How the Belgians lost their marbles
Fiachra Gibbon, arts correspondent
The Guardian, December 7, 2002


It looked like the archaeological scoop of the year. The Elgin Marbles were
not Greek after all, but the work of a wandering stonemason from Devon
called Phil Davies who changed his name to Pheidias to ingratiate himself
with his ancient Athenian patrons.
And it got better. The British Museum, sick of a century of Greek whingeing
about its refusal to return to sculptures to the Acropolis, was now
demanding the repatriation of the entire Parthenon to Britain where it
would be rebuilt as a part of a "shopping centre and multiplex cinema" in
the West Midlands.
In the meantime they had stamped each piece of the Parthenon frieze with
the words MADE IN ENGLAND in large red letters. Curators were now even
considering re-naming them the Davies Marbles. And in another calculated
slight to Hellenistic sensibilities, the museum was giving the sculptures a
jolly good blasting with a power hose to take off the years of accumulated
grime the Greeks said must not be touched.
Unfortunately, the revelations, apparently the result of an unauthorised
dig by the Oxford archaeologist Dr Rex Tooms, were of course bogus. The
clinching proof that Pheidias was the son of a donkey breeder from Devon -
a 4th-century BC terracotta cup found by Dr Tooms bearing the legend "My
name was Phil Davies, but I changed it to Pheidias" - was but a figment of
the imagination of Dr Tom Flynn, who runs the satirical art website,
artnose.com
Yesterday editors of the respected Belgium broadsheet, De Morgen, were
trying to live down every journalist's worse nightmare having swallowed the
spoof whole.
They ran the full story of the shocking discovery, including a vehement
denial by the Greek ministry of culture's Mrs Fredi Mercouri. "These
findings are totally baseless," she fumed. "Pheidias was unequivocally
Greek. Furthermore, Dr Tooms was never granted permission to excavate this
important site and he had no right to remove the artefacts to the British
Museum. It amounts to nothing less than the shameless pillaging of Greek
cultural heritage."
Dr Flynn was still incredulous last night. "I just couldn't believe it. A
friend in Brussels read it and rang me immediately. As he read it out I
just laughed and laughed, my sides nearly split. I rang the paper but they
have yet to get back to me. The poor, poor Belgians."
De Morgen manfully owned up to their boob. "It was a stupid mistake," a
spokesman said. "It all happened on a Sunday when we had a skeletal staff.
We noticed it ourselves the next day and ran a correction. What can you
say. The journalist who translated the piece did so too literally. She
didn't see the significance of the names."

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