Summary Of Lovely Stones By Christopher Hitchens

The loss of Parthenon artifacts happened over centuries through various atrocities committed by military action. In Christopher Hitchens’s “lovely stones,” Hitchens argued that at least one lost part of the Parthenon, half of the adornment sold by Elgin, was recoverable. To rally support for the return of these pieces, Hitchens established an appeal to emotions through vivid imagery, an appeal to morality through sound analogies, and appeal to logic with past successful examples conservations done by Greek museums. Hitchens’ vivid imagery of the adornment in paragraph 3 highlighted that it was once the centerpiece of the Parthenon temple. Hitchens described the adornment with amazing detail. He illustrated that the adornment was decorated with figures such as Pallas Athena, Poseidon, and the gods of the sun and the moon. The intriguing detail grabs the attention of the readers and encourages them to read. Hichens then shifted the focus of the depiction towards the story the adornment contains, suggesting that the story was incomprehensible for modern historians because “half of the cast of that tale is still in Bloomsbury, in London.” Hitchens’ beautiful imagery of the adornment collided sharply with its incompleteness caused when

This created an argument from the perspective of morality. He argued that if works such as Mona Lisa were sawed in half, there would be a “general wish for the halves to be reunited.” Hitchens also claimed that it is grotesque if part of Iris or Poseidon is elsewhere. By comparing the current situation of the adornment to these hypothetical situations, Hitchens implied to the readers that it is morally right for the lost piece to be returned and the current situation is plainly absurd. Consequently, his moral judgements solidify his position that the lost piece must be