Cold is the heart, fair Greece! that looks on thee,
	Nor feels as lovers o'er the dust they lov'd ;
	Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
	Thy walls defac'd, thy mouldering shrines remov'd
	By British hands, which it had best behov'd
	To guard those relics ne'er to be restor'd.
	Curst be the hour when from their isle they rov'd,
	And once again thy hopeless bosom gor'd,
	And snatch'd thy shrinking Gods to northern climes abhorr'd.

In "The Curse of Minerva," Byron's privately circulated execration of the Scottish peer, in a metaphoric gesture of great significance for this paper, Elgin himself is turned to stone: "So let him stand through ages yet unborn,/Fix'd statue on the pedestal of Scorn." In the Latin addendum to the poem we get a clue to the biographical source of Byron's sexual jibes: "Tu statuam rapias, Scote, sed uxor abest" (which I loosely translate as: You may abscond with the stones, Scotchman, but your wife has absconded too). Byron's taunting remark refers to Lady Elgin's notorious affair with another Scotsman, Robert Fergusson, and the subsequent divorce trial, the revelations of which confirmed the affair as the most lurid sex scandal of 1808. And if it is Byron's attack on Elgin that is the best remembered feature of the whole story, this is the least remembered. It is, I suggest, because we have been content so long with the liberal-Byron pillorying of Elgin and not concerned ourselves with the particulars of Elgin's story, such as his marriage breakdown, which clearly determined the metaphorics of Byron's critique, that the full implications of the marbles' controversy have eluded us: as an illuminating moment not only in the aesthetics of Romantic Hellenism but in the history of British imperialism, with the British Museum as the intersection of these two ideological formations.

It is the untold half of the story I wish to relate here, with a view to examining how in Keats, no less than in Byron, the ideological economy of exchange embodied in Hellenism whereby Britain inherits the glory of Athens through the custody and aestheticization of her archaeological remains is questioned. The difference between the two poets is that Byron's is a direct attack equating imperialism and sexual violence, with the marbles functioning purely as a political symbol of imperial rapacity, whereas Keats' poetic response emphasizes his own aesthetic experience of the marbles without drawing any explicit political conclusions. And yet, I wish to argue, it is through just this emphasis on the psychology of aesthetic response that Keats' Hyperion project, especially if read with an eye to Lord Elgin's story, makes available to us an allegory of the contradictions inherent in the relationship between Hellenism and imperialism that is at least as powerful as Byron's more celebrated contribution.

The reception of the Elgin marbles in England in the first part of the nineteenth century and the public controversy that raged around, in ascending order of importance, the legitimacy of their acquisition, their aesthetic merit, and their purchase by the British Government, is a defining moment of the Romantic period because so many ideologies and institutions are so clearly represented in the debate. What enabled this publicity, the reason the scandal of the marbles could go so far beyond the circle of dilletanti and collectors who had monopolised English archaeological interest in Greece and Rome in the previous century, was -- and this will sound very familiar to us -- the involvement of taxpayers' money. The huge debts acquired by Lord Elgin in the acquistion of the Parthenon sculptures made it impossible for him to preserve them as a private collection and the British Museum, founded not fifty years before and flushed with the recent endowment of the Greco-Roman statues of Lord Townley, offered a logical repository for the marbles and more importantly an opportunity for Elgin to recoup his losses.

So the line between public and private was crossed. The anxiety of that transgression is evident in the select parliamentary committee report on the proposed purchase of the marbles, in their persistent worrying over the question of the authority under which the marbles had been made available for purchase by the state. Was Elgin's activity as a collector of antiquities facilitated by and continuous with his position as special ambassador to the Levant, without which association to the British Crown he could never have won authorization from the Turks for dismantling the Parthenon frieze? Or was he acting as a private citizen and collector? If the former, was not Elgin guilty of abusing his privileges as representative of His Majesty's government? And if the latter were the case, under what obligation did the government now lie to buy the damn things? That the select committee never fully resolves this dilemma is a hardly surprising instance of noblesse oblige -- Lord Elgin's honour comes across as perhaps the most valuable commodity at stake in the whole transaction -- but the vexed issue of imperialism and authority raised in the report is one I want, with the help of Byron and Keats, to pursue.

Pairing Byron and Keats in this matter is, of course, highly problematic, as the two poets found themselves in opposing camps in the debate over the marbles. Through his friendship with Ben Haydon Keats was allied with the pro-marbles party, which consisted not only of the British artistic fraternity but, most significantly, the sculptor Canova and the Italian connoisseur Visconti. The latter were professional arbiters of taste brought over from the continent by Elgin and Canova's letter to the select parliamentary committee is representative of the pro-Elgin lobby's line on the aesthetic side of the question:

I admire in [the marbles] the truth of nature combined with the choice of beautiful forms: everything about them breathes animation, with a singular truth of expression, and with a degree of skill which is the more exquisite as it is without the least affectation of the pomp of art, which is concealed with admirable address. The naked figures are real flesh, in its native beauty.

Evident here is the peculiarly romantic marriage of a neo-classicist truth-beauty aesthetic with an emphasis on naturalist effects: that living, breathing quality of animation so persuasively suggested by the marbles. Conspicuously absent is any reference to the defaced, fragmentary state of the statues on which the anti-marbles party, and Byron and Payne Knight in particular, focused their attacks. Byron branded them "misshapen monuments and maimed antiques," and when asked by the parliamentary committee whether he would rank the marbles in the first-class of art, Payne Knight replies that "their state of preservation is such I cannot form a very accurate notion; their surface is gone mostly . . . they are so mutilated I cannot say much about them." The irony is that Payne Knight had plenty enough to say about the marbles, most of it the self-interested and disingenuous opinion one would expect from the Society of Dilletanti's champion in their struggle with an emergent bourgeois public museum culture. Ironically, not being able to say much about the marbles is as productive a trope for Keats as for Payne Knight: "Forgive me, Haydon! that I cannot speak/Definitively of these mighty things" sums up the conceit of Keats' two sonnets to Haydon, which focus on his own highly charged but ambiguous response to viewing the marbles, to the exclusion of any description of the statues whatsoever. As more than one commentator has pointed out, it is only in the syntactical disintegration of the first sonnet, that is, at the formal level of the poem, that we get a sense that it is the fragmentary state of the marbles that makes most impression on Keats:

	Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
	Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
	So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
	That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
	Wasting of old Time - with a billowy main -
	A sun - a shadow of a magnitude.

The same critics generally follow Keats' poetic engagement with the marbles into the Hyperion project, especially the "Fall of Hyperion" in which the epic drama of "Hyperion" has been, as it were, museumized; where the poet is conducted by Moneta, as through a gallery or museum, on a tour of various statuesque tableaux strongly reminiscent of the figures from the Parthenon frieze. In this way the pathos of the drama of "Hyperion" is transfered from the characters themselves, the fallen Titans, to the poetic subject himself, who enters the dioramic picture in order to experience their loss as his own: "And every day by day methought I grew/More gaunt and ghostly." And it is this quality of physical identification with the marbles that, of course, distinguishes his response from the politically motivated ambivalence of a Payne Knight.

A more important distinction I wish to make, however, is between Keats and other supporters of Elgin. Whereas Canova, Haydon and Hazlitt are, in their various degrees of rapturous approval of the marbles, moved to elaborately aestheticized and anatomically precise descriptions of the marbles, Keats finds in them an altogether different inspiration. The Elgin marbles sonnets and Hyperion poems are filled not with idealized descriptions of statuesque figures but with images of muteness, paralysis and blindness, with liminal psychological states and interrupted cognitions:

	Suddenly a palsied chill
	Struck from the paved level up my limbs,
	And was ascending quick to put cold grasp
	Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat!
	I shriek'd, and the sharp anguish of my shriek
	Stung my own ears -- I strove hard to escape
	The numbness, strove to gain the lowest step.
	Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold
	Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart;
	And when I clasp'd my hands I felt them not.

Here the relationship between the viewing subject and the marbles is dramatized as a seduction scene in which the poet inscribes his own body into the fragmentary images he sees to compensate for their physical mutilation and more importantly, given the radically de-historicized environment of the museum, to provide for their critical desolation, their sublime dearth of meaning. It is a dark ontological fantasy of Keats', to write about turning to stone, but when traced through the story of Lord Elgin himself it is a fantasy that comes quite shockingly to life, like the gods themselves out of their dreadful torpor at the opening of "Hyperion."

During the course of the sensational divorce trial in which Lord Elgin brought a case of adultery against his wife, various witnesses were brought to the stand to account for the breakdown in the marriage. It was evident to the court that Elgin's busy diplomatic schedule, his ceaseless ferrying around the Eastern Mediterranean in an attempt to secure British interests against Napoleon, not less than his monomaniacal interest in antiquities, had put much strain on the relationship. But it is not this neglect, hardly unusual in a man of Elgin's class and position anyway, that comes across as having the gravest implications for the nuptial bond. Rather, it is Elgin's ill-health, specifically, a degenerative condition of the face concentrated in the nose, that appears to have determined the course of Lady Elgin's disaffection. The prosecutor's examination of Elgin's ambassadorial secretary, William Hamilton, reads:

- Mr. Hamilton, would you say that this withdrawal on the part of 
Lady
Elgin was due to a definite reason?
- Yes. While in Constantinople, Lord Elgin contracted a sever ague which 
consequently resulted in the loss of his nose.
- Mr. Hamilton, would you say that her Ladyship's interest in Lord Elgin
began to wane at this point?
- Yes.

The transcripts of the proceedings record a considerable commotion in the courtroom at this testimony, an uproar repeated when another of Elgin's secretaries, John Morier, was asked for his observations on Lady Elgin's conduct toward Lord Elgin:

- In the beginning she was a most affectionate wife and mother.
- Do you mean to say that her Ladyship's conduct changed?
- Yes.
- When exactly?
- As Lord Elgin's affliction became more serious.
- You are referring to the loss of his lordship's nose?
- I am.

Not surprisingly, there are no portraits of Lord Elgin in later life, and we can rely only on Lady Elgin's letters and a few inconclusive doctor's reports for our assessment of the gravity of Elgin's condition, but it seems not unreasonable to describe the wasting disease he suffered from as having eaten away the greater part of his face. The diagnosis of one Harley Street physician is worth quoting, if only as a fine example of the periphrastic style long honored by the medical profession as expedient to those occasions when one has no idea what one is looking at:

A sore, established in the nose, supposing it was brought on by picking or any similar accident, would naturally, by full living and sedentary life...[become] very inflammatory and ultimately an obstinate ulcer.

We have already observed the disastrous effects of this condition on Elgin's love life, indeed, that he became an object of sexual revulsion for his wife, but if we consider his testimony before the parliamentary committee in 1816, a more than merely prurient interest in Elgin's disfiguration becomes necessary. It is revealed in the course of the inquiry that Elgin's interest in the Parthenon marbles was at first purely academic: he intended only to have sketches done and plaster moulds made of the statuary. It was when he observed what he perceived as the violent desecration of the marbles at the hands of all and sundry -- the Turks, Greeks, and European tourists -- that he conceived of a mission of wholesale salvage of the marbles:

every traveller coming added to the general defacement of the statuary in his reach: there are now in London pieces broken off within our day. And the Turks have been continually defacing the heads...It was upon these suggestions and with these feelings, that I proceeded to remove as much of the sculpture as I conveniently could; it was no part of my original plan to bring away anything but my models.

A much more complex and suggestive chain of resemblances between Elgin's story and Byron and Keats' poems becomes apparent. A chain leading from the loss of Elgin's nose to his wife's peremptory denial of conjugal privileges and eventual adultery, to a public sexual humiliation at the hands of Byron in his description of Elgin as a "statue on the pedestal of Scorn". Furthermore, Byron's choice of metaphor speaks to a connection between the kind of pathological identification between viewer and marbles we observed in Keats, and Elgin's own inveterate and ultimately ruinous passion for Grecian statues -- statues not the least remarkable for a species of facial degeneration which would seem to have found its living image in Elgin himself. The representation Elgin makes to the British Parliament for recovery of his losses in the East now rings with a greater pathos than a mere tabling of accounts. Beyond inspiring a pathological interest in the defaced statues of the Parthenon, the loss of his nose is a misfortune continuous with Elgin's emasculation and the loss of his wife, the bankrupting of his estate, and the ruin of a once-promising political career. The ruins of the Acropolis mark his own ruin, personally, professionally and financially. The fact that Elgin never gets his money, his wife, or his job back would appear to be accidents of the story but the irrecoverability of his nose, the permanent and fateful effects of his disfigurement, offers the irresistible picture of an emblematic imperial adventurer, extending his means and his health far beyond its limits, seeking the corrupted image of himself in foreign lands, desiring with an unslakeable want not to discover but re-cover, not to acquire wealth or celebrity but to make restitution for a loss. In his decade-long obsession with the removal of the Parthenon marbles, Elgin seeks to put a face to his own imperial aspiration and being but finds in the defaced statues he so covets only the mirror of his own need, a reflection of his own virtual identity which he nevertheless sets about, with an implacable will, to salvage whatever the cost. If English Hellenism is the production of metaphors of Greece which the British state might then lay claim to as the natural custodian and inheritor of Athenian imperial glory, Elgin's story offers a critique of that aesthetic-ideological exchange. The truth-beauty idealizations of Canova and Haydon are, quite literally, scarred, and, for Keats as much as for Elgin, the desire to see one's own imperial destiny reflected in the marbles produces only nightmarish images of disfiguration and death.

Byron describes this self-destructive quality of imperial desire in sexual terms, as a rape which redounds on the perpetrator as cuckoldry and humiliation. In the interrupted apotheosis of Apollo that concludes the "Hyperion" text, Keats offers an even more dramatic meditation on the paradoxes of imperial power:

	O why should I
	Feel curs'd and thwarted, when the liegeless air
	Yields to my step aspirant 
		. . .			
	I have heard the cloudy thunder: Where is power?

By the time Keats abandons the poem some thirty lines later, the question "where is power?" has found no articulate response, only Apollo's shriek and an apotheosis indistinguishable from death:

	Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush
	All the immortal fairness of his limbs;
	Most like the struggle at the gate of death;
	Or liker still to one who should take leave
	Of pale immortal death, and with a pang
	As hot as death's is chill, with fierce convulse
	Die into life: so young Apollo anguish'd

This passage has been read as a conflicted representation of Keats own poetic election wherein Keats casts himself as the aspirant god of English poetry but can't bring himself to actually describe that wished-for incarnation. These multiple paradoxes: the apotheosis and death of Apollo, Keats' poetic election and poetic failure, are of a piece with the ambiguous posterity of Lord Elgin, and with the contradictions inherent in the Hellenist project in which his marbles shared: whereby a national identity is produced through the substitution of aesthetic objects for the idea of imperial dominion. The self-destructive nature of that project, of substituting aesthetic wonder for political power, is evident in the "Hyperion" passage, where imperial election is a curse and imperial power can be experienced only negatively, as a death or metamorphosis into stone. Elgin's salvaging his own emaciated image from the ruins of the Acropolis dramatizes for us a similar pathology wherein the structural contradiction of the imperial project, conceived by the select parliamentary committee on the marbles as a problem of Elgin's authority, of a power exercised without authority, is exposed like a skull beneath corrupted flesh:

	Look on its broken arch, its ruin'd wall,
	Its chambers desolate, and portals foul:
	Yes this was once Ambition's airy hall,
	The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul:
	Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
	The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit
	And Passion's host, that never brook'd control

Byron's metaphor for Elgin's beloved Parthenon is again exact and strongly reminiscent of Keats' figure of historical knowledge in "The Fall of Hyperion":

	at the view of sad Moneta's brow,
	I ached to see what things the hollow brain
	Behind enwombed: what high tragedy
	In the dark secret Chambers of her skull
	Was acting

As "sculpture builded up upon the grave/Of their own power," the Elgin marbles and their history describe a Hellenist culture under the aspect of the tomb. It is the museum as mausoleum, in which the glory of the past is not re-animated by the idealizations of an imperial ideology, nor subsists as the comfortingly aestheticized artefactual evidence of state power, but tells a profoundly alien history and threatens, at any moment, to assume the powers of a Medusa.

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