Debates from the Grave: a Review of Art as Plunder by Margaret M. Miles

At the center of Margaret M. Miles’ latest book are two men: corrupt Roman magistrate of Sicily, Gaius Verres, and the lawyer who prosecuted him, Marcus Tullius Cicero. Art as Plunder: The Ancient Origins of Debate about Cultural Property unfurls from the matters at stake in their famous legal battle of the first century BCE.

While Rome was preoccupied with Spartacus’ slave revolt, Gaius Verres wreaked havoc on the Sicilian people as their governor from 73 to 70 BCE. During that extended post Verres exercised indulgent abuse of power; he extorted money from the locals and killed innocent people, but, according to Miles, what figured most important in Cicero’s prosecution was the governor’s sacrilegious and indecorous theft of art.

Using eyewitness accounts and documentary evidence, Cicero presented the Roman jury with horrifying episodes of Verres’ bad behavior. Maybe the most poignant of these incidents happened in Sicilian city of Tyndaris where Verres coveted after a statue of Mercury that the townspeople were keen to hold on to—it had historical importance and had been once plundered during wartime but since repatriated. As punishment for his refusal to surrender the statue, the distinguished local magistrate, Sopater, was stripped naked in freezing rain and tied to a bronze equestrian statue in the city’s center until the local senate agreed to hand over their Mercury.

Verres violated integral codes of Roman behavior. He disregarded rules of hospitality in a foreign land, and he pillaged sanctuaries, private homes, and public places during peacetime. Worse, Verres did not even offer his spoils to the gods or for public benefit; rather, the plunder decorated his private atrium in Rome. To be sure, Verres was officially charged with extortion of forty million sesterces from the Sicilians—not with stealing art. But the accounts in Cicero’s Verrines that best illuminate the governor’s greed, decadence, and aggression are those that depict his injudicious removal of cultural property for his personal use.

Miles does an excellent job of contextualizing these violations. In her first chapter she exhaustively details ancient precedents for plunder with examples ranging from the Elamite confiscation of the Stele of Naram-Sin in the second millennium BCE to the unparalleled repatriation of Sicilian art by Scipio Aemilianus in the second century BCE. In her second chapter, her focus narrows and she reconstructs the specific historic moment in which Verres’ trial took place.

If Cicero’s picture of Verres looks familiar, it should. As Miles tells us in her last chapter, the Verrines were often cited and evoked as parallel arguments in Neoclassical legal cases like Edmund Burke’s prosecution of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India from 1773-1784. Lord Byron also used the text in his denunciation of Lord Elgin’s removal of antiquities and architectural elements from the Acropolis.

Perhaps the most compelling resurrection of Cicero’s Verrines took place after the Napoleonic Wars with the Duke of Wellington’s order that France must give back all of the art it plundered to its rightful nation of origin. Miles’ portrait of the Duke is the culmination of the “humane general” theme that runs throughout her book in rare passages of history. In these episodes, rulers are shown acting outside the typical conventions of war, behaving magnanimously, and thinking insightfully about the future of foreign relations and cultural heritage.

The scope of Art as Plunder is vast and interdisciplinary; thus it will be an invaluable resource to a number of audiences including cultural property advocates, museum curators, soldiers, ancient historians, Neoclassical historians, and anyone with an interest in art history, aesthetics, and military history. Its academic quality—heavy footnotes and an extensive bibliography—should not scare away readers with a casual interest in the subject. Miles’ language is intelligent but completely lucid. The only thing really keeping Art as Plunder away from a popular audience right now is the cost. (The list price is $90.00).

By providing a comprehensive picture of ancient views about plunder, Miles propels her reader into the ancient mind. She then challenges her audience to take that knowledge and try to make sense of pillages, legal developments, and battles of repatriation that have taken place in the past few centuries and are still taking place today. The author’s aim is not to mine the historical record for evidence supporting the protection and repatriation of cultural property—the story she has to tell is much more nuanced and complicated than that. However, Miles does make it clear that those persons in line with the Verrine model often end up on the wrong side of history. Art as Plunder should warn the most ravenous of collectors to start thinking about posterity.

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