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We are currently looking for educational or journalistic writing regarding classics and general archaeology. This includes, but is not limited to op-eds, academic papers, journalistic articles, CNF, and site reports. If you have an exciting project or are a member of academia, we would also love to interview you for Columns.All submissions must be 3000 words or under and academic works must be accompanied by a bibliography (in any style).We are also interested in interviewing creative writers about their craft, experience in the literary sector, and their upcoming publications. Writing advice columns are also of interest to us.Please send all submissions and interview proposals through the form below or to aothenmedia@gmail.com.

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ao3, myth, and the power of fan-fiction

An exploration into how modern fan fiction can impact the classical field, and vice versa.

Samantha Ng (EIC)
Julia Neugarten

Julia Neugarten is conducting PhD research at Radboud University to explore how fan fiction from Archive of Our Own (AO3) transforms, retains, or rewrites elements from Greek mythology.

Why did you choose to explore the link between Greek Mythology and fan fiction?When I was doing my master’s in literary studies, I gradually became frustrated that we were almost exclusively talking about literature that was part of the western literary canon, while in my free time I was almost exclusively reading fanfiction. I knew that there was this beautiful, productive, creative, and fascinating literary community out there that literary scholars were often overlooking. I became interested in applying methods and theories from literary studies to fanfiction. I spent quite some time applying to PhD-programs with that idea, and in the end I was inspired by the Anchoring Innovation project to dive into fanfiction about Greek myth. Turns out that it's an absolute treasure trove of fascinating stories!I also think there are similarities between the way the storyworld of Greek mythology is structured and the way fanfiction is being written and read online these days. Myths change their meaning and shape from one author or source to the next, and there isn’t necessarily one definitive version of each myth. Rather, all the different retellings offer varying perspectives, and because audiences often know many different versions of a story or myth, these layer over each other and all contribute to an overarching understanding of the storyworld, its characters and the associated plot events. Fanfiction can function similarly by placing different versions of a story or character in dialogue with each other.

What sort of methods are you using in your research to analyse fanfiction?I have a very large corpus of fanfiction – more than 5000 stories. In total, it’s almost 28 million words. It would probably take me about seven years to read all of that, and I have four years to complete my PhD. So aside from some of the methods that are common to literary and cultural studies – close reading of individual works, their stylistic choices, narrative form, the way they represent selected themes and concepts – I am also applying some methods from computational literary studies to discern large-scale patterns in the corpus.My dissertation is structured around three concepts: power, emotion, and repetition. I’ve noticed that fanfiction often shifts or rewrites elements of Greek myth to explore power relations, particularly between men and women. While these myths frequently contain unequal gendered power dynamics with men overpowering women and women having little agency, contemporary fanfiction often turns these dynamics on their head. In the chapter on power, I am examining several case studies that represent gendered power dynamics in different ways, and I am also looking into computational approaches to extract power dynamics from text. The emotion chapter looks at the ways characters’ emotions are represented and explored in fanfiction, but also at the emotional ties that fans have to Antiquity and the way fanfiction communities feel attached to mythology. Finally, the repetition chapter will chart how (re)writing the same or similar stories over and over again functions as a mechanism for creatively exploring and questioning culturally dominant representations of power and emotions.That’s just how I’m envisioning it now, about halfway through the project. So any of that may still change.
Can you explain what anchoring innovation is?The concept (or rather, concepts) of anchoring innovation essentially describe a process of embedding the new in the old. The idea is that innovations in culture, society or technology need to be sufficiently anchored in what is familiar, understood or known within a particular cultural context if these innovations are to be successfully taken up.An interesting example of anchoring innovation is this advertisement, cited by Ineke Sluiter, the leader of the Anchoring Innovation project in a 2018 article.

The advertisement reads ‘Plants are the new cows.’ Thus, a product that is new or innovative (note how it literally says ‘nieuw’, the Dutch word for new, at the bottom), namely a plant-based milk, is advertised by linking it conceptually to a product that is already known or familiar to prospective buyers: milk that comes from cows. The innovation of introducing a plant-based staple into your diet is made to seem familiar by its connection to something that is already known. This is anchoring innovation. More broadly, the concept(s) of anchoring innovation can be used in the humanities and social sciences to study cultural change, shifting societal norms, and changes to what is considered familiar or new, stable or innovative in different periods of history.
What role does anchoring innovation have in the relationship between mythology and fan fiction?That question is central to my dissertation, and it’s something I’m still grappling with. On the one hand, fanfiction about Greek myth seems to be innovating stories that are culturally very familiar and old (the myths). If you look at it that way, mythology is the anchor and something like a feminist retelling, or a work of fanfiction that centers interiority, individuality and emotionality rather than a large-scale societal drama like the Trojan War, is a contemporary adaptation or innovation of that anchor.But when I read fanfiction about Greek myth I sometimes get the sense that the tropes and narrative structures that are popular in fanfiction communities, things like enemies-to-lovers stories or the coffeeshop alternate universe, are actually more familiar to those communities than antiquity is. If that’s the case, then those fanfiction staples can be considered the anchors while introducing a mythological figure like Hades or Zeus into that storyworld is more of an innovation from the community’s perspective. I think these dynamics are different in every story, and they also differ between readers and writers; what is familiar or known to one person may be completely innovative and surprising to someone else.
Do you think fan fiction can provide people with a pathway to classical studies? Why or why not?Yes, definitely!People navigate their fanfiction-reading in lots of different ways. Archive of Our Own, the website that my research focuses on, currently hosts over 13 million stories (Rebaza 2024) so people have to filter and select stories based on personal preferences such as particular characters, storyworlds or tropes. In an interesting survey conducted by Fansplaining, 31% of the 6.744 respondents said that they sometimes (or even always!) read fanfiction while they weren’t familiar with the source material, often because someone they trusted recommended it, or because the story contained a trope they enjoyed. And 50% of respondents reported that this then led them to have a look at the source material later. This makes me pretty confident that fanfiction can sometimes lead people to dive into mythology, and maybe even into its academic study.
Do you have any thoughts regarding how access to classical studies can be improved?This is a difficult question for me to answer, because the cultural, infrastructural, and economic factors that influence access to classical studies differ vastly between countries. Personally, I am based in the Netherlands, where Classics (both Latin and Ancient Greek) have a relatively large role in secondary education compared to other European countries or the USA. I think this also leads them to have a more firmly entrenched position in universities, and while those seeking a university education certainly face barriers to access, I think these barriers are probably relatively similarly distributed across all humanities disciplines and not specific to classics.I will say that studying fanfiction about Greek myth has made me keenly aware that I have been socialized to value some types of knowledge and practices over others: academic knowledge over affective or fannish knowledge, scholarly writing over creative writing, classical culture over popular culture. The more fanfiction I read about Greek mythology, the more I think these hierarchies of knowledge and skill are elitist and silly, and they exclude valuable, original, and surprising ideas and insights and the people who produce them. In October I’ll be organizing a small conference titled Fanfiction and the Ancient World Together with my colleague Amanda Potter. We’re hoping to create a space where scholarly and fannish knowledge can enter into dialogue with each other.
Can you tell us about how you were introduced to the classical world?My mother is a classicist. When I was a child, she would read me retellings of Greek mythology by Dutch author Imme Dros. Later I read Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, and then I went to the type of secondary school – a ‘gymnasium’ – where they teach Latin and Ancient Greek. So I was introduced to the classical world from an early age, and then developed that interest further in secondary school and beyond.
What's your favorite fan fiction?Ooh, that’s difficult. I read lots of different types of fanfiction for lots of different reasons. Additionally, there is, or at least there used to be, a pretty strong social norm within fanfiction communities that you shouldn’t point ‘outsiders’ to works of fanfiction because that might lead to unwanted attention or even criticism and ridicule.Keeping that in mind, I’m going to go with Subliminal by Speranza. The story was included – with permission from its author – in Francesca Coppa’s anthology The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, which I take as a kind of blanket permission for people not well-versed in the readerly norms of fanfiction communities to have a peek at it.It’s a story based on the BBC’s TV adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock, from the 2010’s. I was an avid reader of Sherlock fanfiction for a while, and Subliminal has all the features that made this fandom, and fanfiction in general, so appealing. In the story, Sherlock solves a mystery through his cleverness, and throughout his interior monologue, observations and deductions are documented through a mix of footnotes and smaller print. This way, the story visually communicates what it feels like for Sherlock’s brain to go a million miles an hour and to follow multiple trains of thought simultaneously. Thus, the story alludes to both the content-level source material of Sherlock (by narrating a mysterious crime), and the TV adaptation’s visual language (by integrating Sherlock’s thought processes visually in the story, just like the TV show did). Finally, the footnotes and small print insertions also bring together the different elements that make much Sherlock fanfiction so fun: they integrate the subtextual attraction and romance between Sherlock and his roommate John Watson into the action-packed whirlwind of their lives. I love this story because it skillfully incorporates exactly what makes fanfiction so great; your enjoyment reading Subliminal is greatly increased if you’re also familiar with the source material it’s transforming and you can spot all the little references and allusions. Additionally, the story makes clever use of fanfiction’s online means of distribution, where differences in font size and insertion of footnotes are easily formatted.As a sidenote, Speranza is kind of famous in fandom circles for contributing intensively to the infrastructure that has made (online) fandom possible, so they deserve all the acclaim they can get.
Finally, what's your favorite myth?For some reason this is the question I struggled with most. I don’t feel a very strong emotional or fannish connection to many myths, although I am a huge fan of Madeline Miller’s novel Song of Achilles and everything fanfiction communities have done with it. Through reading so much fanfiction about Greek myth, my appreciation for the Hades and Persephone myth has also grown. Although when I first encountered it in school I was horrified, I think fans are finding interesting ways to reclaim power in rewriting that myth.

More information about Julia Neugarten's work can be found on her personal website and on Anchoring Innovation's website

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keeping our share: why the elgin marbles need to stay where they are

By Dr Mario Trabucco della Torretta

The marbles in the British Museum, photo from Arthur Dunn

After more than 200 years of incessant debate on the collection of sculptures assembled by the 7th Earl of Elgin on the Acropolis of Athens, you can almost say that arguments in favour of sending them back to Greece have assumed a formulaic nature. They must invariably contain copious references to Lord Byron, appeal to the good nature of the reader to hear the plight of an “oppressed” nation, generously spread unqualified terms like “looting” and “stealing”, duly mention the “cleaning scandal”, and attack the “slippery slope” argument by arguing that the Parthenon is a unique case. But above all, whatever the circumstances, they must vigorously deny any credibility to the so-called “firman”. These are the mandatory ingredients. There are also optional ones: a parallel between the Turks and the Nazis, a depiction of Lord Elgin as a greedy social climber (favoured more by opportunity than by his own wits), commentary on his divorce and contingent financial difficulties, allegations of bribery, and so many more. Try that yourself: ask any large language model to produce an essay on the Elgin Marbles along those lines, and you will be greeted by a text that is virtually indistinguishable from the countless journalistic articles on the same subject you can easily find on the web. Mr Wexler’s piece in this magazine mixes the mandatory and optional ingredients in his particular recipe, avoiding the more openly polemical bits, and seasoning the whole with a modicum of spicy decolonisation sauce. Alas, for all his evident skill, he cannot escape the original sin affecting all of those ingredients: they are entirely false. Let’s start with the firman. Though we do not possess the original Turkish document, we know virtually everything about it: who drafted it (Rev.d Hunt), who wrote it (Bartolomeo Pisani), who translated it into Italian (Antonio Danè), what it said (thanks to the translation), who brought it to Athens (the imperial commissary Rashid Aga), who received it (the Voivode and the Chief Judge of Athens) and who acted upon it (the Acropolis commander). Not bad for a “ghost document”, eh? But there is more: John Galt affirms to have seen the Turkish original, and Byron, Dodwell, Mary Nisbet and Hobhouse all mention it as the authority for the removal of the antiquities from the Acropolis. Historians such as William StClair and Edhem Eldem accept the authenticity of the so-called firman as a real historical document, reinforced by references to it in both British and Ottoman official documents from the archives. Also legal scholars like Alexander Herman do not dispute the legal efficacy of the instrument, saying that “on the balance of evidence” any court of law would be bound to find in favour of the UK. In the face of the historical evidence, Elgin’s story holds up pretty well. And why wouldn’t it? Imagine the opposite scenario: a bunch of foreigners waltz into a military base and start taking down building materials, reworking huge marble blocks, shipping everything away for months and with hundreds of hired labourers, and the soldiers there do… nothing? Ludicrous. The reality is that neither the existence nor “the veracity of the firman” is really in doubt, and any attempt to impeach its legal validity ends up in failure. Bribes? There is literally zero historical evidence to support this. Permission granted by an occupying power? Even more ridiculous. The right of conquest was a prominent feature of international law until well into the 20th century. Occupation is also codified in law as a concept, requiring that its nature be temporary and that the occupied people not switch allegiance in the meantime. Can anyone really maintain (and document) that the people of Athens in 1801 were still loyal -after 343 years- to the Florentine dukes of Athens, the rightful sovereigns of the crusader state created there in 1204 and overrun by the Ottoman conquest in 1458? Considering the evidence with honesty and impartiality, only one interpretation is possible: the Ottoman government, the legitimate and internationally recognised sovereign authority over Athens, had willingly decided to alienate some bits of public property and give them to the British ambassador as a gift. To sum it up, they did what was in their own right to do. I know that staring at this fact makes us baulk in horror. Yet, we must not make the mistake of thinking that people in Athens two centuries ago had the same kind of regard and sensibility about the cultural heritage we have today. As historians, we have a duty to get to know our subjects, their ideas, and their morals and try to explain with those elements why people from the past made this or that historical choice. The acquisition of the Elgin Collection makes no difference; as a historical fact, it has a context and it may be successfully explained without the use of concepts and norms that were not current in that particular time and place. The Ottoman documents found by Eldem mention that “there is no harm in ceding” the Marbles to Elgin and that “there is no harm in granting permission for the transport and passage of the said stones”, the main reason being that “stones of this kind, decorated with figures, are not held in consideration among Muslims, but are appreciated by the Frankish states”. From their point of view, they were closing the deal of a lifetime: giving away something that had relatively low value in their eyes while getting political goodwill from a powerful ally in exchange. It wasn’t much different for the Greek-speaking population of Athens. The Archbishop had been very generous with Elgin and his family, gifting them antiquities found in or around various ecclesiastical properties. Ancient monuments did not receive much love from the Orthodox hierarchies, who considered them to be relics of a pagan past that was best ignored by good, God-fearing Christians. Emblematic of this attitude is the case of the temple of Artemis Agrotera on the Ilissos river: the little building, a smaller version of the temple of Athena Nike, was initially converted into a country chapel and seen in this state by Stuart and Revett in 1765. Only three years later, the building had been dismantled with the blessing of the Archbishop so that the building materials could be split, partly used to build a new church and partly passed to the Voivode to reinforce the fortification wall around the city. The leading men of the city, the demogerontes, were all very supportive of Elgin’s mission as it brought a wave of prosperity to the city in the form of wages for the hundreds of labourers needed to move, cut, and transport the heavy marbles slabs. This attitude should not surprise us too much. In 1801, nobody in Athens shared the appreciation and reverence shown by the Western travellers for the antiquities of the city. The authors of the Greek Enlightenment lament, still in the first decade of the 19th century, how “our people do not have any idea not even of their ancestors” (Sakellarios), noting that “the publication of [Greek] writers is totally new to us” (Korais). This does not mean that there were no protests when Elgin’s men removed the statues and friezes from the citadel: we know there were some from both Greeks and Turks. Yet these protests were not motivated by a genuine antiquarian preoccupation to safeguard a shared heritage seen as the physical embodiment of a common cultural identity (which was instead Elgin’s main preoccupation, in the face of impending dilapidation), but rather by the fear of losing elements impregnated with magical connotations and whose departure could have endangered the welfare and wellbeing of the community. Many travellers recount stories of popular attachment to statues and inscriptions seen as foci of thaumaturgic power, channels of chthonian energies, or guarantors of soil fertility so long as they remained in their place. Some of the stories even support their removal, narrating of ancient spirits chained within the sculptures that could only be set free once away from the lands dominated by the Turks. For many years, these stories have been brushed off as inventions made by locals to impress gullible Western travellers or even constructs engineered by those same travellers to justify the extraction of antiquities in the name of colonialistic superiority and Eurocentric “scientific” knowledge. The reality is that dismissing these stories is the true colonialistic act, and, as argued by Yannis Hamilakis, it is only by recognising these “indigenous archaeologies” as legitimate modes of knowledge that we truly start to “decolonise Greek archaeology”. Read in this light, the Ottoman gesture of granting Elgin his wish to take away “any pieces of stone with inscriptions and figures” must appear not only legitimate but also fully justifiable and consistent with the culture within which it originates. No imperial strongarming, just a free and mutually beneficial exchange between consenting parties acting as equals. To talk of imperialistic coercion, colonialistic exploitation, and peoples with no voice just to make sense of an act that we cannot possibly contemplate from our point of view here and now would be a failure to recognise that -in the words of L. P. Hartley- “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”, and we should just respect that. Sure, let’s even accept what happened in the past -I hear you say- but “there is a thing called progress”, to quote a prominent Greek repatriationist. Should we be stuck in a situation whose fundamentals we no longer share just because it may be argued that it made sense two hundred years ago? I shall suggest three reasons why we should. When it comes to museums, I see two main reasons why we go to great lengths to collect, preserve and display all this “old stuff”, and the choice of reason is dependent on the nature of the object. There are items coming from distant places, in time or space, which we keep to remind ourselves that other ways are possible, to educate our intellects on the idea of diversity. These are usually objects that cannot be reconciled with our own Western cultural identity, like a war drum or a moai. On the other side of the spectrum, there are objects that tell us, one way or another, who we have been, how we used to do things and think about the world. We keep these items to tell us about ourselves. From this second perspective, the Elgin Marbles truly belong in a British museum, as they illustrate aspects of our own culture that are still present today after two and a half millennia of cultural evolution: the beauty of the human form, democratic ideals, the preservation of order from the attack of chaos and entropy. These were the same reasons that prompted Elgin to bankrupt himself in an effort to save what he rightly considered as important relics of our past on the point of being obliterated. Even this effort is a story in its own right, the story of our love and reverence for our ancient past, the Grand Tour, antiquarianism and the birth of scientific archaeology. These are stories of British people (and of all Westerners in general) that you can rightly explore in the British Museum. The Elgin Marbles are not out of place in those rooms; there is a historical and cultural reason why they are there and not still in Athens or converted into dust at the foot of the Acropolis. And since their acquisition, they have been reigniting our cultural discourse time and again, renewing the arts in Britain and beyond (just as Lord Elgin had intended) in a story of Classical reception and reuse that we are still in the process of fully untangling. Even if you were to struggle in hearing these remarks, even if you -against all evidence to the contrary- still considered the acquisition of the Marbles a robbery and a historical wrong to be righted, I would tell you there is a place for them in our museums. Museums are not just there to enlighten us about what we like about ourselves. They sometimes show us our darkest side and prompt us to confront it, to enter into a dialogue with a difficult past so we can learn a valuable lesson. In our museums, we learn about all the hundreds of different ways we kill each other, we learn about slavery, torture, and humiliation. The items that exemplify those stories are not there as a celebration but as a memento. It would be dishonest of us just to present an edulcorated and idealised version of our history, sanitised and stripped of all the items that make us blush. Contested heritage, when legitimately and legally acquired (as in the case of the Elgin Marbles), is much more valuable as an educational tool in our museums than it would ever be as a celebration in the country of origin. This last point is even more important when returned heritage is sought as a prop for a narrative that is more ideologic than historical. Museums, because of their role in displaying identity, have deep political connotations and are prime targets for distortions and instrumentalisations. Since the very birth of the modern Greek state, Greek antiquities have been the embodiment of an idea: that the new Greek people are the inheritors of the cultural legacy of the ancient Greeks, passed to them in an unbroken cultural (and genetic) line through the centuries, and justifying their possession of the land that was their forefathers. The new Greeks immediately started to assert control over this legacy of highly symbolic objects, enacting legislation and creating museums, universities and bureaucracies around them. The trouble is that -as Stathis Gourgouris affirms- “the Hellenic civilisation as we know it was in effect the invention of the ‘science of antiquity’, of Classics”. And not just any idea of Classics, but one born and nurtured in that German-speaking world that would express the first kings and elite of the new nation-state. In this framework, the return of the Elgin Marbles would only be a tribute to the desired image of the modern Greeks, one of the missing pieces in the Bavarian propaganda project started by Leo von Klenze when he razed to the ground all the post-Classical history on the Acropolis. It would be the finishing touch to a colonial project the insurgents voluntarily embraced in order to obtain their independence, one which still weaponises the past in order to justify the present. The Elgin Marbles are where they are legitimately and with reason. Not only have we no cause to remove them from London, but to be authentically anti-colonial and genuinely Philhellenic, we should reject any idea of ever returning them to Athens.Reading suggestions:- Edhem Eldem, “From Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern: Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities, 1799–1869”, in Z. Bahrani/Z. Çelik/E. Eldem (edd.), Scramble for the Past. A Story of Archeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, Istanbul 2011, pp. 281–329
- Alexander Herman, The Parthenon Marbles dispute, London 2023
- Yannis Hamilakis, “Decolonizing Greek archaeology: indigenous archaeologies, modernist archaeology and the post-colonial critique” in D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos (eds), A Singular Antiquity, Athens 2008, pp. 273-84.
- Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, colonisation, and the institution of modern Greece, Stanford 2021.
- Elizabeth Marlowe, "From Exceptionalism to Solidarity: the Rhetoric of the Case for the Parthenon Sculptures' Return," Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 41 (2023), 125-50.

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whose marbles? britain, greece, and the parthenon

By Dominic Wexler
Twitter: @djwexler

The Parthenon Marbles, photo from the BBC

By natural law it is just that no one should be enriched by another's loss or injury.¹
- Sextus Pomponius, Roman Jurist.² Here at Aôthen, through our Artifacts Project, we are committed to raising awareness about cultural artifacts whose ownership is contested. So, the campaign to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece falls well within our ambit. Indeed, it compels us to join the Greek cause and lobby for reunification. Greece’s long crusade for restitution began right after its independence in 1832, and yet to this day the British Museum and its abettors insist on keeping the Marbles in London. Greece has been denied the natural right to its cultural heritage in a tragedy spurred by a diplomat and maintained by a museum. Between 1801 and 1812 the workmen of Thomas Bruce 7th Earl of Elgin—otherwise known as Lord Elgin—hacked away at Athena’s temple. Elgin sought social aggrandisement, and the fragments he had carved off of the Parthenon served as an avenue to finance his climb up the English class system. So, he bundled what he had taken from the Parthenon onto ships, ferried it over to England, and sold it to the British Parliament. Sections of the frieze, metopes, and pedimental figures–the Marbles–were then transferred to the British Museum for safekeeping. The museum’s official position in the ownership dispute can be found under their webpage for the ‘Parthenon Sculptures’: Lord Elgin, after being granted a “permit”, “removed about half of the remaining sculptures from the ruins of the Parthenon”³. The Marbles were acquired, bought, and are held lawfully. Only an Italian copy of the supposed permit (or ‘firman’) authorising Elgin’s ‘removals’ has been found. When translated into English, the document clearly limited Elgin’s workers to taking moulds and measurements of the Parthenon, along with a general right to collect rubble and stones littered around it. This contradicts the British Museum’s narrative that pieces of the Parthenon were allowed to be “removed” (a euphemism for ‘sawn-off’). Moreover, the veracity of the firman is in doubt. At the time of Elgin’s despoilment, Greece was under the control of the Ottoman Empire. This meant the Parthenon fell squarely under the jurisdiction of the Sultan, whose formal decrees were adumbrated in the firmans. Yet the firman assenting to Elgin’s expedition does not adhere to official protocols, this indicates the Sultan never gave his approval. The decree is not dated in Arabic, its formal preamble is missing, and the Sultan’s emblem and monogram are entirely absent. The evidence establishes that Elgin’s permit was illegitimate. The firman did not sanction Elgin’s project, and it certainly did not authorise his vandalism. Still, despite there being no valid legal claim to the Marbles, the British Museum clings to the idea that they ought to remain in London. Four key arguments are associated with this position: the “encyclopaedic museum”, the “slippery slope”, the “matter of law”, and the “Elginisation” objections. Each appeals to the colonial impulse, and each has been repudiated by academics⁴, lawyers⁵, and writers⁶. Curators like James Cuno⁷ appeal to the “encyclopaedic museum” for justification. Apparently, keeping the Marbles in the British Museum makes them more accessible to the public. By presenting the metopes, frieze, and pedimental figures alongside cultural pieces from Africa, Italy, and Asia, visitors can appreciate the Marbles in a global (hence encyclopaedic) context. Encyclopaedists contend that this arrangement facilitates Greek culture far better than a united Parthenon ever could. But the Marbles, by definition, cannot be authentically appreciated until they are reunified with the Parthenon from which they were wrenched. They exist in a Greek context only, not in the global context Cuno and his supporters thrust upon us. Filling museums with broken segments of architecture does not advance culture, it dilutes it. The British Museum must substitute the Marbles with plaster casts like those Elgin was originally commissioned to make. Others fear that reunification will trigger a slippery slope: if the British Museum returns the Marbles, where do they draw the line? Must every demand for restitution be satisfied? These questions would carry little weight unless those expressing this concern were aware that entire collections had been dubiously acquired. The confession is implicit in the question. If there is sufficient reason to return a stolen artifact it ought to be returned. As for the Marbles, reunification does not engender a dangerous precedent because the Parthenon has no analogue: Greece endures (unlike, say, Carthage), the Marbles are not a complete work (they are pieces), and the Acropolis Museum in Athens has a dedicated space for them once they are repatriated. Accordingly, fears of an ineluctable declension are unfounded. In late 2023⁸, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and leader of the Conservative Party dodged the issue. He assessed the Parthenon dispute as being ‘a matter of law’. According to Sunak, whether or not the Marbles are repatriated is a decision for the museum trustees, not for the government. But a majority of the trustees (15 of the 25) are appointed by the Prime Minister. Consequently, all Sunak needs to do is pack the board with trustees eager to return the Marbles to Greece. Although it is true the British Museum lacks authority to cede museum property carte blanche, the government can amend the 1963 British Museum Act. By repealing Section 3(4) of the Act, the trustees appointed by Sunak would become authorised to de-accession the Elgin Collection. In fact, this would not be the first time the government used legislation to circumvent de-accession restrictions: the Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act of 2009 established the right of British Museum trustees to return artwork stolen from Jewish owners by the Gestapo during World War II. So Sunak should appoint new trustees and amend the law. Simple. However, do we need to consider the British Museum’s 200 year conservation of the Marbles? As custodians, has London generated a greater right to the Marbles than Greece? This is the ‘Elginisation’ argument, and of all the arguments against reunification, it is the most repugnant. Its logic would exempt a burglar (and his or her beneficiaries) from returning stolen property provided they were responsible. It would mean that so long as a requisite standard of care is maintained over a sufficient duration of time, theft transmogrifies into ownership. This perversion of property rights is, prima facie, wrong. You cannot excuse plunder because the looter happens to be a better steward. Ergo, Elgin cannot be exculpated with appeals to the British Museum’s record, and even if you could, the British Museum has never been a responsible custodian–it has neither protected nor conserved Elgin’s spoils⁹. In the 20th century, the Marbles were ‘whitened’ with scouring agents and copper rods in what came to be known as the ‘Duveen cleaning scandal’. During the whitening, original surfaces were cut away, hammered at, and scraped off. The harm was deemed so egregious that an internal inquiry found the damage was “obvious and cannot be exaggerated”¹⁰. The notion that the British Museum at any point in time generated an entitlement to the Marbles is baseless on both moral and factual grounds. Evidently, the British Museum has profited from illegal taking. Museums fatuously described as ‘encyclopaedic’ are conglomerations of mass larceny rebranded as temples of edification; that was not their design, it is merely post hoc rationalisation. The Marbles and the Parthenon have no equivalent–historically, culturally, or architecturally–meaning reunification will not bring about a slippery slope. Legislative fatalism is another red herring. Amending British Museum policy is as achievable as the UK government is willing. And finally–and most obviously–stealing is wrong, no matter how conscientious you might be. Not one of the aforementioned arguments are compelling enough to override Greece’s enduring right to its culture. A fortiori, Greece’s claim to its cultural heritage is legitimate and incontestable. There is no case for keeping the Marbles in London and every reason to return them to Greece. Here at Aôthen, we enjoin the UK government to give back what was never theirs.— Mortal! — — 't was thus she spake — — that blush of shame
Proclaims thee Briton, once a noble name;
First of the mighty, foremost of the free,
Now honour'd less by all, and least by me:
Chief of thy foes shall Pallas still be found.
Seek'st thou the cause of loathing? — look around.
Lo! here, despite of war and wasting fire,
I saw successive tyrannies expire;
'Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,
Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.- The Curse of Minerva, Lord Byron on the Parthenon and British depredations.¹¹

¹ Jure naturae aequum est neminem cum alterius detrimentum et injuria fieri locupletiorem.² Jack G. Handler and James Arthur Ballentine, Ballentine’s Law Dictionary, 1994, http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA22885743.³ “The Parthenon Sculptures,” The British Museum, n.d., https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/parthenon-sculptures.⁴ Professor Vassilis Demetriades, “Was The Removal Illegal?,” n.d., http://www.parthenon.newmentor.net/illegal.htm; “Profs. Zeynep Aygen & Orhan Sakin | Ottoman Archives for the Acropolis,” The Acropolis Museum, February 19, 2019, https://www.theacropolismuseum.gr/en/multimedia/profs-zeynep-aygen-orhan-sakin-ottoman-archives-acropolis.⁵ Geoffrey Robertson, Who Owns History? (Random House Australia, 2020).⁶ Christopher Hitchens, Robert Browning, and Graham Binns, The Elgin Marbles: Should They be Returned to Greece? (Verso, 1997); Christopher Hitchens, Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles (Hill & Wang, 1988).⁷ OxfordUnion, “We Should NOT Repatriate Artefacts | Dr James Cuno | 4 of 6,” January 10, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmY6tkTBaks.⁸ Aletha Adu, “Sunak Says Retaining Parthenon Marbles Is Matter of Law as He Denies ‘Hissy Fit,’” The Guardian, December 1, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/dec/01/sunak-parthenon-marbles-matter-of-law-denies-hissy-fit.⁹ William St Clair, “The Elgin Marbles: Questions of Stewardship and Accountability,” International Journal of Cultural Property 8, no. 2 (January 1, 1999): 391–521,
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0940739199770803.¹⁰ Neils, Jenifer. “Cleaning and Controversy: The Parthenon Sculptures 1811-1939. By Ian Jenkins.” American Journal of Archaeology 107, no. 3 (July 1, 2003): 507–9. https://doi.org/10.1086/ajs40025412.¹¹Lord Byron, The Curse of Minerva, 4th ed. (Galignani, 1820).

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about

Aôthen Magazine (named after the Doric Greek term for the earliest dawn) is a magazine that is dedicated to all kinds of classics-inspired content; artworks, poetry, essays, reviews, photography, and more as a celebration of both archaeology and history.Aôthen aims to create an enviroment for others to cultivate their interest in classics, as well as to make classics accessible and enjoyable to all.

about the editor-in-chief

Aôthen Magazine is run by Samantha Ng, a UCL Classical Archaeology and Classical Civilization student. Her experience as a WOC student struggling to engage in classics fuelled her desire to start Aôthen in hopes of creating an environment where classical studies are accessible to those without formal classics education. Samantha has been published twice in Ethos Magazine (HK). She has worked as an editor at Coexist Lit and Incognito Press and is currently an outreach intern for the Saving Ancient Studies Alliance. Apart from writing, she enjoys graphic design, listening to music, and walking through parks.

about the team

Kaitlin Smith favors classical mythology and literature, namely specializing in romantic tragedies. She studied creative writing at university and currently works in a bookstore. Her poetry has been featured in Allegory Ridge, Hecate Magazine, and more. She was previously the managing editor of Wrongdoing Magazine and is currently a fiction reader for Reservoir Road. Aside from classics, she also adores writing, photography, and the violin. Connect with her on Twitter and on Instagram @kaitlin_writes.

Dominic Wexler studied history, ancient history, and philosophy for his bachelor’s degree and is currently undertaking a graduate degree in law. He is also an aspiring essayist whose work has been published in the L’Esprit Literary Review and hopes to be published again. His interests are broad, from literature to politics. Despite a busy schedule, reading and writing about the classics has remained a fixture in Dominic’s life. You can find him on Twitter @djwexler.

Abby Masucol (she/her) hails from the Chicago suburbs. She recently graduated college and is pursuing publishing, amongst various interests and passion projects in digital media. Abby also writes poems and short fiction in her free time. When she's not writing, she works as a part-time (glorified) librarian, collects prints, and reads fantasy series. Find her on Twitter & Instagram @abbytama_.

Jordan Solet is a postgraduate student in Classics at the University of St. Andrews. She worked at an art gallery as an exhibit coordinator and curator for several years before diving back into her studies to pursue the life of a historian. She is interested in the origins of magic and women’s history through antiquity. Jordan considers herself a storyteller and uses all forms of art, from prose, poetry and painting, to tell those stories, especially from the ancient world. Her own art often depicts messages of humor, feminism, and classical myths.

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support

Before supporting us, please consider donating to a few of the below charities/relief funds! (click image to be redirected)

To support Aôthen, you can:
- Buy a copy of our magazine
- Purchase an expedited submission pass (get a submission response in 48 hours or less!)
- Tip us on kofi
- Buy our merchandise
- Spread the word about our magazine!

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MAIN SUBMISSIONS CLOSED

COLUMNS SUBMISSIONS ALWAYS OPEN

Please only send pieces related to ancient Egypt, Greece, and RomeAll contributors will receive a 10 USD honorarium (Paypal only), and a high-resolution PDF of the magazine. All work will be published in print and on this website.Not wanting to wait out the usual 3 week response time? We now offer 48 hour expedited responses via our Ko-fi for 3USD. Get a pass here. (Regular submissions will always be free!)Previous contributors should kindly wait one reading period before submitting again in order to increase the diversity of pieces published.Submissions should be sent through the form at the bottom of the page. Emailed submissions will go unread.

What we are looking for:
ONLY pieces related to classics/ancient Egypt, including:
- Poetry (up to 5 poems per submission)
- Essays (opinion or otherwise) (max. 2500 words)
- Short fiction (max. 1000 words)
- Photography (eg. of artefacts or sites)
- Art (digital or traditional)
- Classical translation extracts (max. 1000 words)
- Hybrid worksThe magazine is looking for work that approaches classics in a new, fresh manner. We'd love to see more abstract, contemporary, and modern interpretations of classical history and myths.

An interview by Aôthen discussing what we look for in submissions

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issue one

ORDER A PRINT COPY!
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Special interview with melanie faith

contributors

Steph Harris
Brian Sheffield
Prosper Ifeanyi
Irina Novikova
Helen Jenks
Amanda Williams
Ginger Hanchey
Jonathan Rentler
Enna Horn
Megan Hamilton
Ame McLachan
Clem Flowers
Kaitlin Smith
Michelle Rochniak
Josephine Weaver
Courtney Felle

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issue two

contributors

K.B. Rich
Tom Farr
Andy Vandoren
Livia Meneghin
Niamh Mcnally
Noll Griffin
Natalie Vestin
Megan Jones
Abi Deniz
Hana Kim
Hilary Tam
Paulin Lim
Louise Mather
Khushi Jain
Irteqa Khan

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issue three

ORDER A PRINT COPY!
Read Online
Interview with Ari Lohr

contributors

Michelle Janowiecki
Kahina
April Yu
s. g. mallett
Tamiko Dooley
Muhammed Olowonjoyin
Italo Ferrante
J.W. Wood
Rebecca Ferrier
Justin Cruzana
rebecca herrera alegria
Anthony O'Donovan
Nupur Shah
Alev Adil
L.M. Cole
Poppy Waterman
K.T. Clark

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issue four

contributors

Bob King
Ella Bachrach
Ellen Zhang
Lauren Michelle Finkle
Mary Kuna
Elizabeth Sharpe
Inez Santiago
Paxton Grey
Rin Yang
Stephanie Holden
Amy Oates

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issue five

contributors

Adesiyan Oluwapelumi
Lux Alexander
Elaine Server
Ciaran O'Rourke
Kathryn McGrane
nat raum
Laura Nuckols
Emily O Liu
Edith Friedman
Emily Mather
TJ Bradshaw
Lilirose Luo
Bex Hainsworth
Serena Piccoli

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issue six

contributors

Sophia Lang
Sadee Bee
Thomas Farr
Emily Hay
Emma Neale
Paul Hostovsky
C. C. Rayne
Classfan
Sam Crain
Pritikana Karmakar
D.A. Nicholls
Sultana Raza

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