Posts Tagged ‘Greece’
Stealing the Marbles launches in 13 days. The Kindle version is now available at Amazon for preorder. If you like it, please review it on Amazon.
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!
469 silver talents. That’s what it cost to build the Parthenon way back when. So, what exactly is a talent and how much would it be worth today?
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.
| 
Loading ...
