Tomb Raider

If you are Dr Laura Snook please put the ‘phone back on the hook and desist from calling your libel lawyer. You have inspired today’s post but I have no reason to suppose that you are anything but a rather distinguished classicist. Tomb Raider? Certainly not.

Dr Snook addressed the Ancient World Breakfast Club on Friday morning. Her talk made me and, judging by the number of questions, most of the AWBC sit up and think. To condense her forty minute disquisition into a sentence would baffle many but I relish a challenge. She asked us to consider whether Roman marble copies of Greek bronzes (some 500 years older) were more authentic than much later, probably more accurate, copies.

As I drank some strong black coffee from my Wedgwood “Italian” mug – we are encouraged to bring our own – I was longing to know if she knew about the nefarious activities of super-smoothy-chops Robin Symes. Robin, should you happen to read this wherever you are, you are welcome to sue, as at the time of writing I believe you are clean-shaven.

”Symes is a sort of Bond Villain, a suave, corrupt figure smoothing around elite drawing rooms” – Malik Kaylan, antiquities theft expert.

”Robin looked perfect – although his style was a bit manufactured – with slightly dyed hair” – Nicky Haslam.

Robin’s partner in business and bed had a fatal accident in 1999. His partner’s family, Michaelides, wanted to sort things out. I’m sorry to say that the truth and Robin lived far apart. A friend of mine was hired by the effing furious Michaelides family to hunt him down and destroy him. My words not their precise instructions.  The Greeks happily spent in excess of $16 million to do just that. Just two years ago yet another stash of antiquities was found. An interesting aspect of the affair is that some of the loot is genuine and a lot fake – only Symes knows which is which. Howard Swains tells the tale:

“This was loot — thousands of pieces of it — most likely excavated inexpertly, in the dead of night, from Italian soil some time in the 1970s or 80s. It had then been on an uncertain, smuggled journey out of Italy and into Switzerland, via a skilled but illicit restorer’s workshop. The motorcade that swept it back to Rome was part of its ceremonial repatriation, at least 16 years since its clandestine incarceration in Geneva.

The Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA) described the items as “an Ali Baba’s cave-worthy hoard of Roman and Etruscan treasures”. The press persuaded reluctant officials to attach a monetary figure to the artefacts: They were priceless, of course, but had a market value of perhaps €9 million to those who might want to profit from such things.

The individual most responsible for the gathering in Rome was also the man most notable by his absence. A British former antiquities dealer named Robin Symes was the sole suspect for having once rented the storeroom in the Geneva Freeport from which the loot had now been liberated. Symes’s handwriting was on the outside of the packaging crates; the pages of the British newspapers and the Antiques Trade Gazette that wrapped some objects were almost certainly previously read by him. His fingerprints were all over this stuff.

Once among the world’s richest and most celebrated antiquities dealers, Symes has spent the past decade as a disgraced bankrupt, exposed as a former linchpin in the networks that once traded almost with impunity in such material. But for all Symes’s proven crooked dealings, the full extent of his hidden plunder has still not yet been revealed. Furthermore, although Symes, who is now in his mid-70s, spent seven months in prison for contempt of court in 2005, he has never stood trial for illicit antiquities trading, nor been forced to reveal where he might have squirreled further contraband.

Another cache of Symes’s former stock — possibly the largest known accumulation of illicit antiquities in the world — has been stuck in a legal impasse in London for 14 years. The legacy of his known dealings is now the focus of a complicated liquidation, blighted by squabbles between at least three governments and allegations of procedural impropriety.

The ministries of culture in both Italy and Greece say that material stuck in the U.K. belongs to them, and have lodged appeals for its return. Their stance is supported by prominent archaeologists, whose academic endeavours have long been undermined by tomb-raiders and illicit excavators, turning a profit from desecrating cultural sites. Yet those with a stake in Symes’s former business, as well as a number of creditors, appear to support the sale of the former trader’s stock, insistent that there is insufficient proof of ownership to warrant giving it up.

At a time when the looting and destruction of cultural heritage has never been more prominent, archaeologists await further details not only aboui he items Symes may have spirited away, but the methods by which he was able to profit for so long from the sale of illegally excavated material. Everyone was talking about the same absent character in Rome, as they sometimes also do in London, Cambridge and Athens. In short, what is still to be uncovered from Symes’s former scheming? And, for that matter, where is he?” Howard Swains, Medium.