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DO YOU feel responsible for the sins of your ancestors? Or that you’re owed reparations for past oppression?

My grandfather built quays along the Amazon, thereby playing a part in the exploitation of the rainforests by opening the river to bigger boats. Should I feel guilty, or trump that guilt by concentrating on the long years of exploitation of women and demanding compensation?

The truth is that figuring out who owes what to whom is often a mug’s game, requiring PhDs in history, science and art just to make a start. Take one of the liveliest cases: the Elgin marbles. Britain is about to be inundated with fresh appeals for their return in the run-up to the 2004 Olympics in Athens. So here’s your rapid rebuttal kit in case of Elgin emergencies.

In the late 18th century, the Ottoman Empire covered Greece, Macedonia, Albania—roughly all of south-eastern Europe up to Vienna’s suburbs. Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the empire, wangled permission to open tombs in Italy so he could pick the best vases to take home. In 1799, he pulled off his biggest coup by engineering permits to take parts of the frieze and the metopes adorning the Parthenon.

Back home, Elgin faced a problem when he tried to get the British Museum to take the marbles. The fragments were beautiful examples of great art, right? Maybe: the museum trustees and a House of Commons committee hauled in artists, antiquarians and classicists before accepting the marbles. If they’d been carved by the sculptor Phidias, they were great art. If not, they were just stones. How did they tell if they were by Phidias? Simple. If they were great art, Phidias had made them. If not, not.

Emerging triumphant eventually, the marbles were a hit. Cartoonists lampooned them, the public queued. They have remained at the British Museum since 1816, where anyone can see them free. But then the Turkish empire crumbled. Greece became independent, and for no very good reason, Elgin’s marbles became a symbol of Greek nationhood. After the Second World War, the campaign for their return started in earnest.

That campaign faces a serious legal hurdle, however. In 1978, a European court ruled the marbles were the property of the British Museum, and that’s in Europe. So is Greece. European heritage held in Europe—what’s the problem?

And even if the marbles were returned to Greece? They wouldn’t go back up on the Parthenon but move from a British to a Greek museum. In Athens? Not necessarily. That’s because other regions have prior claims. In the 5th century BC, Athens and its neighbours united as the Delian League to fight the Persians. Athens then appropriated the communal war chest which Pericles used to beautify Athens.

So the Parthenon’s frieze and metopes weren’t paid for by Athenians after all, and the next campaign for the return of the marbles could conceivably come from Naxos, Thasos, Boeotia and the rest of the league (now partly in Greece and partly in Turkey).

Of course, if the descendants of Phidias’s wife put in a bill for all that unpaid housework supporting her sculptor husband, then even at a modest interest rate, auctioning off the Elgin marbles wouldn’t cover it.