“Many are the things the gods accomplish against our expectation” is a line you will find more than once in the surviving corpus of Greek tragedy. It’s usually wheeled out by a gobsmacked chorus when Zeus or one of his Olympian friends pulls off some ridiculous stunt that you didn’t see coming.

Now is the time to polish off this line as a contemporary tragic tale comes to its climax. It seems that, using legislation recently passed by the previous Conservative government, Labour may finally have discovered a way to give the Elgin marbles to Greece. Who would have expected such a twist?

The British Museum Act 1963 bars the British Museum, who hold the Marbles, from disposing of any of their artefacts except in extremely limited circumstances. The strictures of this law have prevented the Trustees of the Museum from doing any deal to hand over the Marbles permanently, although their current Chairman, George Osborne, has been negotiating with the Greek government since 2022 in hope of a settlement which might involve a long-term loan of treasures from Greece in return for a loan of the Marbles. (Talks are apparently reaching an agreement in principle).

Is it actually Athens which has the moral claim to receive them?

However, the Charities Act 2022 contained some poorly-drafted and little-scrutinised provisions which would apparently allow charity trustees to dispose of and return assets when they “could reasonably be regarded as being under a moral obligation to take the action”. By the time that Conservative ministers realised the effect that such provisions might have on the British Museum, the election had been called and it was too late to create an exemption to protect the Marbles. The relevant clauses will come into force once the Labour government decides to enact them by statutory instrument.

If these clauses do come into force, for the Greek government the morality of the case is clear. The Marbles were “essentially stolen”, in the words of the current Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Lord Elgin removed much of the material from the Parthenon illegally at the beginning of the 1800s, and their return would, if anything, be the restitution of state property acquired by theft. Justice must be done, even if the crime is two centuries past. The Marbles must be returned to Athens, he argues, and displayed in a new purpose-built Acropolis Museum.

Mr Mitsotakis is quite right that there may be a moral case for the British Museum to hand over the Elgin Marbles. But is it actually Athens which has the moral claim to receive them?

The Parthenon was begun in 447 BC, and its decoration with the friezes and statues, many of which are now in the British Museum, was completed by 432 BC. They are the emblem of an age in which Athens was reaching its cultural apogee. As Phidias and his colleagues chiselled away at the Parthenon sculptures, Sophocles and Euripides began to vie with each other as writers of tragedy, and Socrates was wandering gadfly-like around the Agora asking passers-by to define “virtue” and “wisdom”.

But whilst Socrates and the tragedians were grappling with the fundamentals of morality at home, Athenian statesmen and diplomats were only too happy to leave such scruples at home. “We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human nature in accepting an empire when it was offered to us and then in refusing to give it up,” an Athenian ambassador told the Spartans just after the Parthenon was finished. “It has always been a rule that the weak should be subject to the strong; and besides, we consider that we are worthy of our power.”

Athens had not started out with a view to being an imperial power. In 478, after the defeat of the Persians at the Battles of Marathon and Plataea, the Athenians presided over the formation of the Delian League. The purpose of the league, which had at least 150 Greek city states as members, was to provide a naval alliance to keep Persia at bay. Each of its members were pledged to contribute ships and men or money to ensure a naval force was always ready against the threat of another eastern invasion.

Athens’ amorality abroad paid for its cultural efflorescence at home

Athens, as the leading Hellenic naval power, was the natural leader of this alliance. At first, no-one could deny that, under their guidance, the league was fulfilling its purpose. However, as time went on and the Persian threat abated, the Athenian treatment of the league shifted. Requests for ships were converted into demands for cash; the treasury of the league was moved from the island of Delos to Athens itself; and whenever any of the league’s cities pointed out that the League had lost its purpose and that there was no reason to send any more money to Athens, the response of Athens was violence. In 469, the island of Naxos tried to secede, but was attacked by Athens and “enslaved” in the words of Thucydides. In 465, the Island of Thasos likewise attempted escape from the League, but after a two-year siege was conquered, forced to destroy its walls and pay an indemnity. In a few short years, Athens had turned a defensive alliance into a tribute-bearing empire.

Naxos and Thasos got off relatively lightly. In 416, during the war between Athens and Sparta, Athens ordered the neutral island of Melos to submit to membership of the league and pay annually into Athens’ coffers, or else be annihilated. When Melos refused, the Athenians were as good as their word. They executed all men of military age, sold the women and children into slavery, and placed 500 colonists on the island. “The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept,” the Athenians told the Melians.

Athens’ amorality abroad paid for its cultural efflorescence at home. The huge surplus from the Delian league, earmarked for the defence of Greece, was diverted by the statesman Pericles into the construction of the Parthenon and its adornment with the Marbles. It was a policy that not every Athenian citizen could square this with their sense of right and wrong. “The Greeks regard it as outrageously arrogant treatment, as blatant tyranny” they complained in the assembly according to the later writer Plutarch, “when they can see that we are using the funds they were forced to contribute for the military defence of Greece to gild and embellish our city, as if she were a vain woman adorning herself with costly marble, statues, and temples at 1000 talents a time.”

It is this nameless Athenian citizen who puts his finger on the fatal flaw in Mr Mitsotakis’s moral case. If Athens is going to base a claim for the Marbles on the highly questionable contention that the British obtained them by theft, then how much the more do the hundreds of cities in the Delian league have a moral claim to the Marbles — these cities who actually paid for them to be created, suffering political oppression, rapine and brutality at Athens’ hand in the process. If we are to include in our judgement the question of a possible theft at a distance of over two centuries, then why not also include in our calculus Athens’ undoubted bloodshed and imperialism (that worst of sins) at a distance of over twenty-four?

Thus, if we are going to enforce a rule of strict morality, let the Marbles be loaded into some giant amphibious craft to roll from town to town around the Aegean, thus making reparation to the Delian cities for Athenian colonialism; or perhaps they should even be divided Solomon-like into an 150-odd pieces, one for each city: a reclining Dionysus for Naxos, Zeus on his couch for Thasos, perhaps a centaur grappling with a lapith for unfortunate Melos … Or, perhaps we should simply concede that we do not have the Olympian perspective of Zeus — “the pathways of whose understanding stretch dark and tangled” as Aeschylus says — which would allow us to make any meaningful moral judgement on an artefact whose origins reach back to the dawn of western history.