What Lord Elgin Did

Was it history's greatest archaeological crime or an act of preservation?

Maybe I’m a bad person, but it kind of tickled me to learn that Lord Elgin had an unhappy life.

Elgin (real name: Thomas Bruce) is the British nobleman who removed many of the sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, eventually whisking them away to London, where they’ve controversially resided in the British Museum ever since. I’ll get to Elgin’s status as the avatar of greedy, thieving European imperialist archaeologists in a bit, but first let’s examine — and, if you don’t like Elgin, revel in — his misfortune.

According to scholar Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Elgin was, for much of his life, “better known as a cuckold than a collector of antiquities.”

Elgin married the heiress Mary Nisbet in 1799, and she accompanied him to an ambassadorial post in Constantinople, where the couple lived in extreme luxury. For a while, they seemed happy — Mary shared in her husband’s enthusiasm for collecting Greek archaeological treasures. But things went sour when Napoleon arrested Elgin (he was placed un…