“Stealing Athena”

“Stealing Athena” is by Karen Essex and I needed a whole day after finishing it to collect my thoughts and start writing.
The story is about Lord and Lady Elgin ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire and collectors of Greek art. It starts with Lord Elgin obsession with Athens Acropolis and his greed in collecting marble statues and sending them back to England. The only problem is he doesn’t have the necessary founds to do so and that’s where Mary comes in. She is beautiful and has a great fortune. So Elgin marries her but poor girl thinks it is for love. It is also the story of Aspasia the mistress of Pericles the most powerful man of Athens and the one building the great pantheon for the Goddess Athena. As years passes we read the happenings in both women lives, the dangerous pregnancies Mary goes through and how she begs her husband to have no more children and how he ignores her. His disfiguring disease and his pressure for more money and his imprisonment in France. How Aspasia becomes a great intellectual figures in Athens society and what dangers she faces.
At the end both women go through trails: Lord Elgin sues Mary for adultery and divorce, hoping to get more money out of her and her parents and Aspasia’s enemies sue her for improper behavior and her power over Athens’s governor. But while Mary’s legal husband (a 19th century gentleman and aristocrat) does his best to destroy her name and reputation in society, Aspasia’s lover defends her and respects her openly. Why? She was a foreigner and a powerless courtesan in Athens. Pericles valued her for her wisdom, for her brain and for her heart. He loved her. On the other hand, Lord Elgin never loved Mary despite all her wonderful qualities, her cleverness, her love and all the hardship she went through for his sake.
One should ask which man was more civilized, a 19th century count or a general from two thousand years earlier. Which one was more human, more respectful? Dare we conclude that these two millennia added nothing to the fairness and purity of human heart?
You can see why the book had me quite shaken, don’t you?!