Duke University Alumni Magazine

"Every day in every country, there's something interesting happening." --Elena Pritula, a journalist from Ukraine who is a Visiting Media Fellow at Duke's Sanford Institute of Public Policy "I was so excited. You just can't even believe. It was wonderful." --Freshman lacrosse player Meghan McLaughlin, on the first win in the history of the new women's lacrosse program over Maryland-Baltimore County "Those wishing to debate intellectualism at Duke must not do so with rhetorical attacks on fraternities but must instead find a rational and factual basis for their complaints." --Trinity senior Alex Rogers in his Chronicle column "Chocolate Liegois" "The new America in the twenty-first century will be primarily non-white, a place that George Washington would not recognize." --John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke history professor emeritus, in a speech on East Campus at a freshman symposium "The most radical test I can put to you about your work is what joy do you derive and what joy do others derive from your work?" --Author Matthew Fox speaking on "The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood for Our Time" in Page Auditorium "The events that revolve around food are good because people show up for them." --Campus Council secretary Lisa Levine '98, on quad events and interaction "Once a student moves off- campus, the student's behavior translates into the image of the university." --A Chronicle editorial on "Off-Campus Etiquette" "I used to think that the midlife crisis was so corny and humiliating because there was nothing original about it. I realize now that the midlife crisis is an event and that not having a midlife crisis is a midlife crisis." --British novelist Martin Amis speaking at the Regulator Bookshop on Ninth Street We asked twenty-five seniors: How would you categorize your post- graduation plans? Definite: 9 Tentative: 12 What plans?: 4

     After four years of hard work, the future looms. Seniors with a strategy admit to being more at ease about the direction they're headed. But that isn't very reassuring to the majority of soon-to-be graduates who are still undecided about life after Duke.

     Barbara Kohler has her immediate future well-mapped out. "I'm going to drive cross-country with my friends right after graduation. Then I'm headed to Japan to teach English for a year or two. I won't know until I get there where I'll be living, but I'd still consider that definite."

     Danielle Lemmon categorized her plans as tentative--but firm. "I'm definitely going to go to Los Angeles to work in film production," she says. "But, beyond that, I have no real plans. I guess I'll set myself up when I get there."

     Charlotte Morgan is clueless. "I have absolutely no idea what I am going to do come May 13," she says "I don't even know where I am going to go."

What does the recent resurfacing in Russia of "Priam's Treasure" and other Trojan objects signal about the legacy of Henrich Schliemann-the German archaeologist and the presumed "discoverer" of the lost city of Troy-and about the spoils of war?

     Schliemann always seems to stir controversy; David Traill's most recent book, Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit (St. Martin's Press, 1995), again makes the claim that he did not "find" the Treasure; he merely had assembled it at the end of May 1873. But if so, it only again proves Schliemann's genius, for at the time nothing whatever was known of the Early Bronze Age, and if he had even assembled it, it would have taken great prescience to have brought together so many pieces that did in fact chronologically and stylistically belong together.

     Later in the year, he tried to sell the Treasure, along with other antiquities, first to the British Museum and then to the Louvre. Thwarted, he eventually smuggled it out to Athens, paid reparations to the Ottoman government of Turkey, and then donated it to Berlin in 1881, where it stayed until the end of World War II, when it was seen "heading east in a boxcar." For more than twenty years, rumors had flown that the Treasure had been rediscovered in storage;now the new exhibit, expected to travel, has raised even more controversy, especially over the Internet, concerning to whom the Treasure belongs.

     The repatriation of cultural patrimony is indeed a thorny one, and in this case it seems historically vexed. If it can be argued that Schliemann had "bought" the Treasure from the Turks, then perhaps Germany has the most legal claim from his donation. Even though Russia has the Treasure, keeping it seems out of the question: The Treasure was surely stolen as Berlin collapsed, and the postwar Hague protocol of 1954 expressly prohibits the export of cultural properties from any occupied territories and mandates that all cultural properties exported during war be returned at the end of the hostilities, and not be retained as war reparations. The "right thing to do" would be to give it back to Turkey, but such a beneficence would seem historically uncharacteristic of Russia. And if Russia does give the Treasure back to Turkey, what, as the lively postings on the Internet remind us, should England do about the Elgin Marbles?

     I foresee the Treasure traveling about for several years, charming visitors to Western museums, while some sort of international agreement is worked out whereby it is handed over to a respectable international consortium that eventually repatriates it to Turkey -this may very possibly coincide with the completion of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens and the subsequent repatriation of the Parthenon sculptures to Greece. As the Greeks would say, "Makari!" ("oh blessed day!').

--John G. Younger, professor of classical archaeology

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