The secrets of London’s Athenian golden age

I had a misspent youth. During the period when most normal adolescents were playing Grand Theft Auto or discovering ten interesting facts about Pamela Anderson, I am afraid that I would take the tube by myself — aged about 13 — and visit the British Museum.

I would walk through the cat-headed Egyptians and the cloven-hoofed Babylon-ians and the typewriter-bearded Assyrians, and all the other savage and ludicrous Near Eastern divinities, until I penetrated the innermost and holiest shrine of London’s greatest cultural temple, the Duveen galleries.

And there, like so many before and since, I would give thanks to the slightly dim–witted 7th Earl of Elgin. Yes, I would mentally congratulate that reviled but blameless Scottish diplomat who in 1803 spent a stonking £75,000 of his own money to rescue those treasures from the Ottoman lime kiln, and who thereby allowed me and every other Londoner to form a glimmer of understanding of that revolution which took place in Athens in the 5th century bc.

You go in that room, and you feel you are in a new and better world.

You have left behind the totalitarian tyrannies, with their rigid and robotic processions of prisoners, their undifferentiated armies, their scenes of humiliation and massacre and headless corpses chucked (plus ça change, alas) in the Tigris. You notice a change in the mood.

It’s not just the quality of the sculpture; it’s the attitude towards the subject.

You look at the riders of the Panathenaic frieze, and you see that this one has boots on, this one has chosen sandals for the big day, this one is tapping his head, this one is having difficulties with an obstreperous cow; and you realise that in the swivel of the hips and the unique articulation of the neck the sculptors were trying to say something new: that these people were meant to be the real people of Athens, just as important as the Olympian gods themselves.