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 statu…