Fly high, baby. Help the Marbles find their way home.

The request for the restitution of the Parthenon Marbles is not made by the Greek government in the name of the Greek nation or of Greek history. It is made in the name of the cultural heritage of the world and with the voice of the mutilated monument itself, that cries out for its marbles to be returned.

Evangelos Venizelos, Greek Minister of Culture

When the Greeks were besieging the Acropolis in 1821, during the war for independence from the Ottoman Empire, word came down that the Turks were destroying the temple to get at the lead clamps so as to make bullets. Kyriakos Pittakis, one of the leaders of the Greek revolution, after conferring with his fellow warriors, had a quantity of lead bullets sent to the Turk defenders so they might stop the destruction of the sacred temple. Bullets they knew full well would be winging their way back to them with fatal results.

If that alone does not show how much the Greeks revere their temple, nothing can.

Send The Marbles Home!

Ninety-two high relief metopes surround the temple, thirty-two on each side, fourteen on each end. These sculptures depict scenes from Greek mythology and legend. A low relief frieze 160 meters long depicts the Panathenaic festival. Triangular pediments at either end contained statues in the round representing the birth of Athena and her contest with Poseidon for the land of Attica.

The Parthenon is considered to be the culmination of Greek sculpture, surpassing that of any other building of the classical age.

A talent is an ancient unit of mass and corresponds roughly to the mass of water needed to fill an amphora. Now, in Rome, an amphora was around 26 liters while in Greece it could vary from 18.5 liters up to 36 liters. This obvious lack of standardization made the worth of your silver talent dependent on which empire (not to mention time period) you happen to be residing in at the time. The Babylonian talent came in at around 30.3kg while the Egyptian talent cut your net worth by 3.3kg, coming in at 27kg. You would have gotten richer faster working for the Romans as their talent worked out at 32.3kg compared to the Greek or Attic talent which low-balled in at a measly 26kg. The ancient Israelites, over-achievers from the get-go, blew everyone out of the water with a talent weighing in at a whopping 58.9kg.

Now you need to jump in your sleek little time machine, zip back to 448 BC, snatch those 469 silver talents and zip back to today. Careful, that silver’s going to be pretty heavy.

So, now that you’ve got them back, how much will all that effort net you?

Well, 469 Greek or Attic silver talents, at 26kg per talent, weighs in at 12,663kg. The per kilogram price of silver as of the date of this post is $557.98 USD/409.64 EUR. so, your little trip back in time would net you 7,065,700.74 USD/5,187,271.32 EUR.

Considering inflation, I doubt that much would be enough to build the Porch of the Maidens today.

The Lady from the Porch of the Maidens plays a central, spiritual role in Stealing The Marbles and I always wanted to capture that feeling in the cover. Of course, being graphically challenged precluded my even imagining what something like that would look like but the first time I saw the proposed cover, I knew the folks at Rebel e had pulled it off.

Stealing The Marbles – Coming soon from Rebel e Publishers.

A previous attempt to build a sanctuary for Athena Parthenos on the same spot was begun shortly after the Battle of Marathon (c. 490-488 BC). This building would have stood beside the archaic temple dedicated to the Athena Polias. It was still under construction when the Persians sacked the city in 480 BC.