Earl of Elgin

Now, they did remain on the Parthenon in the Acropolis for millennia, until the beginning of the 19th century.

And in 1801, the seventh Earl of Elgin, a man called Thomas Bruce-

Thomas Bruce.

[laughs]

I would suggest it's more than that, but I'm of a different time and class.

James Bruce, the 8th Earl of Elgin, also found himself occasionally on the side of the angels.

As the Governor General of Jamaica in the wake of the depression caused by emancipation, he dedicated his service to trying to understand why it could possibly be that newly freed blacks distrusted the white planters and didn't want to work for them.

His solution was to bring in indentured servants from India, but made the gradual realization that this was also a cruel institution.

To understand how half of the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon ended up over fifteen hundred miles away in London, one must examine an independent track of history from the early nineteenth century.

The narrative centers on Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, who secured an appointment as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in seventeen ninety-nine.

Elgin was deeply passionate about classical art and initially just wanted to make plaster casts and drawings of Greek antiquities to help improve the arts back in Great Britain.

To pull off this massive cultural project, he hired an extensive team of artists, architects, and sculptors.