Napoleon Escalates Efforts to Obtain the Parthenon Marbles, Arresting Lord Elgin’s Agent in the Acquisition of Those Antiquities and Many Others

We have never seen another letter of Napoleon relating to his quest to acquire classical antiquities

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The hunt for antiquities by Napoleon was intense and worldwide. At one point, Napoleon held the jewels of the Egyptian Empire, symbolized by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. But works of art were for him trophies of his conquests and he sought to bring these global treasures to the Louvre.

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Napoleon Escalates Efforts to Obtain the Parthenon Marbles, Arresting Lord Elgin’s Agent in the Acquisition of Those Antiquities and Many Others

We have never seen another letter of Napoleon relating to his quest to acquire classical antiquities

The hunt for antiquities by Napoleon was intense and worldwide. At one point, Napoleon held the jewels of the Egyptian Empire, symbolized by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. But works of art were for him trophies of his conquests and he sought to bring these global treasures to the Louvre.

There is one treasure that Napoleon tried to get but did not: the Elgin Marbles, the great sculptures that adorned the Parthenon. There were a large collection of Classical Greek marble sculptures made under the supervision of the architect and sculptor Phidias and his assistants in Ancient Greece. From 1801 to 1812, agents of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin removed about half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, as well as sculptures from the Propylaea and Erechtheum. The Marbles were transported by sea to Britain. The ongoing war between Britain and France interrupted and challenged the transport of these antiques.

When the French and Turks (who had power in Greece) became friends again it became important for the British to get the Parthenon marbles out of Greece as quickly as possible. Lord Elgin tried to buy a big ship but was unsuccessful and even though he was able to hire several smaller ones the crates were piling up faster then they could export them. To add to his problems his own ship, the HMS Mentor with seventeen cases on board, including some of the finest sections from the Parthenon freize, sank in a storm at the entrance to the harbor of Kythera. With fifty cases still in Piraeus it seemed like half of Elgin’s treasure would have to be left behind. Then on Christmas Eve in 1802 the HMS Braakel ran aground outside Pireaus.

To handle many of these challenges, Elgin sent his right man and chaplain, Phillip Hunt, who, after the wrecking of the ship carrying the marbles, appeared with a small army of Greeks and Albanians and rescued the ship. These made it back to England. It was to Hunt and William Richard Hamilton, his private secretary, that Elgin gave the primary task of collecting antiquities.

The Treaty of Amiens temporarily ended hostilities between France and Britain. It was signed in the city of Amiens on March 25, 1802 by Joseph Bonaparte and Marquess Cornwallis as a “Definitive Treaty of Peace.” This peace lasted only one year until May 18, 1803, and was the only period of general peace in Europe between 1793 and 1814.

After the end of this treaty, Napoleon vowed to arrest English citizens traveling through his dominion. But he did so with strategy. In 1803, he arrested Lord Elgin and held him until 1806, with the goal of getting him to give the Emperor his collection. Elgin claimed afterward that he could have obtained his liberty and named any price should he sell to Napoleon his collection of antiques.

Elgin and Hunt had separated in 1803, and Hunt was compiling information to later write a memoir of the hunt for antiques. And when Hunt entered French territory, or Napoleon realized he had, Napoleon expanded his effort to get the Marbles and other antiques.

Letter signed, St. Cloud, May 8, 1804, to Minister of War Marshall Berthier. “My intention, Citizen Minister, is that Mr. Hunt, anglican minister attached to Lord Elgin at Orleans, be arrested and conducted under secure escort to Fort Bitche, where he will be handed over to the Commander.”

That this arrest was made at the highest level attests to its importance to Napoleon. We have never seen another letter of Napoleon relating to his quest to acquire classical antiquities.

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