impossible a horse could keep his feet, upon the side of steep precipices with immense stones. I am much gratified I had the courage to do it.” Lady Elgin’s travelogue was certainly like none other. Other Western travelers had written of and sketched the sites of villages and ancient ruins, but Lady Elgin’s vantage point was unique, like the view from Mount Olympus, because everywhere she went, she was treated like a goddess.

  Deeply moved by it all, she decided nonetheless that when they returned to Athens, she would remain there instead of accompanying Elgin on to Thebes. Elgin’s lifetime dream of a journey into the past consumed his heart, but Mary’s own heart lay in the present. Despite worldwide public adoration, the celebrated Lady Elgin longed to hold her own “dear Babs”—to fuss over them at mealtime, playtime, and bedtime. So Mary “persuaded him to go, as I think it will be a pleasure to him all his life afterwards; but he did not like leaving his Dot!” Good thing he did though, as the ever practical Mary was probably the only person on earth who, at this point, could make his dreams come true.

  Chapter 13

  THE ACROPOLIS: CAUTION TO THE WIND

  In the middle of May, Mary was once again in Athens, where she performed her duties as wife, mother, and ambassadress with her usual energy and cheer. British ships came and went and, although Elgin was away, Mary hosted every visiting captain at the consulate. One in particular, Captain Hoste of the Mutine, was about Mary’s age, a frequent guest in Constantinople, and a favorite of Lord Nelson. He arrived in Athens near death, and Mary, genuinely fond of him and concerned for his health, thought him poignant as he chatted with her about his parents, whom he had not seen for nine years. She felt great sympathy for him because he, like she, was homesick, and so she continued to send him notes of encouragement until, almost miraculously, he recovered. Her friendship and thoughtfulness would not be forgotten. Alone in Athens, she focused on her children and her role as a helpmate to her husband, whose artistic venture on the Acropolis had mushroomed. Elgin’s artists, who had arrived to draw and record the beauties of the ancient world, were now in the process of dismantling it. Mary would call on her friendship with Captain Hoste to help her in a labor of love.

  In 1802, while the population in Constantinople was in the hundreds of thousands, there were barely one thousand people living in Athens. The Acropolis was largely a slum with shacks festooning its hillside. To assert that the Parthenon stood serenely at the summit of the Acropolis untouched for two thousand years until that time is simply untrue. In fact, this gleaming white Pentelic marble temple, the heavenward symbol of triumph, superiority, and divine protection, stood over nearly two thousand years of debris and had become the premier target of invaders almost from the moment she crowned the Acropolis.

  The Parthenon was erected in the fifth century BC to celebrate the end of a period of struggle with Persia. The temple was dedicated to Athena, the protector of Athens and its artisans. Every year in July, Athena’s birthday was celebrated with a festival called the Panathenaia, and every four years, the Great Panathenaia, whose thrilling procession of chariots and champions is commemorated on the Parthenon frieze, drew the finest competitors in horsemanship and athletics.

  At the end of the fourth century AD, Alaric the Visigoth and his soldiers sacked Athens and caused huge destruction to the Acropolis some twenty years before their pillage of Rome. In the fifth century AD, Christians gutted the east end of the Parthenon to create an apse and constructed a bell tower. In 1458, the Turks attacked and reconfigured the church into a mosque, transforming the bell tower into a minaret. The Turks used the sacred site as a powder magazine, and when, on September 26, 1687, Venetian soldiers shelled her, the Parthenon exploded. General Morosini and his soldiers seized the moment and sacked the place. Even the Danes lopped the heads off metopes in 1688, and these can still be seen in the museum in Copenhagen. The Vatican has chunks from the west pediment; the French have an entire collection in the Louvre and some in Strasbourg. Pieces of the Parthenon are on display in museums in Würzburg, Heidelberg, and Munich; the Austrians host a collection in Vienna. The Parthenon was eviscerated by target practice, ravaged by storms and earthquakes, and used as a bathroom; tourists frequently vandalized portions by carving their names o
r hacking off souvenir fragments.

  In the seventeenth century collections of Greek antiquities began to appear in some of the great country homes of England. The Earl of Arundel, the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Pembroke, the first Duke of Devonshire, and even King Charles I were avid Hellenophiles. The French, led by the Marquis de Nointel, joined in this interest in classical Athens. Nointel preceded Elgin by almost 130 years when he brought his own artist, Jacques Carrey, to sketch the Acropolis. Carrey’s illustrations, executed around 1674, predated the Venetian bombardment by some thirteen years, and thus he provided the world with a fairly accurate record of what the Parthenon looked like before the explosion. Englishman George Wheler wrote a detailed account of his own journey to Greece in 1682. In 1697, John Potter, later the archbishop of Canterbury, published Archaeologia Graeca, which was republished again and again, the seventh edition appearing in 1751.