Even if you are certain that Lord Elgin stole the marbles from the Parthenon at the turn of the 18th century, his doggedness merits at least an iota of admiration. In his quest to remove and bear home to England choice sections from the ancient Greek monument, Thomas Bruce, seventh earl of Elgin and British ambassador to Constantinople (1799–1803), suffered a litany of woes.

He exhausted his fortune to bribe Turkish officials into submission and had to pay sponge divers to retrieve crates of Parthenon friezes and sculptures from the hull of a hired ship that sank. He and his pregnant wife, Mary, were detained in France as prisoners of war during their return trip to Britain, and the son she bore in custody lived for barely a year. The French released her to escort the infant’s body to the ancestral Elgin home in Scotland, but authorities insisted on keeping her diplomat husband detained. During their forced separation, Mary began an affair that would prompt Lord Elgin to sue for divorce. Lord Byron mocked him in verse. And, having requested £74,000 from the British government for his efforts, he was paid less than half the sum—and the money went directly to his creditors. Ultimately he moved to France to avoid them and died there, penniless, in 1841.

William St. Clair, author of “Lord Elgin and the Marbles,” (Oxford University Press, USA, 1998), says, “He ruined himself, he ruined his life and he destroyed the family fortune for several generations as a result of his actions.” Moreover, he fathered a controversy that refuses to die; two centuries onward, the British and the Greeks are still arguing over if and when the antiquities should return to their Athenian home. Andrew Douglas Alexander Thomas Bruce, the current Earl of Elgin, told Smithsonian magazine in 1992 that he was “sorry his great-grandfather (had) ever (seen) the bloody stones.”

Lord Elgin fulfilled his goal, however; artists, poets and scholars flocked to study and learn from the Parthenon marbles. Still, few would accept crippling debt, imprisonment, public mockery, marital breakdown and the death of a child for such an abstract payoff, even if they knew beforehand that poet John Keats would write “Ode on a Grecian Urn” after viewing the hard-won fragments. “He was never in any doubt over whether it was the right thing to do,” says St. Clair, who pinpoints a motive every collector understands. “He genuinely thought it (the Parthenon marbles) was the greatest masterpiece by the hand of man.”